§ XIII Dreams as Omens and Media of Communication Between Gods and Men
Reference has now to be made to the part played by dreams as supposed channels of communication between heaven and earth; as portents, omens, etc. The common belief among the nations of antiquity that they were sent by the gods, and the like belief lurking in the minds of the superstitious to this day, are the scarcely-altered survivals of barbaric confusion respecting them.
When man had advanced from the earlier stages of undefined wonder and bewilderment concerning the powers around and above him to anthropomorphic conceptions of them, i.e. to making them in his own image, the events of his dreams were striking confirmation of his notions about the constant intervention of spiritual beings, gods, chiefs, and ancestors, in the affairs of life. That personal life and will with which the rude intelligence invests the objects of its awe; waving trees, swirling waters, drifting clouds, whirling winds, stately march of sun and star, seemed especially manifest in dreams and visions. In their unrelated and bewildering, or, on the other hand, their surpassingly clear, incidents, the powers indwelling in all things seemed to come nearer than in the less sensational occurrences of the day, uttering their monitions, or making known their will. They were the media by which this and that thing was commanded or forbidden, or by which guidance and counsel and knowledge of the future were given. To induce them, therefore, became a constant effort. The discovery that fasting is a certain method of procuring them is one reason of its prevalence in the lower culture. Amongst all the indigenous races of North America abstinence has been practised as a chief means of securing supernatural inspiration. The Redskin, to become a sorcerer or to secure a revelation from his totem, or the Eskimo, to become Angekok, will endure the most severe privations.
It is believed that whatever is seen in the first dream thus produced by fasting becomes the manitou, or guardian spirit of life, corresponding to the “daimon” of Socrates. And whoever by much fasting is favoured with dreams, and cultivates the art of explaining them as bearing on the future, becomes the feared and consulted “medicine man” of his tribe. His kee-keé-wins, or records, are finally shown to the old people, who meet together and consult upon them. They in the end give their approval, and declare that he is gifted as a prophet, is inspired with wisdom, and is fit to lead in the councils of the people.99
Very slender data were needed for the conclusions first drawn from dreams; let the death of a friend or foe be the incident, and the event happen; let a hunting-path fill the half-torpid fancy, and a day’s fasting follow; let the mother of a young sportsman dream that she saw a bear in a certain place, and the son, guided by her account, find the bear where indicated, and kill it; the arbitrary relation is set up forthwith. As Lord Bacon says, “Men mark the hits, but not the misses,” and a thousand dreams unfulfilled count as nothing against one dream fulfilled. Out of that is shaped, as dream-lore shows, a canon of interpretation by which whole races will explain their dreams, never staying, when experience happens to confirm it, to wonder that the correspondences are not more frequent than they are. Where the arbitrary act was wrought, the isolated or conflicting influences manifest, there deity or demon was working. So the passage from the crude interpretation of his dreams by the barbarian to the formal elaboration of the dream-oracle is obvious. It was only one of many modes by which the gods were thought to hold converse with man, and by which their will was divined. It was one phase of that many-sided belief in power for good or evil inhering in everything, and which led man to see omens in the common events of life, in births, in the objects any one met in a journey or saw in the sky; to divine the future by numbers, by the lines in the hand, by the song and flight of birds (lurking in the word augury), by the entrails of sacrificed men and animals.100 Sometimes the god sends the message through a spiritual being, an angel (literally “messenger”); sometimes he, himself, speaks in vision, but more often through the symbolism of both familiar and unfamiliar things. To interpret this is a serious science, and skill and shrewdness applied therein with success were passports to high place and royal favour. In this we have the familiar illustrations of Joseph and Daniel, and, indeed, we need not travel beyond the books of the Old Testament for abundant and varied examples of the importance attached to dreams and visions, and of the place accorded to dreams,101 an importance undiminished until we come to the literature of the centuries just before Christ. For example, in the Book of Jesus the Son of Sirac, we read—
“Vain and deceitful hopes befit the senseless man,
And dreams make fools rejoice,
Like one who grasps at a shadow and chases the wind,
Is he who puts trust in dreams.”102
In the belief that through dreams and oracles Yahweh made known his will, the influence of older beliefs and their literature is apparent. Among the Accadians, a pre-Semitic race in Babylonia, there existed a mass of treatises on magic and divination by dreams and visions, and both from this and from Egyptian sources, blended with survivals from their barbaric past, the Hebrews largely drew.
