← Ancient Oracles

The Yut Sticks 윷점A New Year oracle of Korea

A Korean hanok courtyard at night under a full moon, with glowing paper lanterns and snow in the corners. On a straw mat lie four long yut sticks, two round side up and two flat side up, beside a low table with a sewn paper booklet, a brass bowl of nuts and a plate of rice cakes.
New Year's first full moon: two flat faces up, so the throw is 개, Dog.

Every Korean family knows yut, the New Year game of four wooden sticks, each flat on one side and rounded on the other. Throw them, count how many land flat side up, and move your pieces round the board. But at the first full moon of the year the same sticks were also an oracle. You threw three times, and the three counts pointed to one of sixty-four short sayings in old Chinese characters, like "a rat gets into the granary" or "a moth flies into the lamp", which told you how your year would go.

These are the sixty-four sayings recorded in Seoul in the late 1700s by the scholar Yu Deuk-gong, and sold again a century later in little booklets in the city's markets every New Year.

How to consult

  1. Think about the year ahead, or any question. Type it in if you like; it stays on your device.
  2. Throw the four sticks three times. Each time, count the flat faces.
  3. The three counts make a code, like 2-3-1. Read the saying for that code, with our English and a short reading.

The five throws

Count the flat faces. The names are farm animals. In the oracle, Cow and Horse both count as four.

Your question and answers stay on this device.

Your past throws
    How do we know?
    • ✔ The sayings are old. Yu Deuk-gong (1748–1807) described the customs of Seoul through the year in his Gyeongdo japji (京都雜志). He records that at the New Year people threw the yut sticks three times to tell the year's fortune, and gives the sixty-four sayings. Our list follows the one printed in the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture from his book, and agrees with the first four, which are quoted from his book in Korea's classics database.
    • ✔ A living New Year custom. In 1895 the American museum curator Stewart Culin wrote that early each New Year a small book was sold in the markets of Seoul for telling fortunes with the long yut sticks, and he printed a picture of its first page. It shows the same sayings, a rat getting into the granary, a light found at night, a fly meeting the spring, in Korean, in a slightly different order.
    • ✔ Why sixty-four. Four sticks give five throws, but in the oracle Cow (four flat) and Horse (none flat) count the same, so each throw gives a number from one to four. Three throws give 4 × 4 × 4 = 64 answers, the same number as the hexagrams of the Book of Changes.
    • ≈ The hexagrams. Each answer was matched with a hexagram. Our sources name five of them (Pig-Pig-Pig is Qian, the Creative, for example). All five follow one simple rule, and we have used the same rule to give the hexagram for the other fifty-nine.
    • ≈ Admiral Yi. Yi Sun-sin, the admiral who defended Korea in the 1590s, wrote in his war diary that he cast lots before battle. Some scholars think this was the yut oracle; others are not sure.
    • ≈ The grades. The old sources call some sayings lucky and some unlucky. For the rest we judged from the image: good, mixed or bad.
    • ≈ The odds. The app makes each face of each stick equally likely, so Dog (two flat) comes up most often, six times in sixteen. Real sticks are not perfectly even, and how they fall depends on their shape.
    • ✔ Our words. The English translations, readings and grades are written for this app.

    Sayings: Yu Deuk-gong 柳得恭, 京都雜志 (late 18th century, public domain), as listed in the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture (한국민족문화대백과사전, "윷점"); the first four checked against 尹愭, 無名子集, in the Korean Classics Database. Stewart Culin, Korean Games, with Notes on the Corresponding Games of China and Japan (Philadelphia, 1895), pp. 72–75, fig. 79 (public domain). English: our own. Courtyard picture: made for this app. Sounds: made in the browser.