Whisperers
Page 9
Other recorded dream cures included that of Euhippus who suffered from a broken spear point embedded in his jaw. During an induced dream in the Abaton, the god drew out the point and carried it away, leaving the patient free from pain (and presumably from the spear point) when he awoke. Clinatas of Thebes was rid of a lice infestation when Asclepios appeared in his dream to brush him down with a stiff broom.
The iamata can be unclear at times about what happened in a dream and what in the waking state. To the Greek mind, the two were almost interchangeable: actions carried out on the dream body were automatically transferred to the physical. Sometimes there was an observable crossover. One patient who presented himself at the Asclepion had an ulcerated toe. He dreamed that a handsome youth treated his affliction with a special remedy and woke cured. But priests on duty at the temple claimed the cure had actually taken place when one of the sacred snakes licked the toe.
Dreams were not thought to be subjective experiences, as they are today. The Greeks appear to have believed the dream state was something akin to another world that people could visit in sleep. Consequently, it was perfectly possible to dream on behalf of someone else. When Arata of Laconia fell foul of dropsy and was too ill to travel, her mother journeyed to Epidaurus to incubate a dream for her. In the Abaton the mother dreamed that the god removed her daughter’s head and drained it of liquid before restoring it to her shoulders. Curiously, Arata had the same dream and was free of her affliction by the time her mother returned home.
Sometimes a worthy patient did not find his way to an Asclepion of his own accord—he might be summoned by the god in a dream or, more rarely, a waking vision. The second-century CE writer Aelius Aristides recorded a personal experience of this phenomenon is his diary, which he later published as Hieroi Logoi or “Sacred Tales.” Aristides lived in Smyrna, an ancient Greek city located on the Aegean coast of Anatolia and ruined his health on a rigorous midwinter journey across the Balkans to the Adriatic and Rome. By the time he came home again, he was suffering from convulsions, breathing difficulties, and periodic paralysis. In this sorry state, he had a dream during which he was summoned to become a devotee of Asclepios at his Pergamum shrine. For seventeen years, Aristides placed himself entirely in the hands of the god—and cold hands they turned out to be. Asclepios prescribed exhausting fasts, emetics, purges, bloodletting, naked winter runs around the temple, plunges into frozen rivers and lakes, special foods, and long periods when he was forbidden to wash. Not altogether surprisingly, Aristides eventually tired of this treatment and turned to human physicians for help, but Asclepios promptly punished him for his faithlessness by inflicting him with chills, digestive ailments, and catarrh. On the positive side, however, Aristides believed the god protected him in times of plague, brought him favor with the authorities, and arranged for the defeat of his literary rivals.
Although by far the most popular, Asclepios was not the only god of healing in Greece—Apollo was probably second favorite, but there were many others. As their following increased, the technique of dream incubation for spirit contact spread beyond the boundaries of the country. In the third century BCE, Ptolemy I established Greek rule in Egypt and shortly thereafter was visited in a dream by a god who introduced himself as Serapis and demanded that his statue be brought from the Black Sea coast and established in Alexandria, the new Egyptian capital. Although Serapis promised benefits to the kingdom, Ptolemy procrastinated so that the god had to come again, with threats this time, in a second dream. This time Ptolemy caved in at once and not only fetched the statue but had a new Serapeum built in Alexandria to house it. True to his word, Serapis thereafter began to appear in the dreams of the sick, with therapeutic effect. But he was a more demanding deity than Asclepios and induced in his devotees at Memphis and elsewhere a state called katoche during which they were compelled to obey his commands until released into normal consciousness.
Serapis, the healing god established in Alexandria following spirit instructions given in a pharaoh’s dream
An artist’s impression of a Delphic priestess, whose trance communications with spirits guided the ancient world
Serapis shared his Memphis shrine with a native Egyptian deity named Imhotep—a real person who was deified after his death as Imouthes. Imouthes was as demanding in his own way as Serapis and just as unpredictable. When a scribe failed to publish a book on Imouthes’s healing miracles, this god struck him down with a fever as punishment, then appeared in a dream to cure him with a single look.
