GAMBLING 3259
of the episcopacy. Although the popes ignored these decrees,
Gallicanism retained considerable influence in eighteenth-
century France and was generally taught in the seminaries.
The Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790), so decisive in
fixing the religious pattern of the French Revolution, had a
strong Gallican flavor, as did the seventy-seven Organic Arti-
cles unilaterally appended to the Concordat of 1801 by Na-
poléon.
The clearest example of parliamentary Gallicanism was
its use by the Jesuits’ Jansenist enemies, who employed it
skillfully in securing the suppression of the Society of Jesus
in France in 1764. Although many factors contributed to
this condemnation, it could not have happened without the
strong Gallican—and hence anti-Jesuit—orientation of the
judicial bodies.
Gallicanism reached the flood tide of its political influ-
ence in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras; thereafter its
strength ebbed. The sufferings and occasionally the heroism
of the popes during this prolonged crisis evoked wide sympa-
thy, not exclusively among the Roman Catholic populations.
The disappearance or weakening of the Old Regime mon-
archs, who had been friendly to Catholicism while striving
to control it, created a new political atmosphere in which iso-
lated or persecuted Catholics turned to the papacy for pro-
tection. Improvements in communications and other fea-
tures of modernization assisted. Nearly everywhere in the
nineteenth century, ultramontanism, the antithesis of Galli-
canism, triumphed. It is ironic that during the century when
European nationalism reached its culmination, official Ca-
tholicism moved toward greater accent on its international
features. Although the early stages of the modern national
state system favored the development of Gallicanism, the
maturation of the national state saw its virtual disappearance.
SEE ALSO Ultramontanism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Martimort, A.-G. Le gallicanisme de Bossuet. Paris, 1953. Traces
the development of Gallican ideas among the bishops, the
magistrates, and the ministers of the crown. The best account
available of the Extraordinary Assembly of the Clergy of
France, 1681–1682.
Martimort, A.-G. Le gallicanisme. Paris, 1973. The best introduc-
tion to this complicated topic, with the most up-to-date bib-
liography currently in print. Although brief, it covers an im-
mense span, from Phillip II to the First Vatican Council,
with particular attention to the late medieval period. Chapter
7 is useful for its distinctions among the types of Galli-
canism.
Martin, Victor. Les origines du gallicanisme. 2 vols. Paris, 1939.
Martin apparently intended to encompasss the whole move-
ment but ended his work after reaching the Pragmatic Sanc-
tion of Bourges. It is an immense mobilization of sources for
the earlier period, with an exhaustive index.
Rothkrug, Lionel. Opposition to Louis XIV: The Political and Social
Origins of the French Enlightenment. Princeton, 1965. A
broad perspective on seventeenth-century conflicts. Chapter
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION, SECOND EDITION
1, “The Intellectual and Religious Opposition to Reform,”
includes a useful sketch of Gallicanism.
Van Kley, Dale. The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits from
France, 1757–1765. New Haven, 1975. The best explana-
tion in English of the use made by the Jansenists of the Galli-
can attitudes of the Parlements. Particularly helpful in distin-
guishing the varied forms Gallicanism assumed in the
eighteenth century. And it makes an exciting story.
JOSEPH N. MOODY (1987)
GAMALIEL OF YAVNEH SEE GAMLIDEL OF
YAVNEH
GAMALIEL THE ELDER SEE GAMLIDEL THE
ELDER
GAMBLING. The religious significance of gambling is,
in effect, twofold. Many religious traditions, especially the
great religions, in their works of legislation and codification,
promote as their orthodox norm a prohibition against, or at
least discouragement of, gambling. On the other hand, in
many cultures gambling takes on religious significance in
connection with myths and rituals.
This twofold simplification, however, addresses gam-
bling only insofar as it takes on overt religious significance.
No discussion of gambling would be complete, however,
without acknowledging its covert religious significance, par-
ticularly in cultures that prohibit it or, having adopted a sec-
ularized attitude, look upon it as something nonreligious or
merely “cultural.” Although beyond the main focus of this
essay, it is evident that much of what goes on in the name
of secular, cultural, or even legalized gambling is both en-
hanced by the flaunting or circumvention of traditional pro-
hibitions and heightened by ritualized procedures too nu-
merous to mention, by special “sacred” and “liminal” times
(the American Superbowl) and places (casinos in remote or
international spots), and by a cast of mythological characters
and aspirations (the cool, passionate, roving, or desperate
gambler; the jackpot winner).
