Oracles and Omens

by WILLIAM HOWELLS

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FORTUNETELLING is dear to our hearts, and there is no doubt that the art of divining is the most persistent and popular of all our non-Christian religious activities. However it is done, divination means getting information about the future, or about things which are otherwise hidden (What is Uncle Joe leaving me in his will?), by some use of oracles and omens; getting word about human affairs from non-human sources. You see a sign, and you know that it is connected directly with something else, just as a drop in the barometer is connected with an approaching storm. You accept the usual fallacies of magic and add one more: that future events are certain rather than merely probable.

The magical kind of divination, by signs and portents (it is called mantic science), proceeds either by omens, in which you simply make note of something you see, or else by some kind of mechanical oracle necessitating your performing an experiment in order to get an answer.

The Nandi, a cattle-herding people of East Africa, use few or no devices, but they are forever watching for omens, which they have built up into a tremendous lore. This seems to be their main religious preoccupation, keeping a herdsman busy when he has nothing to do. If a rat crosses your path, that is good; but if it is a snake, that is bad. If you stub your big toe, that is good; but if it is one of your other toes, it is bad. All day long a Nandi is keeping score, to see how he stands by night. In contrast to this omen-taking, the near-by Azande of the Congo and the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan do divining by special mechanical means which they have contrived and which they use constantly; it is their great defense against witchcraft.

Omens come largely out of purely natural phenomena. Astrology is the prize example of the hypertrophy of an omen system. It uses all the heavenly bodies, putting them into every possible relation, real or imaginary, significant or not, so that an infinite number of individual horoscopes may be turned out. It has been running on for centuries, unchecked by any spirit of inquiry other than books written to prove its accuracy after the event; and because of its antiquity it is all the more complicated, and can quote ancient authority and use a preposterous jargon to give itself airs. It was once deeply entrenched in more than one religion, of course, especially those of Central America and of Babylonia. It was respectable then; its fall from grace is recent, caused by its giving birth to a true science, astronomy. Modern astrology is the bilge which has been wrung out of astronomy proper.

Other manifestations of the heavens, like eclipses, or comets, or lightning, are used without reference to astrology, for simpler purposes of deciding whether or not to proceed with something. In Greece a sacred procession from Athens to Delphi waited upon a signal of lightning.

Animals are another great source of information. This is not because they know, themselves, what is in the offing, but simply that they act as signs and as guides. It may be that their appearance alone is important; the Bushmen of South Africa rejoice to see a mantis. Or animals may constitute a sign foreordained by the gods: Cadmus had to follow a cow for a long time before she settled down to show him where to found a town, and in the very same way, the ancient Aztecs wandered until they saw an eagle sitting on a cactus and holding a serpent in its mouth, and there they founded Mexico City. These two examples are, of course, both legendary.

The art of reading a message from the flight of birds (called ornithomancy among the ancients) was the main stock-in-trade of the augurs of ancient Greece and Rome; if they were not suited by the way the birds flew, nothing could take place. This is by no means peculiar to the people of classical times, being used in many parts of the primitive world. The natives of the interior of Borneo are especially bird-ridden; they will not start to build a house (a major undertaking, up to four hundred yards long) until the birds give their assent, and they will stop at once if, while they are at it, the birds change the complexion of their omens. They have found that the most practical way of getting something done is to begin the job with a rush when the birds give the sign, and thereupon to send out small boys to beat gongs and keep the birds away; then they are sure there will be no bad omens because there will not be any omens at all.

The ancients on occasion used a pit of snakes or a tankful of fish as a source of omens. Such a thing as this marks the beginning of getting the omens under your own control, and so being able to consult them whenever you see fit. One of the classical methods was to feed grain to sacred chickens; if they ate heartily, the interpretation was “Do”; if they were reluctant, “Don’t.” Recall the case of Admiral P. Claudius, in charge of a Roman force about to attack the Carthaginians in the First Punic War. Naval doctrine apparently prescribed this chicken-feeding (called alectryomancy by savants) as part of the business of arriving at a sound military decision, and so he was equipped with the holy pullets, doubtless under the charge of his intelligence officer. These were duly broken out, and grain was put down on the deck for them. Alas, the chickens were stricken with mal de mer, and stood uncertainly by the rail, indifferent to food. Claudius watched this for a bit and then lost his patience, roared “If they won’t eat, let them drink,” had the chickens thrown over the side, and hoisted the order to engage. But the chickens were right; he lost the battle. Says Cicero: “This joke, when the fleet was defeated, brought many a tear to him, and mighty carnage to the Roman people.”

