Dreams

 

I omit references within the text as this is a familiar essay, far from a scholarly one.   My readers will have noticed that I am hardly a nice observer of the distinction, though, and I have decided to append a general list of a few sources unnamed in the body of the piece, many of which are well-known. 

 

     Sir Thomas Browne observes in his excellent essay on dreams “that some have never dreamed is as improbable as that some have never laughed.”  People all dream nightly, and thus may act as gods, creating worlds, or at least as artists, spinners of gossamer fictions with such delicacy that they fall to pieces and vanish after the eyes have opened.  This evidence of the fundamental human need for narrative is reconfirmed daily by everyone’s experience, but there is no more agreement about the best use for these products of the imagination than for their cousins emerging from the more conscious areas of the brain, the short stories in a literary quarterly.

     Perhaps the evanescent quality of dreams (in which way they contrast with the author’s hopes of eternal life on the page at least) has a fortunate aspect.  Though fascinating to the dreamer, laden with significant detail and accompanied by urgent emotion, dreams generally cannot survive retelling.  There is little so boring as someone else’s dream.  Even great writers like Anais Nin and Jack Kerouac cannot sustain reader’s interest in unprocessed records of nighttime fantasies.  Yet dreams have such beguiling appeal to the dreamer that they seem as though they surely must bear consequential information. 

     In Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale” the rooster Chantecleer, deeply troubled by a dream, groans, fearing, correctly, as it turns out, that his dream of a predator presages an actual attack.  His lady Pertelote reproves him, saying “vanitee in sweven is.”  She offers a physiological explanation, suggesting that dreams arise from overeating, a notion she shares with Winsor McKay whose comic strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend was wholly composed of nightmares occasioned by overindulgence.  A good medieval polemicist, the hen cites the authority of Cato who discounted the significance of dreams. 

     More people over the years have agreed with the rooster than with his consort.  It is certainly the more stimulating and productive position, though heavy dinners late at night may play their own role.   Very many around the world and all through time have like Chanticleer thought dreams contain clues to future events.  The Bible is full of dream interpreters of this sort.    

     In Genesis Joseph no sooner says that interpreting dreams “belongs to God,” then he offers to do the job himself.  He accurately decodes the dreams of his fellow prisoners, with nice symmetry predicting that one will be freed and the other executed.  Neither of the dreams, though, directly portrays the destined outcome; through what Browne had called “symbolicall adaptation” three branches must be read as three days and birds munching bread as birds picking flesh from a corpse.  Thus, while dreams are considered to reveal the future, they do so only indirectly, obliquely, symbolically, after the manner of art. 

     In a depiction of Israel’s utopian future once the nation is properly observant, God promises not only to defeat their military enemies (as well as a plague of locusts), but also that “your old men shall dream dreams,” a promise repeated for Christians in the account of Pentecost.  Yet, in spite of the potential of revelation, it is sometimes difficult to discern the difference between God’s voice and a lie.  Jeremiah warns that false prophets may mislead the people declaring, “I have dreamed.”  After all, as Zecharaiah tells, the priests of other deities also offer dream visions.  “For the idols have spoken vanity, and the diviners have seen a lie, and have told false dreams.”  Islam likewise distinguished between the divinely inspired true dream (al-ru’ya) and the false dream, which may come from the devil, though many dreams are considered meaningless and inconsequential (hulm).

     The need for acute discernment in the interpretation of dreams has led to professional training in the skill by shamans and priests.   In many cultures the very dreaming of significant dreams is a task undertaken by specialists.  Not only have psychedelics (called by some in this context entheogens) been useful for vision-seekers, many cultures use psychotropic drugs specifically for the purpose of achieving more lucid dreams.  For instance, the Chonal people of Oaxaca use Calea ternifolia, called in English dream grass and the Xhosa people use Silene undulata, or African dream root.

     Belief in the predictive value of dreams has withered in modern times, though it like astrology survives in vulgar forms such as the pulp publication 1000 Dreams and what they mean (1944), attributed to Yohanna ibn al Farmouzi, and the Gypsy's Witch Dream Book of Numbers (1972).  The latter, in a sign of the decadence of the genre it shares with some fortune cookies, reduces all dreams to numbers of interest only to gamblers.  

