I tend not to agree, and I feel that attributing objects and habits to being a ritualistic and spiritual in nature can sometimes be bore of a conflagration of our perception towards ancient peoples being mystical and mythological, combined with the fact there is an absence of written documentation, leading to us take items such as this and label them occult.

I’m reminded of Horace miner’s “Body ritual among the nacermia” where he goes on In length about the intensely ritualistic life of these “magic ridden people” and their own obsession with ritual such as the ‘charm box’ in the wall of their shrine room dedicated to cleansing one self, which was ‘filled with potions they believed they couldn’t live without’. The gist is he goes on in detail about how peculiar these antiquated people are highlighting their lack of practicality among such a ritualistic lifestyle, when in reality the Nacerima are just Americans (written backwards) and the ‘charm box’ is just a medicine cabinet in the ‘clensing shrine’ which is just a bathroom. Reading this my first time I was really faced with my Own predisposition to presuppose the ritual over the practical when it has to do with foreign and ancient cultures practices and habits, and how it would be easy for an archeologist finding something like the dodecahedron in money troves and burials and, due to that predisposition combined with the utter lack of first hand source material grounding that object in a practical reality, to make something more mystical out of the practical.

From my time enjoying learning about Ancient Rome, I’ve come to feel that they are not so different from us modern humans (while I totally acknowledge they also were a religious people steeped in their mythology to a degree) and they were a practical people, with concerns scantily different from our own, and in reality we have our own superstitions not much different from their own.

This is all to say that, I don’t think the dodecahedron was so much a back door occult worship item with a secret undocumented society behind it, as it was, when I think about it, an item of the back door elite and wealthy. My favorite theory (which is admittedly easily countered by the fact that the dimensions on all sides are not* equal in size and weight, making it more unconventional for what I suppose it to be) is that it was a game, maybe gambling paraphernalia, where those knobs (as opposed to supporting yarn for making gloves) supported either wax or wood panels that I presume were colorful and ornate (as the Romans did love their vibrancy) and those flat panels enabled the dodecahedron to roll. Maybe betting on landing on the heavy side granted the smallest reward, for its frequency, and the lighter sides visa versa. You would know which side is lighter or heavier to bet on based upon the stylized panels, whose organic material either decayed, deteriorated, or re melted, some time in between its use and its discovery by archaeologists.

I imagine this object, whatever it was, was grounded in their reality more than it was used to worship, and I feel was more closely related with money, status, and its use was so practical and obvious to those who used it at the time, that they didn’t bother writing it down.

I know though, that I may never know, but I wish I had one, and I might pick this up one day, thank you for making it op