Chapter III: The Communion of Gods and Men (2)

So far then as the broad principles of practical auspice-taking are concerned, the proofs of the identity of modern with ancient methods are sufficiently complete; and it remains only to show that the modern practice of this art is not a mere inert survival of customs no longer understood but is in truth informed by the same intelligent religious spirit as in antiquity. What that spirit was, is admirably defined in that passage of Plutarch which I have already quoted, in which he claims that the quickness of birds and their intelligence and their alertness to act upon every thought qualify them, beyond all other living things, for the part of messengers between gods and men. Celsus too in his polemics against Christianity, made frank confession of the old faith: ‘We believe in the prescience of all animals and particularly of birds. Diviners are only interpreters of their predictions. If then the birds ... impart to us by signs all that God has revealed to them, it follows of necessity that they have a closer intimacy than we with the divine, that they surpass us in knowledge of it, and are dearer to God than we[850].’ Indeed it might seem that there was hope of birds knowing that which a god sought in vain to learn. To Demeter enquiring for her ravished child ‘no god nor mortal man would tell the true tale, nor came there to her any bird of omen as messenger of truth[851].’ In effect, the special aptitude of birds to carry divine messages to men was never questioned in ancient Greece; it was a very axiom of religion, without which the whole science of auspices would have been a baseless fabrication.

Now it would have been no matter of surprise for us, if practical augury had still been in vogue at the present day and the theory had been forgotten; if the customs born of a belief in the prophetic power of birds had, with the inveteracy of all custom, outlived the parent principle. Rather it is surprising that among all the perplexity and bewilderment of thought caused by the long series of changes, religious, political, and social, through which Greece has passed, this recognition of birds as intermediaries between heaven and earth has abated none of its force or its purity, neither vanquished by the direct antagonism of Christianity, nor contaminated by the influx of Slavonic or other foreign thought. Yet so it is; and the perusal of any collection of modern folk-songs will show that the idea is fully as familiar now as in the literature of old time.

A few examples may be cited; and in selecting them I shall exclude from consideration those many Klephtic ballads which open with a conversation between three ‘birds[852]’; for the word ‘bird’ (πουλί) seems to have become among the Klephts a colloquial equivalent for ‘spy’ or ‘scout,’ suggested perhaps by the qualities of intelligence, alertness, and speed required, and it is admittedly[853] impossible in many cases to determine whether the term has its literal or its conventional meaning. Moreover these openings of ballads have passed into a somewhat set form; and formulae are no more proof of the continuance of belief than mummies of the continuance of life.

But, even with the range of trustworthy evidence thus limited, the residue of popular poetry contains ample store of passages in which birds are recognised as the best messengers between this world and another. And here, as we shall see, the reiteration of the idea is not uniform in expression; the thought has not been crystallised into a number of beautiful but inert phrases; it is still alive, still young, still procreative of fresh poetry.

There is a well-known folk-song, recorded in several versions, which tells how a young bride, trusting in the might of her nine brothers and in her husband’s valour, boasted that she had no fear of Charos. ‘A bird, an evil bird, went unto Charos, and told him, and Charos shot an arrow at her and the girl grew pale; a second and a third he shot and stretched her on her death-bed[854].’ The special bird in the poet’s mind was, one may surmise, ‘Charon’s bird,’ the tawny owl, which as I have noted is always a messenger of evil. In another poem a bird issues from the lower world and brings doleful tidings to women who weep over their lost ones. ‘A little bird came forth from the world below; his claws were red and his feathers black, reddened with blood and blackened with the soil. Mothers run to see him, and sisters to learn of him, and wives of good men to get true tidings. Mother brings sugar, and sister scented wine, and wives of good men bear amaranth in their hands. “Eat the sugar, bird, and drink of the scented wine, and smell the amaranth, and confess to us the truth.” “Good women, that which I saw, how should I tell it or confess it? I saw Charos riding in the plains apace; he dragged the young men by the hair, the old men by their hands, and ranged at his saddle-bow he bore the little children[855].”’

Nor is it only between earth and the nether world that birds carry tidings to and fro; earth and heaven are equally united by their ministry. An historical ballad, belonging to the year 1825, when Ibrahim Pasha had just occupied the fortress of Navarino and other places in the Morea and was about to join in investing Mesolonghi, gives to this idea unusually imaginative treatment; for the bird which brings from heaven encouragement and prophecies of future success (one of which was literally fulfilled in the battle of Navarino two years later) is an incarnation of the soul of a fallen Greek warrior. ‘“Would I were a bird” (I said), “that I might fly and go to Mesolonghi, and see how goes the sword-play and the musketry, how fight the unconquered falcons[856] of Roumelie.” And a bird of golden plumage warbled answer to me: “Hold, good George; an thou thirstest for Arab[857] blood, here too are infidels for thee to slay as many as thou wilt. Dost see far away yonder the Turkish ships? Charos is standing over them, and they shall be turned to ashes.” “Good bird, how didst thou learn this that thou tellest me?” “A bird I seem to thee to be, but no bird am I. Yon island that I espied for thee afar belongeth to Navarino; ’twas there I spent my last breath a-fighting. Tsamados am I, and unto the world have I come; from the heavens where I dwell I discern you clearly, yet yearn to see you face to face.” “Nay, what shouldest thou see now among us in our unhappy land? Knowest thou not what befell and now is in the Morea?” “Good George, be not distraught, consent not to despair; though the Morea fight not now, a time will come again when they will fight like wild beasts and chase their foe. Piteously shall bones lie scattered before Mesolonghi, and there shall the lions of Suli rejoice.” And the bird flew away and went up to the heavens[858].’

