Scapulimancy is divination from the shoulder blade of a slaughtered sheep. The bone is put into the fire. The cracks and marks that the heat makes in it are read as an answer to a question that the diviner or his client held in mind.[1] The method is recorded at the court of Attila, at the court of the Mongol khan Möngke and, in great detail, among the Kirghiz, Mongols and Altaians of the nineteenth century. Between the Huns and the Mongols stands an eleventh-century dictionary of the Turkic languages, with a word for the divining and a saying about the shoulder blade. The Chinese histories of the steppe peoples and the sources of the Göktürk khaganates describe other ways of reading signs. They do not describe this one.

The method

The fullest description from before the modern period is that of the Franciscan William of Rubruck, an envoy at the court of the Mongol khan Möngke. On the Sunday of Septuagesima, 8 February 1254, a servant came out of the khan’s dwelling carrying sheep’s shoulder blades burnt to coals.[2] Rubruck asked what they were for. He was told that Möngke did nothing in the world without first consulting these bones. He did not even allow a visitor into his dwelling without consulting them.[2]

The procedure ran in steps. When the khan wished to do something, servants brought him three bones that had not yet been charred. He held one and thought of the thing he wished to ask, whether he should do it or not. Then he handed it to a servant to burn.[2] Two small buildings beside his dwelling served for the burning, and servants looked for the bones every day throughout the camp.[3] When the bones had been charred black, the servants brought them back to him. If the heat had split a bone along its whole length, the way was open and he could act. If the bone had cracked crosswise, or round pieces had started out of it, he could not act. If one of the three was favourable, he acted.[3]

The bones lay in front of Möngke at other audiences as well. Rubruck saw charred shoulder blades before him on one visit.[4] On Quadragesima Sunday, 1 March, Rubruck was called to court with a monk. The khan had a charred shoulder blade in his hand and looked at it. Then, as if reading from it, he began to reprimand the monk.[5]

Records of the Huns

The oldest record that can belong here is a sentence in Jordanes. Before the battle on the Catalaunian Plains in 451, the Hun king Attila feared to give battle. He decided to learn the future from soothsayers. They looked, as was their custom, now at the entrails of cattle and now at certain veins in scraped bones. They announced bad things for the Huns.[6] They added one consolation: the leader of the enemy would fall, and his death would spoil the victory.[6]

Jordanes does not say that the bones were shoulder blades, and he does not say that they were burnt. The literature distinguishes two forms of the method. In the Asiatic form, the bones, mostly the shoulder blades of sheep, are scraped clean and exposed to fire, and the fissures are read. In the European form, the bones are read as they are. That form is attested only centuries after Attila.[7] A monograph on the subject therefore declines to decide which form the Huns used. The discussion of the passage regards the Hunnic method as the eastern one. Its ground is that the Huns cannot have borrowed the method from their neighbours and subjects in Hungary and on the western steppe.[7]

Two further points belong to that discussion. Excavators found sheep shoulder blades, one of them scorched, in two Sarmatoid cemeteries of the last centuries before the Christian era. The cemeteries are at Vrevskii south-west of Tashkent and at Lavyandak near Bukhara. The excavators suppose that the blades were used for divination. If they were, the practice would point to an eastern, non-Iranian element.[8] The Alans, who lived beside the Huns, had a different method, which Ammianus describes. They gathered straight willow rods and sorted them at a fixed time with secret incantations. In this way they learnt plainly what was portended.[9]

The Huns also had the specialist whom the Turkic peoples later call kam. The word stands in the names of two high-ranking Huns, Atakam and Eskam. The diviners of Attila may have been shamans at the same time.[10]

The Chinese histories

The Chinese chapters on the steppe peoples are those on the Xiongnu in the Shiji and the Han Shu, those on the Wuhuan and Xianbei in the Hou Han Shu, those on the Rouran and the Gaoche in the Wei Shu and the Bei Shi, and those on the Göktürks in the Zhou Shu, the Sui Shu and the Tang histories. None of them describes a reading of cracks in a bone.[11]

