Divination
and Oracles
Most of what we’ve looked at so far has been about us talking to the divine forces of the universe, but as anyone who has ever been on a blind date knows, talking at someone isn’t the same as holding a conversation. Do ut des—I give so that you may give—is the principle underlying the practice of making offering; the same reciprocity applies to the practice of prayer. The des, the giving back, of a prayer is an oracle. The word “oracle” itself (don’t you love authors with a fetish for etymology?) comes from the Latin orare, “to speak,” which is apparently cognate with the Hittite word ariya, “to consult an oracle.” This idea of speaking to the gods, then, stretches back to the beginning of Indo-European history. Similarly, the word “divination” comes from the Latin divinus, meaning “pertaining to a deity.” Divination was and is a sacred activity in which the gods speak back.
In my opinion, it’s also the most fun of the theurgic practices. It’s more common now to think of divination as an entertainment; we can visit a fortuneteller at the corner of the street and have our hands fondled, our cards read, and hear a string of pleasant and vague lies. This is, of course, nothing new. The ancient Greeks played a divination game at symposia: it evidently involved flinging the dregs of a wine cup into a brass canister and listening to the quality of the ping. It’s hard to imagine that anyone took that terribly seriously.
At the same time, oracles and divination were a serious business. In the late Empire, it was a capital crime to consult an oracle or diviner of any type for the answer to any question concerning the Emperor. This act, as a threat to state security, was a crime of treason.84 Later, Christian emperors obviously banned many of the practices, only relenting bit by bit as particular types of divination developed Christian justifications, such as astrology. Currently, in the United States, many states have a precarious and touchy relationship with “fortunetellers.” As a laudable effort to crack down on fraud, some states have gone a bit far and banned any such activities, which then raises first amendment questions. For example, one could argue that divination is part of the religious practices of Neopagans, not to mention older religions such as Santería. What, then, happens to the practitioners of those arts? Are they automatically assumed fraudulent, or do they have first amendment rights to practice their religion? A long list of cases have gone to local courts, and in general the courts tend to uphold the first amendment rights of the diviners as long as no fraud is occurring. Some states and cities, in an effort to prevent fraud while honoring the right of people to believe what they like, require licenses. Others ban the practice outright. If you intend to offer divinations for money, don’t trust that the courts will go your way in the case of a dispute: call your local courthouse or police station and ask about the local laws.
Fraud is a real problem now as it was in the ancient world; however, pseudo-
skeptics sometimes take these frauds as standard, ignoring in the process centuries of positive examples of diviners. Other skeptics, more intellectually honest, admit that people might well believe in their “woo-woo” but that it doesn’t really work. Skeptics and pseudoskeptics have an arsenal of arguments for why divination doesn’t really work even though it seems to. For example, there is the well-known phenomenon of selection bias: we notice our successes and not our failures. This is true; it really does happen. But I don’t know a single serious diviner who doesn’t keep records and mark off successes and failures both. In other words, we are aware of selection bias and try to correct for it. Similarly, Barnum statements are often invoked as a common way to appear to say something serious but really say nothing at all. A Barnum statement is a description that applies to a large number of people, such as “you’re a very social person sometimes.” TV psychics use enough of these to fill a dumpster, which is where they belong, and skeptics are right to criticize them. But at the same time, in a real divination, I rarely run into such statements.
This criticism isn’t new, by the way. Cicero, a skeptic of divination, argued in 44 bce that divination is bunk because oracles are often vague. He cites the famous example of the oracle of Delphi, which predicted that
When Croesus o’er the river Halys goes
He will a mighty kingdom overthrow,85
Croesus did so, and lost his empire in the resulting war. Cicero argues that no matter what happened, the oracle would be right; it was a kind of Barnum statement, although Cicero didn’t have that term. The Neoplatonists answered such criticisms by pointing to Heraclitus’s maxim about the oracle: It communicates “neither talking nor concealing … but ‘giving indications by signs.’”86 In other words, yes, the oracle (and divination) doesn’t talk to us in the language of linear logic, of true-and-false; however, it points to those things we might consider. What was the god saying to Croesus? “If you want to destroy empires, go ahead—to the gods, it’s all one whether your empire or another is destroyed.” Cicero ignores the important point of the oracle, which is the “when” statement. Croesus could have taken a moment to think about whether or not he really wanted to overthrow a kingdom or whether diplomatic means might be more appropriate. The oracle answers like a teacher: giving him an opportunity to rethink his previous ideas.
Frankly, as a skeptic, I am actually in some sympathy with Cicero, despite mostly accepting the Stoic and Neoplatonic doctrines that divination is real because the gods are real. I think it’s healthy to cultivate a skeptical mind about all magic—theurgy, thaumaturgy, or divination. To accept unquestioningly is to be unthinking. As Socrates said, “life without enquiry is not worth living.”87 Similarly, the unthinking religion is not worth pursuing.
One trap I have seen in divination, in various discussion forums online as well as in conversations in person—and even in myself—is the tendency to justify. Here the skeptics are right, and we must guard against it. I see it especially in more complex systems that require interpretation, such as astrology and geomancy. If someone asks a question such as “Will I get the job?” and the chart says no, people often struggle to find some way in which to interpret it as a yes. “Sure, the moon is void of course and the signifier is square the quesited, but did you notice that Jupiter is in exaltation?” I call this tendency “obfuscation through elaboration,” a desire to find some obscure detail or method that allows you to get the answer you want. It is rife in modern astrology and also common among tarot readers and other diviners.
Leaving this kind of fallacy aside, however, my anecdotal but skeptical experience of divination is that it works. Through it one can attain correct answers to questions, and not only that: one can gain insight into problems that previously might have been elusive. I also think it works best when the diviner has some connection to the divine: in other words, it is a theurgic act. This isn’t to say that an atheist cannot divine effectively, but to do so he or she must be in touch with the Nous, whether or not there is belief in it.
So how does it work? In Neoplatonic cosmology, the Nous is outside of time. Time is a form that exists in the Psyche, so if we can raise our own minds (little-n nous) up to behold the mind of the universe (big-N Nous) then we can see the timeless landscape of existence. We can use various methods to rise up and see this timeless landscape. Sometimes, special visions are created in the mind, phantasms that come not from our senses but from the Nous. At other times, we seek out inspiration in randomness, allowing us to break out of the cause-and-effect world of the physical to gain some insight into the larger picture. The ancient Romans and Greeks developed myriad methods of doing so, and we’ll explore a sample of them in the remainder of the chapter.
Dreams
Plutarch calls dreams “the oldest oracle,”88 and in the Odyssey Penelope describes a theory of dreams, after having what seems to her to be a prophetic one:
Dreams are very curious and unaccountable things, and they
do not by any means invariably come true. There are two
gates through which these unsubstantial fancies proceed;
the one is of horn, and the other ivory. Those that come
through the gate of ivory are fatuous, but those from the
gate of horn mean something to those that see them.89
The words “horn” and “ivory” are puns in Greek for words that mean, essentially, “come true” and “deceive,” respectively. Virgil, imitating Homer but writing in Latin, which doesn’t have the same pun, justifies it by pointing out that horn is transparent when cut thinly, while ivory is not. The art of dreaming true, called oneiromancy, consists almost entirely of determining which dreams are true and which are false, of which comes through the ivory gate, and which through the gate of horn.
