Now the means of communion between men and gods are obviously twofold—the methods by which men make their communications to the gods, and the methods by which the gods make their communications to men. The former class of communications involve for the most part questions or petitions; the latter are mainly the responses thereto; and it would seem natural to consider them in that order. But inasmuch as more is known of the ancient methods by which the gods signified their will to men than of the reverse process, it will be convenient first to establish the unity of modern folklore with ancient religion in this division of the subject, and afterwards to discuss how any modern ideas concerning the means open to man of communicating with the gods may bear upon the less known corresponding department of ancient religion. For if we find that the theory no less than the practice of divination, that is, of receiving and interpreting divine messages, has been handed down from antiquity almost unchanged, there will be a greater probability that, along with the general modern system of sacrifices or offerings which accompany men’s petitions, a curious conception of human sacrifice in particular which I once encountered is also a relic of ancient religion.
The survival of divination then in its several branches first claims our attention. The various modes employed are for the most part enumerated by Aeschylus[791] in the passage where Prometheus recounts the subjects in which he claimed to have first instructed mankind: dreams and their interpretation; chance words (κληδόνες) overheard, often conveying another meaning to the hearer than that which the speaker intended; meetings on the road (ἐνόδιοι σύμβολοι), where the person or object encountered was a portent of the traveller’s success or failure in his errand; auspices in the strict sense of the word, observations, that is, of the flight and habits of birds; augury from a sacrificial victim, either by inspection of its entrails or by signs seen in the fire in which it was being consumed. To these arts Suidas[792] adds ‘domestic divination’ (οἰκοσκοπικόν)—the interpretation of various trivial incidents of domestic life—palmistry (χειροσκοπικόν), and divination from the twitching of any part of the body (παλμικόν). Finally of course there was direct inspiration (μαντική), either temporary, as in an individual seer, or permanent, as at the oracle of Delphi.
Whether the common-folk ever distinguished the comparative values of these many methods of divination may well be doubted. The Delphic oracle, I suspect, attained its high prestige more because it was ready to supply immediately on demand a more or less direct and detailed answer to a definite question, than because personal inspiration was held to be in any way a surer channel for divine communications than were other means of divination. Some thinkers indeed, chiefly of the Peripatetic school[793], were inclined to draw distinctions between ‘natural’ and ‘skilled’ divination[794]. The ‘natural’ methods, including dreams and all direct inspiration, were accepted by them; the ‘skilled’ methods, those which required the services of a professional augur or interpreter, were disallowed. But the division proposed was in itself bad—for dreams do not by any means exclusively belong to the first class, but probably in the majority of cases require interpretation by experts—and, apart from that consideration, the distinction was the invention of a philosophical sect and not an expression of popular feeling. There is nothing to show that the common-folk, believing as they did in the practicability of communion with their gods, esteemed one means of divination as intrinsically more valuable than another.
Nor was there any logical reason for such discrimination. Granted that there were gods superior to man in knowledge and in power and also willing to communicate with him, no restriction could logically be set upon the means of communication which they might choose to adopt. There was no reason why they should speak by the mouth of a priestess intoxicated with mephitic vapours or disturb men’s sleep with visions rather than use the birds as their messengers or write their commandment on the intestines of a sacrificial victim.
A certain justification for accepting some means of divination, such as intelligible dreams, and for suspecting others, might certainly have been found in distrust of any human intermediary; vagrant and necessitous oracle-mongers infested the country; and even the priestess of Delphi, as history shows, was not always superior to political and pecuniary considerations. But experience of fraud did not apparently teach distrust; the fact that oracles and other means of divination were undoubtedly often abused did not cause the Greek people to reject the proper use of them; down to this day all the chief methods of ancient divination still continue. In some cases, we shall see, the modern employment of such methods is a mere survival of ancient custom without any intelligent religious motive; but in others there is abundant evidence that the modern folk are still actuated by the feelings which so dominated the lives of their ancestors—the belief in, and the desire for, close and frequent communion with the powers above.