In definitional terms, religious gambling is not easily
separated from games and divination. Because gambling can-
not be discussed without reference to games, this article shall
deal with games only where they are the focus of wages and
stakes. As for divination, the use in certain cases of similar
implements (lots, bones, dice) and the occurrence of similar
attitudes to unseen forces are not sufficient to support the
frequently aired view that gambling derives from divination
(Tylor, 1871). One does not, in fact, need implements or
games at all to gamble. This article shall, however, refer to
the drawing of lots and other forms of divination where their
use is similar or related to that of gambling practices.
GAMBLING IN TRADITIONAL CULTURES. Unless one adopts
a diffusionist perspective and attempts to derive all forms of
3260 GAMBLING
gambling from ancient Near Eastern or other Asian proto-
types, the prevalence of gambling rites and myths in archaic
cultures strongly suggests that the origins of religious gam-
bling are irretrievable. Archaeologists have suggested that the
painted pebbles found in the Mas d’Azil caves in the Pyre-
nees, from the Mesolithic period, are gambling implements.
The earliest known dice and board game is that found in the
Sumerian royal tombs at Ur, from about 2600 BCE. Gam-
bling can only be assumed here, as with Indus Valley dice
from about 2000 BCE and Egyptian (1990–1780 BCE), Cre-
tan (1800–1650 BCE), and Palestinian (c. sixteenth century
BCE) finds, some of which resemble cribbage boards. Evi-
dence of ball games and gaming boards from Mesoamerican
cultures, of types that continue to be played in that area
today, is also traceable to about 1500 BCE. And R: gveda 10.34
provides the first gambler’s lament in its “Hymn to Gam-
bling” (c. 1200 BCE). The games of ancient cultures appear
not only to be similar to those found in recent and contem-
porary field contexts but to have had in some cases—such
as the Mesoamerican—remarkable continuity from past to
present. As the religious significance of gambling is clearly
more in a state of living “expression” than belated “applica-
tion” (Jensen, 1963, pp. 59-64) in contemporary tribal cul-
tures, such cultures present the best evidence for understand-
ing the religious dimensions of gambling in general.
Unfortunately, ethnographic discussion of “sacred”
gambling is uneven. There is sufficient documentation to be
confident that it is found on all continents and probably
among most, if not all, tribal communities. Many games and
implements have been described and collected from around
the world, but few studies have examined the cultural and
religious significance of gambling at the field level in any de-
tailed way. The only thorough field research on gambling
seems to be Geertz’s study of the Balinese cockfight, and in
that situation its rather covert religious significance is tied in
with the Balinese version of popular Hinduism (Geertz,
1973). Nonetheless, Geertz’s findings and insights are illu-
minating with respect to a wider view of religious gambling.
Generally, one finds two models for understanding the
archaic religious significance of gambling: Geertz’s notion of
“deep play,” a consuming passionate involvement drawing
on deeply ingrained cultural codes and strategies, and the
pervasively cited notion that gambling games draw on “cos-
mic symbolism,” or have “cosmic significance.” Because
Geertz mentions calendrical and cosmological ideas that bear
upon the choice and placement of cocks (p. 427), it is evi-
dent that the two approaches are not antithetical. In fact, the
“cosmic significance” clearly lends itself to the “deepening”
of the play.
The cosmological significance of gambling games was
maintained by Culin, author of several monumental works
on games. In his book on North American Indian games, he
summarizes the common pattern of references to gambling
games in the origin myths of numerous tribes:
They usually consist of a series of contests in which the
demiurge, the first man, the culture hero, overcomes
some opponent, a foe of the human race, by exercise of
superior cunning, skill, or magic. Comparison of these
myths . . . discloses the primal gamblers as those curi-
ous children, the divine Twins, the miraculous off-
spring of the Sun. . . . They live in the east and the
west; they rule night and day, winter and summer. They
are the morning and evening stars. Their virgin mother,
who appears also as their sister and wife, is constantly
spoken of as their grandmother, and is the Moon, or the
Earth, the Spider Woman, the embodiment of the fem-
inine principle in nature. Always contending, they are
the original patrons of play, and their games are now
played by men. (Culin, 1907, p. 32)
In Culin’s Zuni example, the emblems of the Twin War
Gods, their weapons, are classified fourfold in accord with
the four directions and are interchangeable with their gaming
implements. Thus, for example, stick dice are arrows, shafts,
or miniature bows (ibid., p. 33). A correlation between dice
and weapons is also made in the Hindu Mahābhārata epic.