To aid in this determination, lists of dream symbols were recorded in scrolls or books and probably sold as popular guides to divination, just as dream books are now. One of the oldest we have is an Egyptian papyrus that details what specific dreams mean, frequently based on a puns or transparent symbolism. For example, it tells us that “if a man sees himself in a dream with his bed catching fire, bad; it means driving away his wife.”90 Similar books also exist in ancient Greek and Latin literature.
General principles for dream interpretation, requiring more thought and less page flipping or scroll rolling, appear in more serious works. For example, Macrobius describes dreams in which a person of authority—a god or a parent for example—makes a direct prediction as a kind of prophesy.91 In my experience, other warning signs that a dream is prophetic include not seeing the face of the person speaking, remembering the dream in unusual detail well after most dreams of the night have been forgotten, and the ability to do something in the dream that one normally cannot do in a dream, such as reading. All of these can be tip-offs that a dream is a message.
These are prophetic dreams that come without warning, but sometimes we need an immediate answer to a question. In order to trigger a dream, ancient dreamers engaged in the practice of the incubation of prophetic dreams. At the famous temples of Aesclepius, for example, the ill came to make an offering, sleep on the skin of the sacrificed animal, and dream of their cure. Sometimes these cures were miraculous, sometimes medical, and sometimes a mixture of the two (such as requiring that the worshiper take some ashes from the altar and drink them in wine). After receiving the cure, the cured would make a votive offering often in the shape of the organ afflicted. Quite a lot of these votives have turned up in these temples of incubation.
Probably, private citizens—especially theurgists—performed their own incubations. In fact, certain folk magic traditions of incubation survive, such as the practice of putting a piece of leftover wedding cake under the pillow to dream of a future husband (or to dream of future ants, I’d think). I’ve had some luck incubating dreams with a bedtime prayer including a vow of a libation or offering if the dream comes through. The Greek Magical Papyri offer a wide selection of possible incubation spells, some simple, some complex. Most involve writing a particular incantation or the question on an object which is then slept on or near, or burned as the wick of an oil lamp. Lamps are popular devices in divination in the Greek Magical Papyri, not only as a means to incubate a dream but as a scrying medium as well.
Scrying
The Greek Magical Papyri list many means of achieving visions of gods. What these deities revealed were probably additional spells, as one occasionally finds a spell described as “god given.” I don’t think this was a figure of speech. The other thing probably revealed about the gods was philosophical and mystical insight into one’s existence: in other words, the aim of theurgy itself. These rituals are very simple. We can divide these spells into two rough classes: lamp divination and saucer divination—or if we wish to be erudite, pyromancy and hydromancy.
In pyromancy, the focal point is a lamp. These lamps were shallow dishes with a spout into which a linen wick was laid. The lamp was filled with olive oil and the wick, once wet, was lit. Lamps as physical objects were about as ordinary as lightbulbs, and although particular spells demand particular types of wicks or mixtures of oil, in general all that is required is an ordinary, everyday lamp that is, as many of the lamp spells in the Greek Magical Papyri tell us, not painted red. Betz suggests that red was a color associated with Seth and therefore of ill-omen, but I suspect that it was an optical rather than a religious requirement. The spell works better when the flame stands out from the lamp, and a brightly colored lamp will not work as well as a dull-colored one. For that reason, a glass oil lamp doesn’t work that well for scrying—too many reflections.
Hydromancy, on the other hand, calls for a shallow dish, usually specified to be silver. It is filled with spring water, and often a young boy is used as the scryer. Again, the optical effects of the water—here, the reflection—is paramount, which is why a shiny bowl works better than a dull one. Sometimes, the water is tinted with a little ink. Wine was also sometimes used, being dark enough to offer a clear reflection.
The physical effect of looking with single-focused attention at a reflection or a bright light in a dim room triggers an optical illusion called Troxler’s fading, in which details in the peripheral vision, no longer being updated by the moving eye, fade out of consciousness. A secondary effect in reflections creates distortions, and while it has been known to magicians and teenage girls at sleepovers for a thousand years, Giovanni B. Caputo describes the illusion for the first time in 2010, naming it “the strange-face-in-the-mirror illusion.”92 This kind of scrying takes advantage of this optical effect, as well as a “sensation of otherness”93 produced by it. Skeptics are welcome to say that such visions are nothing but this optical illusion, but I would counter by pointing out that the face transforms, or the visions in the lamp take shape, based on the subtle and unknown inclinations in the mind. In other words, this illusion is a means of systematically deranging the senses to produce a vision.
The magical manuals of Late Antiquity describe a third class of visions: direct vision. These are akin to what we think of as scrying in the more modern sense. Edward Kelley probably wasn’t seeing his reflection in the shewstone of John Dee, but was using it as a means to arrive at a state of consciousness in which he could see and hear phantasms. These phantasms, images in the mind, are projected outward from the imagination and seem to take on a life separate from one’s own will. In other words, unlike a fantasy in which the fantasizer can control what happens next (“Let’s see, then I’ll use the lottery winnings to buy a car, no, a boat”), a phantasm takes on autonomy. Maintaining focus on the crystal or shewstone helps the will in letting go of the image, freeing it to become the vessel for the divine or daimonic influence evoked by the ceremony. But a scrying surface isn’t necessary and is often absent in these rituals, so the magician instead relies on the ritual itself to focus his will on something other than controlling the phantasm.
Exercise 5.1: Scrying
This is a simple ritual outline to which you may add particular prayers or evocations or barbarous words of power. You can use the animated statue you created in exercise 4.4, but you do not need such an icon. Instead, you can focus it on one of the gateway deities such as Janus or Hekate, or you can scry Apollo for an oracle. When you become skilled at the practice, you can use scrying to devise spells and rituals and receive theurgic techniques that are particularly suited to your own particular temperament.
Step 1: If doing a saucer divination, you will need a shallow silvery bowl that is very clean and brightly polished. If doing lamp divination, you need an oil lamp or a candle. If using a candle, brown or black is best. You’ll also need a comfortable seat. Prepare by purifying yourself and the place of working with chernips or natron water.
Step 2: Make an incense offering to the deity of whom you wish to have a vision, asking it a specific question. The only things on the working table should be the incense and the scrying object in front of the icon if you are using one.
Step 3: Dim the lights so the flame is the brightest thing in the room, or if using hydromancy, until you can make out your reflection only dimly in the water.
Step 4: Stare at the scrying medium while consciously relaxing your body, from the head down to the feet. Modulate your breath, perhaps using the fourfold breath in which you inhale for a count of four, hold for a count of four, exhale for a count of four, and hold for a count of four.
Step 5: As you stare at the object of focus, you will experience optical effects, including distortion and areas of your vision blanking. These are not visions, but they are an indication that you’re preparing for visions.
