Dreams, too, have played an immensely important role in divination. In the Bible, Jacob foresees the lofty future of his people when he dreams of a ladder rising from his breast to the very heights of Heaven, with angels ascending and descending its many rungs; in the Gospel of St. Matthew, an angel visits Joseph in a dream and informs him that Mary will be having a child by the Holy Spirit; in dreams, an angel warns the magi not to tell Herod about the birth of Jesus, advises the Holy Family to flee from the imminent Massacre of the Innocents, and later tells Joseph when it’s safe to return to Israel. According to early passages in the Passion, even Pontius Pilate’s wife had dreams, troubling dreams which led her to beg her husband to spare the life of Jesus rather than Barabbas.
The study and interpretation of dreams, known as
oneiromancy,
was a regular practice among the ancient peoples of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Palestine: the Egyptians called dreams mysterious messengers and believed they were words of counsel sent by the goddess Isis; the Greek playwright Aeschylus claimed they were invented by Prometheus, the Titan who had also bestowed fire on mankind; Herodotus tells us that in the temple
of Bel in Babylon, a priestess slept on a bed of ram skin and purposefully dreamed dreams that would foretell events. In the second century
A.D.,
Artemidorus Daldianus, a professional seer, collected every anecdote, story, and scientific observation he could find pertaining to dreams and published them in five books called the
Oneirocritica:
"I have not only made special efforts to obtain every book on the interpretation of dreams,” he wrote, “but also have kept company for many years with the much-disdained soothsayers of the marketplace.” His aim, he asserted, was “to fight against those who wished to abolish divination,” and in that he was surprisingly successful; his books were reprinted, and translated into several languages, for many centuries to come. (Even Freud read them with interest.)
Although the theories of the ancients differed in many respects, there were some broad similarities. By and large, it was believed that in sleep, the soul was set free from the body and communed with the cosmic forces in a way that it couldn’t when imprisoned by flesh and wakefulness. It was able to travel unimpeded and see events and scenes and accidents that might figure in the dreamer’s future life. But because these visions were so often garbled, unclear, or, according to one popular theory, exactly the
opposite
of what would actually transpire on the earthly plane, they required careful analysis by someone skilled in the task.
In a pseudo-physiological explanation, the Christian philosopher and magician Albertus Magnus argued that there was a special spot in the front of the brain that connected each human being with the universe as a whole and that the five senses transmitted all of their findings, via the bloodstream, to this special spot. There, in what Albertus called the
cellula phantastica,
or
imaginatio,
dreams were constructed.
Later, his disciple Arnold of Villanova divided these dreams into those that came from outside, from a divine source, and those that originated in the body itself. As a doctor, he was particularly interested in the medical meanings of dreams, and he attributed a lot of their imagery to the four bodily humors. If, for instance, you dreamed of rain and damp, Villanova
chalked it up to an excess of phlegm. If you dreamed about shooting stars or thunder, it was yellow bile that was causing it; catastrophe and horror, black bile. If you dreamed about things that were colored red, from fire to apples, it had something to do with the blood. Villanova also believed that when you dreamed about certain parts of the body, those parts signified members of your family and household. The eyes referred to children; the head to father; the arms to brothers. The right hand related to the mother, sons, and friends; the left hand to a wife or daughter. As for the feet, they were reserved for servants.
A later doctor, Paracelsus, threw in his lot with the ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, whose teachings were being enthusiastically revived during the Renaissance. Because the individual soul is a part of the greater cosmic soul—a microcosm in touch with the macrocosm—Paracelsus believed that it could, when freed by sleep, apprehend both the past and the future. It could also transport messages back and forth between the living and the dead. There was only one hitch, as far as Paracelsus could see: if the soul failed to get back to the body before the sleeper awakened, then the sleeper, finding himself short of the vital life force, might die.