It is not, in fact, difficult to advance the principle that
every game, ancient or modern, creates a miniature cosmos,
its arena, rules, apparatus, and players comprising a unique
spatiotemporal world that reflects and symbolizes aspects of
known and accepted cosmological structures. This is as true
of Monopoly, football, or cricket as it is of more traditional
games such as snakes and ladders, which in its Indian context
symbolized a difficult ascent to heaven (Grunfeld, 1975,
pp. 131–133). There are many examples from American In-
dian cultures of counting boards, playing boards, and ball-
game courts having “gateways” or quadrants that correspond
to the four directions; to the alternating seasons; to the equi-
noctial points; to tribal divisions such as men versus women,
married women versus single women, old men versus young
men; and to moiety divisions identified with heaven and
earth, changes in the seasons, or other cosmological referents
(Culin, 1907, pp. 34–208 passim). In his careful study of the
Mesoamerican ball game, Humphrey (1979) thus allows that
“there seems to be no question” that it “was based on a kind
of cosmic symbolism.” He suggests that the movement of the
ball represented the course of heavenly bodies through dual-
istically conceived upper and lower worlds, the two sides thus
enacting the struggle between light and darkness, summer
and winter, life and death. The ancient Chinese game of
pitchpot (see Yang, 1969, pp. 138–165) may rely on cosmo-
logical notions of the pot (or, sometimes, the gourd) as a con-
tainer of the world and symbol of primal chaos. Also striking
in this connection is the ancient Aztec board game of patolli,
which has evident formal similarities with the South Asian
game of pachisi. Arguments over whether the similarities are
due to diffusion or independent use of similar cosmological
structures have remained unresolved since the late nine-
teenth century. In any case, Beck (1982, pp. 199–205) has
argued cogently for the cosmological significance of pachisi.
The pieces move around the four-armed board, representing
the world quarters, in a way that follows the reverse (counter-
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION, SECOND EDITION

clockwise) movement of the sun through the houses of the
zodiac. The four-sided dice are identified with the four Indi-
an ages (yugas). The goal of returning to the center thus sug-
gests a triumph over spatiotemporal conditions.
Geertz’s discussion of the Balinese cockfight draws its
concept of deep play from Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832),
the English economist and philosopher, who uses the term
to refer to situations in which stakes are so high that partici-
pation is irrational. At the cockfight, two kinds of bets are
made: even-money center bets between the two cock owners
and their allied supporters, and side bets on odds made
among the assembled crowd. As a rule, the larger the center
bets, the more even are the odds reached in the crowd. Inter-
est and “depth” are thus enhanced by making the outcome
appear as unpredictable as possible. But the size of the center
bet also “deepens” the stakes for the cock owners. For the
stakes here are not just material, but are matters of honor,
esteem, status, and, also, delight in bringing oblique affront
to the opponent. Except for addicted gamblers, who are
drawn—usually to their ruin—to the small center bet and
long odds matches, real status remains largely unaffected, be-
cause victories and losses tend to balance out. But the deep
play at status reversals and reclamations of status is real
enough in its psychological and social impact. Only men
play, while on the periphery of the cockfight, roulette and
other gambling games of sheer chance are operated by con-
cessionaires for women, children, the poor, and others who
find themselves excluded.
“Deep-play” cockfighting is thus for “the solid citizen-
ry” and resembles an “affaire d’honneur” (Geertz, 1973,
pp. 435–436). Moreover, it pits not merely individuals
against each other, but corporate groups—most notably,
whole villages and patriarchal descent groups. Support
money for the central bet comes from other members of the
group, and even side-betting against the cock of one’s group
is considered disloyal. The cock owners thus have not only
their own status at stake, but their status within their respec-
tive groups and that of the groups themselves.
All of this is displayed “in a medium of feathers, blood,
crowds, and money” (ibid., p. 444) that arouses the deepest
passions but is rounded off with furtive payments that affirm
a cultivated embarrassment at such personal identification
with the world of demonic and animal violence. For the
cockfight is also, fundamentally, an encounter with the de-
monic: “a blood sacrifice offered, with the appropriate chants
and oblations, to the demons in order to pacify their raven-
ous, cannibal hunger” (ibid., p. 420). The fights are regularly
performed in connection with temple festivals and as collec-
tive responses to such natural evils as illness, crop failure, and
volcanic eruptions.