Such an identification of the winged messenger with the soul of a dead man does not represent the ordinary thought of the people; it is a conceit peculiar to this ballad; but the very fact that the dead warrior is made to assume the guise of a bird in order to communicate with his living comrades shows how strong is the popular feeling that birds are the natural intermediaries between earth and heaven.

Thus then the ancient belief that birds are among the most apt instruments of divine and human communion has survived as little impaired by lapse of ages as the practical science of augury founded upon it. Perhaps indeed it has even fared better; for practical augury has, I suspect, suffered from the paucity or extinction of professional augurs, who alone could be expected to remember and to transmit to their successors all the complex details of their art, whereas the old faith may even have gained thereby; for history, I suppose, is not void of instances in which the professional exponents of a religion have fostered its forms and have starved its spirit, forgetting their ministry in their desire for mastery, and making their office the sole gate of communion with heaven. But, be that as it may, such decline as there may have been from the complete and elaborate system of auspices which the ancients possessed is not at any rate due to any abatement of the ancient belief in the mediation of birds.

Not of course that the peasant, when he draws an omen from the eagle’s stoop or the raven’s croak, pauses at all to reflect on the general principle by which his act is guided; his recognition of the principle is then as formal and unconscious as is his avowal of Christianity when he crosses himself. But if ever in meditative mood he seeks the reason and basis of his auspice-taking, he falls back, as the popular poetry proves, on the doctrine that the powers above and below have chosen birds as their messengers to mankind.

Doubtless many other peoples have held or still hold kindred beliefs; but the fact that in Modern Greece the same class of birds is observed as in Ancient Greece and that the same broad principles of interpretation are followed is sufficient warranty that the underlying belief is also a genuinely Hellenic heritage.

The next method of divination to be considered, that namely in which omens were obtained from sacrifice, was anciently divided into two branches; in one the diviner concerned himself with the dissection of the victim, and based his predictions on the appearance of various internal parts; in the other, special portions of the victim were consumed by fire, and omens were read in the flame or smoke therefrom. Of the latter I have discovered no trace in Modern Greece; but the former still survives in some districts.

Naturally however this mode of divination is less frequently practised than that with which I have just dealt. The cry or the flight of birds can be observed without let or hindrance in the course of daily work, and, what is more important still, without cost; while this method involves the slaying of a victim, and is consequently confined to high days and holidays when the peasants eat meat. But when occasion offers or even demands the performance of the rite, the presages drawn therefrom are the more valued because they are less readily to be obtained.

And the value attached to them is by no means diminished because the method pursued is less intelligent than the taking of auspices. In the latter case, as we have seen, the common-folk have a reasonable basis for their actions in the universal belief that birds are by nature qualified to act as messengers between gods and men; in the former the peasants are more blindly and mechanically repeating the practices of their forefathers. They would be hard put to it to say how it comes to pass that divine counsels should be found figured in the recesses of a sheep’s anatomy. But in their very inability to answer this question, no less than in their acceptance of the means of communion, they resemble their ancestors; for, with all their love of enquiry, they too practised the art without answering conclusively or unanimously the questionings of their own hearts concerning it. One theory advanced was that the anatomical construction of the victim was directly affected by the prayers and religious rites to which it was subjected. Another held the internal symptoms to be inexorable and immutable, and saw divine agency only in the promptings of the sacrificer’s mind and his choice of an animal whose entrails were suitably inscribed by nature[859]. A third view, advocated by Plato, was that the liver was as a mirror in which divine thought was reflected; during life this divine thought might remain hidden as tacit intuition or be manifested in prophetic utterance; after death the divine visions contemplated by the soul were left recorded in imagery upon the liver, and faded only by degrees[860]. The obvious objection to this theory was its too practical corollary, that human entrails would be the most interesting to consult. Less barbarous therefore in consequences, if also less exquisite in idea, was the fourth doctrine, propounded by Philostratus, that the liver had no power of presage unless it were completely emancipated from the passions and surrendered wholly to divine influence--a condition best fulfilled by animals of peaceful and apathetic temperament[861].

But while these theories were built up and knocked down, the practices which they were meant to explain continued firm and unshaken. The fact seems to be that the custom of consulting entrails was not native to Greece. In Homeric times the liver was not dissected in search of omens, and such observations as were made were directed to the brightness of the flame and the ascent of the smoke from burnt offerings and not to any malformation or discoloration of the victim’s inward parts. All that could be learnt was whether the sacrifice, and therefore also the prayers accompanying it, were accepted or rejected. The complexities of post-Homeric divination from burnt sacrifice and the whole system of inspecting the entrails seem to have been a foreign importation. Whether the source was Etruscan, Carian, Cyprian, Babylonian, or Egyptian, does not here concern us[862]; the practices were in origin foreign to Greece, and the ancients, in referring the invention of them to Delphus, son of Poseidon, to Prometheus, to Sisyphus, or to Orpheus[863], were guilty not only of sheer fabrication but of manifest anachronism[864]. Homer convicts them.