In the many “dream books” that were written and compiled over the centuries, all sorts of meanings were attached to specific imagery and visions. One of the most influential of these books was written in 1530 by an astrologer in Lyons named Jean Tibault; entitled
La Physionomie des songes et visions fantastiques des personnes,
it included roughly four hundred catchphrases, alphabetically arranged, for the decoding of elements drawn from a dream. “To dream that you are a tree,” it said, “means illness.” “To see a lighted candle means anger or strife.” “To gather grapes means harm.” “To grind or purloin pepper means melancholy.” “To have a long beard means strength or profit.” “To hear bells ring means slander.” “To cut bacon means the death of someone.” “Old shoes,” it also mentioned, “means sadness,” while new ones meant consolation.
In another such book,
The Golden Key of the Egyptians,
an
extensive table of days was included, with dates on which various dreams could be considered good, or bad, omens. Dreams you have on March the 2, 9, 12, and 14, for instance, were dreams you should never tell anybody about. Dreams you have on December 10, 20, and 29, on the other hand, would bring great joy. In general, according to this key, dreams you have on Wednesday nights would be the most informative when it came to business matters, while those you have on Fridays would be more pertinent to romantic affairs.
When trying to decide which dreams were truly oracular and which ones were simply, well, dreams, an authority on the subject who went by the name of Rankajou suggested that you should discard any dreams that occurred during the first couple of hours of sleep; they were just the results of the digestive process. You should also discard any dreams of things or people that you had just heard discussed; these were no more than echoes from the day. Also to be discounted, dreams that resulted from an illness, a fright, an uncomfortable sleeping position, or a book you were reading before falling off to sleep. The best dreams, when it came to their predictive power, were the ones you had between three and seven in the morning, when digestion was all done, the mind had been untroubled, and the body, presumably, had found itself a relaxing position of repose. How exactly you remembered these particular dreams and distinguished them from any others that had come to mind (from tainted causes like a draft or a head cold) Rankajou did not say.
THE SIBYLLINE BOOKS
During the reign of King Tarquin the Proud, who ruled Rome from 534 to 510
B.C
., a strange visitor appeared at his palace one cold winter day. Unlike most of the dignitaries and plutocrats who asked for an audience with the king, this visitor was an old woman in a voluminous cloak. Nobody knew who she was or where she’d come from, but there was something in her
demeanor that was so mysterious and compelling that she was allowed to see the king, nonetheless.
When he asked her what business she had with him, she drew from under her robe nine books (or scrolls) which she offered to sell to him. Tarquin asked her how much she wanted for them, and the old woman quoted a price so fantastic that Tarquin laughed. The old woman didn’t. With a sober, even sad, expression, she took three of the books and threw them into the fire burning in a brazier near the king’s throne. Then she asked him if he wanted to buy the six remaining books.
Again, the king asked the price, and she gave him the same price she’d originally asked. “Why should I pay you for six books as much as you were asking for nine?” Tarquin replied.
The old woman threw three more books into the fire.
Tarquin was amazed. Who was this old woman, and what was in these books?
For the third time, she asked if he would buy the books, and this time the king didn’t laugh or scoff at the offer. Fixing his gaze on the resolute old woman, he wondered what he should do. And when, without bending, she moved to throw the last remaining books on the fire, he said, “Stop!” And he paid her, in gold, the full sum she was asking.
Then the old woman turned and slowly walked out of the palace. She was never seen again.
Had Tarquin made a good buy?
When the books were opened, they were discovered to be written in Greek. After they were translated for the Roman king, he learned that they were books of magic and prophecy and that they addressed the future and the welfare of the Roman empire. Now, the king’s augurs declared, the old woman must have been the famed Sibyl of Cumae, one of the divinely inspired seers of the ancient world, the same one who had counseled Aeneas before he made his descent through the infernal regions.
