Gambling

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GAMBLING

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 gambling only insofar as it takes on overt religious significance. No discussion of gambling would be complete, however, without acknowledging its covert religious significance, particularly in cultures that prohibit it or, having adopted a secularized 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 enhanced by the flaunting or circumvention of traditional prohibitions and heightened by ritualized procedures too numerous 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 cannot 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 gambling from ancient Near Eastern or other Asian prototypes, the prevalence of gambling rites and myths in archaic cultures strongly suggests that the origins of religious gambling are irretrievable. Archaeologists have suggested that the painted pebbles found in the Mas d'Azil caves in the Pyrenees, 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. Gambling can only be assumed here, as with Indus Valley dice from about 2000 bce and Egyptian (1990–1780 bce), Cretan (1800–1650 bce), and Palestinian (c. sixteenth century bce) finds, some of which resemble cribbage boards. Evidence 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 Ṛgveda 10.34 provides the first gambler's lament in its "Hymn to Gambling" (c. 1200 bce). The games of ancient cultures appear not only to be similar to those found in recent and contemporary 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 "application" (Jensen, 1963, pp. 59-64) in contemporary tribal cultures, such cultures present the best evidence for understanding 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 detailed 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 illuminating 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 "cosmic 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 evident 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 curious children, the divine Twins, the miraculous offspring 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 feminine 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 Indian 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 equinoctial 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 dualistically 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 cosmological notions of the pot (or, sometimes, the gourd) as a container 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 nineteenth 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-clockwise) movement of the sun through the houses of the zodiac. The four-sided dice are identified with the four Indian ages (yuga s). The goal of returning to the center thus suggests 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 participation 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. Interest 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, because 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 concessionaires for women, children, the poor, and others who find themselves excluded.

"Deep-play" cockfighting is thus for "the solid citizenry" 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 respective 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 demonic: "a blood sacrifice offered, with the appropriate chants and oblations, to the demons in order to pacify their ravenous, cannibal hunger" (ibid., p. 420). The fights are regularly performed in connection with temple festivals and as collective 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. Humphrey (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 offerings of tobacco to the spirits of the game precede the action. 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 spectators 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 imprecations.… They quarrel and fight, which never happens 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 suggestive feature of deep play that emerges here is the significance of "stripping," for being willing to gamble all one possesses 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 important 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 cosmological 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 reiterations 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 desired outcome. But the important point is that the participants submit to the principles of the game. Similar initiatory and cosmogonic overtones are found in contexts where gambling 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 different religions have denounced or prohibited gambling are revealing on two fronts. First, they reflect the axiomatic theological and cultural values operative in the respective traditions. 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 significance and deep-play involvement are among the condemned 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 (Destiny) 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 polemic 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 Talmudic and rabbinic prohibitions against a variety of games, from the Greek Olympics to cards and chess, which Jews regarded 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 (Commentary on Sanhedrin 3.3). This disqualification rests on the principle that gamblers are guilty of facilitating acts of robbery 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; Bṛhaspati 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 passage 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 cannot 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 accentuates 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 excommunication, 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 toward the clergy, and only certain games (especially cards and dice) were forbidden (Slater, 1909, pp. 375–376). Such relaxing of restrictions on lay gambling has facilitated church sponsorship of bingo and lottery games in fund-raising efforts. The same is true in Orthodox churches.

Christian condemnations of gambling gather their fullest 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). Similarly, 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 Qurʾān when Muḥammad 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 incompetent 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 passage 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 Kṛṣṇa when he denounces the epic's famous dice match. Kṛṣṇa 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 mentioned—that draw people to the divine. Thus, whereas Kṛṣṇa here warns of gambling's dangers, when he reveals his "supernal manifestations" in the Bhagavadgītā he claims to be identical with the game of dice itself: "I am the gambling of rogues" (10.36).

