The name of Pherebates was, according to several theosophers, assigned to Proserpine because she lived upon turtle-doves, and these birds were the usual offering which the priestesses of Maia made to that goddess, who is the Proserpine of earth, daughter of the fair Ceres, and foster-mother of the human race. The initiates of Eleusis abstained from domestic birds, fish, beans, peaches and apples; they abstained also from intercourse with a woman in child-bed, as well as during her normal periods. Porphyry, from whom this information is derived, adds as follows: “Whosoever has studied the science of visions knows that one must abstain from all kinds of birds in order to be liberated from the bondage of terrestrial things and find a place among the celestial gods.” But the reason he does not give.
According to Euripides, the initiates of the secret cultus of Jupiter in Crete touched no flesh-meat; in the chorus addressed to King Minos, the priests in question are made to speak as follows: “Son of a Phœnician Tyrian woman, descendant of Europa and great Jupiter, King of the Isle of Crete, famous through an hundred cities, we come unto thee, forsaking temples built of oak and cypress fashioned with knives; leaders of a pure life, behold, we come. Since I was made a priest of Jupiter-Idæus, I take no part in the nocturnal feasts of Bacchanals, I eat no half-cooked meats; but I offer tapers to the mother of the gods. I am a priest among the Curetes clothed in white; I keep far from the cradles of men; I shun also their tombs; and I eat nothing which has been animated by the breath of life.”
The flesh of fish is phosphorescent and hence is aphrodisiacal. Beans are heating and cause absence of mind. For every form of abstinence, including the most irregular forms, a deep reason, apart from all superstition, can probably be found. There are certain combinations of foods which are opposed to the harmonies of Nature. “Thou shalt not seethe the kid in his mother’s milk,” said Moses—a prescription which is touching as an allegory and wise on the ground of hygiene.
The Greeks like the Romans, but not to the same extent, were believers in presages; it was good augury when serpents tasted the sacred offerings; it was favourable or the reverse when it thundered on the right or the left hand. There were presages in the ways of sneezing and in other natural weaknesses which may be left here to conjecture. In the Hymn of Mercury, Homer narrates that when the god of thieves was still in his cradle he stole the oxen of Apollo, who took the youngster and shook him, to make him confess the larceny:
Mercure s’avisant d’un étrange miracle,
De ses flancs courroucés fit entendre l’oracle;
Jusqu’au grand Apollon la vapeur en monta.[116]
It was all presage with the Romans—a stone against which the foot struck, the cry of a screech-owl, the barking of a dog, a broken vase, an old woman who was first to look at you. All such idle terrors had for their basis that grand magical science of divination which neglects no token but from an effect overlooked by the vulgar ascends through a sequence of interlinked causes. This science knows, for example, that those atmospheric influences which cause the dog to howl are fatal for certain sufferers, that the appearance and the wheeling of ravens mean the presence of unburied bodies—which is always of sinister augury; localities of murder and execution are frequented by these fowl. The flight of other birds prognosticates hard winters, while yet others, by their plaintive cries over the sea, give the signal of coming storms. On that which science discerns ignorance remarks and generalises; the first sees useful warnings everywhere; the other distresses and frightens itself at everything.
The Romans furthermore were great observers of dreams; the art of their interpretation belongs to the science of the vital light, to the understanding of its direction and reflections. Men versed in transcendental mathematics are well aware that there can be no image in the absence of light, be it direct, reflected or refracted; and by the direction of the ray, the return under the fold of which they know how to find, they arrive by an exact calculation, and invariably, at the source of light and can estimate its universal or relative force. They take into account also the healthy or diseased state of the visual mechanism, external or internal, and attribute thereto the apparent deformity or rectitude of images. For such persons, dreams are a complete revelation, since dream is a semblance of immortality during that nightly death which we call sleep. In the dream-state we share in the universal life, unconscious of good or evil, time or space. We leap over trees, dance on water, breathe upon prisons and they fall; or alternatively, we are heavy, sad, hunted, chained up—according to the state of our health and often that of our conscience. All this is useful to observe, and unquestionably, but what can be inferred therefrom by those who know nothing and are without the wish to learn?
The all-powerful action of harmony, in exalting the soul and giving it rule over the senses, was well known to the ancient sages; but that which they employed to soothe was wrested by enchanters to excite and intoxicate. The sorceresses of Thessaly and of Rome believed that the moon could be dragged from the sky by the barbarous verses which they recited and that it fell pale and bleeding to the earth. The monotony of their recitations, the sweep of their magical wands; their circumambulations about circles, magnetised, excited, and led them by stages to fury, to ecstasy, even to catalepsy itself. In this kind of waking state, they fell into dream, saw tombs open, the air overcast by clouds of demons, the moon falling from heaven.