Yut Divination — Reading the Year in Four Wooden Sticks
The yut game was the signature New Year's pastime, the whole family gathered in a circle, but it was also an ancient method of divining the fortunes of the year. This practice was called yut divination: four wooden sticks were thrown, and the year's luck was read from the shapes that came up. Play and prophecy were one and the same — and within it lived the old impulse to find meaning in chance and read it out.
Yut, Both Game and Divination
Yut is played by throwing four wooden sticks split in half, and the score is set by the combination of how many land face-down and face-up. On holidays people enjoyed it as a game, dividing into teams to move their pieces around the board, but at the start of the year a single person would throw the yut to divine the fortunes of the coming year. This kind of fortune-telling by yut is called yut divination, or cheoksajeom. The impulse to read meaning out of the chance of a game has echoes in divination traditions the world over.
Do, Gae, Geol, Yut, Mo — the Five Outcomes
The outcome is decided by how many of the four sticks land face-up (belly upward). One face-up is Do, two is Gae, three is Geol, all four face-up is Yut, and all four face-down is Mo. Each corresponds to one of five domestic animals — pig, dog, sheep, ox, and horse — and where Do means a small step of one square, Mo means a great stride of five. Yut and Mo each come up only about once in sixteen throws, so these rare scores have long been taken as auspicious signs.
How Yut Divination Is Cast
In traditional yut divination, the yut is usually thrown three times, and the three scores are laid out in order to form a single hexagram-like reading. If Do, Gae, and Geol come up, for instance, they are taken as one set and matched to their corresponding interpretation. Throwing three times is read as an attempt to capture the beginning, middle, and end — the start, the course, and the outcome of a matter. These days it is also common to simply throw once and read the day's energy from that.
The Sixty-Four Yut Readings
The combinations of Do, Gae, Geol, Yut, and Mo drawn over three throws come to sixty-four in all, and the old divination texts set each one down alongside a short verse. Each reading carries a symbolic image — a child meeting its mother, a rat entering the granary — that hints obliquely at fortune or misfortune. Such symbols are closer to metaphors that invite you to look at your own situation than to blunt pronouncements of a verdict. So even the same reading leaves broad room for reflection, depending on the circumstances you find yourself in.
Yut Divination Today
Today yut divination is enjoyed less as weighty prophecy than as a light bit of fun to open the new year and a moment to steady the mind. If a good reading comes up, trust its energy and take heart; if a cautionary one appears, simply grow a touch more careful — that is enough. To attach meaning to a result that arose by chance and see the day anew: this, perhaps, is why yut divination has been loved for so long. Toss a round lightly and check what today's reading holds.
Yut divination is a fortune-telling method all our own, borrowing the chance of a game that decides winners and losers to read, obliquely, the grain of a year and a day. If you're curious what Do, Gae, Geol, Yut, and Mo hold, throw the yut yourself and receive today's reading.