In this, too, “there is nothing new under the sun.” Homer, painting the vividness and agonising incompleteness of the passing visions, affirms that dreams from Jove proceed, although sometimes to deceive men; Plato assigns prophetic character to the images seen in them; Aristotle sees a divination concerning some things in dreams which is not incredible; the answer to oracles was sought in them, as when the worshipper slept in a temple on the skin of a sacrificed ram, and learned his destiny through the dream that came. The Stoics argued that if the gods love and care for men and are all-knowing, they will tell their purposes to men in sleep. Cicero attaches high importance to the faculty of interpreting them; their phenomena, like those of oracles and predictions, should, he contends, be explained just as the grammarians and the commentators explain the poets.103
With the influence of these beliefs in the air, and with the legend-visions of Scripture as authority, the divine origin of dreams became a doctrine of the Christian Church. Tertullian says that “we receive dreams from God, there being no man so foolish as never to have known any dreams come true,” and in his De Anima reference is made to a host of writers of dream treatises. For the most part they are but names; their treatises have perished, but enough remains for the perusal of the curious regarding ancient rules of interpretation and the particular significance of certain dreams. The current views of dreams in classic antiquity are believed to be partly embodied in the ’Ονειροκριτικα’ of Artemidorus of Ephesus, who flourished about the middle of the second century, and who reduces dream interpretation to a body of elaborate rules, while amongst Christian writers Synesius of Cyrene, who lived two centuries later, holds a corresponding place.
Both classic and patristic writers supply copious details concerning the classes into which dreams were divided, and which have some curious correspondences among the Oriental nations, as well as in our dream-lore, e.g., when Artemidorus says that he who dreams he hath lost a tooth shall lose a friend, we may compare with this a quotation which Brand gives from the Sapho and Phao of Lily, a playwright of the time of Elizabeth. “Dreams have their trueth. Dreams are but dotings, which come either by things we see in the day or meates that we eat, and so the common-sense preferring it to be the imaginative. ‘I dreamed,’ says Ismena, ‘mine eyetooth was loose, and that I thrust it out with my tongue.’ ‘It foretelleth,’ replies Mileta, ‘the loss of a friend; and I ever thought thee so full of prattle that thou wouldst thrust out the best friend with thy tatling.’”
It is, however, needless to quote from Artemidorus and others of their kin. They do but furnish samples of the ingenuity applied to profitless speculations on matters which were fundamental then, and around which the mind played unchecked and unchallenged. Moreover, the subtle distinctions made between dreams in former times were slowly effaced, or sank to their proper level in the gossip of chap books—our European kee-keé-wins. But the belief in the dream as having a serious meaning, and in the spectral appearances in visions as real existences, remained as strong as in any barbarian or pagan. In an atmosphere charged with the supernatural, apparitions and the like were matters of course, the particular form of the illusion to which the senses testified being in harmony with the ideas of the age. The devil does not appear to Greek or Roman, but he sorely troubled the saints, unless their nerves were, like Luther’s, strong enough to overmaster him. Luther speaks of him as coming into his cell, and making a great noise behind the stove, and of his walking in the cloister above his cell at night; “but as I knew it was the devil,” he says, “I paid no attention to him, and went to sleep.” Sceptics now and again arose protesting against the current belief, but they were as a voice crying in the desert. One Henry Cornelius Agrippa, in the fifteenth century, a man born out of due time, says, “To this delusion not a few great philosophers have given not a little credit, especially Democritus, Aristotle, Sincsius, etc., so far building on examples of dreams, which some accident hath made to be true, that thence they endeavour to persuade men that there are no dreams but what are real.”
