In savage and in civilized times eclipses, comets, the appearance of a new star, and earthquakes have been regarded as indications of the attitude of the deity—sometimes favorable, sometimes unfavorable.
[916]. The words and actions of men and their normal peculiarities of bodily form have furnished comparatively few divinatory signs, the reason being, probably, that in early times animals and other nonhuman things arrested the attention of observers more forcibly, while in later times such acts and forms were more readily explained from natural conditions and laws. The palpitation of the eye, which seems sometimes to uneducated man to be produced by an external force, has been taken as a presage of misfortune. A burning sensation in the ear is still believed by some persons to be a sign that one is being talked about; in early stages of culture the sensation was regarded as a warning sent by the guardian spirit or some other superhuman being. Sneezing was once looked on as a happy omen: when Telemachus gave a resounding sneeze Penelope interpreted it as a sign that news of his father was at hand.[1627] An act performed without ulterior purpose may be taken to symbolize some sort of fortune. When the Calif Omar sent an embassy to the Persian King Yezdegird summoning him to embrace Islam, the angry king commanded that a clod of earth should be brought and that the ambassadors should bear it out of the city, which they accordingly did; and this act was taken both by Arabs and by Persians as a presage of Moslem victory—the invaders had a portion of Persian soil.[1628] An element of magic, however, may have entered into this conviction; the bit of soil was supposed, perhaps, to carry with it the whole land. A chance word has often been seized on as an indication of the future, or a proper name taken as a presage.
[917]. The belief in the sacredness or divinity of the human body has led to the search for divinatory signs in its parts. But it is only the hand that has been extensively employed in this way. The hand has offered itself as most available for divination, partly, perhaps, because of the variety and importance of its functions, partly because of the variety of lines it shows and the ease with which it may be examined. Chiromancy, or palmistry, has been developed into a science and has maintained itself to the present day; but it has largely lost its divinatory significance and has become a study of character, which is supposed to be indicated by the lines of the hand. In its divinatory rôle it has often been connected with astrology.
[918]. The preceding examples deal with occurrences that present themselves without human initiation. In certain cases the materials for divination are arranged by men themselves. In such methods there is always an appeal to the deity, a demand that a god shall intervene and indicate his will under the conditions prepared by men, the assumption being that the god has prepared the event or thing in question, and that, when properly approached, he will be disposed to give his worshipers the assistance desired. The casting of lots and similar random procedures have been common methods of divination the world over. The African Kafir diviner detects criminals by the fall of small objects used as dice. The Ashanti discover future events by the figures formed when palm wine is thrown on the ground, and from the nature of the numbers, whether even or odd, when one lets fall a handful of nuts. In a dispute the Yoruban priest holds in his hand a number of grass stalks, one of which is bent, and the person who draws the bent stalk is adjudged to be in fault.[1629] The Hebrews had the official use of objects called "urim and thummim" (terms whose meaning is unknown to us), which were probably small cubes, to each of which was somehow attached an answer "yes" or "no," or the name of a person. Thus, when David inquired whether he was to attack the Philistines, the answer seems to have been "yes."[1630] When it was a question who had violated the taboo announced by Saul, the urim and thummim first decided that it was not the people but the royal family; and then, as between Saul and Jonathan, that it was the latter who was guilty.[1631] According to the Book of Ezekiel the Chaldean King Nebuchadrezzar drew lots by arrows to determine what road he should take in a campaign.[1632] The old Arabs employed a species of divination by arrows, which, when thrown down, by their position indicated the will of the gods; and in the division of the flesh of a beast slaughtered by a clan or group, the portions to be assigned to various persons were determined by the drawing of arrows.[1633] Divination by lot was also largely employed by the Greeks and the Romans.[1634] The method called "sortes vergilianae" is still in vogue; it was and is a custom among pious persons, Christian or Moslem, to learn the course that they are to take in an emergency by opening a Bible or a copy of the Koran at random and accepting the first words on which the eye falls as an indication of the divine will, the deity being supposed to direct the eye.[1635]
[919]. One of the commonest and most important methods of divination in antiquity was the examination of the entrails of animals (haruspication). Of this system there are a few examples among savage peoples,[1636] but it has attained special significance only among the great civilized nations and especially among the Babylonians, the Etruscans, and the Greeks and Romans. The slaughtered animal was generally held to be itself sacred or divine, and, as it was offered to the deity, it was a natural belief that the god would indicate his will by the character of the inward parts, which were supposed to be particularly connected with the life of the animal. Of these animal parts the liver was regarded as the most important. The liver was for the Babylonians the special seat of thought, whether from its position or its size or from some other consideration we have no means of knowing. The explanation of the form and appearance of the liver became itself a separate science, and this science was developed with extraordinary minuteness by the Babylonians. The whole structure of the liver, together with the gall, bladder, and the ducts, was analyzed, and to every part, every line, and every difference of appearance a separate significance was assigned. Thus hepatoscopy, demanding long training and influencing political action (and, doubtless, calling for ingenuity and tact in interpretations), assumed great importance in Babylonia and Assyria; and it was hardly less important among the Etruscans, the Greeks, and the Romans.[1637] It is held by some scholars that Babylonia was the original home of the developed science, whence it passed into Greece and Italy.[1638] It may be recognized in Babylonia in the third millennium B.C., and there is no improbability in the supposition that Babylonian influence was felt in Asia Minor and Eastern Europe; but, in view of the number of possibly independent centers of culture in this region in ancient times and the paucity of data, the question may be left open.