    In recent times the interpretation of dreams has turned from divination to psychology, or, to use the mythic imagery of Freud’s Vergilian epigraph for The Interpretation of Dreams, from the heavens to the underworld.  Most moderns would assent to Freud’s declaration that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious, though the use of dreams in therapeutic practice has declined precipitously along with the rest of the psychoanalytic system, in spite of the quondam assent of Freud’s colleagues such as Jung who maintained, “who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes.”  Today, of course, a psychiatrist, after having observed the patient’s general demeanor, is likely to be primarily a prescriber of pills, leaving the talk therapy not to psychologists, but to social workers.  The doctor may never hear a patient’s dream.

    The revelation that narrative action in  a literary text has occurred in a dream has been derided as too convenient a convention, yet it has honorably used by writers including Li Gongzuo in "A Lifetime in a Dream," Chaucer whose Book of the Duchess is built around two dreams, and Langland whose Piers Plowman has an even more elaborate dream architecture.  Everyone knows of the sudden appearance of the white rabbit in a waistcoat to Alice in her doze on the riverbank and of Dorothy’s being carried off to Munchkin Country and eventually Oz before each young heroine awakens again to everyday reality.  The device is used in a good many less-remembered works such as Fritz Lang’s 1944 The Woman in the Window in which as in Oz some characters from the waking world appear in dream roles.  I consider the episode of Marge’s Little Lulu outstanding in which Tubby is pleased when he rises from bed (in dream) to find himself with a moustache but before his second awakening into the security of his accustomed world, he finds himself pursued by an outraged mob crying “little boys can’t have moustaches!” 

     Dreams may convey an entire vision, a world-view.  The most celebrated dreamer of this sort is likely Zhuang Zhou who dreamed he was a butterfly and, upon awakening, pondered whether he might not as likely be a butterfly dreaming he was a man as a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly.  (Oddly, Socrates makes exactly the same point in a passage clear and casual if more abstract and less artful.)  Such epistemological questioning of reality seems to express skepticism like that of the Pyrrhonists, but there is no equivalence between the insect and human consciousness.  During the dream Zhang had been “flitting and fluttering about, happy with himself and doing as he pleased,” whereas upon rising he fell to uneasy self-conscious cogitation.  It is a smaller Fall from grace perhaps to lose the wings of a butterfly than to be exiled from Eden, but the trajectory is similar.  From the wholly involved but free participation in a natural spontaneous life such as we imagine animals to experience we have descended to the neurotic human psyche, prey to guilt, doubt, and self-questioning.

     Liezi describes a dream of the time the Yellow Emperor wore himself out with governing.  He devoted himself to his duties and at the same time indulged in sensual pleasures until, finding that his “ravaged flesh darkened and his dulled senses were stupefied, he concluded that attachment to himself and to the kingdom were both destructive.  He went into retirement, neglecting matters of state and living like an ascetic.  At this point he had a dream of the utopian land of Hua Hsü where people “have no cravings and lusts.” There “all men follow their natural course” and they have never heard of “profit and loss.”  They have thereby gained an extraordinary sensation of liberation, expressing by Liezi as “the ability to ride space as though walking the solid earth.” This same Yellow Emperor was said to appoint officials based on verbal clues in dreams and to him was ascribed a book of dream interpretation. 

     My own dreams seem rarely to rise to the economy and clarity, not to mention the significance, of these dreams, but of course examples from written sources are generally composed or literary dreams.  Even those reported by physicians such as Freud and Jung seem to many critics to be artificially pruned to reinforce the author’s general theories.  I experience neither divine openings nor the terror of nightmares.  Many times I have found myself in a semi-familiar area, a campus or a city neighborhood having extraordinary difficulty making my way to my destination.  I turn a corner and see an unexpected territory yet to be traversed or a make a short cut through a university building only to find it a maze of corridors.  I feel the mildest frustration.  What can be the purpose of such a fantasy?   Having been student or instructor most of my life, I have often found my dream persona unprepared sometimes for attending, sometimes for teaching a class, though again without much anxiety.  “Ah, well,” I would think, “I have three papers due tomorrow, but two can be submitted late and it will be easy to do the third tonight.”   Or I would improvise a lecture I could deliver without the students’ having read any specific text.  The mildness of my dreams is consistent.  I like many have also imagined myself without pants or without clothes in public places, but others seem not to notice.  The unconscious is often conceived as a roaring beast, but mine seems thoroughly domesticated.