That dream incubation spread to Egypt was predictable enough, since Egypt was now ruled by a Greek pharaoh, but the reason for its spread to Rome was bizarre in the extreme, if contemporary accounts are to be believed. According to these sources, Rome was suffering the ravages of plague in 292 BCE and sent a deputation to the Greek oracle at Delphi in the hope of advice. The oracle told them to visit Epidaurus. When the mission arrived, its members were greeted by a huge serpent that appeared from under a statue of Asclepios and then boarded the Roman ship and went to sleep beneath a tent. Firm believers in omens, the Romans left it where it was and sailed for home. The snake swam ashore at Antium, where it remained for three days coiled around a tree before boarding the ship again. When the ship entered the Tiber, it went ashore on Tiber Island and disappeared … as, almost at once, did the raging plague. The grateful Romans built their first Asclepion on the island and established worship of the healing god under his Latin name, Aesculapius.
The Delphic Oracle that advised this deputation was another, considerably more famous, example of spirit communication in the world of ancient Greece. According to the Greek historian Diodorus, the Delphic Oracle came into being because of the activities of a goat. A goatherd watched the animal peer into a crack in the ground known as the “Delphic chasm,” then begin to leap about in an extraordinary manner. Other goats approaching the chasm exhibited the same peculiar behavior. So did the goatherd when he went to investigate, but with one important difference: he immediately began to utter prophecies. Word of the phenomenon quickly spread and vast numbers of people made pilgrimage to see for themselves. Unfortunately many were overcome by the fumes and sent tumbling into the chasm so that the authorities proclaimed it a health hazard and decreed that henceforth only a single, specially appointed woman would be permitted to prophecy. She was supplied with a tripod to sit on so she would not fall in.
Although a great many authors, ancient and modern, have passed on the theory that Delphic pythia (oracular priestesses) were intoxicated by volcanic fumes,9 there is no archaeological evidence of any fissure under the Delphic temple. Proponents of the Diodorus theory suggest it may well have closed over during an earthquake, but the Roman author Lucan proposed a different explanation altogether. He held that the priestess was able to prophesy because she was temporarily possessed by the god Apollo.
Lucan never visited Delphi in person, so his description of a pythia rushing around in the grip of divine madness is suspect, but other accounts do little to dispel the idea that some form of mediumship was involved. Certainly Delphi was presented to a believing public as the voice of Apollo, who selected the spot by killing the “blood-reeking bane”10 of a female dragon that had been terrorizing the countryside. The idea that gods or other spirits spoke through oracles had wide popular currency. In his play Elektra, Euripides writes how Orestes attributes the words of an oracle to an alastor or mischievous spirit when it advises him to kill his mother. No member of his audiences would have found the suggestion unlikely.
It is worth remembering that the ancient Greeks had no holy scriptures they could turn to for guidance, nor did their priesthood offer living advice in anything analogous to the modern Sunday sermon. But people then and now had the same deep-rooted human need for direction so that Delphi, despite its fame, was far from the only oracular temple in the Greek world. There were others spread across the entire country with Dodona, Claros, and Didyma among the more popular sites. Most of these subsidiary oracles
, like Delphi itself, were dedicated to Apollo and virtually all made their pronouncements through an entranced medium, male or female, speaking with changed voice and personality as the temporary incarnation of the god. Often their answers were garbled, leading to the widespread belief that the gods had little time for rash inquiries (which seemed to be most inquiries pertaining to mundane human affairs) and were not above confusing or even misleading their authors. As a consequence, a structure of questioning developed within which the querient was not permitted to hear the medium’s actual reply but only its interpretation, delivered in verse by a priest. There was also expense involved. At Delphi, a single question could cost the equivalent of two days’ wages, plus additional “freewill” offerings. But this was the minimum cost only for private inquiries. Governments and individuals in positions of power could expect to pay ten times as much. Many were happy to do so and their questions, related to potential wars and similar matters of life and death, ensured that the political fate of whole provinces and even countries rested on spirit utterances.
But it would be quite wrong to assume the spirits of Greece influenced only her contemporary cultures. Greece is widely acknowledged as the cradle of Western civilization, which allows us to deduce that many of the philosophies we embrace so instinctively today were bequeathed to us by ancient spirit voices. Moreover, even the most superficial study of history shows a similar bequest was made to us by that other great classical civilization, the military culture of ancient Rome.