Direct inspiration is a gift which at the present day a man is not inclined to claim for himself, though he will often attribute it to another; for it implies insanity. But though the gift is not therefore envied, it is everywhere respected. Mental derangement, which appears to me to be exceedingly common among the Greek peasants, sets the sufferer not merely apart from his fellows but in a sense above them. His utterances are received with a certain awe, and so far as they are intelligible are taken as predictions. He is in general secure from ill-treatment, and though he do no work he is not allowed to want. The strangest case which I encountered was that of a man, unquestionably mad, who wandered from place to place and seemed to be known everywhere. I met him in all three times, in Athens, in Tenos, and in Thessaly. He had no fixed home, did no work, and was usually penniless; but a wild manner, a rolling eye, and an extraordinary power of conducting his part of a conversation in metrical, if not highly poetical, form sufficed to obtain for him lodging, food, and clothing, and even a free passage, it appeared, on the Greek coasting steamers. Whether the long monologues in verse in which he sometimes indulged were also improvisations, I could not of course tell; but once to have heard and seen his delivery of them was to understand why, among a superstitious people, he passed for a prophet. He was a modern type of those old seers whose name μάντεις was believed by Plato to have been formed from the verb μαίνεσθαι, ‘to be mad’; his frenzy really gave the appearance of inspiration.
Dreams furnish a more sober and naturally also a more general means of communion with the gods; and the belief in them as a channel of divine revelation is both firmly rooted and widely spread. This indeed is only natural. The change from paganism to Christianity, even if it had been more thorough and complete than it actually has been, would probably not have affected this article of faith. So long as a people believe in any one or more deities not wholly removed from human affairs, it is logically competent for them to regard their dreams as a special communication to them from heaven; and Christianity, far from repudiating the old pagan idea, confirmed it by biblical authority. The Greek Church, as we shall see, has made effective use of it.
The degree of importance universally attached in old time to dreams is too well known to all students of Greek literature to call for comment. Artemidorus’ prefatory remarks to his Oneirocritica, or ‘Treatise on the interpretation of dreams,’ and his criticism of former exponents of the same science, would alone prove that public interest in the subject must indeed have been great to stimulate so serious and so large a literature. There is the same practical evidence of a similar interest in modern Greece. Books of the same nature are sought after and consulted no less eagerly now than then. A new edition of some Μέγας Ὀνειροκρίτης, or ‘Great Dream-interpreter,’ figures constantly in the advertisements of Athenian newspapers, and the public demand for such works is undeniable. In isolated homesteads, to which the Bible has never found its way, I have several times seen a grimy tattered copy of such a book preserved among the most precious possessions of the family, and honoured with a place on the shelf where stood the icon of the household’s patron-saint and whence hung his holy lamp.
One of the pieces of information most frequently imparted to men in dreams is the situation of some buried treasure. The precautions necessary for unearthing it, namely complete reticence as to the dream, and the sacrifice of a cock, have already been mentioned[795]. This kind of dream has been utilized by the Greek Church. There is no article of ecclesiastical property of more value than a venerable icon; to any church or monastery which aspires to become a great religious centre an ancient and reputable icon, competent to work miracles, is indispensable.
Now the most obvious way of obtaining such pictures is, it seems, to dig them up. A few weeks underground will have given the right tone to the crudest copy of crude Byzantine art, and all that is required, in order to determine the spot for excavation, is a dream on the part of some person privy to the interment. It was on this system that the miracle-working icon of Tenos came to be unearthed on the very day that the standard of revolt from Turkey was raised, thus making the island the home of patriotism as well as of religion. And this is no solitary example; the number of icons exhumed in obedience to dreams is immense; wherever the traveller goes in Greece, he is wearied with the same reiterated story, and if the picture in question happens to be of the Panagia, there is often an appendix to the effect that the painter of it was St Luke—an attribution which can only have been based on clerical criticism of the style. Inspection is now difficult; the old pagan custom of covering venerable statues with gold or silver foil by way of thank-offering[796] has, to avoid idolatry, been transferred to icons; and in many cases only the faces and the hands of the saints depicted are left visible, the outlines of the rest of the picture being merely incised upon the silver foil. But, with inspection thus limited, the layman does not detect in any crudity of style a sufficient reason why the saintly painter, if only he could have foreseen the ordinary decoration of Greek churches, should have had his productions put out of sight in the ground. Nevertheless the story of the origin of the icon is believed as readily as the story of its finding.