The Symbolic Cosmos:
Divination, Prophecy and their Fate in the West
ÓBonnie E. Schrack, 2002 3rd revised edition
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The resurgence of the practice of divination among people within the domain of Western civilization during the past several decades is one of the curious and unforeseen aspects of the cultural changes of what are now called postmodern times. Yet there has been little serious scholarly response that would explore the many questions raised by this revival. Most of the best work on divination has been accomplished by anthropologists who have made detailed studies of it in the societies where it has never suffered the fall from prominence and acceptance that it experienced in the West.1
My work, in contrast to theirs, will approach the problem of understanding divination mainly from the perspective of religious studies, and it will examine some of the ideas and attitudes toward divination that have characterized Western religion and culture. My purposes are not solely those of ideal, disinterested scholarship (if such a thing exists). Ultimately I hope that it will be possible to build some bridges of understanding between communities who stand to benefit by learning from one another, among which are that of the practitioners of divination in North America and Europe, who lack much in the way of clearly thought out theoretical perspectives on their own practice; the academic world, especially that of religious studies and theology, which appears scarcely aware of the burgeoning activity of the diviners that has been developing under, as it were, its very nose; and ultimately and most importantly, the lay Christians and spiritual searchers who long for clarity in discerning God’s will for their lives, and have been institutionally denied many of the ways of discovering it which have been relied upon in other times and cultures.
It is my hope to begin here a process leading toward ways of comprehending various forms of divination in a clearer relationship to explicitly religious forms of God’s self-communication. It will not be possible to quickly clear away the distrust and misunderstanding that have for centuries obscured divination in the eyes of Christianity and the church, but not to begin to examine the problem would be to ignore the situation of many who, in the midst of these cynical times, have been reaching out, albeit by unconventional means, and opening themselves to the holy Mystery that calls and offers itself in love to every human being.
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An Overview of the Phenomenon
Before proceeding any further, we must look at how divination is to be defined. One of the most useful attempts in recent scholarship is found in Evan Zuesse’s widely cited article in the Encyclopedia of Religion. He calls divination "the art or practice of discovering the personal, human significance of future, or more commonly, present or past events," also noting that it "involves communication with personally binding realities and seeks to discover the ‘ought’ addressed specifically to the personal self or to a group."2 His use of the ‘ought’ here helps to emphasize the crucial ethical dimension which common prejudices against divination have tended to obscure.
Further observations worthy of our attention are made by the anthropologist Philip Peek, although his bias toward understanding divination from an overwhelmingly cognitive and epistemological standpoint must be taken into account. He stresses its role in African societies as providing "a trusted means of decision making, a basic source of vital knowledge." While he admits (rather reluctantly) that "although divination systems are not solely manifestations of religious beliefs, a sacred world view is nonetheless a key element," he generally is little concerned with the
2. Evan M. Zuesse, "Divination," in The Encyclopedia of Religion, 1987.
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religious dimension; his outlook is summed up in such statements as: "Divination systems are not simply closed ideologies founded on religious beliefs but are dynamic systems of knowledge upon which the proper ordering of social action is based.3
Despite this limitation, Peek draws our attention to a central feature of divination, namely that it is a process of inquiry, a search for knowledge of a particular kind: that which is inaccessible by ordinary means of sensing, thinking and judging. These operations produce conclusions which people may come to feel are inadequate, shallow, falling far short of the depth of understanding desired. The finiteness of our capacities to know as humans is recognized, and a vaster realm of truth is intuited, lying beyond our immediate grasp. Its existence is implied in a comment Peek quotes from Mary Douglas: "Any culture which admits the use of oracles and divination is committed to a distinction between appearances and reality. The oracle offers a way of reaching beyond appearances to another source of knowledge."4
Peek himself concludes that for these cultures, "the suprahuman realm is the repository of true knowledge." However, we shall see later the significance of his observation that though in divination "everything possible is done to ensure correct communication, all participants appreciate that there is a fundamental unknowability in the universe,"5 which even the most careful and skillful divinatory efforts cannot hope to penetrate. Thus, there is an appeal to this source, without the supposition that a complete uncovering of its truths is possible or even conceivable.
3. Peek, introduction to African Divination Systems, 2-3.
4. Mary Douglas, "If the Dogon . . . " in Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 129; quoted in Peek, African Divination Systems, 195.
5. Peek, 195.
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Another of the most important features of divination is that it derives its meanings by interpreting given objects or phenomena as symbols. Peek refers to them as "esoteric codes," "polysemic morphemes" which will be translated by the diviner into "meaningful metaphoric utterances."6 This designation of symbolic meaning to things and events is the way divination links the deeper, hidden world of the true meanings of things with our ordinary, daily reality.