Step 6: At first, you may experience visions in your imagination, and have a sense that they are internal. The more you work with scrying, the more these visions will externalize, but do not worry about whether or not the vision is in your mind or outside it. If the vision provides you useful information, it really doesn’t matter.
Step 7: Also be prepared to receive perceptions with your other senses, including hearing, smell, and even your kinesthetic sense.
Step 8: When finished, offer your gratitude to the god you have called, then end the ceremony as you would any other ritual. It’s useful to ground yourself in some mundane activity immediately afterwards.
This particular ritual of scrying with the lamp also hints at the theurgic practice of photagogia, or leading in the light. This practice is mentioned in several sources as a way of meditating or perhaps divining with light. Iamblichus describes several procedures: conducting the light through water, focusing it on a divine figure, concentrating it in one spot, and so on.94 I suspect that he is speaking only tangentially about material light here, and is instead offering several means of meditating and concentrating the mind, through contemplation of water or of light itself. In these practices, the lamp becomes a tool of meditation.
Clairvoyance
Scrying relies on and helps develop the ability to have visions, called clairvoyance. Clairvoyance is a divine gift, a means of perceiving the invisible world and making it visible. Of course, as with most gifts, this is a gift we can develop with practice.
The mind operates by creating phantasms, sensory copies of its experiences. It constructs those phantasms out of three storehouses. First, it can take in sensory objects from the environment and construct a phantasm. This is what happens when we see an apple: we don’t really see an apple. We get some sensory input and then we construct the phantasm of an apple and project it onto the place where that sensory input comes from. We never really experience anything of the world of matter: we only experiences the phantasms triggered by our sensory experiences of matter.
But then we can store those phantasms in our memory, which is the second storehouse. We can take images out of the storehouse of memory and combine them, as if we were editing a movie. Again, we are never really experiencing our memories: we are editing them. This is why memory decays over time; we have reworked the material of the storehouse to such a degree that we’ve eroded it. We can also take those images and combine them in ways that never existed. I can imagine flying a unicorn to Spain, while I’ve never seen a unicorn in the world of matter and never been to Spain. But I can use pictures I’ve seen of unicorns, experiences I’ve had that were like flying (jumping, diving, swinging), facts I know about Spain, and fill in the gaps with memories of other places I’ve been to. Ultimately, I can create a nice fantasy out of the phantasms stored in my memory.
The third storehouse is the one that concerns us the most, because this is the source of divine phantasms. The first storehouse of our senses exists in the world of matter. The second is locked in the lower reaches of our psyche. The third, however, is timeless, a reflection of the ideas of the Nous as well as the source of clairvoyance. These images are hard for our minds to grasp, however, and we clothe them in the phantasms of our memory and our senses, occasionally making it hard to distinguish between them.
We learn to have these clairvoyant images the same way we learn to do anything: practice. Here’s a regimen of training and some tips that may help you:
Exercise 5.2: Developing Clairvoyance
Step 1: Begin by learning to create phantasms as described in chapter 2.
Step 2: Practice creating phantasms of simple geometrical figures in various colors. The pentagram is a good one, since it has a lot of magical uses anyway. For many people, simple figures like these are actually harder than more complex and detailed scenes, so if you wish, start with memories and work up to abstract geometry.
Step 3: Exteriorize, or project, the phantasm. For example, if you are making a pentagram, project it and imagine it in the air in front of you, a few feet away. Practice this for a few minutes daily.
Step 4: You may get to the point where you can see the pentagram as a ghostly image that is “half there.” That’s usually all you need for effective magic.
Step 5: Continue to practice exteriorization. If you have a particular talent for clairvoyance, you may begin to see the phantasm as an external image.
Step 6: Now, using a location or object you have enlivened such as the divine image you constructed earlier, look at it. Instead of constructing a phantasm, ask yourself what you see.
Step 7: You may not see anything at first, so try these tricks:
- Close one eye so the image becomes two dimensional. Then imagine turning it like a page. What’s behind it?
- Play “what if?” Ask yourself, “If I were clairvoyant, what would I see?” Then project that phantasm onto the place and let go of control of it.
- Imagine a door in the shape of the image, and then imagine opening to see what’s behind it. What is it?
Step 8: The biggest part of the trick is giving up control of your imagination. Once you do that, you will discover that imagined objects can take on a reality outside of your will.
The potential for self-deception is large, of course. I can pretend to see a nymph, or I can see a nymph. How do I know the difference between a nymph I made up and a real one? One answer to that question is exteriorization. We know when a phantasm is in our mind alone, such as an imaginary nymph. We know, unless we have a psychological disorder, that our memories and fantasies are not happening currently, because we do not perceive them exterior to ourselves. If we can train ourselves to see the phantasms of clairvoyance exterior to ourselves, we can identify them as real in a way our fantasies are not.
There are those in the occult community who insist upon the exteriorization of visualization. If you cannot see the spirits you evoke, they say, you have not evoked any. They have a good point, and I admire their firmness in the face of a lot of fuzzy-wuzzy occult blatherskite. But at the same time, I have to point out that an exteriorization of a phantasm from the memory or imagination is also possible. We call this a hallucination, and it’s not a guarantee of magical success. A lot of mentally ill people are exteriorizing visions all the time, and not all of them—maybe not any of them—are clairvoyant. The second objection I have is purely empirical: many people do some quite remarkable magic without exteriorizing their clairvoyance at all. Some of my most impressively successful evocations, judging by results, did not come with exteriorized visions of the spirits.
So how can we tell whether a phantasm in our imagination comes from the storehouse of our memory and imagination, or from reality? While it might be nice to have a quick touchstone, there’s no substitute for careful introspection and self-honesty. In my experience, the most useful technique, which you should not neglect even if you have exteriorized your visions, is to follow the image backwards to its origin. If you find the origin of the image in the physical world (if, for example, it’s retina burn, or fatigued eyes), it’s clearly not clairvoyance. If, similarly, you can trace it back to your fantasies or memories, it also may not be clairvoyance. For example, if I suddenly have a vision of getting in a car accident but I watched a movie the week previous in which someone got into a car accident, that’s probably just memory and imagination. A daymare, in other words, and not a vision.
Trance and Invocation
The classical practice of trance is not simple, nor was it always healthy. Descriptions of trance in ancient literature describe it as damaging to the health and dangerous to the recipient. For example, Lucan describes a Pythia overcome by the spirit of Apollo in terms that a modern reader cannot help but regard as epileptic.95 It was a common belief that drawing a god into oneself was dangerous, because it is too much power for the body to hold. We find relatively few rituals in ancient sources for direct invocation and identification with deities in distinction to other polytheistic religions like Vodou or Candomblé. Modern magical practices such as assuming the godform were not—as far as I can tell—common in classical and late ancient magic.
