My own knowledge of its use is obtained entirely from Acarnania and Aetolia; but the practice is also recorded from Zagorion in Epirus[867], and prevails too, I have been told, among the shepherds of Elis. The opportunity for it is, as I have said, offered only by certain feast-days, when the peasants indulge in meat. On other occasions, when the shepherds kill only in order to sell in the towns, divination cannot be undertaken; for it is only after cooking that the meat can be properly removed from the bone so as to leave it clean and legible. There is therefore no doubt an economical reason for confining this practice to certain religious festivals; but this consideration must not be allowed to obscure the genuinely religious character of the rite itself. In Zagorion, at the festivals in honour of the patron-saint of each village or monastery, sheep are brought and slain in the enclosure of the particular sanctuary, and are called κουρμπάνι̯α[868], a plural evidently of the Hebrew word ‘corban,’ a thing devoted to the service of God; thus both name and ceremony proclaim this custom a genuine survival of sacrifice; and it is apparently from the shoulder-blades of these victims that omens are drawn[869]. A similar case of divination by sacrifice came to my knowledge in Boeotia, though whether the shoulder-blade or some other part of the victim furnished the predictions, I could not ascertain. While looking round a small museum at Skimitári I had happened to stop before a relief representing a man leading some animal to sacrifice, and heard the custodian, a peasant of the place, remark to another peasant, evidently a stranger to the district, who had followed me in, ‘That is just like what we do’; and he then explained that at a church of St George, somewhere in the neighbourhood, there was an annual festival at which a similar scene took place. The villagers of the country-side congregate early on the morning of St George’s day round the church, each man bringing a kid or a lamb; service in the church having been duly performed, the priest comes out and blesses each of the animals in turn, after which they are killed and roasted and a feast is held accompanied by some kind of divination from the victims. Such in brief was the custodian’s account; but, when I intervened in the conversation with a question about the method of divining, he would say nothing more. The Boeotians are still boorish. But what I had already overheard exhibits clearly enough the religious character of the rite; and I do not doubt that in Aetolia and Acarnania also the peasants handle the sheep’s shoulder-blade in an equally religious mood. Their very indulgence in meat is due to the religious occasion; much more therefore the divination which reveals to them the mind of those powers whom they worship.
In the art of interpreting the particular marks upon the shoulder-blade I cannot claim to be an adept. The few facts which I managed to discover were that in general spots and blurs upon the bone are prognostications adverse to the hopes of the enquirer, and that a clean white surface always gives full security: that different portions of the bone are scrutinised for answers to different classes of questions; thus the prospects of the lambing season are indicated on the projecting ridge of the bone, and the weather-forecast on the flat surfaces on either side of it, marks on the right side (the bone being held horizontally with what is naturally its upper end towards the diviner) being favourable signs, and those on the left ill-omened: and finally that a pestilence is foreshown by a depression in the surface of the bone. The science, I was told, is extremely complex and elaborate; but I never had the fortune to meet any peasant who was considered an expert in it; the best exponents of it are to be found among the mountain shepherds, and since these are constantly shifting their grazing grounds it is no easy matter to fall in with one both able and willing to unfold the full mysteries of the art. How to distinguish in interpretation markings of different sizes, shapes, and colours I never discovered[870].
But the little which I learnt agrees in the main with the ancient method as described by Michael Psellus[871]. ‘Those,’ he says, ‘who wish to avail themselves of this means of divination, pick out a sheep or lamb from the flock, and, after settling in their mind or saying aloud the question which they wish to ask, slay the victim and remove the shoulder-blade from the carcase. This—the organ of divination as they think—they bake thoroughly upon hot embers, and having stripped it of the flesh find on it the tokens of that issue about which they are enquiring. The answers to different kinds of questions are learnt from different parts[872]. Questions of life or death are decided by the projection of the ridge[873]; if this is clean and white on both sides, a promise of life is thereby given; but if it is blurred, it is a token of death. Weather-forecasts again are made from inspection of the middle part of the shoulder-blade; if the two membrane-like surfaces which form the middle of the shoulder-blade on either side of the ridge[874] are white and clean, they indicate calm weather to come; while, if they are thickly spotted, the reverse is to be expected.’ Here, it will have been noticed, no mention is made of any discrimination between the markings on the right and on the left sides of the bone; but this, I suspect, is an omission on the part of Psellus, for so simple a principle of ancient divination is hardly likely to have been excluded from consideration in this case. In other respects the information which I obtained tallies closely with his account; the clean and white appearance of the bone was then, as it is now, a reassuring omen; then, as now, the prospects of the weather were to be learnt from the flat surface on either side of the ridge; then, as now, the question of life or death, which from the shepherd’s point of view becomes most acute at each lambing season, was settled by reference to the ridge of the bone. To judge then from the few principles of the art known to me, divination from the shoulder-blade, besides being still recognised as a religious rite, is conducted on the same lines by Aetolian and Acarnanian peasants as it was by those ancient augurs to whose hand-books probably Psellus was indebted for his knowledge.
Another animal utilised in the same district for purposes of divination is the pig; but in this case the prophetic organ is not the shoulder-blade but the spleen. This is removed from the fresh carcase before the rest of the flesh is cut up or cooked in any way, and omens are taken from the roughness or discoloration of its surface. The questions which may be decided by this means are very various—the prospects of weather, of crops, and of vineyards, the success of journeys and other enterprises, the advisability of a contemplated marriage, and so forth. Of the exact details of the art I know even less than in the last case; the facts which I learned were these, that a smooth surface is a good omen, just as it was in the case of other internal organs in the time of Aeschylus[875], while certain roughnesses portend obstacles and difficulties in a journey or enterprise, and further that certain abnormal blotches of colour give warning of blight and mildew on crops and vines. Proficiency in the science, I was told, is commonest among the inhabitants of the low-lying cultivated or wooded districts of Acarnania where large herds of half-wild swine are kept; and hence it is natural that the predictions sought in this way are chiefly concerned with agricultural and social interests, whereas the omens obtained from the sheep’s shoulder-blade by shepherds living solitary lives in the mountains deal with few issues other than the prospects of the flock. But this difference between the two methods of divination is circumstantial rather than essential; either method can, I believe, in the hands of experts be used for answering almost any questions.