The Sibylline Books, as they were then dubbed, were reverently placed in a shrine in the great temple of Jupiter on the Capitol; there, they were overseen by a small group of official
custodians (half patrician, half plebeian) whose duty it was to consult them, at the behest of the Senate, whenever guidance was needed. Most important, the books were used to figure out what religious rituals had to be performed in order to stave off national catastrophes, such as earthquakes, droughts, pestilence, and war. After one such consultation in 226
B.C.,
the guardians of the books ordered that a Greek and a Gallic couple be buried alive in the Forum, in propitiation of the gods of the underworld.
Though the fate of the original books is unclear (they were probably consumed in a fire in 83
B.C.),
reconstituted versions remained among the most precious and revered possessions of the Roman empire for many centuries. When Augustus became pontifex maximus, he ordered all the books of magic and prophecy then extant to be gathered together and burned (in 12
B.C.).
But the three Sibylline Books he spared. These he ordered to be taken from the Capitoline Hill and placed in a golden chest, which was then enshrined in the base of a statue of Apollo on the Palatine Hill.
They were preserved there until the reign of the emperor Honorius (from
A.D.
395 to 423). At that time, the empire was in great danger, with the barbarians restive at its borders, and the Goth leader, Alaric, moving his army across the Alps. It was then that the Roman general Stilicho decided to put a stop to the pagan beliefs that half the population still stubbornly clung to. He stole the treasures stored in the temples, ripped the gold plates off the doors of the Capitol, and put the Sibylline Books to the torch. When his wife, Serena, took a precious necklace from a statue of the goddess Rhea and had the nerve to wear it herself in public, the wrath of the people became unquenchable. Stilicho, despite his private cadre of barbarian bodyguards, was hunted down, captured, and beheaded. The Senate then sentenced his wife to death by strangulation.
Terrifed by the approaching Gothic horde, the government officials turned to some persuasive Etruscan sorcerers, who claimed that they could call down lightning bolts and blast the Goths to powder. Needless to say, the Etruscans failed to deliver, and after a prolonged siege, the Romans were forced to surrender
nearly everything they owned to Alaric and his army, in exchange for the privilege of keeping their lives.
THE HAND OF FATE
Of all the body parts regularly turned to for divination—and this pretty much includes everything from the head to the toes—none was ever more studied than the hand. The hands are at once one of the most expressive parts of the body and of course one of the most utilitarian. Perhaps because they are so vital in the practical sense, they have also been invested with considerable importance in other ways, too—the hands have been used both to predict the individual destiny of their owner and to diagnose his or her present health and disposition.
The science, or art, of chiromancy (from the Greek words for “hand” and “divination") goes back as far as three thousand years before the birth of Christ, when it was already being practiced in China. Even in the most ancient Greek writings, chiromancy is discussed as if it were an established and widespread belief; Homer refers to it, and later on, so do Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen. (Indeed, there’s a story, possibly apocryphal, that a chiromancer studied Aristotle’s palm, then made some rather unflattering statements about the great philosopher’s character. Aristotle’s students were so shocked and dismayed that they were ready to string up the palmist by his heels, when Aristotle stopped them and said that the hand reader had done a good job; the very flaws that the reader had seen were in fact the flaws he’d been striving all his life to overcome.) In the patristic literature (the writings of the Fathers of the early Christian church) several references to chiromancy are made, and it’s clear from these that most people at that time believed there was mystical significance in any marks that could be found on this “organ of organs,” the hand.
When studying the hand for divinatory purposes, everything about it was to be taken into account. How was the hand shaped? Was it small and narrow or wide and thick? Was the
skin rough or smooth? Were the fingers short and blunt, or were they long and tapered? Were there many lines, crisscrossing the palm every which way, or were there just a few, barely discernible? Were the nails hard and clear or brittle and cloudy? Was there hair on the hand, and if so, where and how much? And what about the veins—were they blue and prominent or pink and delicate? Was the skin warm and dry or cold and damp? All of these were factors that a conscientious chiromancer could, and usually did, take into account.