     On several occasions, for months at a time, I have set out a notebook on the night table to record my dreams and I have definitely observed that putting this sort of conscious attention on dreams alters them considerably.  They become far easier to recall, more coherent, and more weighty with the meaning I sought.  Probably the Lakota in a sweat lodge will experience what he has been taught and what he has observed in the practice of others.  A Cameroonian educated in France told me that a snake would visit him in the night to advise him.  As a member of the snake clan it was no more than he expected.  Thus I am confident a Freudian or a Jungian would rapidly acquire the knack of dreams congenial to expectations.    

     It may be, in fact, that our deepest sleep represents at once an unerring prediction of the future and a philosophic cue.  Decades ago the Dalai Lama addressed the great American populace through People magazine saying, in what is his most achievable suggestion if not the most lofty, “Sleep is the best meditation.”  The Vedanta Hindu tradition identifies the waking state with the gross body and the sleeping state with the subtle body.  The deeper sleep in which consciousness is eliminated altogether, the non-REM sleep is identified with the absolute.  (In the familiar way of philosophic one-upmanship, some authors include a fourth state as the final one, at once transcending and underlying the other three.)   Thus samadhi, far from being a remote and mysterious state of consciousness, is experienced by everyone nightly.  While such emptiness may be the source and end of everything, and indeed nirvana means “blown out, extinguished” it is nonetheless far less engaging than the dreams that can dominate our attention at one moment and vanish in a moment.  Dreams seem, like much of what we experience, to mean what we wish for them to mean.

 

 

Sources

Browne, “On Dreams;” Genesis 40:8, Joel 2:28, Acts 2:17, Jeremiah 23:25, Zecharaiah 10:2; Gianluca Toro and Benjamin Thomas, foreword by Jonathan Ott, Drugs of the Dreaming: Oneirogens: Salvia divinorum and Other Dream-Enhancing Plants; Carl Jung, Letters; Plato, Theaetetus; Zhuang Zhou, The Book of Lieh-tzu; Huangfu Mi, Records of Emperors and Kings, Mandukya Upanishad.

Kurt Seligmann’s Riddlesome Symbols

A shorter version of this essay prefaces the forthcoming third Seligmann lecture to be published by the Seligmann Center in Sugar Loaf. Each is available from the Center or through me for $15.