Divination from the pig’s spleen is, I think, undoubtedly ancient. It appears to be a solitary survival of the σπλαγχνοσκοπία, or ‘inspection of entrails,’ which in ancient Greece would seem to have been the commonest method of divining from the sacrificial victim. Among the animals embarrassed with prophetic entrails the pig indeed was not ordinarily reckoned; but Pausanias mentions that the people of Cyprus discovered its value[876], and it seems actually to have furnished responses to the highly reputable oracle of Paphos[877]. How it has come to pass that modern Acarnania should preserve a custom peculiar to ancient Cyprus, is a problem that I cannot solve; but it can hardly be questioned that here again we have an old religious rite still maintained as a proven means of communion with those powers in whose knowledge lies the future.
Divination from sacrifice also forms part of the preliminaries of a wedding in many districts. On the day before the actual ceremony[878] the first animal for the feast is killed by the bridegroom with his own hand. The proper victim is a young ram, though in case of poverty a more humble substitute is permitted. This, after being in some districts blessed by the priest who receives in return a portion of the victim, is made to stand facing eastward, and the bridegroom endeavours to slaughter it with a single blow of an axe. Omens for the marriage are taken from the manner and the direction in which the blood spirts out; and a further investigation is sometimes made as to whether the tongue is bitten or the mouth foaming, each sign finding its own interpretation in the lore of the village cronies[879]. The substitute allowed for the ram is a cock. Where the peasants avail themselves of this economy, the killing is usually deferred until after the wedding service, and is performed on the doorstep of the bridegroom’s house before the bride is led in. The bird is held down on the threshold by the best man, and the bridegroom, having been provided with a sharp axe, tries to sever the cock’s neck at one blow. Here too the man’s dexterity counts for something; for the peace or the agony in which the victim is despatched belongs to that class of omens which in antiquity also were drawn from the demeanour of the animal before and during the act of sacrifice, and were taken not indeed to furnish a detailed answer to any question preferred but to indicate the acceptance or the rejection of the offering and the accompanying petitions. It is however the effusion of blood and the muscular convulsions of the decapitated bird which are most keenly observed; for from these signs, I was told, the old women of the village profess to determine such points of interest as the chastity of the bride, the supremacy of the husband or the wife in the future ménage, and the number and sex of children to be born. All this information can in most places where the rite prevails be obtained without any dissection of the victim such as would have been customary in antiquity; but in Aetolia and Acarnania the peasants continue faithful to what are probably ancient methods even in this detail; there the breast-bone of the fowl is treated both at weddings and on other religious occasions as a poor man’s legitimate substitute for the ovine shoulder-blade, which it sufficiently resembles in the possession of a ridge with flat surfaces on either side suitable for divine inscriptions.
But it is not upon coincidences of practical detail, instructive as they are in proving the unity of modern with ancient Greece, that I wish most to insist. If it is clear that the victims often blest by the priests at weddings and on other religious occasions are really felt by the people to be sacrifices, then the practice of divining from them, whatever the exact method pursued, is once more distinct evidence of the belief that the powers above are able and willing to hold close communion with men.
Among the minor methods of divination we may notice first what Suidas calls οἰκοσκοπικόν or ‘domestic divination’; under this head he includes such incidents as the appearance of a weasel on the roof, or of a snake, the spilling of oil, honey, wine, water, or ashes, and the crackling of logs on the fire. The subject was expounded apparently in a serious treatise by one Xenocrates; but it is difficult to suppose that there was any scientific system governing so heterogeneous a conglomeration of incidents; the treatise was probably no more than a compilation of possible occurrences with disconnected regulations for interpreting each of them.
Many events of a like trivial nature are observed at the present day, and the interpretations set upon some of them are demonstrably ancient. A weasel seen about the house, just as on the road, is significant of evil[880], more especially if there is in the household a girl about to be married; for the weasel (νυφίτσα) was once, it is said, a maiden destined to become, as the name implies, a ‘little bride,’ but in some way she was robbed of her happiness and transformed into an animal; its appearance therefore augurs ill for an intended wedding. A snake on the contrary is of good omen when seen in the house; for it is the guardian-genius watching over its own. The orientation of a cat when engaged in washing its face indicates the point of the compass from which wind may be expected. A mouse nibbling a hole in a bag of flour is in Zagorion[881] as distressing a portent as it was to the superstitious man of Theophrastus[882]. A dog howling at night in or near the house portends a death in the neighbourhood, as it did in the time of Theocritus: ‘Hark,’ cries Simaetha, ‘the dogs are barking through the town. Hecate is at the cross-ways. Haste, clash the brazen cymbals[883]’; only instead of the cymbals it is customary to use an ejaculation addressed to the dog, ‘may you burst’ (νὰ σκάσῃς), or ‘may you eat your own head’ (νὰ φᾶς τὸ κεφάλι σου).
Again, to take another class of the domestic incidents mentioned by Suidas, the spilling of oil is universally an evil omen, and the spilling of wine a good omen; the former foreshadows poverty, the latter plenty. The upsetting of water is also a presage of good success, especially on a journey; but in this connexion, as a later chapter will show, it often passes out of the sphere of divination, which should rest on purely fortuitous occurrences, into that of sympathetic magic.