The explicit recognition of chance's role in events great and small pervaded Uzdan culture in all its periods and was treated as a matter of religious significance.  However, chance was not thought of as we think of it, as being a matter of randomness.  This was not, however, because the Uzdans had a strongly deterministic worldview---far from it.  Rather, any event in which chance played a role was seen as being an expression of the global order, ripe with significance not just about the present state of the world, but its future state, thus explaining the curious character of Uzdan methods of divination.  Indeed, for much of the early Uzdan period, chance events were seen as causally efficacious.  A given hand in a card game, what birds flew from what corner of the sky, whether this or that fly would leave a window first: such events were thought not merely to give information but to actively change what would come to pass, albeit generally in unclear ways that required much interpretation.

As might be imagined, this conception of chance is intertwined with a myriad of other attributes of Uzdan culture, and there is no space here to investigate all the connections with the diligence they deserve.  (Interested readers are referred to my forthcoming monograph Chance in Pre-Imperial Uzda for a model discussion of the issues in that period.)  Thus, I will limit my remarks to a few related topics:

1. Chance, Luck, and Related Matters

Recalling the Uzdan conception of social hierarchy and social subsumption, it should be no surprise that they did not stop in their organismic prejudice with their own society, but extended it outward into the entire world.  Nature itself in all its manifestations was built towards some end and displayed that end in natural events, if one only knew how to read them. One of the most time-honored interpretations of chance events that pertain directly to one's own advantage or disadvantage, of course, whether in Uzda, Uzdumalia, or any other society, is that such events---instances of luck or unluck---comment directly on oneself.  This was, in fact, the Uzdan conception as well. Curiously, Uzdumalian society was more egalitarian in this realm than in the purely social, and it was thought to be possible to change one's luckly station through assiduous effort and sometimes mystical means; sometimes this resulted in a change of general social station as well.  Thus I must disagree with my colleague who states that players of Alchemy who claimed to have devised winning strategies were charlatans or rogues.  There were of course charlatans and rogues in abundance, as there ever are, but in many cases the cheaters were first and foremost their own dupes, who believed that they had managed to increase their natural luckiness and that therefore nature itself was conspiring to give them favorable rolls and hands.  The money that came to them was merely the means by which the universe's recognition of their change in estate would come to be mirrored by society's recognition of their newfound wealth, if not class.

Similarly, bad luck, if consistently demonstrated, often sufficed to damn someone from society.  Not, of course, because an unlucky person was unlikely to enjoy success, but because his bad luck showed that it was a mistake, a cosmic mistake, in fact, that he had ever enjoyed what success he had had.  The composition of parodic dialogues on the question of whether a Borrit's deformities were a sign of his bad luck, or the earliest and most horrific expression thereof, was a frequent means of mocking the perceived emptiness of the scholarship of the Low Imperial period, during which the professors seemed completely disconnected from the anarchy that reigned mere feet outside their universities, which were mostly spared from hostilities, being seen on all sides as utterly irrelevant.  Despite the parodic intent, this was not really as theoretically idle a question as the writers made it otu to be, for those few Borrits who overcame their status and rose to success often did so through many victories at contests of luck, in which (for example) a contestant would be restrained at one end of a narrow hallway, to be shot at by a blindfolded archer standing at the other end.  If the wound were trivial, or of the contestant were not hit at all, this was taken to be extremely good proof of his luck.

2. Chance and Divination

As mentioned above, the Uzdan conception of chance resulted in divinatory strategies that bore little resemblance to those of other cultures of the time.  Nearly anything was, potentially, a divination, and early on was thought of as actually changing some aspect of the future.  Arguably the fantastic complexity of games like Alchemy owes to this: if the game were simpler, the thought goes, it would have been easier for the players to see themselves in the cards and dice, and playing the game would have potentially profound effects on their lives.  With the complexity increased to absurd levels, however, while one could still tell if one had won or lost, it was no longer at all obvious what that meant in particular in one's life.  That it meant something was never doubted, but the player could continue on his way without being burdened by knowledge of what.

Simpler means were adopted for divinatory purposes, though players of Alchemy who had proven their luck were among the most demanded diviners.  Since it was thought that the matter inquired about was to some degree in flux until the divination took place, having an extremely lucky diviner was greatly advantageous.  In fact, at the height of the belief in the causal efficacy of divination, it was not uncommon for armies to march to a battlefield with nearly as many gamblers as soldiers.  It is said, too, that when Drevis V was found in his palace by rioters, he was obsessively rolling dice, as if that alone would suffice to stave off his execution.

3. Dissent

The idea that, since every fact, social or natural, is part of the same order, one can use chance events to foretell the future, and especially that the future was open to influence by divination, was roundly mocked by the heretic philosopher Grallian Horfx, a provincial who had not grown up in Uzdan culture. He claimed that "If a man see an egg held above the ground, he is not at all surprised when, upon its release, he witnesses the natural sequel; nor does he look on it as any thing, whereof he had need of an augury to inform him what would happen. The course of events can be predicted completely, once the starting conditions are known, and we have no reason to consider, that the contests of armies do not admit of similar analysis, except that their complexity be too great for us to comprehend.  The progress of science is held back when we insist upon seeing the world as but one thing, and fail to observe, that its many independent processes can be separated one from the other with great profit to the investigator."  He was put to death for his trouble, but his ideas and those of scattered other philosophers found support in early Targhandism. The underclass that constituted the first adherents to Targhandism were by and large sick of their misfortunes being cast as an appropriate and necessary part of the cosmic order, and were attracted to the Targhandic emphasis on individual progress and personal conversion.  (Targhandism was the first religion in the area to convert adherents one by one; the chief Uzdan religion and its offshoots tended to interpret entire regions into their fold, reconciling seeming differences with great syncretic creativity.)  Horfx's arguments decoupling events from each other and from a cosmic order frequently show up in early Targhandic writings in somewhat masked or polemic forms.  Even Buan's Epiphany was often cast in this light in homiletic texts, with great emphasis being placed on the appearance of a particular person, Ghizni, to Buan, as a particular person, outside his social role.  Though acknowledged as a chance event, Targhandists argued that this could in no way be seen as an event in a cosmic order, but only as a breaking-through of the Word of Targhand to an individual as such---a notion which, but for the heretical philosophers who came before, would have been practically unthinkable.

See also:

Alchemy (game)

Borrits

Buan of Uzda

Early Targhandism

Philosophical precursors to Targhandism

Heretical Sects of Uzda