They name other methods. Beihouli was chief of the Hulü tribe of the Gaoche. At the turn of the fifth century, he went over to the Wei after the Rouran khan Shelun had beaten him. He was skilled in divining good and ill with fifty milfoil stalks and was often right, which earned him favour at court.[12] At the court of Chula Khan, a divination was made about a march on Bingzhou and came out unfavourable. The text does not say how it was made.[13] The Wei Shu also has the Gaoche slaughter many animals in thanksgiving and burn the bones to make a fire, while the riders gallop round it. The passage describes a sacrifice and gives no reading.[12]

Kashgari’s dictionary

The dictionary that Mahmud al-Kashgari wrote in the 1070s has two entries on the shoulder blade and one on the act of divining. Irq is glossed as divining, taking omens and drawing out what is hidden.[14] Ürüŋ is the diviner’s fee. Kashgari’s example sentence, alig ürüŋi bĕr, tells someone to give the fee. It says literally “give the white of the hand”.[15] The word for the shoulder blade is ösin in one entry and yarın in another.[16]

Under yarın, Kashgari adds a saying of the Turks, yarın bulγansa el bulγanur: if the shoulder blade is impaired, the state will be impaired.[17] The saying joins the bone to the fate of the realm. It may be an allusion to divination from the blade.[18] The Dīwān itself gives no reading of cracks.[19]

Reports from the nineteenth century

The Siberian traveller and ethnographer Grigorii Potanin published a book in 1881. He wrote that divination by the shoulder blade was spread everywhere in Mongolia and could be found among the Khalkha, the Torgut, the Uriankhai and the Kirghiz.[20] The Kirghiz called the bone džaurun and the Mongols tal. Instead of saying that a man divined from the blade, they said that he laid it.[20] In the reading, the blade stands for a horse. The joint is the forehand, the broad end the hindquarters and the ridge down the middle the back, arkalyk. The flat side without a ridge is the alakan, the palm. The round hollow in the joint is the kettle, kazan in Kirghiz.[21]

THE SHOULDER BLADE READ AS A HORSE kazan, the kettle:the round hollow in the joint baudau, the neck arkalyk, the ridge:the back of the horse the joint:forehandthe broad end:hindquarters The reverse side, flat and without a ridge, is the alakan, the palm.
A sheep's shoulder blade read as a horse, with the names a Kirghiz diviner gave its parts to Potanin. The same list names two corners of the blade the ear and the forehead, and the Torgut and Uriankhai diviners he questioned name the cracks differently. Modern diagram; the proportions are schematic.

The blade was prepared with care. The Kirghiz held that it must not be gnawed with the teeth and that the cartilage must not be cut off with a knife. Otherwise the blade would not tell the truth.[22] Radloff describes the same practice among the Kirghiz. He gives the same rules and adds that the used blade may not be thrown to the dogs, or it brings misfortune to the house, until it has been broken by hand under certain spells.[23] Potanin has the same prohibition: among the Kirghiz it was a sin to throw a boiled blade to the dogs without breaking it.[24] When the diviner had finished, he sat with his back to the door and threw the blade behind him. If it struck the upper doorpost, all that the cracks had said would come true.[25]

The cracks were read for answers to practical questions. A Torgut diviner of the Tarbagatai gave Potanin names for them. One crack meant news, one fire, one a pack-load, one a joyful message, one a departure and one the death of the sick. A crack along the whole side meant a gift from God, and another meant thieves lying in wait for the cattle.[22] The kettle was read too. If coal from the fat and cartilage burnt in the hollow, it was full. If the hollow burnt out clean, it was empty.[22] A Kirghiz diviner named one line the black road, and the crack called the tongue meant news.[22] In the Kirghiz reading, a crack named bögöt forbade a journey that had been asked about. A crack across the flat side meant that bound thieves would be brought in. A crack that began at the edge meant that lost cattle would be found.[26] The Uriankhai shaman from Kobdo read the cracks as fires and ranked them by class: the fire of the khan, of nobles, of good people, of rich people, of middling people, and of bad people and thieves. Cold fire, hot fire and the place of the devil were separate signs.[26]

Lost animals and stolen goods were the commonest questions. An Altaian kam gave a reading for a man whose animal had been stolen. In this interpretation, a line that went out to the edges of the bone and came back showed that the animal had been taken far away and would return. A line that ended at the large edge of the bone showed it near the house. A line that passed over that edge showed it in a thief’s hands, on its way up a mountain.[27]

