Latin sors covers the whole fatal economy: the lot, the casting of lots, the oracular response written on a lot, fate itself, one's share, and even interest-bearing capital. Sortiarius is one who influences fate or fortune by lot; sortilegium is divination by lots, sors plus legere, to read. The medieval career: sortilege narrowed from lawful divination to unlawful divination to sorcery full stop, per the Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages. The word for the sorcerer is thus a job title in fate's accounting department, cousin to assort, consort, and sort itself.
The semantic slide tells the history of the charge: the lot-reader becomes the lot-influencer becomes the witch, because a culture that believes in allotted fate must criminalize anyone who claims to edit the allotment. The Greek parallel ran on pharmakeia, drug-magic, a different technology with the same social verdict: the sorcerer is whoever operates on fate without a license. Rome read lots; the church read providence; both needed someone to blame when the reading came out wrong. The sortiarius was always available.
The claim: sorcery's root reveals the ancient fear precisely, fate as a system that could be gamed, the sortiarius as the man with the seed values, and the word's survival as the permanent suspicion that any sufficiently mysterious expertise, statistics, algorithms, markets, is lot-rigging in modern dress. Verdict: the sors family still runs the casino, the census, and the stock sort, and the accusation structure is identical: whoever understands the allocation system is indistinguishable from whoever is fixing it. The sorcerer's modern heirs are quant desks. Nobody has burned one yet, which either proves progress or proves the hex improved.
If sorcery began as reading lots, what is the spell: changing fate, or reading it wrong on purpose?