Throwing the bones
No table to look up — and, unlike the coca leaves, not even a shared set of pieces.
What it is, in plain words
Across southern Africa — among Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele, Tsonga, Shona and neighbouring peoples — a diviner reads by throwing. A set is cast onto a mat: bones, shells, coins, seeds, small carved pieces, sometimes dice. How the pieces land, which way they face, how near they fall to one another, and which of them landed on top: that is the reading.
The person who reads is a sangoma, a diviner who is also a healer and a keeper of the relationship between a family and its ancestors. People do not choose the work the way one chooses a career. It begins with a calling, ukuthwasa, and the training that follows is served under a teacher, a gobela, before anyone practises for others.
Why a program cannot look this up
This is the clearest case on the whole site, so it is worth spelling out. Bokki can compute Saju because the sixty stem-and-branch pairs mean the same thing in every practitioner's hands — the table is shared, written down, and centuries old. Maya day-signs are the same: a fixed list, a fixed count.
A sangoma's set does not work that way. The pieces are theirs. They are gathered over the course of a training, and what a given piece says is bound to that particular healer and to the ancestors who speak through them. Two sangomas can throw sets that share not one object. There is no master list, and there is not supposed to be one.
So there is nothing here for a program to look up, and building a lookup table anyway would not be an approximation of the tradition. It would be inventing a tradition and putting somebody else's name on it. That is the failure this project is organised around refusing.
What Bokki does with it: nothing
The practice sits in our atlas of world traditions with the status honoured — in our code, never built, never stamped in the passport, never sold. There is no bone-throwing screen here and there will not be one.
One more line, because it matters. A sangoma is also a healer, and healing is exactly the ground where Bokki refuses to speak at all. We do not do symptoms, we do not do diagnosis, and we do not put numbers on anybody's body. Naming that boundary here is part of respecting the practice rather than flattening it into an entertainment.
Closing note — 'no table' was the answer
In short: a shared, written, fixed table is the first thing Bokki needs, and it is not the only thing. The Aztec tonalpohualli has one — thirteen numbers against twenty named days — and we still do not compute it, because we cannot name in public the correlation it would have to rest on. The sexagenary cycle and the Tzolkʼin clear both bars. A sangoma's personal set does not clear the first: by principle there is no shared table at all.
This page simply copies out a fork in our code. The atlas files every tradition under one of three statuses — computed, documented but not built, or honoured — and the bones were the fastest verdict of all: honoured, not because imitation is hard (a random draw would be easy), but because attaching the real name to an imitation would mean inventing a tradition. Add our rule of staying silent on healing, and keeping a respectful distance while naming the practice correctly was the best we could do.
See the traditions we do compute →