Here the ideas of Paul Ricoeur on symbol are most illuminating. Ricoeur’s understanding of a symbol is of something that with its "surplus of meaning," gives rise to "an endless exegesis." "No concept can exhaust the requirement of further thinking borne by symbols . . . no given categorization can embrace all the semantic possibilities of a symbol."7 Yet it is only by the work of interpretation and creation of a discourse that these endless possibilities are able to be manifested.
He speaks of symbols in terms of the "primordial rootedness of Discourse in Life": dream symbols are rooted in the unconscious forces of the psyche, and religious symbols in the power of the Sacred or the numinous. The symbol is rooted in the cosmos, "the universe of the Sacred," which is "irreducible" to language.8 What characterizes the depths in which the symbols are grounded is that their numinous power surpasses all possibilities of confinement and definition by particular, verbal or semantic meanings. Of Otto’s understanding of the Sacred as power, he says,
We are here crossing the threshold of an experience that does not allow itself to be completely inscribed within the categories of logos or proclamation . . .The numinous element is not first a question of language, if it ever really becomes one, for to speak of power is to speak of something other than speech.9
6. Peek, 200.
7. Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning, (Fort Worth: Texas Christian Univ. Press, 1976), 57.
8. Ibid., 59-61.
9. Ibid., 60-61.
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Even more, Ricoeur provides us with some of the most insightful descriptions to be found of the way such symbols, discerned in our world, may be understood as transmitters of sacred meaning in divination, which because of their eloquence and beauty I will quote at some length. He points to how ritual and myth are linked in a
logic of correspondences, which characterizes the sacred universe and indicates the specificity of homo religiosus’s vision of the world. Such ties occur at the level of the very elements of the natural world such as the sky, earth, air, and water. . . . Within the sacred universe . . . life is everywhere a sacrality, which permeates everything and which is seen in the movement of the stars, the return to life of vegetation each year, and the alternation of birth and death. It is in this sense that symbols are bound within the sacred universe: the symbols only come to language to the extent that the elements of the world themselves become transparent. . . . The capacity to speak is founded on the capacity of the cosmos to signify (emphasis mine).10
The cosmos itself understood as fundamentally symbolic is a central concept to which we shall return. It is expressed not only in divination, but as Ricoeur describes, is found in the myths, the rites of initiation, the designs of temples, and concepts of the human body in which
the hierogamy of earth and sky corresponds to the union between male and female as a correspondence between the macrocosm and the microcosm. Similarly there is a correspondence between the tillable soil and the feminine organ, between the fecundity of the earth and the maternal womb, between the sun and our eyes, semen and seeds, burial and the sowing of grain, birth and the return of spring.11
10. Ibid., 61-62.
11. Ibid., 62.
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The inner and outer worlds communicate and both are known in primal symbols,
whether it be . . . above and below, the cardinal directions, the spectacle of the heavens, terrestrial localization, houses, paths, fire, wind, stones, or water. . . this anthropological and cosmic symbolism is in a kind of subterranean communication with our libidinal sphere and through it with what Freud called the . . . combat between the giants, . . . between eros and death. . . 12
For Ricoeur, then, symbols allow the task of mediation between the underlying sacred realities that express and reveal themselves in the symbol, and the language which seeks to convey, but never fully conveys their meaning.
What asks to be brought to language in symbols, but which never passes over completely into language, is always something powerful, efficacious, forceful. . . . The dialectic of power and form takes place, which insures that language only captures the foam on the surface of life.13
From an appreciation of these resonances between the greater cosmic cycles and the rhythms of human life, then, it is only a series of small steps to their systematization into a customary, socially constituted set of symbols differentiated into ever-finer gradations, with their corresponding meanings, as seen and interpreted by diviners.
What is implicit in such an understanding of reality is that it is meaningful to see events in the universe, in nature, as indicators of our own lives because we are bound together with them in a sacredly grounded and ordered unity in which each part is capable of revealing the whole. Elements of the whole are not conceived of as existing autonomously, subsequently juxtaposed, and interacting on a solely external basis; rather, the course of their development unfolds in mutually interdependent, co-evolving fashion, sharing an intrinsic kinship which lets none separate itself to operate in sovereign independence.
12. Ibid., 65.
13. Ibid., 63.
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Because of their assumption that human beings are part of this unity and interrelatedness, which acts in ways lying beyond the understanding of non-symbolic thought, hidden from our reasoning consciousness, those who rely on divination believe that decisions of import should not be made without a sounding, via the symbolic indicators, of the changing, subterranean tides and terrain, a reconnaissance of all of the forces at play that conjoin in a given moment, to touch on and shape the lives in question.
There are many forms of divination, of which we must carefully take note, since some may not fit common preconceptions of what constitutes divination, although they accomplish the same essential functions. Evan Zuesse lists many of the methods which have appeared in various cultures, and attempts a system of classification. This typology is far from perfect; it is based, though, on an interesting distinction between the different ways various cultures have themselves explained their divinatory performances.