     The use of symbols outlined by Kurt Seligmann in his lecture on the topic explicitly seeks to contribute to expand the term’s definition, though his opinions rest securely on nearly a hundred years of scholarly elucidation of symbolic meaning in traditional contexts. While Seligmann’s view of symbols does give a nod to Surrealist ideas, it in fact deviates considerably from that advanced by Breton, and in the end he proposes a method for renewing old symbols for use in the twentieth century distinctly his own, while incorporating the insights of philologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and literary critics.
     Greek and Roman mythology had long been included in the European curriculum, but systematic knowledge and comparison of other symbolic systems only began to emerge in the nineteenth century. Nineteenth century writers like J. J. Bachofen mined the expanding fund of knowledge of antiquity to posit an early stage of matriarchy while William Robertson Smith found significant parallels between ancient Hebrew and other ancient Semitic beliefs. While the “higher criticism” sought to place Christianity in its Near Eastern context, scholars like Max Müller and Heinrich Zimmer were bringing the West its first accurate knowledge of Asian texts.
     At the same time pioneering work described and analyzed the cultures of what were called “primitive” societies. Edward Burnett Tylor, Oxford’s first professor of anthropology, distinguished between “savagery,” and “barbarism” on the route toward civilization, and James Frazer undertook the first comprehensive study of myths and rituals worldwide, published in The Golden Bough and elsewhere. [1]
     Attempts to organize and meaningfully relate the new information coming from the study of Babylon, India, and China, as well as the forests of New Guinea and the Amazon, followed. Meanwhile the foundations of the study of semiotics, of signs in general, were being established by C. S. Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure.
     The Surrealists, on the other hand, had little interest in the use of pre-existing symbols. In his 1924 Manifesto Breton suggests the child, the madman, and especially the dreamer as models of the imaginative subject, but never refers to myth or suggests the re-use of any existing symbolic image. Indeed, his entire emphasis is on the generation of inscrutable new objects for contemplation. Furthermore, such Surrealist images (devised in a “hypnagogic state”) do not fit a pattern of symbol and meaning, but rather a new model: “two distant realities” united to form a new one in which “the more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be -- the greater its emotional power and poetic reality.” Breton privileges “previously neglected associations” and “the disinterested play of thought,” and absolutely opposes convention and tradition. Through such newly-coined images, whose meaning is obscure if not ineffable, “we can hope that mysteries which are not really mysteries will give way to the great Mystery.” [2] The most significant techniques for developing such material are first, the linking of unlikely pairs, resulting in a new semantic field and second, the use of aleatory methods to generate ideas entirely independent of both the past and conscious thought.
     The Surrealist attitude is succinctly expressed by René Crevel’s unequivocal statement: “Poetry which delivers us of the symbol sows liberty itself.” [3] The recommended Surrealist practice may be illustrated by the editing of Buñuel and Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou during which “no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation would be accepted." According to Buñuel, "we had to open all doors to the irrational and keep only those images that surprised us, without trying to explain why." According to its maker (retaining his own emphatic capitals) “NOTHING, in the film, SYMBOLIZES ANYTHING.” [4]
     Seligmann regards this Surrealist position as delusory. He begins his lecture by citing a number of symbols the meanings of which are “established by convention,” though even at this point he notes that interpretation is dynamic, changing through time. Surely he is thinking of his Surrealist colleagues when he observes that, “many an artist of today wishes to break completely with the past.” This cannot be done because the artist must have a public and “the only conciliator between him and the public . . . is precisely the symbol.” The symbol always represents at least a partial conjunction of what is signified by the sign-maker and what is understood by the sign-reader. Thus, the symbols of Surrealism “may seem at first glance to be entirely new creations. Close scrutiny, however, reveals their ties with the past.”
     According to Seligmann one cannot rid oneself of semantic associations even when contemplating abstract forms. Though the non-figurative painter may abolish all conscious symbols, the unconscious is “ineradicable.” He says that “psychoanalysis has shown that all symbols . . .are signs arisen from the depths of our psyche.” Thus abstract paintings can be “read” though they lack explicit symbols because of this unconscious content in which “public and the artist meet upon common psychic ground.” Even a modernist’s “freely invented forms” are “not just a private affair” as they cannot escape this collective psychic base.
     Furthermore, symbols are not only common to all humanity, they are in part consistent through history. The artist sounds very much like Jung when he discusses certain symbols the meaning of which “is deeply rooted in our psyches,” symbols that express “lasting ideas” will persist through the centuries. From a basic reassurance that the cosmos is orderly (and even just!) to the details of ritual, symbolic usage has always comforted humans with “the signs of civilization.” According to Seligmann “in times of uncertainty” (including his own era) “an uncanny profusion of images” will be produced in an effort to seize some control over circumstance.
     According to Seligmann “tradition and convention” had always governed the reading of symbolic language, but along with clearly significant symbols, artists used as well archaic ones whose meaning had been largely lost, and these “mysterious” symbols came to be regarded as more magical, among them the attributes of Abraxas. Such underdetermined symbols, as the Symbolist poets recognized, potentially are more powerful than those with clearly assigned meaning.
     Seligmann notes as well that intuitive symbols may arise naturally in the mind of the artist or the consumer of art and yet still be associated with pre-existing symbolic associations. Though such symbols are “direct,” spontaneous, not prescribed but “from personal emotions,” they remain related to earlier patterns of symbolic significance. Similar notions had already been developed by psychologists who found insight into the minds of their patients in exotic myths and rituals. Freud, to whom the Surrealists owed so much, quoted literary texts and classical myths to support his view of the dreams and fantasies he encountered in his practice. [5]
     Even more important for Seligmann in his revaluation of the relevance of ancient symbols for modern man were surely the works of his fellow Swiss C. G. Jung who proposed the notion of a collective unconscious [6] in which were recorded not merely instincts but also archetypes. Jung delighted in exactly the same sort of symbolic religious, alchemical, and occult texts that Seligmann collected, and for both authors the illustrations were of primary interest.
     Discounting the value of the chance conjunctions beloved by the Surrealists, Seligmann nonetheless finds particular significance in somewhat indeterminate symbols. According to him, though all symbols had at first a set coded meaning, some had become more “mysterious” as time passed, and these were particularly likely to acquire occult uses. He persists in recognizing what he several times calls “riddlesome” symbols as the most fruitful.
     Seligmann, while accepting a general position on symbols less radical than orthodox Surrealism would propose, nonetheless insisted upon maintaining his own idiosyncratic fascination with magic. According to him certain powerful symbols “do not only reflect, they also emanate ideas.” If the meaning of those words is far from clear, the artist then explains that such symbols “assume talismanic power” and illustrates by the case of the Star of David used in occult operations as the Seal of Solomon. He suggests that a visual or written collective production of the sort called “exquisite corpse” may result in a “riddlesome emblem.”
     More dramatically, Seligmann recounts the story of Victor Brauner who had represented himself with only one eye long before he lost an eye in an accident. To Seligmann his intuitive precognition is bound up with a symbol rich in parallels such as Oedipus and Cyclops. These occult claims have little effect on his aesthetics, either in theory or practice, though they do contribute a note of sensation and a vague background of imminent portentous significance. He slides here from Brauner’s story to the myths of the sort that inform his ultimate world view: alchemical procedures, the worm ouroboros, and the philosophical challenge to dualism, all firmly based in earlier symbolic systems.
     In fact, Seligmann only modifies the view of symbols as signs with a conventional meaning by reinforcing the observations of Freud and Jung that the very same symbols sometimes occur to individuals independent of tradition and by his recognition that some symbols have partly or wholly indeterminate meanings. His fascination with symbols in magical use and in non-European cultures deviates from Breton’s Surrealist orthodoxy, and his acceptance of such procedures as the “exquisite corpse” seems designed primarily to please his colleagues in the movement, fitting awkwardly as it does with his historical investigations. A survey of Seligmann’s visual work indicates a lack of dependence on aleatory techniques and instead a consistent use of myth and symbol from the past including paintings representing Baal and Astarte, Melusine, Clio, Leda, Cybele, Amphitrite, Sphinx and Minotaur as well as works featuring motifs from Carnival and heraldry. Seligmann’s images, for all their distortions and individuality, are firmly rooted in European history. Rather than adopting the pose of rejecting the past, he has indeed made it new.