The bone had a second life outside divination. Shoulder blades inscribed with prayers are found among the stones of Mongol cairns, and at important cairns whole strings of them hang.[24] Mongols and Altaians used the bone as a test of strength and tried to break its flat part with a flick of the forefinger.[24]

Diviners and shamans

The reader of the blade is not necessarily a shaman. Potanin says that shamans and ordinary people alike practised the art.[22] Radloff says the same of the Kirghiz, who had professional diviners and other people who practised it.[23] The Altai missionary Verbitskii lists the yarınčı, who divined from the burnt blade, among five specialists beside the kam. The others are the seer who foretells in a seizure, the guesser, the reader of the hand and the weather-maker with the stone.[28] A survey of the peoples of Siberia gives the same list on the authority of an earlier collector.[29]

Other scholars warn against treating the diviner as a shaman. Some sources let the shaman divine from the shoulder blade of a sheep. However, the word shaman is often used there wrongly, and anyone familiar with the matter can do these things without being a shaman who falls into ecstasy.[30] In their view, the shaman’s own work is the ecstasy in which the spirit speaks through his mouth.[30]

The Kashgari entries show how close the offices stood. In one example sentence of the Dīwān, the diviners murmur spells together. The word for diviner there is qam, the word that later texts and the collectors of the nineteenth century use for the shaman.[31]

In epic and in saying

The blade stands in the epics of the Kirghiz and the Nogai. In the Kirghiz cycle of Manas, one of the hero’s companions is a diviner who reads the blade. The Kalmuk khan has a diviner who sees a bloody head rolling in it and warns against the campaign. The khan sets out nevertheless, and Manas defeats and kills him.[18] In a Nogai tale, Toktamish, fleeing, has a shepherd read the blade for him.[18]

A report of 1771 shows the practice at a khan’s camp. Captain Rychkov was travelling in the Kazakh steppe. He saw a well-known Kirghiz diviner read the blade at the camp of Nur Ali Khan, who was preparing to pursue the Kalmuks. The diviner burnt the bone, took it in his hand and read in the lines that a spirit had mixed among the Kalmuks the day before and frightened them. He read that a third spirit would decide their fate and protect them.[32] Among the Bashkirs of the east, a man who lies a great deal is called a blade. The phrase may be a trace of the diviners whom the Muslim clerics had driven out.[18]

The Göktürks

The records of the Göktürk khaganates describe a ritual specialist, one divination at a khan’s court and signs read by the courts of Sui and Tang. They do not say how the divination at Chula’s court was made, and they never mention a bone.[13] The article on omens and divination sets out what the sources give. The dictionary of the 1070s was written more than three centuries after the last khaganate of the Göktürks ended. The reports of the nineteenth century were written more than a thousand years after.

Two things can be said without crossing that gap. The first is that the method is recorded in Europe in the fifth century, at the Mongol court in the thirteenth and across the steppe in the nineteenth. Nomadic peoples of different languages therefore knew it at different times.[33] The second is that the Turkic word for divination, ırk, stands in the vocabulary of the Old Uyghur Manichaean and Buddhist texts with the senses divination, omen, fate and luck.[34]

Names and terms

Irq is the Old Turkic word for omen and divination. It gives the Irk Bitig, the Book of Omens, its title. Kashgari glosses it as divining and taking omens.[14] One derivation takes the word from a root meaning a fissure or crack. It sets beside the word the Mongolian tülge, portent, from a verb meaning to burn.[8] If the first derivation is right, the word named the cracks before it named any divining. Kashgari’s gloss gives only the general sense, and the connection with bones is a modern proposal.

The Turkic names of the bone differ by place. Kashgari has ösin and yarın. Potanin’s Kirghiz say džaurun, and the Mongols tal.[20] A Turkish study of the shamanism of the Altai peoples lists the forms cavrun for the Kazakhs, yorun for the Altaians and Kirghiz, çaan for the Abakan Tatars and saarın for the Yakuts. It notes that the Kirghiz also say dal, as the Mongols do.[35] The same study reports that the Arabs treated the reading of the blade as an old Greek science under the name ʿilm al-ketf. It reports that the Greeks and Romans knew it as omoplatoscopy and scapulimantia.[36]

Reliability

The practice is secure at three points. Rubruck describes the Mongol court of 1254 in detail and as an eyewitness. The reports from Kirghiz, Mongol and Altaian country in the nineteenth century are many, and they agree on the main steps. These steps are a sheep’s blade, fire, cracks, named zones of the bone and readings for lost goods, thieves, journeys and sickness. Jordanes’ scraped bones are a likely earlier case, though his sentence does not say how the bones were read.