Buddhist tradition sustains the same critique of gambling without such accent on the ambiguity. In the sixteenth chapter of the Parabhava Sutta, the Buddha includes addiction to women, strong drink, and dice as one of eleven combinations 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. Elsewhere, monks are warned that numerous games and spectacles—including combats between elephants, horses, buffalo, bulls, goats, rams, and cocks; various board games; chariot racing; and dicing—are addictive distractions and detrimental to virtue (Tevijja Sutta, Majjhima Sīlam 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 continues 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 representing a grand lama played dice with a man dressed as a demonic 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 Damayantī, 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 gambling. This is true not only of Kṛṣṇa 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 (yuga s), which "roll" four by four a thousand times within 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 līlā, literally "divine play" or "divine sport." The game's disruption holds the implication 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 yuga s, it is played ritually at liminal temporal junctures in which the continuity of the universe is imperiled. Śiva and Pārvatī thus provide the mythic model for those who play dice ritually at the festival of Dīvālī (Dīpāvalī), 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 Pārvatī with the dice match of the Mahābhārata is that of stripping. The stakes for which Śiva and Pārvatī play are their clothes and ornaments. When Śiva loses his loincloth, he gets angry, goes off naked, or refuses to pay up. Pārvatī 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 nakedness, which would imply their merger as Śiva and Śakti, Puruṣa and Prakṛti, at the mahāpralaya. What is striking about the dice match in the Mahābhārata is that after the five Paṇḍava brothers have gambled away everything, even their freedom and their wife-in-common, Draupadī, the culminating act is the attempt by the winners (the Kauravas) to disrobe the heroine in front of her husbands and the whole assembly. As Draupadī is an incarnation of the Goddess, the miraculous intervention by Kṛṣṇa 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 Duḥśāsana to disrobe Draupadī result in his demonic possession, while Draupadī 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 elsewhere. This occurs not only in the Mahābhārata but in Indian folk epics as well. In the Tamil folk epic The Elder Brother's Story, the twin brothers play six games of dice with Viṣṇu at intervals preceding dramatic turns of fortune, the last of which is their death (Beck, 1982, p. 143). In the Telugu epic The Heroes of Palnāḍu, 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 recent years, actual cockfights have been outlawed at the festivals 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 gambling 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 antagonistic father from the underworld with a view toward their reconciliation.

Yet there is another dimension to the stance of the heroic 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 Draupadī, 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 precision 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 renouncing 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.

Bibliography

A good bibliography, mainly on the history and legislation of European 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 encyclopedia 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 Religion 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 Arthur 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 divination, and Charles John Erasmus's "Patolli, Pachisi, and the Limitation of Possibilities," Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 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 Marianna Tax Choldin and Wolfgang Weissleder (Chicago, 1963), pp. 59–64, and, especially, Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation 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 "Suggestions for a Cognitive Study of the Mesoamerican Ball Game," in Play as Context (ATASP Proceedings, 1979), edited by Alyce Taylor Cheska (West Point, N.Y., 1981), and Pierre Ventur's "Mopan Maya Dice Games from the Southern 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 illustrations. 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; reprint, Washington, D. C., 1973). See also Rafael Karsten's "Ceremonial Games of the South American Indians" (in English), Societas Scientarum Fennica: Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum, vol. 3, pt. 2 (Helsinki, 1930); Jan C. Heesterman's The Ancient Indian Royal Consecration (The Hague, 1957); Liansheng Yang's Excursions in Sinology (Cambridge, Mass., 1969); L. Austune Waddell's The Buddhism of Tibet, or Lamaism (1895; reprint, Cambridge, 1958). On prohibitions of gambling, see the articles by Hartland, Paton, and Slater mentioned above; M. M. Knappen's Tudor Puritanism (Chicago, 1939); and The Qurʾān, translated 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); Alexandra 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 Mwindo Epic (Berkeley, Calif., 1969). On Pascal's wager, see Blaise Pascal's Pensées, translated by A. J. Krailsheimer (Harmondsworth, 1966).