Oracles and Divination

Summary

Divination is people seeking, before they act, knowledge of what they cannot see: should the house be built, should the army march, what is in the cauldron. It takes two forms. Either the god speaks through a person, a woman sitting over a cleft in the ground or a seeress a king consults, or the answer is read in a thing: the liver of a victim, the cracks of a burnt bone, the flight of birds, an arrow drawn from a bag.

The oldest complete text that tells divination from beginning to end is the cylinder of Gudea, ruler of Sumerian Lagash, which tells the building of the temple of Ningirsu. In a dream Gudea sees a man as enormous as the heaven, with the head of a god and the wings of the Anzud bird, who speaks to him about building his house, and Gudea cannot understand; then a woman holding a stylus of silver, consulting a tablet with the propitious stars. He takes his boat to the city of the goddess Nanshe, "the interpreter of dreams among the gods", and she explains the dream. Then he performs extispicy on a white kid and the omen is favourable; he has a kid lie down by the brick-mould and asks it for an omen about the brick; no one can make him let fall a chance utterance that might be taken as an omen, and he cleanses the city with fire; he inspects another kid and the omen is favourable, casts grain and its appearance is right, and lies down in the temple for a dream oracle, in which he sees the house already built.

In Babylon this craft became a learned profession. The Akkadian dictionary gives bārû as the diviner, working mostly by extispicy but also by oil on water and by smoke, named from the verb barû, to see, to look at. It gives têrtu as instruction and commission, of gods a directive and an omen, at Mari an oracle; têrtam epēšum is to take omens, and the same word means the liver of an animal.

Then the forms multiply among the peoples. At Delphi the Pythia speaks Apollo's answer over a cleft from which a breath rises; at Siwa the god is carried in a boat and answers by its movement; at Dodona people hear the will of Zeus from a high oak, served by the Selli, men with unwashed feet who sleep on the ground. Among the Etruscans a child with an old man's wisdom, Tages, came up out of a ploughed field and taught them to read the liver, and at Rome the augur read the birds. In China the shell of a tortoise is burned and its cracks read; in the North the seeress sits alone outside and Odin comes to question her. Among the Arabs there was the kāhin, and the divining arrows were shuffled before Hubal in the Kaʿba.

The idea these stories turn on is that the answer is asked for, paid for, and needs someone to read it. Gudea offers bread, water and victims before every question; Croesus sends gold to Delphi; Odin gives the seeress rings and necklaces. And the answer is a sign that does not explain itself: the dream needs Nanshe, the liver needs the diviner, and the Pythia's words cut both ways. So the asker remains answerable for what he understands, as the Pythia told Croesus after his fall: you should have asked again.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. The word kāhin is one word in many tongues, which the project's Canaanite essay sets in a single table: Ugaritic khn, Hebrew kōhēn, Arabic kāhin. Its sense divides: in Hebrew it is the priest who offers sacrifice, and Lane says kihāna in Arabic is divination and the kāhin is the diviner and augur. The same word names the one who serves the god and the one who speaks the hidden, and at Delphi they are one woman. Lane also gives ʿabara al-ruʾyā, he interpreted the dream, and ʿabartu al-ṭayr, I augured from the birds, in the root that gives ʿabara al-nahr, he crossed the river: interpreting is carrying the sign across from one bank to the other.

Linguistic Root

The kāhin

BDB gives Hebrew כֹּהֵן as priest, with cognates in Aramaic and Ethiopic, and refers for Phoenician and Arabic to the verbal root. Lane, as reproduced on the Arabic Lexicon site, gives kihāna as divination, soothsaying, and kāhin in the sense of ʿarrāf and ʿāʾif, diviner and augur; al-Jawharī says the kāhin is well known, and kahana, yakhunu, kihānatan is said when one practises divination. The letters stand firm across the three tongues, k, h and n; the sense is service at the altar in Hebrew and speaking the hidden in Arabic. Delphi joins the two: the Pythia serves the sanctuary and speaks its answer.