It is then the foreign origin of these methods of divination which explains the attitude of the ancient Greeks towards them. It was a practice, not a theory--a custom, not an idea--a conglomeration of usages, not a coherent and reasoned system--which was introduced from abroad. The Greeks accepted it readily as furnishing them with one more means to that communion with their gods which to them was a spiritual necessity. The principle of the machinery employed was unknown to them; but what matter? Its operation was commended by the experience of others and soon tested by their own. The unknown principle long continued to excite interest, conjecture, speculation, among the educated and enlightened, but their failures to reach any final and unanimous conclusion never moved them to dispute the tested fact. And if this was the attitude of the educated, the common-folk of those days must surely have been in the same position as the people of to-day--gladly accepting the usage and avowedly ignorant of the principle. Such blind acquiescence during so many centuries may seem indeed a disparagement of the Greeks’ intelligence; but it is equally a testimonial to their religious faith; it is the things which defy reasoning that are best worth believing; and among these the Greeks have steadfastly numbered the writing of divine counsels on the sacrificial victim’s inward parts.

The actual methods now pursued are also an inheritance from the ancient world. The animal from which the Klephts a century ago are said to have taken omens most successfully was the sheep, and the portion of its anatomy on which the tokens of the future were to be read was the shoulder-blade. The questions to which an answer was most often sought were, as might be surmised from the life of the enquirers, questions of war. ‘In this connexion,’ says a Greek writer[865] of the first half of last century, when stories of the Klephts’ life might still be heard from their own lips, ‘the shoulder-blade of a young lamb is ... a veritable Sibylline book; for its condition enables men to ascertain beforehand the issue of an important engagement, the serious losses on each side, the strength of the enemy, the reinforcements to be expected, and indeed the very moment when danger threatens’; and he recounts, by way of illustration, the story of a Thessalian band of Klephts, whose captain, in the security of his own fastness, was sitting divining in this way; suddenly he sprang up with the exclamation, ‘The Turks have caught us alive,’ and at the head of his troop had only just time to break through the Turkish forces which were already surrounding them.

That this method of divination was derived directly and with little deviation from the old system of inspecting shoulder-blades (ὠμοπλατοσκοπία) as known to Michael Psellus can hardly be doubted. ‘If the question be of war,’ he says, ‘a patch of red observed on the right side of the shoulder-blade, or a long dark line on the left, foreshows a great war; but if both sides present their normal white appearance, it is an omen of peace to come[866].’

But the days of patriot-outlaws are over now, and the questions submitted to the arbitrament of ovine shoulder-blades are of more peaceful bent. It is the shepherd now, and not the warrior, who thus resolves the uncertainties of the future. It is the vicissitudes of weather, not of war, that interest him; the birth of lambs, not the death of Turks. It is of plague, pestilence, and famine threatening his flock, not of battle and murder and sudden death for himself, that he seeks forewarning. But the same instrument of divination supplies the answers.

My own knowledge of its use is obtained entirely from Acarnania and Aetolia; but the practice is also recorded from Zagorion in Epirus[867], and prevails too, I have been told, among the shepherds of Elis. The opportunity for it is, as I have said, offered only by certain feast-days, when the peasants indulge in meat. On other occasions, when the shepherds kill only in order to sell in the towns, divination cannot be undertaken; for it is only after cooking that the meat can be properly removed from the bone so as to leave it clean and legible. There is therefore no doubt an economical reason for confining this practice to certain religious festivals; but this consideration must not be allowed to obscure the genuinely religious character of the rite itself. In Zagorion, at the festivals in honour of the patron-saint of each village or monastery, sheep are brought and slain in the enclosure of the particular sanctuary, and are called κουρμπάνι̯α[868], a plural evidently of the Hebrew word ‘corban,’ a thing devoted to the service of God; thus both name and ceremony proclaim this custom a genuine survival of sacrifice; and it is apparently from the shoulder-blades of these victims that omens are drawn[869]. A similar case of divination by sacrifice came to my knowledge in Boeotia, though whether the shoulder-blade or some other part of the victim furnished the predictions, I could not ascertain. While looking round a small museum at Skimitári I had happened to stop before a relief representing a man leading some animal to sacrifice, and heard the custodian, a peasant of the place, remark to another peasant, evidently a stranger to the district, who had followed me in, ‘That is just like what we do’; and he then explained that at a church of St George, somewhere in the neighbourhood, there was an annual festival at which a similar scene took place. The villagers of the country-side congregate early on the morning of St George’s day round the church, each man bringing a kid or a lamb; service in the church having been duly performed, the priest comes out and blesses each of the animals in turn, after which they are killed and roasted and a feast is held accompanied by some kind of divination from the victims. Such in brief was the custodian’s account; but, when I intervened in the conversation with a question about the method of divining, he would say nothing more. The Boeotians are still boorish. But what I had already overheard exhibits clearly enough the religious character of the rite; and I do not doubt that in Aetolia and Acarnania also the peasants handle the sheep’s shoulder-blade in an equally religious mood. Their very indulgence in meat is due to the religious occasion; much more therefore the divination which reveals to them the mind of those powers whom they worship.

