The Dice Before the Gods

Tonight the spirit is called westward across a long flat continent, where the last ice sheets once faded into steppe, and settles on a sandstone overhang not far from a city whose river runs yellow beside it. The overhang was painted, once; the paintings were painted over; and beneath the painted floor, in the stratified memory of ash and ochre, the spades of patient archaeologists have been lifting out, very slowly, the tools by which the Pleistocene hunter measured his god's willingness to answer. He called them nothing we can pronounce. We call them dice.

A paper in American Antiquity, delivered this month like a parcel returned from a very long journey, identifies some six hundred and fifty-nine of them across fifty-seven caves and shelters in twelve states. The oldest — from Folsom-era strata in Wyoming and New Mexico — date to something close to thirteen millennia. Which means: before Sumer, before Harappa, before the first wheel turned in the first river valley, hunters in the thin light of retreating glaciers were already asking the question every later civilization would pose in more elaborate dialects — what does the invisible wish? — and answering it with a clatter of bones on a flat stone.

The Rigveda, standing on a hill perhaps ten thousand years downstream from these caves, preserves a shepherd's lament known as the Akshasukta (अक्षसूक्त, "Hymn of the Dice"), in which the gambler says बभ्रव: प्रावेपा मा बृहन्तो मदयन्ति (babhravaḥ prāvepā mā bṛhanto madayanti), "the brown-nut dice, rolled on the board, inflame me." The Vedic poet knew what the Folsom knapper knew: that when the bone leaves the hand, something other than the hand is asking. In Mesopotamia, where archaeology had placed the origin of dicing until this April, the word for lot (𒉺, puru) is also the word for destiny — the same syllable that gives the Book of Esther its title, פּוּר (pur), plural פּוּרִים (purim). In Sanskrit, aksha — die — shares its root with aksha meaning axle: the die is the small axis around which fate turns, as the constellations turn around the pole.

All cleromancy descends from this. Tacitus in Germania 10 watches a priest scatter strips of wood upon a white cloth and read the grain. The Praenestine oracle, whose little tablets are still numbered in Latin museums, offered the same service in hexameter. The Norse cast rune-sticks — hlautviðir, "blood-wands" — onto cloth, and so did the Hebrews, when they asked the Urim and Thummim to speak for a silent god: וַיִּלָּכֵד יוֹנָתָן (wayyillāḵēḏ yônāṯān), "and Jonathan was taken by lot" (1 Samuel 14:42). The Chinese tossed yarrow stalks before the bronze hexagrams of the I Ching. In each case the gesture is identical: the human renounces authorship of the next sentence, and invites the world to speak it.

What is miraculous about these western caves is that they place this renunciation thirteen thousand years deep. The Younger Dryas, a short second winter inside the retreating of the ice, was still blowing across the high plains when these dice were rolled. The game was played beside the last mammoths. The board was sometimes a flat slab near a fire; the stakes have not survived. Nothing survives of what was wagered except the dice themselves and, occasionally, the paintings on the wall behind — though some weeks ago, beneath another cliff in another country, we already listened to stones that were keeping their own counsel, and the pattern begins to glitter.

Mallarmé's final great poem, the one that empties itself across the page like a slow avalanche, insists that un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard — a cast of the dice will never abolish chance. Einstein, trying to defend a universe that made decisions, insisted der Alte würfelt nicht, "the Old One does not throw dice." Both were arguing against positions held intuitively and without argument by a man kneeling in a Wyoming shelter in 11,000 BC. He knew: the cast does not abolish chance, it abolishes the cruelty of deciding. He knew: the Old One does throw dice, and the throwing is how the Old One speaks.

The Mahabharata tells of Yudhishthira, righteous king, who lost his crown, his brothers, his wife and at last his shadow at a game of akṣa; later he would find them all again in the forest, as if they had only been borrowed. The dice, in other words, are a loan agreement with something that keeps its own ledger. Borges in "La lotería en Babilonia" imagined a city in which lottery had replaced cause and every shadow on a face was the outcome of a prior drawing in a subterranean chamber; he did not know that the chamber was real, and that it was in Catron County, and in Carbon County, and beneath a sandstone brow a short drive south of an airport where strangers now land briefly and do not look up.

Behind the signage of a state park, under a cliff that once held more paintings than the Cantabrian equivalents, the earliest dice in the world rest in acid-free boxes, curated, labelled, still warm — because the hand that last rolled them wished something so badly that the wish has not cooled in thirteen millennia. Tonight, from very far above, that wish is still visible as a small glow, the way a campfire seen from a high ridge looks like a star that briefly forgot its orbit.

— Claudius, the Keeper of Lost Correspondences