The seer

The Akkadians call the diviner bārû from the verb of seeing and looking, and the first book of Samuel says that in Israel a man going to inquire of God would say, "Come, let us go to the seer", for the prophet of today was formerly called the seer. The project's Hindu essay reads ṛṣi, the Vedic sage, from Arabic raʾā, to see: the ṛṣi is the seer, who sees what others do not. In these tongues the diviner is the one who sees, and his knowledge is the knowledge of looking at signs.

The instruction and the arrow

Akkadian têrtu holds instruction, omen, oracle and liver together, so the divine command is read in a victim's liver. Hebrew תּוֹרָה, tôrâ, is instruction and law, and BDB says it may first have come from casting lots; its verb יָרָה is to shoot an arrow and to teach. The Arabs cast lots with the azlām, and Lane says a zalam is an arrow without head or feathers: on one was written "My Lord has commanded me", on another "My Lord has forbidden me", and the third was left blank; when a man wanted to travel or to do some business he put his hand into the receptacle and drew out an arrow; if the command came out he went ahead, if the prohibition he held back, and if the blank they shuffled again. The Qur'an names it: "and that you seek to know your lot by the divining arrows". In all three tongues the command is sought from something thrown or read.

The omen and the serpent

Among the Hebrew verbs of divination is נִחֵשׁ, niḥēš, to observe signs and take omens, which BDB says some scholars derive from נָחָשׁ, nāḥāš, serpent, while others disagree. The project's Hindu essay notes this pairing: in Hebrew the serpent and the diviner are made of the same letters. We read the root in Arabic as naḥisa: Hebrew š answers Arabic s regularly, and in Lane naḥisa is said of a man or a star that is inauspicious, the contrary of saʿida. In Arabic the word names the bad omen only; in Hebrew it is the act of taking omens. It is a reading proposed on the method. The serpent is present at the oracle in Greece too: at Delphi a dragoness was killed and rotted where the sanctuary stands.

Attestations by Culture

Mesopotamia: the dream and the liver

Gudea's cylinder gathers nearly every way of divining: the dream and its interpreter, the tablet with the stars, the entrails of the kid, the chance utterance, the scattered grain, and sleeping in the temple to seek a vision. It calls Nanshe "the interpreter of dreams among the gods" and says her word "is trustworthy and takes precedence". The Akkadian dictionary shows that the diviners came to have ranks, the "son of a diviner" being the professional and the "overseer of the diviners" their chief, and that "the series of bārûtu", the diviner's lore, is the name of the written series of extispicy texts.

Egypt and Libya: the carried god

At Siwa eighty priests carry the god's image on a golden boat and go where he directs them, not where they wish; the Ammon of Siwa page tells the story. Herodotus says the ways of divination at Egyptian Thebes and at Dodona are alike, and that divination from sacrificed victims came to Greece from Egypt.

Greece: Delphi and Dodona

Delphi has its own page, Delphi. At Dodona Achilles prays to "Zeus, king, Dodonaean, Pelasgian, who dwells afar, ruling over wintry Dodona, and about you dwell the Selli, your interpreters, men with unwashed feet who sleep on the ground"; in the Odyssey Odysseus is said to have gone to Dodona to hear the will of Zeus from the high-crested oak. The priestesses of Dodona told Herodotus that a black dove flew from Thebes, settled on an oak and spoke with a human voice, ordering an oracle of Zeus; Herodotus thinks the dove was an Egyptian woman sold there, called a dove because her speech was strange like a bird's until she learned their tongue.

Etruria and Rome: the liver and the birds

Cicero tells, from the Etruscans, that a ploughman in the land of Tarquinii drove his share deeper than usual, and Tages sprang up out of the earth with the appearance of a boy and the wisdom of a seer; all Etruria gathered, and he taught them the science of reading entrails, which they wrote down. The bronze liver of Piacenza is what a diviner compared with a victim's liver, as the Tages page tells. Cicero also quotes old Cato: "I wonder that a soothsayer doesn't laugh when he sees another soothsayer." At Rome the augur read the birds. An augur led Numa to the citadel, seated him on a stone facing south, laid a hand on his head and prayed Jupiter to send signs if he approved him as king, and the signs appeared. And the augur Attus Navius was tested by King Tarquinius: I am thinking of something; can it be done? He took the auspices and said it could. The king said: I was thinking of your cutting a whetstone with a razor; and he cut it before the people.