In the art of interpreting the particular marks upon the shoulder-blade I cannot claim to be an adept. The few facts which I managed to discover were that in general spots and blurs upon the bone are prognostications adverse to the hopes of the enquirer, and that a clean white surface always gives full security: that different portions of the bone are scrutinised for answers to different classes of questions; thus the prospects of the lambing season are indicated on the projecting ridge of the bone, and the weather-forecast on the flat surfaces on either side of it, marks on the right side (the bone being held horizontally with what is naturally its upper end towards the diviner) being favourable signs, and those on the left ill-omened: and finally that a pestilence is foreshown by a depression in the surface of the bone. The science, I was told, is extremely complex and elaborate; but I never had the fortune to meet any peasant who was considered an expert in it; the best exponents of it are to be found among the mountain shepherds, and since these are constantly shifting their grazing grounds it is no easy matter to fall in with one both able and willing to unfold the full mysteries of the art. How to distinguish in interpretation markings of different sizes, shapes, and colours I never discovered[870].

But the little which I learnt agrees in the main with the ancient method as described by Michael Psellus[871]. ‘Those,’ he says, ‘who wish to avail themselves of this means of divination, pick out a sheep or lamb from the flock, and, after settling in their mind or saying aloud the question which they wish to ask, slay the victim and remove the shoulder-blade from the carcase. This--the organ of divination as they think--they bake thoroughly upon hot embers, and having stripped it of the flesh find on it the tokens of that issue about which they are enquiring. The answers to different kinds of questions are learnt from different parts[872]. Questions of life or death are decided by the projection of the ridge[873]; if this is clean and white on both sides, a promise of life is thereby given; but if it is blurred, it is a token of death. Weather-forecasts again are made from inspection of the middle part of the shoulder-blade; if the two membrane-like surfaces which form the middle of the shoulder-blade on either side of the ridge[874] are white and clean, they indicate calm weather to come; while, if they are thickly spotted, the reverse is to be expected.’ Here, it will have been noticed, no mention is made of any discrimination between the markings on the right and on the left sides of the bone; but this, I suspect, is an omission on the part of Psellus, for so simple a principle of ancient divination is hardly likely to have been excluded from consideration in this case. In other respects the information which I obtained tallies closely with his account; the clean and white appearance of the bone was then, as it is now, a reassuring omen; then, as now, the prospects of the weather were to be learnt from the flat surface on either side of the ridge; then, as now, the question of life or death, which from the shepherd’s point of view becomes most acute at each lambing season, was settled by reference to the ridge of the bone. To judge then from the few principles of the art known to me, divination from the shoulder-blade, besides being still recognised as a religious rite, is conducted on the same lines by Aetolian and Acarnanian peasants as it was by those ancient augurs to whose hand-books probably Psellus was indebted for his knowledge.

Another animal utilised in the same district for purposes of divination is the pig; but in this case the prophetic organ is not the shoulder-blade but the spleen. This is removed from the fresh carcase before the rest of the flesh is cut up or cooked in any way, and omens are taken from the roughness or discoloration of its surface. The questions which may be decided by this means are very various--the prospects of weather, of crops, and of vineyards, the success of journeys and other enterprises, the advisability of a contemplated marriage, and so forth. Of the exact details of the art I know even less than in the last case; the facts which I learned were these, that a smooth surface is a good omen, just as it was in the case of other internal organs in the time of Aeschylus[875], while certain roughnesses portend obstacles and difficulties in a journey or enterprise, and further that certain abnormal blotches of colour give warning of blight and mildew on crops and vines. Proficiency in the science, I was told, is commonest among the inhabitants of the low-lying cultivated or wooded districts of Acarnania where large herds of half-wild swine are kept; and hence it is natural that the predictions sought in this way are chiefly concerned with agricultural and social interests, whereas the omens obtained from the sheep’s shoulder-blade by shepherds living solitary lives in the mountains deal with few issues other than the prospects of the flock. But this difference between the two methods of divination is circumstantial rather than essential; either method can, I believe, in the hands of experts be used for answering almost any questions.

Divination from the pig’s spleen is, I think, undoubtedly ancient. It appears to be a solitary survival of the σπλαγχνοσκοπία, or ‘inspection of entrails,’ which in ancient Greece would seem to have been the commonest method of divining from the sacrificial victim. Among the animals embarrassed with prophetic entrails the pig indeed was not ordinarily reckoned; but Pausanias mentions that the people of Cyprus discovered its value[876], and it seems actually to have furnished responses to the highly reputable oracle of Paphos[877]. How it has come to pass that modern Acarnania should preserve a custom peculiar to ancient Cyprus, is a problem that I cannot solve; but it can hardly be questioned that here again we have an old religious rite still maintained as a proven means of communion with those powers in whose knowledge lies the future.