On the other hand, the act of inspiration, in which a god breathes into a person, was regarded as a kind of divine madness to be admired. Poets are called vates in Latin, meaning “prophets,” and Plato writes about poets and other divinely inspired people being like iron rings given the power of magnetism by a lodestone.96 In other words, the divinely inspired transmit the force of the gods downward into matter. While this is seen as a kind of madness or mania, it is not regarded, apparently, as an entirely bad kind of madness.
In contemporary magic, it seems everyone and their cousin is going about invoking gods willy-nilly. Part of this is the influence of the Golden Dawn, and part of it is—well, Aleister Crowley and his crew. Most of the advice about how to invoke a god is reflected in a single novel by Dion Fortune, The Goat-Foot God, a fun read if you like stuffy prose. In it, the main character, frustrated by his boring life, decides to invoke a god: Pan. He does so by buying a monastery, decorating it in what he imagines is Pan-like decor, and then breaking social mores in the most boring and stodgy way imaginable for about two hundred pages. At the end, there’s a ritual. It’s delightful. But it’s also profoundly, deeply, almost painfully modernist in conception.97
It is modernist in its assumptions that the gods are signifiers for psychological states, and that we need a balance between society and “wildness.” The wildness is never allowed to get even remotely out of hand (if you need to hire a landscaper to build your sacred grove, you’re a modernist). And the psychological states are solidly Freudian, and to contemporary conceptions of psychology, almost smug. It’s a good novel to read if you’re into magic, and Dion Fortune’s novels are a bit better than Crowley’s. But it’s still a novel.
The postmodern magicians of the late twentieth century took two avenues in regard to invocation. The chaos magicians, being materialists (as far as I know, the only strand of materialist magic ever to exist in the history of the world—go figure) argued that we could invoke any figure whatsoever as a “god” if it had enough followers.98 Hence, Mickey Mouse is a more powerful god these days than Ereshkigal because he has more worshipers. That’s good logic if you’re a materialist. The other strand of postmodern magic, the semiotic approach, with no formal organization behind them and no formal orthodoxy, either adopted the methods of the Modernists with a pick-and-mix approach to deities—invoking now Hermes, now Quetzalcoatl—or they started digging through the original texts and analyzing them not as early psychology but as effective symbolism in which the symbols point to something that really exists, but with an awareness that we might not understand what it means to exist.99
The drawback to the modernist approach, whether we are chaos magicians, semiotic magicians, or traditionalists (whatever that means), is that it requires a time and energy commitment that can be intense. Not many of us can buy a villa, and even very few modernists ever did so. Yet the strength of this approach is also that same drawback: it does take time and energy to draw a god into oneself. But the whole operation and the intensity of it requires us to raise a single question first:
Why do we want to draw a god into ourselves?
In other words, what benefit do we gain from this kind of invocation? I’m not talking about invocations that are essentially prayers that invite the presence of the god into a ceremony: that’s obviously helpful if the goal is to work with that god. But why would uniting with a god help us in any way?
One answer to that question might be that it allows us to work with that god in a more direct, intimate way. Allowing the god to have the reins of our consciousness makes us a tool of the god, and it can potentially elevate us. In those living religious traditions where divine possession is common, that’s what we see: people join with the gods to feel a stronger kinship with them and for a moment, take on their powers. The practice of divine possession can thus speed henosis, at least hypothetically. But there’s a philosophical objection to that method, which is that you are no longer working with the god once you have given up your body and mind to it. Instead, you become merely a tool of the god and not an agent in your own right. The gods want partners, not slaves, in the great work of creation.
Another answer is that we wish to prophesy, and this answer has an ancient pedigree. The Pythia takes on the god in a manner that is not pleasant or necessarily safe in order to offer herself as a spokesperson for the deity. The metaphor for this, again and again in ancient literature, is that the Pythia is raped by the god, and later allegorical interpretations of the myths allege that a scene of “rape” in a myth is a metaphor for divine possession.
Another danger of divine possession is that a god may not leave. There are few spells to call in a god to take over your own body in the Greek Magical Papyri, but there are plenty to get one to leave. Nor is it easy to guarantee that you’ll get the god you call.
The good news is that there is a method of invocation that lacks some of the dangers of the others but still maintains the benefits. New Agers call it overshadowing, and that’s as good a name as any. In this method of invocation, the deity acts as a partner and together you maintain joint custody of the body and mind.
Exercise 5.3: Overshadowing
Step 1: While you don’t need to hire a landscaper to plant you a sacred grove, you do need to have a relationship with the deity. In other words, you should have performed sacrifices and hymns of praise over a period of time before attempting this. Often, the Egyptian gods are preferred for this sort of work by contemporary magicians because they are very easy to visualize. Let’s imagine that we’ve built up a relationship with Thoth, and we intend to ask him to overshadow us to achieve an oracle. We could also use this to get his help in empowering an object, but that will be the subject for a later chapter.
Step 2: Part of the relationship with the deity will be researching him. What does he like, what does he dislike, and most importantly, by what names was he called. First, we learn to write his name in hieroglyphs.
Fig. 10: Thoth in Egyptian
We learn that Thoth is the Greek version of his name, which was something like Djehauti, give or take some vowels.
Step 3: Prepare the place of working by having an image of the god, water for purification, and an incense offering. Also have some paper and a good reliable pen.
Step 4: Purify the area by carrying around the image and the water, then sprinkling as usual.
Step 5: Perform an offering, praying that Thoth will come and guide your hand in writing.
Step 6: Sit in the god-posture—essentially, sitting upright in a chair with your hands on your knees. Have the pad and paper handy, because you’ll need them in a moment. I use a lap desk for convenience and comfort.
Step 7: Perform an operation called “taking on the godform.” In this operation, you create a phantasm of the god in front of you in as much detail as you can. Project the phantasm and then release control of it. When you feel that it is present, ask it to join with you and guide your hand. Imagine it settling down over your body, so that the two forms—yours and its—overlap. Don’t lose track of your form; that’s important.
Step 8: Pick up the pen and position it over the paper. Imagine the god’s hand moving with you.
Step 9: Now, release the hand by moving the image of your hand back to your knee. But leave your physical hand where it is, held now by the god rather than by you. In other words, the two overlapping images now no longer overlap over the hand. You imagine the god holding the pen, while you feel and imagine your hand back on your knee. This particular operation takes some practice and some getting used to; the important thing to remember is to let your kinesthetic sense believe your hand is still on your knee. It helps not to look down, but keep your gaze fixed on the icon of the god in front of you.
Step 10: Ask your question, and let—but do not force—the hand to move. This is sometimes called automatic writing. Some people remain unconscious of what the hands write. I, however, become aware of it a word or two at a time, as if transcribing rather than writing it.
Step 11: You’ll probably find this a bit tiring, so when the hand stops or you become exhausted, move the phantasm of your hand back to overlap your physical hand and return the physical hand
to the god-posture.
Step 12: Project the phantasm of the god standing up and stepping away from you. Salute it by kissing your hand and then reassert your body once again, limb by limb. It’s important to check each limb, making sure you have control over it and that it is where you think it is. It’s a way of regrounding into your body.
Step 13: Offer a prayer of gratitude and add more incense to the fire, then close the ritual as usual.
