Talus Systems Myths
Talus - The talus (astragalus) 'had a special application in days gone by. 
Dice were carved from them, hence the term talisman. That is kind of poetic for there is clearly a major function of the talus to deal with chaos and the unanticipated.



Our word die (singular of dice) comes from the Latin word datum which is also the root of data. There is some indication that the word was used in the common Latin to mean a playing piece.

Talus in one account was the son, or maternal nephew, to Smith Daedalus, in another was forged in the furnace of Smith Hephaestus. Dionysus, because of his titles pyrigenes and ignigena ("engendered by fire")--a reference to the autumnal Toadstool-Dionysus engendered by lightning--may have been equated with Talus in this sense....Mercury was not only patron of dice-players but prophesied from dice. He used five dice with four markings on each, in honor of his Mother, precisely like those given an Indian King at his coronation in honor of the Mother; and if, as I suppose, he used them for alphabetic divination he had his own alphabet of fifteen consonants and five vowels. The game of hucklebones is still played in Great Britain with the traditional set of five. In the case of six-sided dice, however, three made a set in ancient times; these would provide the diviner with eighteen letters of the alphabet, as in the thirteen-consonant Beth-Luis-Nion [alphabet].

[Robert Graves, The White Goddess, p. 330-332. ]