1. Other scholars associated with his methods including Jane Ellen Harrison, F.M. Cornford, Gilbert Murray and A. B. Cook revolutionized the study of Classics by noting similarities between ancient Greek and Roman beliefs and those of other peoples.

2. The French Symbolist poets likewise recognized the power of underdetermined symbols. Note too, the similarity to the koan used by some schools of Zen.

3. From L’Esprit contre la raison.

4. Luis Buñuel, “Notes on the Making of Chien Andalou,” in Art in Cinema, ed. Frank Stauffacher (San Francisco Museum of Art, 1947), 29-30.

5. In his New Introductory Lessons on Psychoanalysis, Freud explicitly says, “In such cases confirmations from elsewhere - from philology, folklore, mythology or ritual - were bound to be especially welcome.” He proceeds then to provide examples.

6. Jung first used the term in "The Significance of Constitution and Heredity in Psychology" (1929).

A Structural View of Certain Oracles

     On even the balmiest of days we are all aware that the specters of mortality, disease, want, violence, and a myriad of other causes of suffering hover nearby. Each of us has experienced the fragility of life and fortune. Tomorrow always poses a threat, vague or vivid according to circumstances. In an attempt to gain some measure of control over a fundamentally unmanageable environment, people have sought patterns in the phenomena around them. While this habit clearly leads toward the recognition of cause and effect and thus in the direction of science, magic and superstition arise from the same source. [1] One of the principal concerns of intellectuals over thousands of years of human history has been the prediction of the future, whether their findings are couched in the hypotheses of experimenters or the resounding rhetoric of Isaiah.
     The oracle in Solomon’s temple is described in detail in the book of Kings while little, unfortunately, is said of its uses. In the ancient world kings regularly consulted oracles for advice on war and statecraft, but many who consulted experts on the future were individuals with more personal priorities. For instance, among the queries that have survived inscribed on lead strips from Dodona, Greece’s oldest oracle, is one from Nikokrateia asking to which of the gods she should sacrifice in order to be better and stronger and cease from her illness. Another implies what may have been a heated issue several thousand years ago: “Lysanias asks Zeus Naios and Dione whether the child which Annula is carrying is not by him.” [2] How suggestive it is that this proposition is stated negatively!
     In antiquity the desire for prophetic knowledge resulted in the formulation of a great many oracular technologies. Some methods, like that which seems to have been practiced at Delphi for over a millennium, were spontaneous, relying wholly on the inspiration of a human intermediary who is thought to directly convey divine knowledge. Similarly, in most shamanistic procedures the prophet simply conveys to listeners what the deity has said. Clearly, from a modern point of view, the efficacy of these oracles depends on the prudence and wisdom of the one delivering the divine message, both in shrewdly analyzing the question posed and in maintaining the kind of ambiguity or obscurity that has, for instance, allowed excited enthusiasts to trumpet Nostradamus’ accuracy with different readings for every generation. Often such prognosticators (and indeed their contemporary incarnations, the reader/advisors that can be found in every American city) have been compared to psychiatrists and other counselors only some of whom hold degrees. Today we hear even of “life coaches.”
     A great many systems of divination involve the priest’s interpretation of specified signs. These vary enormously; among the well-known methods are the observation of cracks in heated shell or bone (practiced in ancient China), of birds (such as much Roman augury), or of tea leaves (called tasseography). These allow for almost unlimited latitude in decoding and thus, like the direct methods above (and such related beliefs such as explaining the meaning of dreams) reflect more than anything else the acumen of the practitioner. Parallels might be made with such varied agents as brokers who rely on the mysteries of “technical analysis.”
     People have also sought to discern the future by selecting one of an inventory of options meant to be encyclopedic. [3] Rather like an Aristotelean essay, such lists of possibilities analyze in the etymological sense, breaking down a topic into constituent parts to produce an anatomy as Burton did for melancholy and Frye for literature. Thus Freud divided the mind into id, ego, and superego and Marx saw proletarians, bourgeoisie, and aristocrats. The scala naturae assumed by Aristotle and elaborated by neo-Platonists similarly aims toward a comprehensive classification of phenomena into a framework sufficient to include all the data. Familiar examples of such symbolic systems that persist in contemporary times include astrology and Tarot. The signs of the zodiac define a comprehensive set of personality types. Just as everyone must have a birth day, everyone must fall into the categories associated with that day (or hour or minute, for the lovers of precision). Were it not used for fortune-telling astrology might claim to be a scientific treatise, resembling the psychiatrists’ Diagnostic and Statistical Manual setting forth the possibilities among which to locate each individual person.
