Science of Sand: Desert Divination Said to Be Guided by Jinn Reported Still Practiced

THE ARABIAN DESERT — A Reddit user posting to r/HighStrangeness has set out an account of Ilm al-Raml, or "the Science of Sand," a form of fortune-telling the author describes as some 1,200 years old and rooted in the deserts of the ancient Middle East.

According to the post, the practitioner, known as a rammal, would lead a client into the desert at night and, beneath the open sky, recite incantations to enter a trance. He would then strike a stick into the sand to produce 16 rapid rows of random dots. In desert folklore, the author writes, the rammal was not alone: a jinn, an unseen spirit, was believed to possess or guide his arm and dictate the number of dots.

The dots were then counted in pairs. An odd remainder left a single dot, and an even one formed a line. From these the practitioner built a matrix of 16 symbols, each said to be tied to a guardian jinn, an elemental force and a celestial body. Through these figures, the post says, practitioners claimed to locate hidden treasure, reveal secret betrayals and foretell deaths.

Religious authorities, the author notes, condemned the art as dangerous sorcery, since it was held to involve summoning jinn to look into Al-Ghayb, the hidden realm. The tradition nonetheless persisted, according to the post, eventually passing from the sands into hidden manuscripts in the backstreets of Istanbul.

The post states that the dramatic open-air ritual has largely vanished. Elders in remote desert towns of North Africa, including Mauritania and Morocco, and secretive practitioners in the Middle East are said to cast it still, using fine sand on wooden trays or handwritten manuscripts, away from public view. The post offers no named sources for these claims.