A correlation between status—in the largest sense—and
deep-play gambling can certainly be found. The importance
of status is reflected in the fact that gambling is frequently
the province of kings, heroes, and aristocrats: the models of
what comes down to the present as the genteel bettor. Hum-
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION, SECOND EDITION
GAMBLING 3261
phrey (1979, pp. 141–146) has applied Geertz’s categories
to the aristocratic patronage of the Mesoamerican ball game.
But still better confirmation for such an analysis comes from
descriptions of the North American Huron Indian dice
games collected by Culin (1907, pp. 105–110). Sacrificial of-
ferings of tobacco to the spirits of the game precede the ac-
tion. Sometimes whole townships and even tribes contend.
In one eight-day game between townships, every inhabitant
of each party threw the dice at least once. Players with lucky
dreams were sought out for the casting:
At this game they hazard all they possess, and many do
not leave off till they are almost stripped quite naked
and till they have lost all they have in their cabins. Some
have been known to stake their liberty for a time. . . .
The players appear like people possessed, and the spec-
tators are not more calm. They all make a thousand
contortions, talk to the bones [i. e., throw the dice],
load the spirits of the adverse party with impreca-
tions. . . . They quarrel and fight, which never hap-
pens among [them] but on these occasions and in
drunkenness. (ibid., pp. 105–106)
Women and girls play the same game, but only separately
and under inferior conditions: with different numbers of
dice, and throwing by hand on a blanket rather than with
a dice box or basket as the men do (ibid., p. 107).
Gambling on one’s freedom is an ultimate status wager
and is a type of bet instanced in many cultures. Another sug-
gestive feature of deep play that emerges here is the signifi-
cance of “stripping,” for being willing to gamble all one pos-
sesses may both literally and figuratively involve such an
outcome. Loss of status is thus potentially far more than just
loss of face. As Geertz remarks, there is both a literal and a
metaphoric significance—sustained by the Balinese language
as in the English—to the Balinese cockfighter’s identification
with his cock (Geertz, 1973, pp. 417–418). I shall note im-
portant recurrences of this gambling-stripping correlation,
which has a wide range of effects, from deep humiliation to
eroticism. Obviously, strip poker is a “secular” example of
the latter orientation.
Ritualized gambling thus seems to rely on both its cos-
mological significance and its character as deep play. The
forces of chance draw the contestants into deep involvement
in a context that allows for both the regulated breakdown
and the creative redefinition of the structural roles by which
society and cosmos operate—a context that the games reflect.
The games thus have the character of liminal passage rites,
or ordeals (Humphrey, 1979, p. 144), as well as of reitera-
tions of the cosmogony, the reestablishment of cosmos out
of chaos. Such initiatory and cosmogonic overtones have
been detected in the dice match that concluded the ancient
Indian sacrifice of royal consecration, or rajasuya. In playing
dice on even terms with members of different castes, the king
overcomes the forces of chance, chaos, and confusion by his
triumph (Heesterman, 1957, pp. 140–157). As is often the
case in ritual gambling, the game is rigged to assure the de-
sired outcome. But the important point is that the partici-
3262 GAMBLING
pants submit to the principles of the game. Similar initiatory
and cosmogonic overtones are found in contexts where gam-
bling is performed for the sick, over the dead, or at turning
points in the seasons (for examples, see Culin, 1907,
pp. 108–115; Hartland, 1924–1927, pp. 168–169; Jensen,
1963, p. 60).
PROHIBITIONS ON GAMBLING. The principles by which dif-
ferent religions have denounced or prohibited gambling are
revealing on two fronts. First, they reflect the axiomatic theo-
logical and cultural values operative in the respective tradi-
tions. Second, they often provide theologically and culturally
attuned indications of what it is that is so appealing about
what they seek to oppose. Not surprisingly, cosmological sig-
nificance and deep-play involvement are among the con-
demned attractions.
In Isaiah 65:11–12, gambling is thus one of the ways
by which Israel provokes the Lord: “[You] who set up a table
for Fortune and fill cups of mixed wine for Destiny, I will
destine you to the sword.” Gad (Fortune) and Meni (Desti-
ny) were gods of fortune, possibly of Syrian or Phoenician
origin. The polemic against gambling is thus made in the
same terms as that against idolatry, which in turn is a polem-
ic against involvement in false cosmologies ruled by false
gods. The context also suggests that such gambling was, at
least to the mind of the prophet, one of the alluring vices of
acculturation besetting Israel. This attitude persists in Tal-
mudic and rabbinic prohibitions against a variety of games,
from the Greek Olympics to cards and chess, which Jews re-
garded themselves as having adopted from their neighbors.
