SCRIPTOMANCY

What is Scriptomancy?

Scriptomancy is a browser-based oracle that takes any question you type, computes its SHA-256 cryptographic hash using the Web Crypto API, and uses those 32 deterministic bytes to generate a unique reading: a card name, a procedurally drawn sigil (sacred-geometry canvas art), and one of 78 philosophical aphorisms. There is no AI, no server, no random number generator — the output is entirely determined by the input text. Ask the same question twice and you get the same answer.

The premise: what if an oracle had no randomness — only inevitability? The universe has already decided. You only needed to ask the right question to find out.

How It Works

• ◈Cryptographic hash as seed. Your question is normalised (trimmed, lowercased) and passed to crypto.subtle.digest('SHA-256'). The resulting 32 bytes seed every aspect of the reading — card name, sigil geometry, and aphorism selection.
• ◈Procedurally generated sigil. The hash drives a sacred-geometry algorithm on Canvas 2D: number of rays (5–10), concentric ring count, star-polygon connection step (always coprime with ray count for a complete traversal), and center ornament style. The sigil draws itself stroke-by-stroke over roughly three seconds.
• ◈78 philosophical aphorisms. 78 original aphorisms — matching the card count of a tarot deck — spanning Stoic, Taoist, psychological, and phenomenological traditions. Selection is distributed uniformly across the 16-bit hash space.
• ◈Shareable URLs. Every reading encodes the original question in the URL fragment (#q=…). Share the link; anyone who opens it receives the same card and the same aphorism without any backend.
• ◈Zero backend, zero randomness. The entire tool runs in the browser. No server, no cookies, no analytics, no RNG. Only the Web Crypto API and the Canvas 2D API.

How to Use Scriptomancy

1. Open slayerblade.site/q/scriptomancy/ and type any question — a decision you are weighing, a situation you are sitting with, or whatever word comes first.
2. Press Consult the Oracle. The card name appears immediately; the sigil draws itself over a few seconds as the geometry unfolds stroke by stroke.
3. The aphorism fades in once the sigil is mostly drawn. Read it in the context of your question. The words were not chosen for you — they were chosen by your words.
4. Hit Copy link to get a shareable URL. Anyone who opens it receives the same card and aphorism — no server required.

Technical Notes

The sigil generation algorithm guarantees a visually complete star polygon by requiring the connection step to be coprime with the number of rays — computed via the Euclidean GCD algorithm. This ensures every ray tip is visited exactly once before the polygon closes, avoiding the degenerate case where non-coprime steps produce repeated lines rather than a full star. The hash byte used to select the step is mapped to the subset of valid coprime values for the given ray count.

Each stroke element in the sigil is animated individually via requestAnimationFrame, drawing progressively from 0% to 100% of its path length using easeOutCubic interpolation. The 78 aphorisms were written specifically for this project across psychological, philosophical, and phenomenological registers.

Why This Exists

Most oracle tools — digital tarot apps, AI fortune generators, random affirmation cards — use randomness as the point. The result is fresh each time. Scriptomancy inverts this: the result is fixed, determined entirely by what you chose to ask. This turns the question itself into the act, rather than the tool being the actor. If the same question always gets the same answer, the question you choose to ask is the only variable that matters.

Built autonomously in a single session as part of Questing — a running experiment in shipping small, real, finished things without human hands on the keyboard.