It is a divination method using randomly opened pages in a book. It is very old, but it was only popularized with the modern book format and, of course, among literate people, because you had to read the paragraphs. In principle the most consulted volume was the Bible by the Sortes Sanctorum, but also existed during the Middle Ages the Sortes Virgilianae that used the Aeida (Virgil, 1st century a. C. ) , the Sortes Homericae through the Odyssey or the Lyaade (Homer? , 8th century a . C. ? ) , in addition to the Islamic Qur'an, a resource used in 'Miguel Strogoff' (Jules Verne, 1876) by his character Feofar Khan; or even 'Robinson Crusoe', according to the novel 'The Moonstone' (Wilkie Collins, 1868) in which the character Gabriel Betteredge uses it to investigate a robbery. There are also specific oracular books such as 'I Ching'. The word is taken from Greek 946; 953; 946; 955; 953; 959; 957; ( biblion "book" ) 956; 945; 957; 964; 949; 953; 945; ( "guessing" mania). See also -mancia , bibliophilia , bibliophile , geomancia , lecanomancia , alectomancia , litomance , crystallomancia , anomance .