SORTIES, sin/tez, Homericz, Biblicm, etc.), a mode of divination by means of a passage or verse in some poet's works or in the Bible. One way of practising this kind of divination was to open the book at random and to take whatever passage or verse is touched by the finger as an indication of the fortune of the inquirer. Another way was to select a number of verses from a poet or from one of the books of the Bible, write them on slips of paper, mix these in an urn, draw one slip at random and from its contents infer good or evil. The Sibylline oracles (see Stem) were also employed in this way. Sortes Virgilianw are so called, as being practised with verses from the poet Virgil, Homeric from Homer, and so on. In Persia sortes are determined by resort to the poems of Hafiz. It is said that the Roman Emperor Severus, who reigned from 193 to 211 A.D., found an intimation of his high destiny in that verse of the "Eneid, Tu regere imperlo populoe, Romano, memento; and that the Emperor Gordianus (self-slain after a reign of 36 days) read his doom in this passage of the same poem: Ostendunt terns hunc tantum fats, nec ultra Base sinunt.
Charles I and Lord Falkland tried the Sortes Virgilianm in the Bodleian Library at Oxford and found passages equally ominous to each. The use of the Scripture books for divination still lingers among people of simple faith; and the obstinate survival of this superstition is due to a strong conviction Of the power and watch ful care of an overruling Providence and a be lief in the Bible as an inspired manual of divine guidance: if resort is less often had in these times to the Sortes Biblicm, that may be due to the decaying respect for the mere letter of Scripture.