Divination from sacrifice also forms part of the preliminaries of a wedding in many districts. On the day before the actual ceremony[878] the first animal for the feast is killed by the bridegroom with his own hand. The proper victim is a young ram, though in case of poverty a more humble substitute is permitted. This, after being in some districts blessed by the priest who receives in return a portion of the victim, is made to stand facing eastward, and the bridegroom endeavours to slaughter it with a single blow of an axe. Omens for the marriage are taken from the manner and the direction in which the blood spirts out; and a further investigation is sometimes made as to whether the tongue is bitten or the mouth foaming, each sign finding its own interpretation in the lore of the village cronies[879]. The substitute allowed for the ram is a cock. Where the peasants avail themselves of this economy, the killing is usually deferred until after the wedding service, and is performed on the doorstep of the bridegroom’s house before the bride is led in. The bird is held down on the threshold by the best man, and the bridegroom, having been provided with a sharp axe, tries to sever the cock’s neck at one blow. Here too the man’s dexterity counts for something; for the peace or the agony in which the victim is despatched belongs to that class of omens which in antiquity also were drawn from the demeanour of the animal before and during the act of sacrifice, and were taken not indeed to furnish a detailed answer to any question preferred but to indicate the acceptance or the rejection of the offering and the accompanying petitions. It is however the effusion of blood and the muscular convulsions of the decapitated bird which are most keenly observed; for from these signs, I was told, the old women of the village profess to determine such points of interest as the chastity of the bride, the supremacy of the husband or the wife in the future _ménage_, and the number and sex of children to be born. All this information can in most places where the rite prevails be obtained without any dissection of the victim such as would have been customary in antiquity; but in Aetolia and Acarnania the peasants continue faithful to what are probably ancient methods even in this detail; there the breast-bone of the fowl is treated both at weddings and on other religious occasions as a poor man’s legitimate substitute for the ovine shoulder-blade, which it sufficiently resembles in the possession of a ridge with flat surfaces on either side suitable for divine inscriptions.

But it is not upon coincidences of practical detail, instructive as they are in proving the unity of modern with ancient Greece, that I wish most to insist. If it is clear that the victims often blest by the priests at weddings and on other religious occasions are really felt by the people to be sacrifices, then the practice of divining from them, whatever the exact method pursued, is once more distinct evidence of the belief that the powers above are able and willing to hold close communion with men.

Among the minor methods of divination we may notice first what Suidas calls οἰκοσκοπικόν or ‘domestic divination’; under this head he includes such incidents as the appearance of a weasel on the roof, or of a snake, the spilling of oil, honey, wine, water, or ashes, and the crackling of logs on the fire. The subject was expounded apparently in a serious treatise by one Xenocrates; but it is difficult to suppose that there was any scientific system governing so heterogeneous a conglomeration of incidents; the treatise was probably no more than a compilation of possible occurrences with disconnected regulations for interpreting each of them.

Many events of a like trivial nature are observed at the present day, and the interpretations set upon some of them are demonstrably ancient. A weasel seen about the house, just as on the road, is significant of evil[880], more especially if there is in the household a girl about to be married; for the weasel (νυφίτσα) was once, it is said, a maiden destined to become, as the name implies, a ‘little bride,’ but in some way she was robbed of her happiness and transformed into an animal; its appearance therefore augurs ill for an intended wedding. A snake on the contrary is of good omen when seen in the house; for it is the guardian-_genius_ watching over its own. The orientation of a cat when engaged in washing its face indicates the point of the compass from which wind may be expected. A mouse nibbling a hole in a bag of flour is in Zagorion[881] as distressing a portent as it was to the superstitious man of Theophrastus[882]. A dog howling at night in or near the house portends a death in the neighbourhood, as it did in the time of Theocritus: ‘Hark,’ cries Simaetha, ‘the dogs are barking through the town. Hecate is at the cross-ways. Haste, clash the brazen cymbals[883]’; only instead of the cymbals it is customary to use an ejaculation addressed to the dog, ‘may you burst’ (νὰ σκάσῃς), or ‘may you eat your own head’ (νὰ φᾶς τὸ κεφάλι σου).

Again, to take another class of the domestic incidents mentioned by Suidas, the spilling of oil is universally an evil omen, and the spilling of wine a good omen; the former foreshadows poverty, the latter plenty. The upsetting of water is also a presage of good success, especially on a journey; but in this connexion, as a later chapter will show, it often passes out of the sphere of divination, which should rest on purely fortuitous occurrences, into that of sympathetic magic.

The crackling of logs on the fire, which Suidas mentions, remains to-day also an incident to be duly noted. Generally it appears to mean that good news is coming or that a friend is arriving, but, if sparks and ashes are thrown out into the room, troubles and anxieties must be expected. The spluttering of a lamp or candle also usually foretells misfortune[884]. Omens as to marriage also may be obtained on the domestic hearth. Two leaves of basil are put together upon a live coal; if they lie as they are placed and burn away quietly, the marriage will be harmonious; if there is a certain amount of crackling, the married life of the two persons represented by the leaves will be disturbed by quarrels; if the leaves crackle fiercely and leap apart, there is an incompatibility of temper which renders the projected alliance undesirable.

These are but a few instances of domestic divination, and a much longer list might easily be compiled. But while I know that many of the peasants do indeed observe such occurrences seriously enough to act upon the supernatural warnings thereby conveyed, yet the religious character of these methods of divination is less demonstrable than that of divination from birds or from sacrifice; and I may content myself with indicating, by a few illustrations only, the continuity of Greek superstition in both this and those other minor branches of divination to which I now pass.