Step 14: Interpret the writing on the pad. Those things you don’t remember writing are often the most important and significant.
Of course, this ritual is just an example: you can give any part of the body temporarily over to the god, such as the mouth if you wish to speak for the god. You can also use any tool you like; for example, you can release the hand holding a pendulum if you like that tool. The point is that you don’t surrender completely; you join in a mutual arrangement. Thus there’s a reciprocity and mutual respect. We recognize that the god is more powerful, but we’re still human and that’s also an important thing to be, with its own role in creation. We don’t have to denigrate ourselves or surrender to the will of another being, even a divine one. We may choose to follow that will, and that’s a more meaningful choice than simply giving up our body.
Omens
Popular folk magic has reduced omens to superstition, but omens were taken seriously in antiquity. In ancient Greece, any involuntary reaction of the body such a twitch or a sneeze could be the indication of an omen. One would look to what had just been said or done to determine the meaning of the omen. Obviously, not every twitch or sneeze was the marker of an omen; if you have a cold, sneezes probably mean nothing at all. Other omens included unexpected weather events, earthquakes, and the flights of birds. The omen is marked by being unusual; it is an oddly timed sneeze, a strange formation of birds.
The ancient Greeks had a system of reading the flights of birds and flashes of lightning, but leave it to the later Romans to codify and complicate this into the system of augury. Augury, the practice of reading weather and the flights of birds, was the domain of a class of priests called augurs. An augur would define a sacred precinct in the sky with a curved wand, then watch for birds flying into and out of various areas or listen for their cries. Lightning flashes, as well, were a particularly bold statement of the gods’ wills. Under the Republic, an augur’s job was to determine the gods’ assent before any person took office, a role that has given us our word “inaugurate.”
It is hard to reconstruct augury. It may not have been a matter of augury being occult knowledge; probably it was common knowledge so no one felt the need to write it down. Or if they did, it hasn’t survived. Essentially the gist of it is that certain birds were recognized by sight, and other birds were recognized by cry. Some birds fell into both classes. The flight or cry of a bird on the right was, in general, beneficial, while a cry or flight to the left was a negative answer. Individual birds were sacred to particular deities, the most obvious example being Zeus and the eagle. Birds who perched, circled, or took off from certain areas were also regarded as significant. Both the Greeks and the Romans agree with this, even though the Greek system is less codified and rigid. Augurs could also request particular signs as oracles, for example asking for an eagle if such-and-such was the case, and a different bird if otherwise.
Haruspicy
Haruspicy was the practice of examining the entrails of a slaughtered animal for omens about the future. As difficult as it is to duplicate augury in modern times, haruspicy is nearly impossible. As explained earlier, it began as a way of judging whether or not the deity found the sacrifice acceptable, but it quickly extended to more general questions. A sacrifice to Iuppiter might be made, for example, and the animal’s entrails, especially the liver, studied for shape, size, and deformity. Deformity was a clear sign of a problem, but as the questions became more complex, more subtle interpretations of the shape and texture of the liver became necessary.
The liver of the sacrificed animal, like the sky, was divided into zones, again named for particular Etruscan gods. The Etruscans themselves learned it from a small man who sprang from the ground where a furrow was plowed. This small man, named Tages, taught the art of haruspicy then disappeared, or so goes the legend.100 Not much but legends survives, sadly, although we do have brass model livers used as teaching aids with delineation of the relevant areas.
It stands to reason that in a ritual of communion like that of sacrifice, the gods might find a way to speak back in the sacrificial animal, whose death becomes the center of the communicative act. For modern practitioners, we again find ourselves stymied. We’re not sure of the details of the art, but even if we were, it’s problematic to dig through the entrails of a freshly slaughtered animal and start examining the liver. It simply isn’t done; it tends to interfere with your guests’ appetites. And, as I’ve said before, I don’t recommend animal sacrifice anyway.
Kledon
A more popular system of divination, both in antiquity and now, kleda require no special equipment or training. Essentially, a person seeking a kledon goes to the marketplace and whispers his or her question into the ear of a statue of Hermes. While walking amid the people of the agora, the first words the inquirer overhears are the answer to the question. In modern times, a radio on scan works just as well, if not better, and in fact I learned this as a game before I knew it had ancient origins.
The kledon has a long literary pedigree. When Odysseus prays for divine guidance on how to get rid of the suitors trying to steal his wife and his lands, he hears a clap of thunder and receives a kledon from an overheard servant: “I wish the suitors would die tonight!” The kledon is so flexible even Christians make use of it: Augustine writes of an occasion in which he found himself seeking guidance, which he receives from a young child playing outside his window:
So was I speaking and weeping in the most bitter contrition
of my heart, when, lo! I heard from a neighbouring house
a voice, as of boy or girl, I know not, chanting, and oft
repeating, “Take up and read; Take up and read.” Instantly,
my countenance altered, I began to think most intently
whether children were wont in any kind of play to sing
such words: nor could I remember ever to have heard
the like. So checking the torrent of my tears, I arose;
interpreting it to be no other than a command from
God to open the book, and read the first chapter
I should find.101
What’s interesting here is that Augustine is led by this kledon to pick up the Bible and perform another kind of kledon, a bibliomantic kledon.
Bibliomancy, divination by book, does not have to involve the Bible, and in ancient times often involved Virgil or Homer instead. A person wishing to consult the book would make a prayer and ask a question, then open the book at random, pointing to a particular line. That line was the oracle, in much the manner as a random word on the street would be in an aural kledon. Obviously, the nature of the divination one receives from these texts will be colored by the nature of the text itself. The Iliad does not provide a lot of options for sweetness and light amid its lines, and if one is too familiar with the book, it’s easy to select a section nonrandomly. My copy of the Iliad falls open to a few of my favorite bits, for example (like the scene when Priam comes to beg for Hector’s body—gets me every time).
Skeptics have criticized the kledon because it’s easy for the inquirer to select a phrase that resonates, thus choosing his or her own answer. It is clear to me that such skeptics have never tried it; a true kledon is unmistakable in its applicability, and it raises the hairs on one’s arms.
For example, some years ago, when I was finishing graduate school, I had very little money. I had no car, no job, and no real prospects for a job. I was more or less on the edge of despair, living in a small studio apartment next to the train tracks. The guy across the hall from me had a large string of suspicious visitors who stayed only a few minutes and left again, almost as if he were running a retail business of some kind. The people above me apparently did not sleep, but instead did jumping jacks every night, pausing only when the train roared by and shook everything in the room. I was nearly finished with my degree but had run out of money and was rapidly losing hope for the future. So I went to a small quiet spot near a college campus to pray and meditate, asking the gods for guidance. On the way back, I passed a young man talking into his cell phone much louder than he needed to: “You have to stop worrying,” he said. “I’m going to take care of you. I’ll get you a car and a house, and you’ll get a job soon. Do you understand?” I couldn’t help myself: “Yes,” I said.
He probably thought I was a crazy man.
