HISTORY
The earliest known domino set, found in China, dates from approximately 2200 years ago. Because they are an off-shoot of dice, mimicking a pair of dice being thrown, domino divination is considered a form of astrogalomancy, which essentially translates as ‘bone divination.’ The earliest dominos, like the earliest dice, were carved from bone, although ivory later became another favorite material for dice and domino sets. Today, most domino sets are made from plastic. Like dice and playing cards, they have been used as a game, as well as for divining purposes, and who knows for sure which use came first. Over the years, the dominoes have developed a defined set of meanings. I used to think those meanings were flexible. I discovered from personal experience and observation that no, those traditional meanings still hold true.
Domino sets come in six-dot, eight-dot and even twelve-dot domino sets, but it is the six-dot domino set I will focus on here. A six-dot domino set gives you a total of twenty-eight different possible answers. I’ve seen another diviner delineate meanings for up to twelve-dot domino sets, but that is 91-dominoes, which gets a little unwieldy. Dominos are another one of those divination methods that are best used for giving you a general prediction of what’s going to happen in the near future, like the coming week. They don’t go into specifics about who and how, nor are they much good for answering specific questions. You can use dominos in simple layouts or spreads, such as the past-present-future spread, or the four-directions spread, but I like to do just a one-domino draw.