Palmistry, according to Suidas, was an ancient art, and a hand-book of it was composed by one Helenos. The signs of the future were read in the lines of the palm and of the fingers as in modern palmistry. This science is still kept up by some of the old women in Greece, but real proficiency therein is as in other countries chiefly attained by the gypsies (ἀτσίγγανοι), who follow a nomadic life in the mountains and have very little intercourse with the native population.

Divination from involuntary movements of various parts of the body--παλμικόν, as Suidas calls it, on which one Poseidonios was a leading authority--is still very generally practised, and evidently has deviated hardly at all from ancient lines. The twitching of a man’s eye or eyebrow is a sign that he will soon see some acquaintance--an enemy, if it be the left eye that throbs, a friend, if it be the right; and this clearly was the principle which the goat-herd of Theocritus followed when he exclaimed, ‘My eye throbs, my right eye; oh! shall I see Amaryllis herself?’[885] Similarly the buzzing or singing of a man’s ears is an indication that he is being spoken of by others, just as it was in the time of Lucian[886]; and, according to the usual principle, the right ear is affected in this manner by praise and kindly speech, the left by backbiting and slander. Again, if the palm of the right hand itch, it shows that a man will receive money; and reversely, if the left palm itch, he will have to pay money away[887]. So too, if the sole of the right or of the left foot itch, it is a premonition of a journey successful or unsuccessful. Omens of this kind fall with uncomfortable frequency to the lot of those who have to find a night’s lodging in Greek inns or cottages.

To the same category belong hiccoughing and sneezing. The hiccough (λόξυγγας), as also in Macedonia choking over food or drink[888], is a sign that some backbiter is at work, and the method of curing it is to guess his name. Sneezing is a favourable omen, but the particular interpretation of it depends on alternative sets of circumstances. If anyone who is speaking is interrupted by a sneeze, whether his own or that of another person present, whatever he is saying is held to be proved true by the occurrence. ’Γειά σου, cry the listeners, καὶ ἀλήθεια λές (or λέει), ‘Health to you, and you speak (_or_ he speaks) truth.’ If however no one present is in the act of speaking when the sneeze is heard, the first phrase only is used, ‘Health to you,’ or by way of facetious variant, νὰ ψοφήσῃ ἡ πεθερά σου, ‘May your mother-in-law die like a dog[889].’ In either case the prayer for good health can benefit only the sneezer; but in the former, that member of the company who is speaking at the time may obtain corroboration of the statement which he is making from the omen produced by another. This part of the belief is very strongly held; and anyone who is in the unfortunate position of having his word doubted or of being compelled to prevaricate will be better advised to conjure up a sneeze than to expostulate or to swear.

Both these interpretations of sneezing date from ancient times. The old equivalent of ‘Health to you’ was Ζεῦ σῶσον, ‘Preserve him, Zeus’; but such expressions are common to many nations and not distinctively Hellenic. The other interpretation of sneezing, as a confirmation of words which are being uttered, is of more special interest, and has been handed down from the Homeric age. ‘Let but Odysseus come,’ says Penelope, ‘and reach his native land, and soon will he and his son requite the violent deeds of these men.’ ‘Thus she spake,’ continues the passage, ‘and Telemachos sneezed aloud; and round about the house rang fearfully; and Penelope laughed, and quickly then she spake winged words to Eumaeus: “Go now, call the stranger here before me. Dost thou not see how my son did sneeze in sanction of all my words[890]? For this should utter death come upon the suitors one and all, nor should one of them escape death and destruction[891].”’

Among other instruments of divination occasionally used are eggs, molten lead, and sieves. Eggs are chiefly used to decide the prospects of a marriage. ‘Speechless water’[892] is fetched by a boy, and the old woman who presides over such operations pours into it the white of an egg. If this keeps together in a close mass, the marriage will turn out well; but if it assumes a broken or confused shape, troubles loom ahead. In antiquity the science was probably more extended; for a work on egg-divining (ὠοσκοπικά) was attributed to Orpheus. A similar rite may be performed with molten lead instead of white of egg, and it suffices to pour it upon any flat surface[893]. Divination with a sieve--the ancient κοσκινομαντεία--also continues, I have been told, but I know no details of the practice.

Thus then the chief methods of learning the gods’ will as practised in antiquity have been reviewed, and are found to be perpetuated in substantially the same form down to the present day; and not only is the form the same but in many of them the same religious spirit is manifest. The principal difference lies in the paucity of professional diviners now; experts assuredly in some branches there still are, but augury alone would now, I think, be a precarious source of livelihood. Advice from the village priest would in so many cases be cheaper and no less valued than that of the soothsayer.

And as with persons so with places. The pagan temples in which oracles were given have been largely superseded by Christian churches, and possibly the peasants are more inclined to pay for masses which will secure the fulfilment of their wishes than for oracular responses which may run counter to them. Still even so oracles have not yet entirely ceased; and in discussing those which survive we shall find once more a coincidence both in form and spirit between ancient and modern Greek religion.

