Do you remember spinning as a child? Just spinning and spinning until you made yourself dizzy, and you staggered around on the grass like a drunk, breathless and laughing and happy to be alive?
Well somewhere along the line, someone turned spinning-yourself-dizzy into a divination method. Like many a divination method, exactly when and where it started being used for this purpose is anyone’s guess. The traditional method for this was a circle of letters was laid out on the grass or on the floor (no word on if the letters were laid out in alphabetic order in the circle) and the spinner spun in the middle until they started staggering around. An observer on hand noted what letters the spinner appeared to stagger on, by, or near. The letters so favored were considered to be a clue to the answer to the question asked. If you do this exercise the traditional way, there needs to be at least two people involved, the spinner and the observer/transcriber. I assume if the spinner gets so dizzy, they fall down on or near certain letters, that probably was considered very significant.