But it is particularly those games that involve gambling that
are singled out for condemnation. The Mishnah declares
twice that dice players and pigeon racers are disqualified
from appearing as witnesses in a court of justice (R. ha-Sh.
1.8; San. 3.3), and the medieval Sefardic philosopher
Mosheh ben Maimon (Maimonides, 1135/8-1204) extends
the ban to include those who play chess for money (Com-
mentary on Sanhedrin 3.3). This disqualification rests on the
principle that gamblers are guilty of facilitating acts of rob-
bery and are thus, in effect, criminals. Curiously, gamblers
are similarly disqualified in Hindu law books, joined to
thieves, assassins, and other dangerous characters for being
“incompetent on account of their depravity” and persons in
whom no truth can be found (Narada Smrti 1.159, 1.178;
Br: haspati Dharmaśāstra 7.30).
The passage from Isaiah also introduces another strain
of condemnation: Using the same Hebrew root in two
words, Yahveh “destines” to the sword those who tempt
“Destiny.” Such a scene is, in fact, played out in another pas-
sage from Isaiah, where the rabshakeh (field marshal) of the
Assyrian king Sennacherib challenges Israel to a wager over
horses, and to an additional (though implied) theological
wager—expressed by boasts referring to Yahveh as a fallible
god like those of the surrounding nations—that Yahveh can-
not deliver Israel. The wager over the horses is ignored, but
the arrogant theological presumption of the affront to the
Lord results in the salvation of Jerusalem and Sennacherib’s
death by the sword (Is. 36–37).
If gambling was denounced in the Bible, however, the
casting of lots was not. The throwing of lots with the Urim
and Tummim (Yes and No), articles kept in the priest’s
apron, was accepted as a means of discerning the divine will.
Thus Saul was chosen by lot to be king (1 Sm. 10:20–21);
rural priests were chosen by lot to serve in Jerusalem (1 Chr.
24–25); and Matthias was selected by lot to become Judas’s
successor as the twelfth apostle (Acts 1:26). In these instances,
the casting of lots cannot be called gambling. But it is also
evident that Israel knew of the use of lots for gambling,
though the references suggest that it was only other nations
that so employed them. In Joel 3:1–3, Yahveh speaks of
bringing judgment upon the nations for “having divided up
my land” and “cast lots for my people.” And in Psalms
22:16–18, the psalmist, seeing himself dead, describes the
“company of evildoers” who “divide my garments among
them, and for my raiment cast lots.” It is this latter passage
that is taken in John 19:23–24 as a prophecy of the scene at
Jesus’ crucifixion, where the Roman soldiers divide up the
crucified Christ’s garments and gamble for his seamless
tunic. Here the symbolism of stripping and gambling accen-
tuates the deepest humiliation and suffering (see Mk. 15:16–
20, 25; Mt. 27:28–29, 36).
Early Christian canon law condemned gambling in no
uncertain terms. Two of the so-called Apostolic Canons (41,
42) prohibited both laity and clergy, under pain of excom-
munication, from engaging in games of chance. And at the
Council of Elvira (306 CE), the seventy-ninth canon decreed
a year’s banishment from communion for anyone guilty of
gambling. But restrictions of later councils were directed to-
ward the clergy, and only certain games (especially cards and
dice) were forbidden (Slater, 1909, pp. 375–376). Such re-
laxing of restrictions on lay gambling has facilitated church
sponsorship of bingo and lottery games in fund-raising ef-
forts. The same is true in Orthodox churches.
Christian condemnations of gambling gather their ful-
lest force in Puritan writings. According to the doctrine of
predestination, because every action is foreordained, matters
of so-called chance are in the hands of God alone. To invoke
God in the name of fortune is to offend him “by making him
the assistant in idle pleasures” (Knappen, 1939, p. 439). Sim-
ilarly, man is but a steward of his goods, which ultimately
belong to God. Thus he must not wager what is truly God’s
(Paton, 1924, p. 166). Furthermore, losers at gambling tend
to express themselves in curses.