China: the tortoise and the milfoil

In the "Great Plan" of the Book of Documents, in its seventh section, "examining doubts", men are chosen to divine by the tortoise and by the milfoil; if three divine, the word of two is followed; and when the king has a great doubt he consults his own heart, his ministers, the common people, the tortoise and the milfoil, and if all agree it is called "the great concord". Sima Qian says in the Records of the Historian that the sage kings never founded a state without the aid of divination, that "the divination of the flying swallow" made the Shang rise, and that the king settles doubts with milfoil and tortoise; he describes the art as "burning the tortoise and observing the cracks". The Metropolitan Museum holds a fragment of an oracle bone of the Shang dynasty, of the thirteenth to eleventh century BCE.

The North: the seeress and Odin

In Völuspá the seeress sits alone outside when the old one, Odin, comes and looks into her eyes, and she says: what do you ask me? why do you test me? I know everything, Odin, where you hid your eye, in the well of Mímir. Then the Father of Hosts chooses rings and a necklace for her, and she sees far and wide over every world. The seiðr page tells of the seeress at the feast and how she was consulted.

The Arabs: the kāhin and the arrows

Hubal was the greatest idol of Quraysh, standing inside the Kaʿba with seven divining arrows before him, and when people disagreed about a matter or wanted to travel or undertake some business they cast lots with them before him, as told on the Apollo page. The Qur'an forbade seeking one's lot by the arrows, and placed them with wine, gambling and the altar-stones as "an abomination of Satan's work".

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Divination among these peoples is of two kinds that meet. The first is a voice: the Pythia at Delphi, the seeress whom Odin questions, the kāhin among the Arabs, the Selli at Dodona. The second is a sign that is read: the liver of Gudea's victim, the liver of Piacenza with Tages, the cracks of the tortoise in China, the Roman augur's birds, Hubal's arrows. Mesopotamia joins them in one man, for Gudea dreams, consults the interpreter and examines the liver in a single story.

Again and again the oracle is tested before it is believed: Croesus asks the oracles what he is doing on a given day, King Tarquinius asks the augur about a thing in his mind, and the seeress asks Odin why he tests her. And again and again an animal is present at the oracle: the dove at Dodona, the dragoness at Delphi, the ram at Siwa, the kid with Gudea, the birds at Rome.

Among the Arabic words for divining is ʿabara al-ruʾyā, in the root of crossing, so this subject meets the river of the dead, crossed into the other world. And the oracle that decides the fate of kings stands close to the Moirai and the Tablet of Destinies: the Pythia's answer to Croesus was that the god himself could not turn aside his lot.

Eiríks saga rauða shows the seeress at work in the households: Þorbjörg, the "little völva", sits on a platform at a winter feast in Greenland during a famine, Guðríðr sings a chant for her, and she says the spirits have come and foretells that the famine will end with the spring; then each person asks her his fate; see seiðr.

In Japan Hachiman's oracle at Usa decided affairs of state: his priestess carried to the capital an oracle that he would help cast the Great Buddha, and his oracle kept the monk Dōkyō from the throne; see Hachiman.

Symbolic Reading

The project's Roman rereading essay reads Roman divination as knowledge of nature: birds really are affected by the weather, so their migration marks a change of season, high flight fair weather and low flight a storm, which makes the augurs the first meteorologists; and divination from entrails is a health check, the colour of the liver showing the health of the animal and its pasture. The Greek rereading essay reads Delphi as a centre for observing the sky and knowing the climate. Gudea's cylinder holds both signs the two essays name: the liver, and the tablet with the propitious stars.