About BUCi

BUCi began with a single observation:

Our ancestors, no matter which continent or century they lived in, asked fate questions. Persians wrote poems. The Maya built calendars. Germanic peoples carved runes. The Chinese burnt turtle shells.

Divination is not "ignorance." Divination is one of humanity's oldest technologies for coping with uncertainty — its core is not prediction, but structured dialogue with the unknown.

That dialogue is something the 21st century still needs.

BUCi is not a fortune-telling platform.

We are a museum.

We gather divination traditions from across the globe — those that have been ignored, misunderstood, or reduced to "superstition" — and curate them with scholarly rigor, present them in poetic language, and let AI help you experience them firsthand.

Every reading is grounded in the source texts of its culture (Hafez's Divan, the Maya Tzolkin, Elder Futhark inscriptions). We don't invent; we curate.

BUCi is a non-profit project.

We don't make BUCi to make money. After covering operating costs (servers, AI, a founder stipend), 50% of the surplus is donated to cultural-preservation projects — especially the living cultures we curate that still struggle to survive. This is an early-stage pledge; the ratio will rise as fixed costs are amortized.

Our first recipient is Ganjoor — a volunteer-maintained open-source Persian poetry digital library. Every poem in BUCi's Hafez system comes from their free corpus. Using the fruit of their labor and donating the surplus back is the cleanest possible loop.

On the "founder stipend" we are transparent: it is a living wage, not a market salary. We believe sustainable > pure — if the founder can't live, the project helps no one.

What you buy is a cultural product, not a donation. But after costs, half of every payment flows to cultural preservation. Every cent is public on the Impact Report.

Yuanci · 远辞

Researcher of divination cultures · Curator

Ten years ago, in the Hafezieh in Shiraz, I watched an elder use a piece of sheep-skin string to open Hafez's Divan at random. The ghazal that landed fit exactly the situation he was facing that evening. That was when I understood: divination is not superstition, but a grammar humanity has used for millennia to deal with chance.

The next ten years I spent moving between Shiraz, Momostenango (Guatemala), and Uppsala (Sweden) — not to seek readings, but to interview the people who still do this every day: Hafez manuscript keepers, K'iche' Maya day-keepers (ajq'ij), Norse rune scholars. My work is documentation and curation.

BUCi exists to bring those interviews, archives, and field notes to readers who live in the 21st century — not in the academic register (the academic books are too thick; I can't finish them either), not in the occult register (the occult corrodes truth-seeking). But in the "museum curator" register: every divination system, laid out cleanly, with history and respect, for the reader to step into.

I don't solve a single question; I narrate a single lineage.

The three launch systems — Hafez, Tzolkin, Rune — represent three basic grammars of divination: "text-type" (a poem answers), "time-type" (what kind of day is today), "symbol-type" (casting and combination).

Expanding by cultural lineage:

• · I Ching (China · number-type) — the next item on the list
• · Tarot (Europe · card-type) — 78 majors and minors
• · Lenormand (Europe · card-type · 19C) — domestic daily perspective, distinct from Tarot
• · Ifá (West Africa · Yoruba · geometric) — 256 odu
• · Geomancy (Arabic · sand divination) — a shared medieval tradition between the Islamic world and Europe
• · Tonalpohualli (Aztec) — another branch of the 260-day calendar shared with Tzolkin

Two or three civilizations added each year. The goal isn't "all of them," it's that each one we add is done right.

Without these predecessors, BUCi would not exist:

• · The Ganjoor Project — Iranian volunteer-maintained free digitized Hafez corpus; BUCi's Persian and English texts come from here
• · Yuri Knorozov — Soviet scholar, deciphered Maya script in 1952
• · Barbara Tedlock — the first Western anthropologist to complete the ajq'ij training
• · Edred Thorsson (Stephen Flowers) — "face the history" school of contemporary rune scholarship
• · Carl Gustav Jung — in 1949, used "synchronicity" to keep divination's place in Western intellectual life

And all the unnamed priests, day-keepers, and manuscript guardians who still do this work.