A rather practical Islamic stance is expressed in the
QurDān when Muh: ammad discourages wine and a form of
gambling with arrows in which the loser pays for a young
camel that is slaughtered and given to the poor: “In both
there is sin and profit to men; but the sin of both is greater
than the profit of the same” (Palmer, 1880, p. 32).
The Hindu law books are full of cautionary remarks on
gambling. As noted already, gamblers are judged incompe-
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION, SECOND EDITION

tent witnesses in matters of law. There are statements that
gambling makes one impure, and that the wealth obtained
by gambling is tainted. Most significant, however, is a pas-
sage from the Laws of Manu concerning the duties of kings:
Of the royal vices, ten are born of pleasure and eight of anger,
and all end in misery; of the ten that “spring from love of
pleasure,” the most pernicious are drinking, dice, women,
and hunting (7.45–50). This list of four vices recurs in the
Mahābhārata (3.14.7) in the mouth of the divine Kr: s: n: a
when he denounces the epic’s famous dice match. Kr: s: n: a adds
that gambling is the worst “desire-born” vice of all. Thus one
seems to have here a condemnation of gambling as deep play.
This correlation between gambling and desire is at the very
heart of the Indian meditation on gambling, for actions born
of desire are binding to this world. Yet in Hindu terms it is
also the things of desire—including the four just men-
tioned—that draw people to the divine. Thus, whereas Kr: s: n: a
here warns of gambling’s dangers, when he reveals his “super-
nal manifestations” in the Bhagavadgı̄tā he claims to be iden-
tical with the game of dice itself: “I am the gambling of
rogues” (10.36).
Buddhist tradition sustains the same critique of gam-
bling without such accent on the ambiguity. In the sixteenth
chapter of the Parabhava Sutta, the Buddha includes addic-
tion to women, strong drink, and dice as one of eleven com-
binations of means whereby men are brought to loss. The
text contrasts these eleven roads to ruin with the one path
to victory: loving the dhamma, the Buddha’s teaching. Else-
where, monks are warned that numerous games and specta-
cles—including combats between elephants, horses, buffalo,
bulls, goats, rams, and cocks; various board games; chariot
racing; and dicing—are addictive distractions and detrimen-
tal to virtue (Tevijja Sutta, Majjhima Sı̄lam 2–4).
GAMBLING GODS, DEMONS, AND HEROES. Yet even the
gods—not to mention their demonic adversaries—are wont
to gamble. Yahveh makes an implied wager with Satan that
Job will remain blameless and upright when deprived of all
he has (Jb. 1:6–12). In Christian traditions, the devil contin-
ues to gamble for the human soul, as in Stephen Vincent
Benét’s story The Devil and Daniel Webster (1937). In Tibet,
an annual ceremony was performed in which a priest repre-
senting a grand lama played dice with a man dressed as a de-
monic ghost king. With fixed dice, the priest won, chasing
the demon away and confirming the truth of the teaching
(Waddell, 1895, p. 512). In India, the two lowest of the four
dice throws are demonic. Thus in the epic story of Nala and
Damayantı̄, one demon (Dvāpara) enters the dice, and the
other (Kali) “possesses” the hero, dooming him to lose all he
has won (Mahābhārata 3.55–56). But the Hindu gods play
anyway, and are even, as we have seen, identified with gam-
bling. This is true not only of Kr: s: n: a but, more decisively,
of Śiva, who is from very early times the lord of gamblers,
and who plays dice in classical myths with his wife Parvati.
As noted, Indian dice are named after the four ages
(yugas), which “roll” four by four a thousand times within
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION, SECOND EDITION
GAMBLING 3263
the larger time unit of the kalpa. The dice play of the divine
couple thus represents the continuity of the universe and
their absorption with and within it. This “deep play” is one
expression of the theological concept of lı̄lā, literally “divine
play” or “divine sport.” The game’s disruption holds the im-
plication of the end of the universe (the mahāpralaya), while
its resumption holds the implication of the recreation (the
cosmogony). But insofar as the game is associated with the
rise and fall of the yugas, it is played ritually at liminal tempo-
ral junctures in which the continuity of the universe is imper-
iled. Śiva and Pārvatı̄ thus provide the mythic model for
those who play dice ritually at the festival of Dı̄vālı̄
(Dı̄pāvalı̄), which marks a traditional new year. And it is at
the mythic juncture of the Dvāparayuga and the Kaliyuga
that the great dice match of the Mahābhārata occurs.