According to Livy, the very foundation of Rome was marked—and marred—by spirit contact. Having decided to found a new settlement, the twins Romulus and Remus began to quarrel about which of them the town should be named for and who should govern it. Since they could reach no agreement, they decided to ask the tutelary gods of the countryside to make the decision for them by augury. The brothers then retired to separate hills—Palatine and Aventine—to await their respective signs. Remus was the first to hear from the spirits when six vultures appeared, but shortly afterward twelve of the same birds appeared to Romulus. Livy writes, “The followers of each promptly saluted their master as king, one side basing its claim on priority, the other upon number. Angry words ensued, followed all too soon by blows, and in the course of the affray, Remus was killed … This, then, was how Romulus obtained the sole power. The newly built city was called by its founder’s name.”11
It is difficult to know how much truth lies in this intriguing tale. There is no archaeological evidence of the original settlement and historian Robert Hughes describes Rome’s accepted foundation date, 753 BCE, as “wholly mythical.”12 What is certain is that augury of the type Livy described did not end with Romulus and Remus but came to dominate the thinking of patricians, politicians, and plebeians alike across the centuries as the settlement became a city and the city became an empire. Tradition has it that King Romulus established a College of Augurs sometime between 735 and 716 BCE. At this period it had no more than three members, but by 81 BCE the number had increased to fifteen. For several centuries, serving augurs elected new members to the college, but this right disappeared in 103 BCE and the appointment of augurs was politicized.
Augury itself was not, as many assume, a procedure designed to foretell the future, nor even to determine a correct course of action. Rather it sought to discover whether a particular decision, already made, found favor with the gods and thus should be acted upon or abandoned. In other words, it was a system of communication with spirit beings created to ensure their approval of human actions. As such, it is worth noting, a favorable augury could only really be judged in retrospect. If the signs appeared favorable, but the outcome proved catastrophic, then the augur must have misread them in the first place.
College augurs handed down the techniques of their craft to new members of the profession—a profession that carried with it enormous prestige and power. Augurs were consulted prior to every major undertaking in Roman society, both public and private. Their findings determined matters of trade, diplomacy, war, and even religion. To make those findings, an augur would first don the trabea, a state robe edged with purple, reserved for members of his profession, kings, and certain priests and knights. He would then retire to high ground, or sometimes a tower, cover his head with a special cowl, and place his left foot on a boulder.13 From this elevated position, he turned his face eastward and used a short, straight rod with a right-angled bend at one end to mark out the heavens into four quarters. Then he waited for a sign from the gods, related to the undertaking in question. When such a sign appeared, it was not considered a valid augury until confirmed by a second sign of the same type. There were several groups of omens to which particular attention had to be paid. The first, and arguably most important, were signs in the heavens themselves—a flash of lightning, a roll of thunder, the appearance of a meteorite or comet, or the behavior of birds, notably vultures, eagles, owls, and crows. The augur might take note of whether thunder came from his right or left, whether lightning produced an odd or even number of strokes, the appearance and direction of a flight of birds, or possibly even the sounds they made. When the augur dropped his eyes from the heavens, he might typically watch out for the appearance of a wild animal like a fox or a wolf, interpreting the direction from which it came and whether it crossed the horizon or ran parallel to it.
A more artificial, but extremely popular, method of divining the will of the gods involved the use of sacred chickens.14 Birds reserved for this purpose were kept in a coop and generally consulted by the augur early in the morning. In a short but solemn ceremony, he would order a moment of silence, then throw down a handful of corn and open the coop. If the chickens swooped directly on the food and ate heartily, it indicated that the gods were pleased about the undertaking in question. But if the chickens refused to eat, flew away, or scattered the food with their wings, the augur would pronounce the omen unfortunate and predict trouble ahead if the proposed course of action was carried through. There was, apparently, no way of avoiding the will of the gods. Prior to the naval Battle of Drepana in 249 BCE, the consul Pulcher ordered a chicken-based augury for his planned attack on the harbor. When released, the chickens refused to eat, but instead of abandoning his plans, Pulcher snapped, “Bibant, quoniam esse nolunt” (“Let them drink if they won’t eat”) and threw the birds overboard. The move reassured his crew sufficiently to follow him into battle, but the attack failed miserably, the battle was lost, and almost all of Pulcher’s ships were sunk.