This main division is between "possession divination" in which the agency of a personal god or spirit is claimed, which category is further divided into those in which the spirit communicates through non-human and through human agents; and on the other hand, "wisdom divination," which involves the perception of mysteries conceived in a more impersonal way: a "movement beyond specific cults, approaching the elemental ground from which all personal spirits and cultic gods . . . arise."14
Stephen Karcher, in his Illustrated Encyclopedia of Divination, follows a five-fold division: first, the interpretation of omens and signs found in nature, the body, and life experiences, whether these are seen as coming from personal gods and spirits, or as the "self-display" of the patterns connecting us with the cosmos.15 Second, mediumistic divination, including shamans, seers, prophets, and all those whose consciousness becomes a vehicle; "they offer their bodies, voices, and creative intelligence to the ‘others’. . . By putting themselves in the middle, they become a means of expression for these forces. . . in an individual personality and in the body politic."16
14. Zuesse, 375-376.
15. Stephen Karcher, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Divination (Shaftesbury, Dorset: Element Books, 1997), 20.
16. Ibid., 90.
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Third are what Karcher calls "oracular systems": these include the ancient Greek and Roman lot and dice oracles; the Ifá divination system, "an extremely sophisticated imaginative and spiritual practice that remains a vital part of life in Nigeria, Benin, and Togo"; the Chinese I Ching, or Book of Change, "the oldest continually used divination system in the world; the classic example of what we call wisdom divination . . . its symbols are the origin of philosophical thought. It is a cosmology, a cultural institution, and the core of a traditional science";17 the Tarot cards; the Germanic runes of the Elder Futhark, an alphabet much used in magical inscriptions, and which Tacitus describes as used in lot divination;18 the Tibetan Sho Mo dice oracles, and others. Fourth is astrology, the main types being the familiar Zodiac that originated in Hellenistic late antiquity; the Chinese, and the Tibetan; and that of the Maya, still practiced today, in connection with an oracular system, by the daykeepers of highland Guatemala.19 Fifth are the various approaches to dream interpretation, that look to the way gods, spirits and daimonic energies speak through the human unconscious, whether this be deliberately sought through incubation, or not.
Zuesse’s section on "possession divination" provides an illuminating view of this important category which both authors recognize. Within it fall "prophetic inspiration, shamanistic ecstasy, mystical illumination and visions, and mediumistic or oracular trance. They differ according to the degree of ego awareness and lucidity, awareness of the ordinary world, and the theoretical recipient of the divinatory message." A broad range of phenomena indeed;
17. Ibid., 124, 128.
18. Tacitus Germania 10.
19. Barbara Tedlock, Time and the Highland Maya (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico, 1982, 1992.)
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while some might be uncomfortable at the thought of ‘lumping’ them together, Zuesse seems well enough aware of the differences between them. The order in which he lists them indicates his sense of the degree to which ego consciousness is retained; the last-mentioned type, for example, the oracular medium, "loses all awareness, it is said, and therefore often remains ignorant of the message that is communicated directly from the spiritual being to the audience." In contrast, at the other end of the spectrum, we have the prophet.
The prophets of the Bible seem to retain a lucid sense of themselves and the world as they exhort their audience, although they are gripped by an overmastering sense of the integral meaning of events as illuminated by God’s presence. The recipient of this revelation of temporal meaning is both the prophet and the human community.20
Thus Zuesse’s perspective is one which includes prophecy with this very broad enterprise of mediation between gods and humanity, and which, we shall see, has begun to be embraced by a certain number of biblical scholars.
Karcher discusses prophecy in quite negative terms, falling into a surprisingly privatistic posture, which he attempts to justify by invoking our postmodern condition, saying, "our age has learned to distrust great visions for the reform of the world after one of history’s bloodiest centuries. . . We have seen the destruction inherent in trying to realize a millennial vision."21 Among other critiques, Karcher, himself sounding rather prophetic in his denunciations, describes the way Greek and Roman high culture came to value prophetic mediums such as the Sibyl over popular methods of lot divination, citing the ban on all private divination by Augustus.
20. Zuesse, 377.
21. Karcher, 87.
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He concludes:
The association prophecy makes between politics, reform, and the highest spiritual authorities, as well as its disconnection from individual affairs, has made it particularly susceptible to being used as propaganda. Roman and Chinese emperors, Reformation clerics, and German fascists have all manipulated prophecies of the coming of the Golden Age and the wonder-signs associated with it to legitimize their rule.22
What seems to have tainted prophecy for Karcher is its involvement with the public, social sphere; he would bypass politics to connect the individual psyche directly with the cosmos. Despite the extremism of his rejection of the role of divine mediation in public life, his point about the seductions of power is one to be seriously examined. We shall be looking at length into this relationship between divination, prophecy, and power.
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22. Ibid., 88.