One of the most important themes that unites the dice
play of Śiva and Pārvatı̄ with the dice match of the
Mahābhārata is that of stripping. The stakes for which Śiva
and Pārvatı̄ play are their clothes and ornaments. When Śiva
loses his loincloth, he gets angry, goes off naked, or refuses
to pay up. Pārvatı̄ points out that he never wins, except by
cheating (O’Flaherty, 1973, pp. 204, 223, 247). Thus it
never comes to pass that both of them are reduced to naked-
ness, which would imply their merger as Śiva and Śakti,
Purus: a and Prakr: ti, at the mahāpralaya. What is striking
about the dice match in the Mahābhārata is that after the five
Pan: d: ava brothers have gambled away everything, even their
freedom and their wife-in-common, Draupadı̄, the culmi-
nating act is the attempt by the winners (the Kauravas) to
disrobe the heroine in front of her husbands and the whole
assembly. As Draupadı̄ is an incarnation of the Goddess, the
miraculous intervention by Kr: s: n: a that prevents her stripping
is a sign that the dissolution of the universe will not occur
in untimely fashion during the intra-yuga period in which
the story is set.
It is seen, then, that divine gambling involves persistent
encounters with the demonic. Hindu materials carry this
theme to great depths, accentuating a continuum between
demonic possession and divine rapture. In South Indian
terukkūttu (“street-drama”) folk plays that enact the epic
story, the attempts by the Kaurava Duh: śāsana to disrobe
Draupadı̄ result in his demonic possession, while Draupadı̄
at the same time experiences the most sublime bhakti
(“divine love”). On the divine-demonic turf of gambling, in
fact, no hero can hope to win without recourse to the powers
that hold the demonic in check. The hero is thus the one
who is willing to take the risk, even against the seemingly
highest odds. It is striking how many epics include episodes
of gambling, and even more striking how frequently the
“good” hero loses, awaiting final triumph or vindication else-
where. This occurs not only in the Mahābhārata but in Indi-
an folk epics as well. In the Tamil folk epic The Elder Broth-
er’s Story, the twin brothers play six games of dice with Vis: n: u
at intervals preceding dramatic turns of fortune, the last of
which is their death (Beck, 1982, p. 143). In the Telugu epic
3264 GAMES
The Heroes of Palnād: u, a cockfight wager divides irreparably
the two camps of half brothers, and a game of tops and a dice
match between another set of younger brothers in the heroic
camp foreshadow the events that lead to their death. In re-
cent years, actual cockfights have been outlawed at the festi-
vals at which these stories are recited (Roghair, 1982, pp. 30
and 62–295 passim). In the Tibetan epic of Gesar of Ling,
the hero repeatedly plays mōs (see Waddell, 1895,
pp. 465–474), a game of divination using colored pebbles,
before his adventures. Here the lots fall out in the divine
hero’s favor. In the Mwindo epic of the Nyanga people of
the Congo Republic, the hero Mwindo plays wiki, a gam-
bling game with seeds. Mwindo plays in the underworld
against the supreme divinity of fire, first losing everything
and then winning it back, in an effort to reclaim his antago-
nistic father from the underworld with a view toward their
reconciliation.
Yet there is another dimension to the stance of the hero-
ic gambler that figures, at least metaphorically, in all the great
religions of faith: that of the person who may lose everything,
or be stripped like Job or Draupadı̄, but will not gamble
away salvation. In positive terms, this is the wager that God
exists, the famous wager that Pascal set forth with such preci-
sion in his Pensées (1670):
But here there is an infinity of infinitely happy life to
be won, one chance of winning against a finite number
of chances of losing. That leaves no choice; wherever
there is infinity, and where there are not infinite
chances of losing against that of winning, there is no
room for hesitation. You must give everything. And
thus, since you are obliged to play, you must be re-
nouncing reason if you hoard your life rather than risk
it for an infinite gain, just as likely to occur as a loss
amounting to nothing. (Krailsheimer, 1966, p. 151)
Pascal is thus at pains to show that the central bet, as in the
Balinese cockfight, is for even money.
SEE ALSO Chance; Divination; Games.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A good bibliography, mainly on the history and legislation of Eu-
ropean and American gambling, is found in Stephen Powell’s
A Gambling Bibliography, Based on the Collection, University
of Nevada, Las Vegas (Las Vegas, 1972). Valuable encyclope-
dia articles include those by J. L. Paton on “Gambling,” E.