Where the Romans used chickens the Azande use termites. When a Zande has some minor question, he cuts two sticks of wood, of different kinds. He takes these to a termite mound and pokes a hole in it, to which the termites come in swarms. He speaks to them, asking them his question and telling them to eat one of the sticks if the answer is yes, and the other if the answer is no. Then he puts the sticks in the hole and fills the space around them, leaves them overnight, and comes back the next day to see what has happened. Even if neither stick or both sticks have been eaten, something can be made out of it.

Another principal business of the augurs was haruspication, or inspecting the entrails of animals (usually pigs) to read messages. It was the conformation of the lobes of the liver, in particular, which gave significant indications of the will of the gods. This again, like so many classical religious customs, is shared by primitive groups in several parts of the world. A variation of it is making notes on the manner in which a wounded animal dies. A chicken is treated thus in Nigeria. The Nilotic Negroes along the White Nile sacrifice bulls to their high god by spearing them, but they take the opportunity to observe in which direction the dying animal staggers, and on which side it finally falls down. Still another variety of dependence on animals is the burning of bones, especially shoulder blades, which was ancient and widespread in the Far East. A shoulder blade of a turtle, sheep, or deer, not yet dried out, was cast into the fire and after a while taken out again. The cracks produced by the heating were then read much as we read the palm of the hand; this is called scapulimancy or omoplatoscopy.

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FROM such a thing it is but a step to purely inanimate objects for divining, mechanical contrivances which call for somebody to manipulate them. Casting lots in one way or another is an old and popular fashion, the present scene of its greatest popularity probably being among the Bantu peoples of South Africa. Here there is commonly used a set of four bones, which represent an old and a young man and an old and a young woman, which are thrown on the ground to make a pattern. There may be added to these another large set of animal bones, also paired by sexes— usually it is the astragalus bone, of the ankle. These represent not only the animals who furnished them, but also other things or attributes attached to them, in a sort of zodiacal linkage: the bones of the male and female impala represent the chief and his wife; the wart hog, who roots things up, the diviner; the baboon, who is not a roaming animal, the village; and the panther, the white people; various shells represent everyday happenings in life. When these are all thrown on the ground, a trained diviner can reap a tremendous amount of information from their various relationships as they lie. Elsewhere in Africa groups of sticks are thrown down like jackstraws, for the same purpose. In Dahomey, in West Africa, there is a much more formal system than the South African one: sixteen palm nut kernels are thrown down in pairs, successively, and the results read from a rigid code of interpretation.

Our European past abounds in the same kind of thing. You need only remember that cards, dice, and even jackstones were invented for divination and not for games, and cards at least have never lost this function. People have stared at crystals, at fires, at fountains, at smoke, at the wind in the trees and the clouds in the sky and the surface of the water; they have swung rings, shears, and sieves from pieces of string; they have stuck knives into books, thrown grain in the air, dropped hot wax into water — and they are still at it. Perhaps the only thing that should puzzle us is why so many methods have fallen into disuse, and why the few have succeeded. I can see the reason for the vitality of astrology, but I do not see why other methods have been largely stripped down to numerology, palmistry, and tea leaves. I suppose the last is good for tea shoppes, and the others are the most convenient; you take your name and your palm wherever you go. You can, it is true, still buy many articles for divination in the home, such as ouija boards, and gadgets which you can suspend over a letter to tell you whether the writer is male or female.

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I HAVE said that the Azande of the Belgian Congo are specialists in astral research. They have been established as such by E. E. Evans-Pritchard in a wonderful book, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande. I wish to describe their two main oracular methods, to show a case of a primitive nation which has come to place much of its reliance for peace of mind in this art.

I gave their system of consulting termites as a sample. More involved is their rubbing board. This is a miniature table, carved out of wood, which has two straight legs and a sort of curved tail, together with another piece of wood the size of the table top, which is slid around on the latter by means of an upright handle. The juice or soft meat of a certain fruit is put on the table top, and the opposite part is moistened and put down over it, and pushed back and forth. Such is the quality of the juice and the two pieces of wood that the upper piece either goes on gliding smoothly over the lower, or else it soon sticks to it quite tightly so that it cannot be pushed back and forth and has to be pulled off. This is all there is to it, and the worker simply asks the board a question, telling it to stick for a yes and slide for a no. It usually leaves no doubt as to what it is doing, either sliding smoothly or sticking promptly, and so it gives the impression that it knows what it is saying and has no doubt in its mind. The occasions on which it misbehaves, by getting only partially stuck or not sliding readily, are easily interpreted as caused by a question being asked wrongly or stupidly, or by the board’s seeing complications which have escaped the questioner. It is a useful and well-liked oracle, and one that the Azande use all the time, because it can be referred to readily. They are continually demanding things of it, wanting to know if they should build a house here or plant a garden there, if a witch is after them, if they will die this year.