[920]. Other parts of the animal bodies also were employed in divination. Tylor[1639] mentions the examination of the bones of the porcupine among North American Indians, the color giving indications as to the success of hunting expeditions. The shoulder blade, when put into the fire, showed by splits in it various kinds of fortune. The heart was of less significance in ancient thought than the liver, it being of less size, and its function in the circulation of the blood not being known. The brain also did not come, until a comparatively late period, to be regarded as the seat of the intellect.[1640]
[921]. From these external signs we may now pass to consider divinatory facts derived from men's inward experience.
Dreams. The importance attached all over the world to dreams as presages is a familiar fact. It would appear that among savage peoples a dream is regarded as representing an historical fact, the actual perception of an occurrence or a situation. It is believed that the mysterious inward thing, the soul, endowed with peculiar power, is capable, during sleep, of leaving the body and wandering to and fro;[1641] why, then, in its journeys, should it not be able to see the plans of friends and enemies, and in general to observe the course of events? We do not know the nature of savage logic in dealing with these visions of the night, but some such line of reasoning as this, it seems probable, is in their minds. The soul, they hold, is an entity, possessing intellectual powers like those of the ordinary living man—it sees certain things, and its knowledge becomes the possession of the man when he awakes. Thus the soul in dreams is a watchman, on the lookout for what may help or harm the man. Perhaps there is, even in low tribes, a vague feeling that it has extraordinary powers of perception; whether such a feeling, if it exists, is connected with a belief that, during sleep, the soul is freed from the limitations of the everyday corporeal man we are not able with our present data to say.[1642] Savages often follow the suggestions made in dreams[1643] (particularly when they are vivid) and are confirmed in their faith by occasional fulfillments of predictions; the mind, working during sleep on the observations made by day, may sometimes fall on situations that afterwards really appear, and a few such realizations are sufficient to establish a rule or creed.
[922]. This naïve conception of dreams as products of the soul's perception of realities survives to a greater or less extent among higher tribes and nations, but finally gives way, when some sort of theistic construction is reached, to the view that they are sent immediately by deities. An approach to this view appears in North America when, for example, a Pawnee Indian sees in a dream some being who gives him important information, though in the folk-tales nothing is said of the source of the dream.[1644] A step in advance appears in the belief of the Ashanti, according to which the existence of a tutelary family deity is indicated in a dream;[1645] it is, however, not clear whether or not they hold that the tutelary deity has himself suggested the dream. In the higher religions a dream is often sent by a patron deity as a prediction or for guidance in a coming emergency. Doubtless it was only in the case of specially distinct dreams and such as related to important matters that attention was paid to them—the deity intervened only in affairs that called for his special direction. Examples are numerous in the history of the great nations of antiquity. The Egyptian King Merneptah in a time of great danger had a dream in which the god Ptah appeared to him and bade him banish fear;[1646] and the Hebrew Yahweh is represented as having sent dreams to a king of Egypt (probably in the interests of the Hebrews) to warn him of a coming famine.[1647] The Assyrian Ashurbanipal was favored with special communications from Ishtar, and the god Ashur in a dream ordered Gyges, King of Lydia, to submit to the Assyrian king.[1648] In some documents of the Pentateuch Yahweh regularly announces his will in dreams to both Hebrews and non-Hebrews;[1649] and a Hebrew writer of a later time (the third or second century B.C.) represents the God of Israel as giving Nebuchadrezzar an outline of the history of the rise and fall of the kingdoms of Western Asia and Greece.[1650] A god might employ a dream for a less worthy purpose: Zeus sends a dream to Agamemnon to mislead him and thus direct the issue of the war.[1651] So important for life did the Greeks conceive the dream to be that, as it would seem, they personified it.[1652]
Incubation. Divine direction by dreams was not always left to chance. The custom arose of sleeping near a shrine (engkoimesis, incubation) where, doubtless, after appropriate ritual preparation the god was expected to signify his will in a dream (his generally friendly feeling was assumed and the dream would be of the nature of an answer to prayer). This was one of the means employed by Saul when he desired to learn what would be the issue of the impending battle with the Philistines.[1653] In Greece, and later in Italy, the most famous shrine of incubation was that of Asklepios (Aesculapius), which was widely resorted to and came to exert a good moral influence.[1654] The renown of the shrine was doubtless increased by the fact that Asklepios was a god of healing.[1655]