     The deck of playing cards which spread from Persia to India on the one hand and to Egypt and Europe on the other, clearly breaks down society by status, [4] but its symbolic application might apply to countless other possibilities and the ordinary deck was early used for divination. Tarot cards, which first appeared in 15th century Italy, with picture cards called trionfi (triumphs, as they served as trump cards) were used for hundreds of years to play trick-taking games before they, like ordinary playing cards, came to be used to predict the future. Yet they ultimately came to be regarded as an inclusive system for representing the innumerable and shifting shape of individual fortune.
     The very ambitious analyses of such oracular systems seek to describe the world of possibilities potential in any given moment. The delineation of the entire array has a value apart from any oracular value. In reading fiction one may come upon this or that chance turn of fortune – but these systems aim to present them all at once as they would appear to the sublime eye. They seek to embrace every possibility after the manner of the multiverses imagined by science and science fiction alike. It is though one were to see from above the entire complex of plot in Ts'ui Pên’s novel (in Borges’ story “The Garden of Forking Paths”). [5]
     The most elaborate systems of this sort of which I am aware are the Chinese I Ching and the West African Ifa which exhibit structural similarities though one existed in written form millennia ago and the other remained in oral transmission until quite recently. [6] Each features 256 options, in the former derived from the eight lines in each of the sixty-four hexagrams and in the latter generated by combinations of the 16 basic Odù. The use of either system involves the selection through a random method of a particular verse as relevant to the question posed to the oracle. The Chinese had used the cracks in heated tortoise shells in ancient times, and more recently the patterns resulting from tossed yarrow stalks. Among users of the Bollingen Wilhelm translation, coin tosses were substituted. Similarly, among the Yoruba and other users of the Ifa the priest or babalawo might use the opele or divination chain, or counters (palm nuts, kola nuts, or cowries) on a divination tray or opon ifá. This aspect of the ceremony is trivial.
     The creator of the I Ching is said to be the culture hero Fu Xi while the Ifa is attributed to Orunmila who governs knowledge in general as well as divination. Their inventories of possibility are taken by believers to be exhaustive. To Jung the I Ching represented a technology based on synchronicity. Confucius, often thought to be the anti-mystic, in spite of his fondness for music and poetry, said that if he had fifty years to spare, he would devote them to the I Ching. Claims no less grand are also made for the verses of the Ifa. A well-known contemporary enthusiast declares of Ifa that the odùs “represent EVERY SINGLE energy, situation, combination of situations that have, are or will ever be,” while some modern professors of computer science assert the validity of Ifa’s predictions and add that the oracle is a sort of computer system. [7]
     In the characteristic way or art, including the art which is called religion, the attitude implied by these oracles is profoundly ambivalent, a passionate assertion undercut by deep doubt. Whether the claims of their partisans are valid and whether any system can in fact predict the future, the I Ching and the Ifa remain as ambitious attempts to classify all experiences in existence from the human point of view and to in a way redeem, with the mandala-like symmetry of the possibilities arrayed in the imagination’s mental theater, the often distressing turns of every life. Such a symbolic pattern allows the adept to rehearse again and again the defeats and the victories even unto the final denouement. Little wonder that a sensitive and intelligent practitioner might gain a sense of mastery from repeated familiarity with such a document either written or oral, and that such a person might occupy a legitimate place in the professions of her or his day.
     Yet the oracles can also evoke pathos, their desperate and unattainable goal of anticipating reality (not to speak of the controlling it through magic) always beyond the grasp of anyone for all the salesmanship and charlatanry of the centuries. They speak the naked voice of desire, the fundamental drive to make all right through possession of one thing or another, as though we could ever find oneself masters of the wild horses of our lives. And, in the lyric beauty of their images, they eloquently testify as well to the satisfaction of play in the manipulation of symbols, the dazzle of a few rapid dance moves, of some liquid sounds (whether verbal or tonal) succeeding to touch the heart, or a tale too striking to be forgotten. Whatever their other virtues or failings, the I Ching and the Ifa resemble, as art does, the human heart, though more composed, more serene, and markedly more wise than the diviners’ agitated customers and a good many of the diviners themselves, and very likely me as well if not the reader. Not every believer in art is a fundamentalist, and all the most reputable seers have sought meaning not in the letter but in the spirit. The predictions retailed on the street in Lagos and Hong Kong may not be debased currency, but merely the form of wisdom most useful to some. The most competent prophets I have no doubt are wise indeed and provide a useful service to their customers today as their predecessors have surely done since mammoths roamed the Alps.



