Sortes Acroāmatum

For millennia, people have turned to stories to escape the mundane and find something more comforting, relatable, or magical. From at least the second century CE, that meant not only reading tales but using them as a tool for divination. The Sortes Virgilianae, “the Virgilian Lots,” saw practitioners chance upon selections of the works of Virgil and interpret them as predictions, evidence of the deep and long-standing association between stories and magic. But it’s 2023 now, and stories don’t always look the way they did when Roman poets turned to bibliomancy. It’s time to update the sortes for a modern, podcasting age.