There is no doubt that the board is susceptible of being manipulated, just like a ouija board, and that the Azande do tend to control its actions. The selections it makes are usually the reasonable ones, and of course it seldom tells a man who is working it that he will die soon. How far people are aware they are tampering with it, or whether they have any sense of cheating, nobody can say, but that of course is a question which is present in every kind of divination in which the performer has any chance to affect the performance or interpret the result. This is not a complaint, because that is divination’s bedside manner; it would be of no comfort to people if it dealt out harsh predictions in equal quantity with the sunny ones. I do not know of any statistics, but I should guess that reassuring trade horoscopes must outnumber disturbing ones by about a thousand to one, and I cannot imagine the most punctilious palmist giving a John Dillinger or a Baby Face Nelson even an approximation of his character and fate.

The Azande’s main oracle, entirely overshadowing the others, is a poison, named benge, which they feed to chickens. Divining by poisoning fowls is widespread in Africa, but it reaches its zenith among the Azande. As they use it, benge is a red powder made from a forest creeper, mixed with water to make a paste. They have to journey to the Mangbetu country to get the plant, and it is consequently expensive. It is an alkaloid poison related to strychnine, and it has the peculiar property of killing some chickens and leaving others unaffected, within the usual limits of the doses used by the Azande.

Benge séances are held privately, away from the village, and out of sight of women, who are a bad influence on it and might spoil it just by looking at it. The man conducting the consultation mixes the poison into a paste, rolls some up in a leaf, and squeezes it into a chicken’s beak, as though he were lettering a cake. He nods the bird’s head to make it swallow, and at this point begins to state the question. He does this quite fully, addressing not the chicken but the benge itself, first setting out the general problem and then adding further details, and expending eloquence on it when he is able. The benge is asked, as carefully as possible, to kill the bird if one answer or view of the case is the correct one or, reversing and restating matters, to spare it if the other side is right. During this time the chicken may have been given a second dose, and shaken up a little. Benge serves so well as a method because it usually allows several minutes to elapse before having any effect, and then either continues to produce no effect whatever or else sends the bird into spasms and kills it quickly and decisively. Seldom is there any halfway stage, when a chicken takes sick but recovers. It is not a question of the efficacy of a given lot of poison or of the strength of the mixture, for the same batch of benge will leave the birds alive or dead in about equal numbers. Furthermore, the size and health of a bird and the number of doses given it do not have a bearing on its survival.

The Azande rely on benge thoroughly, and its decisions have the force of law, especially when obtained by the chief or his officer. It can be asked about anything and it definitely must be referred to in certain affairs, such as where a child should be born or whether it is all right to make a journey or move to a new house. A man would simply be remiss if he failed to poison a chicken before embarking on such a venture; and indeed, if he had the time, a Zande would ask benge about his every move, although this would run into poultry. That is why a rubbing board is such a useful supplement, because it is easier; if he can, a man takes it everywhere, and he never enters another village or leaves it without asking his rubbing board at what time and by what path he should come or go. Azande life is obsessed by oracles — benge, rubbing boards, termite sticks, and certain others — which sit across the natives’ psychic outlook like a pair of spectacles and fulfill some of the functions of gods in other societies.

A characteristic of Azande oracles which makes them somewhat different from divination by animals or by mechanical means is the reverential attitude of the natives toward them. Benge is looked on as a sort of mystical force, and this prevents their thinking of it as a poison. They also keep certain tabus in connection with its use, which would spoil its power if not observed: they cannot, before working it, eat elephant, fish, or certain vegetables, smoke hemp, or make love. The rubbing board likewise is looked on as something conscious and not simply inanimate, and its workers are also under obligations to eat certain medicines and to treat the board in a formal manner. Similarly, in Dahomey, West Africa, the throwing of palm nut kernels is presided over by Fa, goddess of fate, and the practice is accompanied by small amounts of prayer to her.

Here we are on the border line between the idea that divination is simply taking the cover off nature, magically, and the belief that it is supplication to a conscious, knowing being for information. The magical attitude remains the ruling one, however, not so much because the trappings are magical as because man is in control of the performance. He can employ the oracle at his whim, needing only to be correct about it, and the oracle has no choice; it must produce an answer, and the correct one, every time. In this light it does not matter what the people believe to lie behind the oracle itself, dictating its revelations, because they use it and think of it as a piece of magic. But there is an ambiguity nevertheless, suggestive of the other end of the scale, where there are kinds of divination in which the shoe is on the other foot.