An oracle, it must be remembered, is simply a place set apart for the practice of divination; the method of obtaining responses has always varied in different places, and the mediation of a professional diviner, though usual, cannot be regarded as essential[894]. Those caves therefore where women make offerings of honey-cakes to the Fates[895] and pray for the fulfilment of their conjugal hopes are really oracles, provided that there is some means of learning there whether the prayer is accepted or rejected. And this is often the case; most commonly the answer is inferred--on what principle of interpretation, I do not know--from the dripping of water or the detachment and fall from the roof of a particle of stone; and in Aetolia I was told of a cave in the neighbourhood of Agrinion in which the nature of the response is determined by the behaviour of the bats which frequent it. If they remain hanging quiescent from the roof and walls, the suppliant’s hopes will be realised; but if they be disturbed by his or, more often, her intrusion and flutter round confusedly, the Fates are inexorably adverse.

But besides these modest and unpretentious oracles there still survives in the island of Amorgos an oracle of a higher order ensconced in a church and served by a priest. The saint under whose patronage this pagan institution has continued to flourish is St George, here surnamed Balsamites[896]. To the right on entering the church is seen a large squared block of marble hollowed out so as to have the form of an urn inside, and highly polished. It stands apparently on the natural rock, and is roofed over with a dome-shaped lid capable of being locked. At the present day the mouth of the urn is also covered by a marble slab with a hole pierced through it and fitted with a plug; but this was not observed by travellers of the seventeenth century and is probably a recent addition. There is also a discrepancy in the various accounts of the working of the oracle, the older authorities stating that the answers were given by the rise and fall of the water in the vessel, while the modern custom is to interpret the signs given by particles of dust, insects, hairs, bits of dry leaf, and suchlike floating in a cupful of water drawn from the urn[897].

The description given by a Jesuit priest of Santorini, Robert Sauger by name, of what he himself witnessed in Amorgos towards the end of the seventeenth century may be taken as trustworthy, inasmuch as he elsewhere shows himself an accurate observer and certainly was not tempted in the present case to exaggerate the wonders of the rival Church.

‘The cavity,’ he says, ‘fills itself with water and empties itself of its own accord, and it is impossible to imagine what gives the water this motion and where it has a passage; for, besides being very thick, the marble is so highly polished inside and its continuity of surface is so unbroken that it is impossible to detect the tiniest hole or the least unevenness, saving always the opening at the top which is always kept locked. Additionally astonishing is the fact that within the space of one hour the urn fills and empties itself visibly several times; at one moment you see it so full that the water overflows, and a moment afterwards it becomes so dry that it appears to have had no water in it at all.

‘Superstition is rife everywhere. Any Greeks who have a voyage to make do not fail to come and consult the Urn. If the water is high in it, they set off gaily, promising themselves a good passage. But if the Urn is without water, or the water is low in it, they draw therefrom a bad omen for the success of their journey, and do not go, or, if business makes it imperative, go unwillingly.

‘This alleged miracle, which is so famed throughout all Greece, is a source of much gain to the priest who has charge of the Church of St George; for the concourse of Greeks there is incessant; people come thither from great distances, some in all seriousness to advise themselves of the future, others to see the thing with their own eyes, and a certain number to amuse themselves and to have a laugh, as I have had several times, at the credulity of these folk[898].’

Whatever may have been the original method of oracular response--and I suspect that, while the presence or the absence of water furnished a plain ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ to the enquirer, a more detailed reply always depended upon the observation and interpretation of any foreign particles floating in the urn--the faith of the people in its virtue is still intense. It can indeed no longer claim a reputation throughout all Greece; but the inhabitants of Amorgos and the maritime population of neighbouring islands still consult it regularly and seriously concerning voyages, business matters, marriage, and other cares and interests; nor are questioners from farther afield altogether unknown.

This oracular property of water was well known in antiquity. In this branch of divination, says Bouché Leclercq, use was made ‘of springs and streams which were felt to be endowed with a kind of supernatural discernment. Certain waters were accorded the property of confirming oaths and exposing perjury. The water of the Styx, by which the Olympian gods swore, is the prototype of these means of test, among which may be mentioned the spring of Zeus Orkios, near Tyane, and the water-oracle of the Sicilian Palici[899].’ So too water-deities such as Nereus and Proteus were believed to exercise special prophetic powers; and Ino possessed in the neighbourhood of Epidaurus Limera a pool into which barley-cakes were thrown by those who would consult her; if these offerings sank, she was held to have accepted them and to favour the enquirer; if they floated, his hopes would be disappointed[900].

The present oracle of Amorgos is of a higher order than this; its method is more complex, and its responses are more detailed. It should surely have ranked high even among the oracles of old, of which, both in the reverence which it inspires and in the medium which it employs, it is a true descendant.

* * * * *

Having thus examined the means by which the gods deign to communicate with men, and having seen that both in form and in spirit the ancient means of communion have been preserved almost unchanged, we have now to consider the means by which men approach the gods and communicate to them their hopes and petitions.