Yet that was an unmistakable answer to my question, as clear as I could ask for. He and I were the only people on the sidewalk, and his conversation was the very first thing I heard another person say after I finished my prayer. And, at this time, cell phones and loud conversations on them were not as ubiquitous as they are now. A skeptic is welcome to dismiss that as anecdotal evidence, confirmation bias, or any other thing, but no such explanation saps that event of this truth: it was a great, even profound, comfort to me. It gave me the confidence to proceed, and the hope to carry on. Within a month, I had a car. Within a year, I had my dream job. Within two more years, I had a house in a beautiful neighborhood. The kledon was true, but even more importantly, the kledon offered me help and friendship at a time when I sorely needed it.
Oracles
Specific locations in the ancient world were renowned for their connection to the gods, and at those places people could ask questions and be answered. These oracles were very much tied to place, and they often provided economic income to the location that housed them, just as pilgrims circulated money in the Middle Ages and tourists do now.
The most famous of these oracles is the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, wherein a priestess called the Pythia offered mantic utterances which the priests of Apollo translated into verse. This oracle served an important social function as a source of religious authority and arbiter of disputes. A trip to the oracle was expensive, and the oracle only saw querents at certain times of the year. Often, therefore, cities would gather together questions and send them in batches to be answered there. Legend had it that the priestess sat on a tripod above a chasm that exuded gases which sent her into a trance. Whether or not that chasm existed is a matter of debate, although recent geological research indicates that it may have at one time. If it did, I cannot imagine that being a Pythia was a particularly healthy occupation, a suspicion the literature confirms.
Oracles were not always permanent. Plutarch, writing in the first century ce, was a priest of Apollo at Delphi, and wrote a treatise on the decline of oracles, in which he argued that oracles were the mouthpieces not of the gods directly, but of their daimones or angels, and that those daimones were, unlike the gods, mortal and changeable. Hence, a daimon may leave an oracle, which is what he says occurred at Delphi. This explains the decline of the oracle of Delphi in this period, although other oracles were still active at this time, including the oracle at Claros, near Ephesus, and the oracle of Zeus-Ammon at Siwa in Egypt, which told Alexander the Great that he was the son of Ammon.102
At Dodona, an oracle of Zeus offered oracles through the sound of rustling leaves in a sacred groves of oak. This oracle was still active well into Late Antiquity; the emperor Julian, the last pagan emperor of Rome, consulted it in 362 CE.103 In 392 ce, the Christian emperor Theodosius had the oak grove cut down and burned, implying it was still active enough to be a threat to Christianity at that time.104
The decline of the oracles, Plutarch explains, has less to do with the burning by Christians and more to do with the changing lifestyle of the people that consult them. Plutarch’s point can be extended: we are not as tied to place as our ancestors were. It stands to reason that the gods might not be so bound to place, either. Just as we move about from place to place, living in one city for a few years, then in another, maybe they’ve also become unanchored. Of course, this is all speculation, and if anyone wants to take on the quixotic task of reestablishing oracles, I’ll happily watch from over here. For our practical theurgic purposes, there’s not much point in yearning for the lost glories of the past.
On the other hand, we may very well discover places, locales, in our own lives where we feel a stronger connection to the gods we choose to work with (or who choose to work with us). It wouldn’t be out of place to develop our own personal places of power where our divinations may bear richer fruit. Putting up marble columns over a chasm is one thing; finding a grove in the nearby forest preserve where you feel a sense of the numinous and quietly and unobtrusively seeking omens there is quite another. Both have value, but from my practical bent, I find more value in the second than the first.
Sortes
So aside from kleda, which anyone with hearing can do (and, by the way, if you’re hearing impaired, you can also do them with sight as well, letting your gaze fix on the first thing you see), what sorts of things can we do to consult the gods? Those familiar with more modern divination systems such as tarot cards or runes might be familiar with the concept of sortes. Sortes are what we sometimes translate into English as “lots.” Unfortunately, “lots” has also taken on the meaning of a random way of determining who has to do some unpleasant task, so it’s not always the best word for divination.
Late Antiquity’s remaining literature offers us several systems of lots, which are the tips of an iceberg, I imagine, of a diversity of systems very similar to what we have now. Cards didn’t yet exist, because the means of manufacturing them wasn’t available. But the use of dice or chips of wood or stone on which figures had been drawn was probably very common.
Divination by Letter
John Opsopaus, writing as Apollonius Sophistes, describes and translates one such oracle, the Olympus Tablet. In this system of divination, the querent selects a letter by some method, which is unclear. It’s possible that the letter was selected mathematically, through rolling dice or astragali (the knucklebones of sheep) or—and I find this most likely—by drawing a chip or piece of pottery inscribed with the letter from a jar or bowl.
Each letter is assigned a line of verse which begins with that letter. Presumably, the verse acts as an all-purpose answer, and the word beginning with the letter is given added significance. This may have been a flexible oracle, in which the diviner or interpreter might have offered the verse from the tablet, but then followed it up with additional insight on the nature of the letter, its shape, its place in the alphabet, and other significant words beginning with it.
Similar oracle-books were consulted by means of dice or astragali, the latter of which can fall in one of four ways, numbered 1, 3, 4, and 6. Five astragali were thrown and the sum calculated, which would point to one of fifty-six possible oracular verses headed with a divine name. For example, a roll of 23 was headed “Athene,” and the oracle reads as follows:
A one, three sixes, and the fifth a four.
Honor Pallas Athena, and everything you want
Will be yours, and your resolves will be achieved:
She will loosen fetters and rescue you in sickness.105
It’s clear from this that the purpose of this oracle was less fortune-telling and more theurgic. It may look quite practical, but the fact that each throw is assigned to a deity hints that this oracle was a way to check up on one’s relationship to the gods. Similar oracles exist in other polytheistic religions; in Santería, for example, the oracle of Lukumi, known as Ifa in Yoruba, is an oracle in which divine and sacred oral stories are selected and retold in response to a complex ritual manipulation of various objects. A similar system of dice divination called Mo is used in Tibet to select a particular verse relating to Buddhist deities.
You can get your hands on this dice oracle in several ways. Fritz Graf reconstructs and translates the dice oracle in his article “Rolling the Dice for an Answer.”106 If you are interested in a scholarly take on this oracle, you cannot do better than Graf. If, however, you wish a more practical—and, not incidentally, less expensive—approach, Kostas Dervenis has recently published a book containing the entire dice oracle as well as instructions for using knucklebones (either real ones or the resin-cast ones available at many gaming stores and online) or coins to consult it.107 He also includes interesting background as well as illustrations of the bones themselves, which are essential if you are going to use real ones or models, since you need to distinguish one side from another. What really sells me on Dervenis’s book is that he includes not just the translation but the original Greek as well. It’s a nerdy thing to like about the book, I know—but there it is.