Sidney Hartland on “Games,” and G. Margoulith on
“Games (Hebrew and Jewish),” in the Encyclopaedia of Reli-
gion and Ethics, edited by James Hastings, vol. 6 (Edinburgh,
1913); T. Slater’s “Gambling,” in Catholic Encyclopedia, vol.
6 (New York, 1909); and R. F. Schnell’s “Games OT,” in
The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, edited by George Ar-
thur Buttrick (New York, 1962).
For theoretical discussion, see Edward Burnett Tylor’s Primitive
Culture, vol. 1, The Origins of Culture (1871; reprint, New
York, 1958), pp. 78–83, emphasizing diffusion and divina-
tion, and Charles John Erasmus’s “Patolli, Pachisi, and the
Limitation of Possibilities,” Southwestern Journal of Anthro-
pology 6 (1950): 369–387, which evaluates Tylor’s views and
various opposing views (including those of Robert Stewart
Culin). On “play” in different aspects, see Adolf E. Jensen’s
Myth and Cult among Primitive Peoples, translated by Mari-
anna Tax Choldin and Wolfgang Weissleder (Chicago,
1963), pp. 59–64, and, especially, Clifford Geertz’s The In-
terpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, 1973),
pp. 412–453, on the Balinese cockfight. Recent proceedings
of the Association for the Anthropological Study of Play
(ATASP) are worth consulting, especially for the following:
Bernard Mergen’s “Reisman Redux: Football as Work, Play,
Ritual and Metaphor” and Robert L. Humphrey’s “Sugges-
tions for a Cognitive Study of the Mesoamerican Ball
Game,” in Play as Context (ATASP Proceedings, 1979), ed-
ited by Alyce Taylor Cheska (West Point, N.Y., 1981), and
Pierre Ventur’s “Mopan Maya Dice Games from the South-
ern Peten,” in Play and Culture (ATASP Proceedings, 1980),
edited by Helen B. Schwartzman (West Point, N.Y., 1980).
On documentation, see Frederic V. Grunfeld’s Games of the World
(New York, 1975), for informed discussion with illustra-
tions. On American Indian games, see the classic study by
Robert Stewart Culin, Games of the North American Indians,
“Bureau of American Ethnology Report,” no. 24 (1907; re-
print, Washington, D. C., 1973). See also Rafael Karsten’s
“Ceremonial Games of the South American Indians” (in En-
glish), Societas Scientarum Fennica: Commentationes Huma-
narum Litterarum, vol. 3, pt. 2 (Helsinki, 1930); Jan C. He-
esterman’s The Ancient Indian Royal Consecration (The
Hague, 1957); Liansheng Yang’s Excursions in Sinology
(Cambridge, Mass., 1969); L. Austune Waddell’s The Bud-
dhism of Tibet, or Lamaism (1895; reprint, Cambridge,
1958). On prohibitions of gambling, see the articles by Hart-
land, Paton, and Slater mentioned above; M. M. Knappen’s
Tudor Puritanism (Chicago, 1939); and The Qur Dān, trans-
lated by E. H. Palmer in “Sacred Books of the East,” vol. 6
(1880; reprint, Delhi, 1970).
On gambling in myths and epics, see Wendy Doniger
O’Flaherty’s Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva
(Oxford, 1973); Brenda E. F. Beck’s The Three Twins: The
Telling of a South Indian Folk Epic (Bloomington, Ind.,
1982); Gene H. Roghair’s The Epic of Palnadu: A Study and
Translation of Palnati Virula Katha (Oxford, 1982); Alexan-
dra David-Neel’s The Superhuman Life of Gesar of Ling,
translated by Violet Sydney, rev. ed. (London, 1959); and
Daniel P. Biebuyck and Kohombo C. Mateene’s The Mwin-
do Epic (Berkeley, Calif., 1969). On Pascal’s wager, see Blaise
Pascal’s Pensées, translated by A. J. Krailsheimer (Harmonds-
worth, 1966).
New Sources
Handelman, Don, and David Shulman. God Inside Out: Siva’s
Game of Dice. New York, 1997.
ALF HILTEBEITEL (1987)
Revised Bibliography
GAMES are analytically distinguished from other forms of
contest by being framed as “play” and from other forms of
play by their competitive format and the institutional—
public, systematic, and jural—character of their rules. The
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION, SECOND EDITION