Running parallel to the work of the augurs were the activities of the haruspices, with whom augars are sometimes confused in popular modern accounts. A haruspex was a priest trained in the art of divining the will of the gods by examining the behavior and entrails of sacrificed animals. Typically, the animals offered in sacrifice would be sheep or poultry. The haruspex would carefully observe the animals’ behavior and condition before they were killed, and the condition of their entrails—notably the liver—after death. If the caput iecoris (head of the liver) was missing, this was seen as a particularly bad omen. In Euripides’s play Elektra, an incomplete liver signaled the impending death of one of the characters.
To the modern mind, there seems little to choose between the oracular practices of augury and haruspicy. Both seem superstitious, even silly, and curiously lacking in any real spirit contact. But one ancient tale may provide a hint as to why we should not rush to judgment—at least on the question of augury. Livy’s History of Rome, written in the first century BCE, describes how the third king of Rome, Tullus Hostilius, received word of a shower of stones that had fallen on the Alban Mount, the second-highest peak of the Alban Hills near Rome. The mount was a long-extinct volcano and this indication of renewed activity quickly persuaded Hostilius to send an investigatory expedition.
When the men arrived at the mount, they discovered it was indeed mildly active—they were greeted by their very own hailstorm of pebbles—but not so much that it prevented a climb. When they did so, they rec
eived a great augury at the lucus cacumen, the hill’s topmost grove. A spirit voice emerged from the trees to dictate instructions concerning religious observances. Hostilius was sufficiently impressed to order a nine-day festival to mark the event, a celebration repeated when there were subsequent reports of stony rains.
The incident on the Alban Mount was not the only example of verbal augury. The accepted list of omens to be considered by every member of the College of Augurs included “unusual incidents,” such as the hearing of strange voices and the appearance of apparitions. In the De Divinatione (“Concerning Divination”), our best source of information on the divinatory practices of Roman times, Cicero is careful to distinguish between the sort of “cookbook” augury that could be learned by rote and the divinely inspired communication with the gods that took place in an ecstatic trance. A similar distinction was made by Plato,15 suggesting that at least some examples of augury, and possibly even haruspicy, involved neo-shamanic techniques of spirit communication.
The same suspicion hangs over another popular Roman institution, the Mithraic Mysteries, which flourished from about the first to the fourth centuries CE and were strongly supported by the Roman military. Like their Elusion counterparts in Greece, little is definitively known about the Mysteries of Mithras. The Roman Mysteries were bound by oaths of absolute secrecy and no text recounting their innermost activities has survived. But a multitude of subterranean temples have, and archaeological investigation has enabled us to piece together a “best-guess” scenario of what went on.
The Romans themselves believed these Mysteries originated in Persia—Mithra is a Persian god and Mithras the Greek adaptation of his name—but modern scholarship fashionably claims that the cult was indigenous to Roman imperialism and may even have arisen as a counterbalance to early Christianity. There is less controversy about its symbolism. Reliefs of the young Mithras slaying a bull have led scholars to believe the worship likely involved bull sacrifice, while a multitude of eating vessels and implements found at Mithraic sites strongly suggests feasting as part of the ritual. We can also be certain that the Mithraic Mysteries were initiatory—and with that certainty come important pointers toward the sort of spirit contact embodied in the Greek Mysteries. There were seven grades in all, ranging from corvex (crow or raven) through nymphus (male bride), miles (soldier), leo (lion) Peres (Persian), heliodromus (sun-runner), to the supreme grade of pater (father). Entry into each grade was conditional on the candidate having survived a particular ordeal, often in a pit dug into the floor of the Mithraeum. The emperor Commodus (r. 180–192 CE) is alleged to have introduced Mithraic trials specifically designed to kill the candidate as a sop to his own sadism, but even the more routine tests, involving exposure to heat, cold, and other perils, were dangerous. If the candidate survived, he immediately came under the protection of the god associated with his new grade—Mercury for corvex, Venus for nymphus, Mars for miles, Jupiter for leo, Luna for Perses, Sol for heliodromus, and Saturn for pater. On achieving the grade of leo, the candidate’s ethical emphasis became that of purity. The resemblance to shamanic rites in which purifications and life-threatening ordeals led to the knowledge and protection of certain spirit entities is too obvious to require further comment.