Astrology
In the nineteenth century bce, a city named Babili was founded by the Akkadians in the area that is now southern Iraq. In the eighth century bce, a group of people from a (literally) mushy backwater area named Kaldu came to conquer Babili. These people, the Kaldu, were later given the Greek name “Chaldeans” and their city Babili was called Babylon. Just as we have a tendency to call both continents of the far Western Hemisphere “America” as well as the country that dominates much of the northernmost of those continents, the Greeks came to call the entire region “Chaldea” even well after the Kaldu people were barely a memory. What wasn’t just a memory, though, was their learning, which was remarkable.
The Babylonians cared deeply about the night sky. They made some of the first systematic measurements of it in the West, and began to name the stars themselves. They identified seven moving bodies visible to the naked eye and charted their courses with extreme accuracy. They also identified methods to measure distances across the sphere of the sky. Since they used a base 60 system, they broke the sky into 60 x 6 = 360 parts, now called “degrees.” Since twelve was a nice round number for the Babylonians, they broke this into twelve chunks. They identified constellations that at that time rested in those chunks and gave names to these divisions based on those astronomical signs. They noticed that at particular points in the geography of the sky, particular events happened on earth: for example, when the sun entered the first degree of the part of the sky identified with the constellation of the Ram, the length of the day and the night were exactly equal. This, they realized, was also the first day of the spring.
It was clear and beyond doubt that what happened in the sky affected what happened on earth. After all, humans did different activities in the spring than they did in the winter, when the sun entered the part of the sky named after the constellation of Capricorn, and the days became their shortest. What, then, could this mean for the other planets? Could their placements also have an effect on the earth?
“Effect” is used loosely here. Even ancient astronomers didn’t all think (although some did) that the planets had a literal causative effect on the earth. The sun entering Aries didn’t make farmers plant crops. It just meant it was time to do that, and farmers could just sit on their hands and starve if they really liked. Wisdom was knowing what it was time to do, and the stars could tell us that.
They built a body of knowledge out of empirical observation and reasoning from first principles that came to be called the Chaldean knowledge, and the practitioners of this knowledge were called Chaldeans, whether or not they were really from Babylon. This body of knowledge was taken up by the Greeks, and at some point in the second century bce it became a system very much resembling our current conception of astrology involving signs, houses, planets, and aspects. Currently, it is among the oldest and most widespread belief systems in existence.
The attitude toward astrology throughout the ancient world was often as ambivalent as it is in our culture but for different reasons. The Romans regarded it well enough to fear it: it was banned at several times in the Roman empire, and there was more than one instance of the “banishment of the Chaldeans.” Even when astrology was tolerated, to cast a horoscope for the emperor was a good way to get your head removed from your body. Even the Neoplatonists and Hermeticists were not unified in their attitude toward astrology. Plotinus railed against it and refused to allow his birth information to be published. Porphyry, on the other hand, published Proclus’s horoscope at the end of his short biography of him. Skeptics raised objections to it, and astrologers answered those objections. Some of the same arguments appear even today. I was amused to see such an argument on the Internet recently, where a skeptic suggested that if astrology were true, twins would all have exactly the same life. This same objection was raised over a thousand years ago. The answers now were also the same: the stars sketch out general patterns, not exact events; twins do often have very similar lives; twins aren’t born at exactly the same time, so they don’t have exactly the same horoscope, and small changes can mean a lot, as can later events and free will.
I can’t explore all of astrology in this chapter. It is a huge and complex topic, worthy of careful study whether or not you believe in it, especially for the theurgist who can use it as a way to meditate on the gods themselves. For example, Ptolemy, the author of one of the most influential ancient astrological textbooks (the Tetrabiblios), has this to say about his study of astrology:
I know that I am mortal, the creature of one day. But when I
explore the winding course of the stars I no longer touch
with my feet the earth: I am standing near Zeus himself,
drinking my fill of Ambrosia, the food of the gods.108
Astrology, then, as more than just a system of divination, can also be an avenue to theurgy if used properly.
As a skeptic, I admit that astrology has no convincing scientific support published in a peer-reviewed journal. As a philosopher, I’m not sure it ever can. I think the scientific investigation of astrology might be asking the wrong questions. I know that astrology as well as other forms of divination seem to work for me. I know that this is anecdotal evidence and therefore not scientific, and that it is subject to endless “artifacts,” as scientists call them, those statistical errors which lead to erroneous conclusions.
So as contemporary practical theurgists rather than scientists, what are the right questions to ask? I can think of several particularly interesting questions raised by astrology and other systems of divination as well. First among these is “Why are the heavens orderly, and if we imagine they reflect events on earth, what does that say about the universe?” It implies that the universe, too, is orderly, no matter how chaotic it seems. The orderly cycles of the universe tell us something about the Nous: it, too, is orderly. The divine, in other words, is not mad, not fickle, not unpredictable. It may appear that way to us, but from the perspective of the Nous whose laws govern the movements of the stars, it is not so.
It also implies that the universe is correlated in its parts. What happens in the sky matters to what happens on earth. Any gardener will tell you that. And one hardly needs a direct causal link to find these correlations. When the sun enters Capricorn in the Northern Hemisphere, people will usually wear a lot more clothes, and when it enters Aries, people in the Northern Hemisphere start digging up their gardens. This is just another way of saying that first winter comes, and spring comes after. They are correlated to the movements of the sky and so are subtler cycles as well.
Moreover, perspective matters. We know that the math explaining planetary movement is a lot easier if we imagine the sun at the center of the solar system rather than the earth. But from earth, what we see is what we see, and we see the planets describing large circles around us. Both, we know, are true: the Hermetic philosophers could have told Einstein all about relativity long before he figured out the math of it. What we see is a function of where we stand, our context, our past and our perspective, and they thus help determine what we are. But, as Dr. Seuss tells you, you have “brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes.”109 You can change your perspective, both mentally and physically.
Discussions of astrology always seem to raise two questions: “Is everything fated?” and “Do we have free will?” At the risk of contradiction, I’d answer both questions yes. From the perspective of the Nous, the world is a landscape whose future and past and present are all universally present. From the perspective of the Psyche, we choose our actions by will. And from the perspective of matter, everything is a chaotic system of cause and effect with no consciousness or choice at all. All of these, from their perspectives, are correct. From the perspective of the One, of course, all of these viewpoints are unified in a way that’s impossible to explain in words. I think of it as a song: the One hears the whole song, but when you’re playing a song on an instrument, it’s ongoing. It’s a product of the choices you are making in the moment: play this phrase fortissimo, this piano, accent this note, pedal here. Anyone who plays an instrument knows no two performances of a song are ever the same, they’re all products of our choices. But we also have the sheet music that lays out or predestines what we are to play. If we play what is written and only what is written, we will have a very dull little song. If we play too much what is not written—start, for example, adding notes to Beethoven—we have a mess. The difference between me and a master musician is that I play by rote with only a few little decisions here or there—or I improvise and it sounds at best okay, certainly not inspired (and often quite terrible!). A better musician, however, makes choices with every attack of every note. She uses her will to impose upon the written music without breaking it. Similarly, we have free will, but we usually don’t use it. Astrology can train us to use our free will rather than be carried along by chance.