Between those points the evidence thins out. The sources of the Göktürks, the Uyghurs and the Kirghiz of the Yenisei say nothing about the method. The one early Turkic dictionary has a word and a saying without a description. The shoulder blade is therefore a method that nomadic peoples are known to have used at the court of Attila, at the court of Möngke and across the steppe in the nineteenth century. For the Göktürks of the sixth to the eighth century, the sources say nothing, and the question stays open.

References

  1. ^ Rockhill 1900, p. 187–188
  2. ^ a b c Rockhill 1900, p. 187
  3. ^ a b Rockhill 1900, p. 188
  4. ^ Rockhill 1900, p. 194
  5. ^ Rockhill 1900, p. 203–204
  6. ^ a b Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 196, p. 106
  7. ^ a b Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 269–270
  8. ^ a b Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 270
  9. ^ Ammianus Marcellinus
  10. ^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 269
  11. ^ Shiji, juan 110; Han Shu, juan 94; Hou Han Shu, juan 90; Wei Shu, juan 103; Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
  12. ^ a b Wei Shu, juan 103
  13. ^ a b Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 215
  14. ^ a b Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, i 93
  15. ^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, i 156
  16. ^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, i 115; ii 157
  17. ^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, ii 157
  18. ^ a b c d İnan 2017; first edition 1954, p. 154
  19. ^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk
  20. ^ a b c Potanin 1881, p. 88
  21. ^ Potanin 1881, p. 88–89
  22. ^ a b c d e Potanin 1881, p. 89
  23. ^ a b Radloff 1884, p. 474
  24. ^ a b c Potanin 1881, p. 91
  25. ^ Potanin 1881, p. 90–91; 474; Radloff 1884, p. 90–91; 474
  26. ^ a b Potanin 1881, p. 90
  27. ^ İnan 2017; first edition 1954, p. 155–156
  28. ^ Verbitskii 1893, scan 31
  29. ^ Czaplicka 1914, p. 200
  30. ^ a b Harva 1938, p. 540
  31. ^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, ii 213
  32. ^ İnan 2017; first edition 1954, p. 153
  33. ^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 269–270; 187–188; Rockhill 1900, p. 269–270; 187–188
  34. ^ Wilkens 2024, p. 81
  35. ^ İnan 2017; first edition 1954, p. 151
  36. ^ İnan 2017; first edition 1954, p. 151–152

Sources

Literature

  • William Woodville Rockhill (trans. and ed.), The Journey of William of Rubruck to the Eastern Parts of the World, 1253–55, as narrated by himself, with two accounts of the earlier journey of John of Pian de Carpine (1900)
  • Grigorii Nikolaevich Potanin, Очерки Северо-западной Монголии. Вып. 2. Материалы этнографические (Ocherki severo-zapadnoi Mongolii, Bd. 2) (1881)
  • Wilhelm Radloff, Aus Sibirien. Lose Blätter aus meinem Tagebuche. Erster Band (1884)
  • Vasilii Ivanovich Verbitskii, Алтайские инородцы (Altai Foreigners) (1893)
  • Ármin Vámbéry, Die primitive Cultur des turko-tatarischen Volkes, auf Grund sprachlicher Forschungen erörtert (1879)
  • Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen, The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture (1973)
  • Charles Christopher Mierow, The Gothic History of Jordanes in English Version, with an Introduction and a Commentary (1915)
  • Abdülkadir İnan, Tarihte ve Bugün Şamanizm: Materyaller ve Araştırmalar (2017; first edition 1954)
  • Uno Harva, Die religiösen Vorstellungen der altaischen Völker (1938)
  • Marie Antoinette Czaplicka, Aboriginal Siberia: A Study in Social Anthropology (1914)
  • Jens Wilkens (trans. Celalettin Bulut Bostan), Uygur Budizmi ve Manihaizm ile Yerel Dinlerin Etkisi: Dinî Terminoloji Örneği (2024)

Related

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Scapulimancy.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/religions/scapulimancy/

Last revised: 8 November 2026