In our patriarchal society, young men have been emboldened to select their own paths, to determine who and what they wanted to become-leaving boys with no true need for fortune telling or luck. Like so many divinatory games, young women have long been the keepers and practitioners. The cootie catcher is primarily associated with girlhood, a gendered tradition passed hand-to-hand at sleepover parties and in schoolyards. Girls have long been drawn to games of chance, of luck, of peering into a future that seemed to already have been decided for them. Someone took out a piece of paper, tore it into a square, and began to fold. As dusk slipped towards midnight and the wine ran low, we found ourselves recalling the blanket forts of our childhoods-and the strange occult happenings that shimmered inside them.

A tunnel led from the front door into the main quilt-muffled chamber, forcing party guests to make their entrance by squeezing into the room on hands and knees. Lace and golden string lights were draped over chair backs. It was a friend’s 25th birthday, and we had (in a youthful burst of exuberance) transformed her shotgun apartment into a labyrinthine series of blanket forts. I had nearly forgotten about cootie catchers until three winters ago in New Orleans. By its very design, the tradition could survive in any community, could manifest in any child’s hands. And, as a child mystic requires only a single sheet of paper and a writing utensil to conjure one of these fold-up fortune tellers into existence, the toy was available to children of all income levels and classes. From there, it bloomed into one of the nation’s most popular children’s folk traditions, right up there with Bloody Mary in the mirror and “light as a feather, stiff as a board.” Traveling onwards between friendship-braceleted hands, stuffed into pockets, and torn from diary pages, the cootie catcher spread across the world. We do know that the device was popularized in the United States during the 1950s. Like most folk traditions, evolving and adapting under the influence of many thinkers and makers throughout time, the catcher’s true origins are unclear, with some accounts tracking them all the way back to 17 th-century Europe. Regardless of its title, chances are you’ve used the cootie catcher just the way I did: as a two-person game designed to tell brief, randomized fortunes.

There’s Poland’s “niebo-pieklo,” Germany’s “himmel und hölle,” Italy’s “inferno-paradiso”-all of which translate into some form of “heaven and hell.” “Cootie catcher,” itself, refers to one particular style of decorating the apparatus, in which small, scattered dots, or “cooties,” would be drawn on half the second-tier flaps, so that opening and closing the catcher would reveal or swallow them. You may have known the device by another name- “fortune teller” is the most common alternative, though certain regions also favor salt-cellar, whirlybird, chatterbox, or snapdragon, among others. A dream or a question, just on the edge of your memory: the nostalgic step by step ritual of playing with a paper cootie catcher. Seven? The flap levitates open, and there, hidden beneath the innermost paper petal, lies your fate. Five? Alright, whisper the soothsayers, one, two, three, four, five, they count, as their hands twitch in tandem.

Now choose a number from the inner folds. Perhaps it’s been years, decades, since you’ve enacted these motions yourself: first, choose a color from the outside flaps, and the soothsayers speak the letters aloud while widening and shutting the device’s pointed mouth, a soft crinkling of paper swishing through the hushed air. As they work, a small apparatus manifests, pleated and primped. Their hands move in familiar patterns: they fold a piece of notebook paper in half, then again, tuck the corners toward center and crease. There are soothsayers in the back of the school bus.

Origami fortune teller other names