The first and most obvious method, one common to all religions, is of course prayer; but the use of this channel just because it is so universal cannot be claimed as a proof of religious unity between ancient and modern Greece. It is rather in what we should deem the accompaniments of prayer that evidence of such unity must be sought. The ancient Greeks were not in general content with prayer only. It was not customary to approach the gods empty-handed. The poor man indeed, according to Lucian[901], appeased the god merely by kissing his right hand; but the farmer brought an ox from the plough, the shepherd a lamb, the goat-herd a goat, and others incense or a cake. ‘Thus it looks,’ he says, ‘as if the gods do nothing at all _gratis_, but offer their commodities for sale to men; one may buy of them health, for instance, at the cost of a calf, wealth for four oxen, a kingdom for a hecatomb, a safe return passage from Ilium to Pylos for nine bulls, and the crossing from Aulis to Ilium for a princess--a high price certainly, but then Hecuba was bidding Athene twelve cows and a dress to keep Ilium safe. One must suppose however that they have plenty of things to dispose of at the price of a cock, a garland, or even a stick of incense[902].’ That this is a fair account of the externals of Greek ritual can hardly be questioned; for Plato too, in more serious mood, says that ‘the mutual communion between gods and men’ is established by ‘sacrifices of all kinds and the various departments of divination[903].’ The ‘various departments of divination’ are clearly the means by which the gods communicate with men; and ‘sacrifices of all kinds’ therefore represented to Plato’s mind the means by which men communicate with their gods. Prayer, he seems to have felt, was a necessary incident in sacrifice, rather than sacrifice an unnecessary adjunct to prayer.

Now the word θυσία, which we commonly translate ‘sacrifice,’ was a term of very wide meaning in ancient Greek. In Homer the word θύειν was used of making any offering to the gods, and never denoted, though naturally it sometimes connoted, the slaughtering of animals--an act properly expressed by the verb σφάζειν. And in later times the substantive θυσία was still applied to almost any religious festival, at which undoubtedly some offerings, but not necessarily animal sacrifices, were always made. When therefore Plato speaks of θυσίαι πᾶσαι, ‘all sacrifices,’ he is clearly expressing his recognition of the fact that sacrifices (θυσίαι) are manifold in kind--and if in kind, therefore also in intention; for different rituals are the expressions of different religious motives. Communion with the gods was in general terms the object of all offerings made to them by men; but the particular aspect of such communion varied.

Offerings, we may suppose, were rarely if ever made purely for the benefit of the gods without any self-seeking on the part of the worshipper. Even when a sacrifice to some god was merely a pretext for social entertainments--and how frequently this was the case is shown by the fact that φιλοθύτης, ‘fond of sacrificing,’ came to mean simply ‘hospitable’--it is reasonable to suppose that the presentation to the god of the less edible portions of the victim was accompanied at least by an ἵλαθι, ‘be propitious,’ by way of grace before the meal; and at more strictly religious functions, at which the guests, if there were any, were secondary to the god, the dedication of the offering undoubtedly included a declaration of the offerer’s motive.

As regards the character of that motive in most cases, Lucian is right; it was frankly and baldly commercial. Homer does not blink the fact; for Phoenix even commends to the notice of Achilles the open mind displayed by the gods towards an open-handed suppliant. ‘Verily even the gods may be turned, they whose excellence and honour and strength are greater than thine; yet even them do men, when they pray, turn from their purpose with offerings of incense and pleasant vows, with fat and the savour of sacrifice, whensoever a man hath transgressed and done amiss[904].’ And so Greek feeling has ever remained. Offerings are the ordinary means of gaining access to the gods, of buying their goodwill and buying off their anger. The ordinary medium of exchange in such commerce was, when Greece was avowedly pagan, food, and is, now that Greece is nominally Christian, candles: for religion, ever conservative, keeps up the otherwise obsolete system of barter between men and gods, even though the priests of those gods are enlightened enough to accept of a secular modern currency. But the particular commodities in which the barter is made are of little consequence as compared with the spirit which has always animated such dealings. The substitution of candles for meat is practically the only modification which Christianity has effected in this department of religion.

Even this change in detail does not affect the whole range of such operations; candles are not by any means the only offerings of which the Church takes cognisance. In dealing with the question of divination, we have seen cases in which on some religious occasion, saint’s-day or wedding, the priest blesses a genuinely sacrificial victim[905]. We have seen too that at the laying of foundation stones, a religious ceremony conducted by a priest of the Church, some animal is immolated to appease the _genius_ of the site[906]. We have seen again how the Church permits or encourages the dedication of those silver-foil models of various objects--ships and houses, corn-fields and vineyards, eyes and limbs--which serve at once to propitiate the saint to whom they are offered and, on the principle of sympathetic magic, to place the object, thus represented as it were by proxy, under the saint’s special care; and how also the same kind of models are frequently dedicated as thank-offerings[907]; so that indeed, in default of an inscription announcing the motive of the offerer, no one can decide how any given offerings of this kind should be classified[908].

Then too in those religious rites which have survived without ecclesiastical sanction the use and the purpose of food-offerings remain unchanged. The favour of the Fates is bought by offerings of cakes in order that they may bestow upon the women who thus propitiate them the blessing of children[909]. Nereids who have ‘seized’ children are known to withdraw their oft-times baneful influence when the mother takes a present of food to the scene of the calamity and cries to them with an Homeric simplicity, ‘Eat ye the little cakes, good queens, and heal my child[910].’ Even the malice of Callicantzari may sometimes be averted by a present of pork[911].