Most of these other types use a medium, rather than omens or non-human oracles, through whom a god or a spirit makes himself manifest, and there is much more of the notion that this spirit talks at his own pleasure and not that of the seekers. The tip of this end of the divinistic scale is represented by prophets, who are singled out by a deity as a vehicle through which to transmit a revelation to the people. Prophets have direct-wire communication, like Moses, through whom Jehovah issued the entire Hebraic code of law, voluminously and explicitly. The shaman, who is a widespread type of primitive medium, also has this direct contact with spirits who impart messages to him. Some prophets of history and of the savage world have received apparitions or inspirations which were not clear as to their meaning; that is, signs rather than declarations from above, and so have had to provide an interpretation themselves. Such prophets as these — and indeed any prophet — are therefore in a position to lay down the law themselves or construe it to their purposes. At any rate, the familiar sects are so full of illustrations of prophecy and revelation that there is no point in singling out a few.

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DIFFERENT from prophets are human oracles, or mediums in our usual sense. They do not recount a revelation after they have received it, but rather speak publicly with the very voice of the god himself. The obvious example is the Delphic Sybil who for centuries delivered utterances while possessed, which were enigmatic as to their meaning and were recorded and interpreted by the priests of the oracle. This is well paralleled among the Polynesians, who had a similar subject, called a kaula in Hawaii. This person, male or female, was entered, usually at a feast, by a god who sat in the person’s stomach. The medium shortly went into convulsions and began talking in shrill cries or a squeaking voice; this was the god’s own manner of speaking, and not the subject’s. As at Delphi, the communiqué was apt to be obscure as to its sense, so that the priests might have to clarify it, although on occasion the god talked plainly. The medium had the appetite of the god, as well as the voice, and is said to have eaten enormous amounts of food while possessed.

This is the class, I suppose, into which we should put our own minor-league spiritualists, who put out the lights and then speak for the spooks of Indian chiefs and little girls (not having quite the impious brass to represent gods). I do not see why the controls are so commonly of these two kinds — in real life they would be about the most incompetent informants you could find in a month’s journey—but perhaps it is because the Indians, at least, did not get baptized, and so their shades are to be found frequenting paleface séances instead of playing a harp in the happy hunting ground.

Getting in touch with the souls of the dead is of course not a civilized monopoly at all. The business is called necromancy and it goes on everywhere, with many special diviners to do it, who are apt to use an actual bone belonging to the departed in order to make the contact. Rousing the dead is also an important department of shamanism.

There are various other patterns of personal divination, akin to those above, in which possession or control by a superior being is not implicit. Dreaming is the most general of all, and this is an endless subject in itself; all peoples have about the same approach to interpreting dreams, however, taking them as forthright or disguised prophecies, or sometimes as meetings with the dead. It is seldom that dreams are thought to have any particular agent sending them; they are usually accepted simply as a window on the supernatural. In the Old Testament, however, the Lord used dreams to communicate with various people, and in Greece it was possible to obtain a dream sent by a god by sleeping in that god’s temple. In the Sahara, a Tuareg woman who wants news of an absent husband will spend the night sleeping on an ancient tomb. A spirit of the dead, named Idebni, will come to her, and if he likes her looks he will tell her what she wants to know. If he doesn’t like her looks he will strangle her.

There are other diviners whose supernatural powers are thought to be their own, and who frankly owe nothing to the help of spirits. A Zulu seer can answer questions on occult matters, with the help of questioners who lead him on and warm him up; they go at it like Mr. Bones and Mr. Interlocutor, and before getting to the real question involved, he is tested by having to find or describe some purposely hidden object like a button to see if he is in good working order. Some of these powers are actually based on unconscious psychological responses. Crystal-gazers look into the ball until they see a shape which gives them a meaningful impression, much as we see a cloud which makes us think of an elephant. Some, by listening intently, believe they hear snatches of secrets from sea shells held to their ears. And dowsers are the somewhat mysterious people who can use divining rods to find water, or metals, and who were once thought able to track criminals.

In its simpler forms divination is probably harmless and makes a source of easy reassurance. Doubtless it has often had a beneficial effect on a society. Where the diviner comes to be a respected figure, the position will attract intelligent and trustworthy men, who usually understand their responsibility and who, though believing generally in their oracles, will modify questions and answers to fit policies which they know to be for the general welfare. This sounds a little utopian, but it is evident that in certain cultures, like that of the South African Bantu, this does take place. Thus divining can lend its authority to good purposes.

Divination certainly dies hard; it is remarkable how overwhelming a proportion of our ties with the native cults lie in this field. The reason must be that it gives people something Christianity does not, and will not. No such high philosophy as Christianity could ask its believers for patience with life and trust in God on the one hand, and on the other sanction fortunetelling, or approve of wandering spirits smuggling information across the Great Divide to a privileged few. And yet good Christians will use the Bible as a means of divining or discovering secrets, in ways for which it was never intended. And the country is full of welldressed churchgoers who have no idea of the extent of their own heathenism in such beliefs.