Astrology’s greatest benefit to the theurgist isn’t in prediction or divination at all, actually, but in systematizing and giving a grammar to human experience. The seven visible planets represent divine forces that are forms in the universe, and we can place everything that exists into one or several of those categories. Their positions and relationships to each other pick out the patterns of fate that likely befall the person. For example, if Mars is in Libra and square Venus, that may indicate a pattern: those things that Mars rules are weak and at loose ends, and they are often imposing themselves like a bad guest on those things that Venus indicates. Seeing these patterns, therefore, can act as an engine for contemplation.
To the ancient mind, the stars were a vague threat as well as a promise. The belief that the orderly movement of the stars revealed or reflected a secondary order on earth evolved into an ancient fatalism. The majority of people in the ancient world, whether they had free will or not, had few chances to exercise it. Unless you were the emperor, you had a superior who told you what to do and you could not say no. The emperor could decide to send you into exile or kill you on a whim. Moreover, a lot of people not only had superiors, they had owners, as slavery was a very much living institution. Yet at the same time, fortunes could change by no effort of your own. The emperor who sent you abroad in exile could die unexpectedly and his successor could invite you back home. Your master could free you, and freed slaves were eligible to become citizens and gain rights. All of this, however, both the fortunate and unfortunate, was mostly in the hands of others or chance.
One response to this fatalism is to embrace it, and this is the answer of Stoic philosophy, which teaches that one should act in accord with nature. If nature sends you into exile by means of a cruel emperor, go into exile gladly. If he sends you back home, go gladly. If the emperor orders your death, if your master whips you, if your master offers you freedom, if you become a citizen, if you become a slave—all of it is to be considered outside of one’s control and therefore accepted. Of course, the Stoics recognized that not everything was outside of a person’s control, and those things in your control you could take responsibility for: but for the Stoic, that entire list amounted to “your soul, and your response to events.” Everything else was external.
The other response is to strive against fate, to fight it with magic or with mundane means. This approach appeals to Americans, certainly, with our myth of progress and our can-do attitude, but it didn’t show up in the classical world very often and when it did, it was mostly regarded with horror. The witch who summons back her lover is a pathetic or terrible figure in Greek drama and Roman fiction. Moreover, the cultural heroes are not often ones who strove against unimaginable odds and beat them, like our action movie heroes. Cultural heroes were more often people who strove against unimaginable odds, fully aware that they would lose, but acted anyway because it was the right thing to do.
If both of these options seem a bit extreme to you, you’re not alone. I actually have a bit more sympathy for the Stoic position as I find it more realistic, but at the same time I’m not going to roll over every time something goes wrong. To be fair, the Stoics never said you should, but it’s easy to interpret them that way. I would like to find a middle ground between blindly obeying the stars and trying to wrestle them into place, and I’m not alone. The Hermetics make it very clear that we humans are not bound by the positions of the stars:
Each of us at birth, when we receive a soul, are taken under
the wings of the daimones who are assigned that sign of
birth, who govern each of the stars … So they, plunging
into the two parts of the soul through the body, twist
each to their particular energy; but the rational portion
of the soul stands, unruled by the daimones, ready to
welcome the divine.110
The daimon here is a spirit of a god, not evil but not always benevolent. But we are told that the rational part of the soul—our personal nous—stands unmastered by any daimon. We are not taken over by the stars or any other symbols of our fate.
In the next chapter, we will investigate the nature of these and other daimones, and later we will look at ways to change our fate when it does not match our goals. Of course, some things cannot be changed; bad things will happen. Through theurgy, one can learn to focus the rational part of the soul, the will, on the best parts of fate and cope with the worst parts with greater grace and aplomb.
84 Valerie M. Warrior. Roman Religion: A Sourcebook. (Newburyport, MA: Focus, 2002), 150.
85 W. A. Falconer, trans. De Divinatione by Cicero. Loeb Classical Library, vol XX. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923). Accessed 13 May 2013, http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cicero/de_Divinatione/
86 Emma C. Clarke, John M. Dillon, and Jackson P. Hershbell, trans. Iamblichus: On the Mysteries. (Atlanta: Society for Biblical Literature, 2003), 157.
87 W. H. D. Rouse, trans. Great Dialogues of Plato. (New York: Penguin, 2008), 526.
88 Georg Luck. Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds. (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985), 231.
89 Samuel Butler, trans. The Odyssey of Homer. Accessed 14 May 2013, http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/odyssey.mb.txt
90 “The Dream Book.” Accessed 14 May 2013, http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/aes/t/the_dream_book.aspx
91 Georg Luck. Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds. (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985), 234.
92 G. B. Caputo, “Strange-face-in-the-mirror illusion,” Perception 39.7 (2010): 1007–1008
93 Caputo, “Strange,” 1008.
94 Emma C. Clarke, John M. Dillon, and Jackson P. Hershbell, trans. Iamblichus: On the Mysteries. (Atlanta: Society for Biblical Literature, 2003), 155–56.
95 Georg Luck. Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds. (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985), 282.
96 Benjamin Jowett, trans. Phaedrus by Plato. Accessed 10 May 2013, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html
97 Dion Fortune. The Goat-Foot God. (York Beach, ME: Weiser, 1999). Originally published in 1936.
98 There will, doubtless, be some chaos magicians who say they are not materialists, and they may well be right. It’s a very anti-dogmatic school of magic. But many of the core writings on chaos magic are quite materialistic in their assumptions.
99 A distinction of my own making. Chaos magicians like to embrace magicians like A. O. Spare as a sort of pre-chaos magician, but his system of magic actually shares relatively little with the theories of chaos magic. It has a lot more to do with a growing understanding of symbolism and semiotics.
100 Falconer, W. A., trans. De Divinatione by Cicero. Loeb Classical Library, vol XX. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923). Accessed 13 May 2013, http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cicero/de_Divinatione/
101 Augustine. Confessions 8.12. Edward Bouverie Pusey, Trans. Accessed 1 November 2013. http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/jod/augustine/Pusey/book08
102 James B. Rives. Religion in the Roman Empire. (Maldon, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 134; Horace Leonard Jones, trans. The Geography of Strabo. Loeb Classical Library Vol. VIII. Accessed 14 May 2013, http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Strabo/17A3*.html.
103 Joseph Eddy Fontenrose. Didyma: Apollo’s Oracle, Cult, and Companions. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 25.
104 Joseph Fontenrose. The Delphic Oracle. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
105 William Hansen, ed. Anthology of Ancient Greek Popular Literature.(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), 286.
106 Fritz Graf. “Rolling the Dice for an Answer,” in Sarah Iles Johnston and Peter T. Struck, eds., Mantike: Studies in Ancient Divination. (Leiden, NL: Brill, 2005), 51–98.
107 Kostas Dervenis. Oracle Bones Divination: The Greek I Ching. (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 2014).
108 Georg Luck. Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds. (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985), 348.
109 Dr. Seuss. Oh, the Places You’ll Go! (New York: Random House, 1990).
110 Corpus Hermeticum XVI: 15. My translation.