1. Joseph Needham in the monumental Science and Civilisation in China details the East Asian association of divination and scientific inquiry. Indeed, until quite recent times, scientists of substantial achievement often practiced such “parasciences” as alchemy, divination, and astrology. Newton, for instance, pursued alchemical experimentation and predicted the future. John Maynard Keynes commented that “Newton was not the first of the age of reason, he was the last of the magicians.” (“Newton, the Man”)

2. G. H. R. Horsley, New Documents illustrating Early Christianity, vol. 4: Review of the Greek Inscriptions and Papyri Published in 1979, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1997, p. 135.

3. A practice like bibliomancy, in which one randomly selects a passage in scripture or another book is similar but not intentionally inclusive in scope and thus unconsidered here.

4. To Claude François "Pére" Menestrier, the hearts are the church, the spades (or pikes) aristocracy, the diamonds (paving tiles) merchants, and the clubs peasants. (See his Bibliotheque curieuse et instructive de divers ouvrages anciens & modernes.) To Jessie Weston, however, in Ritual and Romance (Chapter 6) they are mystic symbols which are simultaneously sexual.

5. Many of Borges’ stories include such limitless texts (surely the most extravagant fancy of a librarian) in one form or another. The most directly literary are perhaps “The Library of Babel” and “The Book of Sand.”

6. Probably the best edition is Wande Abimbola’s Ifa: An Exposition of the Ifa Literary Corpus (London: Oxford, 1976). There are now a good many version by Africans as well as one by Maulana Karenga, the inventor of Kwanzaa, who produced a partial version under the title Odu Ifa: The Ethical Teachings.

7. See http://www.academia.edu/5315636/A_Comparative_Study_of_Ifa_Divination_and_Computer_Science “Computer Science takes it origin from ifa divination.”