His words have not yet lost their purport. For the credulity of man, the persistence with which he clings to the shadow of the supernatural after having surrendered the substance, seem almost a constant quantity, varying only in form. Unteachable by experience, fools still pay their guineas to mediums to rap out inane messages from the departed, and send postage stamps to the Astronomer Royal, asking him to “work the planets” for them, and secure them luck in love and law-suits. Nor is there any cure for this but in wise culture of the mind, wise correction, and wholesome control of the emotions. “By faithfully intending the mind to the realities of nature,” as Bacon has it, and by living and working among men in a healthy, sympathetic way, exaggeration of a particular line of thought or feeling is prevented, and the balance of the faculties best preserved. For, adds Dr. Maudsley, in pregnant and well-chosen words, “there are not two worlds—a world of nature and a world of human nature—standing over against one another in a sort of antagonism, but one world of nature, in the orderly evolution of which human nature has its subordinate part. Delusions and hallucinations may be described as discordant notes in the grand harmony. It should, then, be every man’s steadfast aim, as a part of nature—his patient work—to cultivate such entire sincerity of relations with it; so to think, feel, and act always in intimate unison with it; to be so completely one with it in life, that when the summons comes to surrender his mortal part to absorption into it, he does so, not fearfully, as to an enemy who has vanquished him, but trustfully, as to a mother who, when the day’s task is done, bids him lie down to sleep.”
Footnotes
1 Buckle’s work appeared in 1857, Darwin’s in 1859.
2 Matthew Arnold, Empedocles on Etna.
3 Countess Cesaresco’s Essays in the Study of Folk-Songs, p. 183.
4 The Folk-Lore of China, p. 52.
5 Mark vii. 33, John ix. 6. Cf. Tacitus, Hist. iv. 81—“A certain man of the Alexandrian populace afflicted with wasted eyes kept imploring the prince to deign to spatter saliva on his cheek and eyeballs.” In Finnish myth the demon Hiisi forms a huge snake from the spittle of a fellow-demon. Cf. also Thomson’s Masai Land, pp. 288-290.
6 Henderson’s Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties, p. 229; cf. Horace, Sat. i. 8, 30; Frazer’s Golden Bough, i. 9; Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, p. 208.
7 Grimm, T. M., 356, 357.
8 II. 427.
9 Page xvi.
10 Custom and Myth, pp. 49, 50. While these sheets are passing through the press I am glad to take occasion to commend Mr. Lang’s scholarly and fascinating book to the reader. As an explanation of the survival of crude and irrational elements in the myths of civilised races, it is a book to be reckoned with by the advocates of the solar theory.
11 “And said the gods, let there be a hammered plate in the midst of the waters, and let it be dividing between waters and waters.” Gen. i. 6. The verb from which the substantive is derived signifies, among other meanings, “to beat out into thin plates.”
12 Gen. viii. 2.
13 Gen. xxviii. 17.
14 Ezek. i. 1.
15 Modern Painters, iii. 154.
16 Dorman’s Primitive Superstitions, p. 350.
17 Leland’s Algonquin Legends, pp. 111, 204.
18 From Sans. mar, to “grind.” Ares and Mars come from the same root.
19 Merry Wives of Windsor, act iv. sc. 4.
20 In Finnish myth the dwarfs punish with pimples and ringworm those who enter new houses without bowing to the four corners.
21 Both “pecuniary” and “fee” are, as established by Grimm’s law, from pecu. Latin pecu-a, pl. pecus, “cattle”; Sanskrit paçu, “cattle,” from pac, to fasten (that which is tied up, i.e. domestic cattle). Cf. Skeats’ Etymol. Dict. in loc. A.S. feoh is cognate with German vich, and the ideas these express occur in ktēma, the Greek word for “property,” which Grimm derives from the verb keto, “to feed cattle.”
22 Not the same as the Greek Heraklês. The similarity of name led the Romans to identify their Hercules, who was a god of boundaries, like Jupiter Terminus, with the Greek hero. Cacus is not cognate with Greek kakos, bad, but was originally Cæcius, the “blinder” or “darkener.”
23 Decline and Fall, iii. 171; Emerson’s English Traits, p. 123.
24 See Ralston’s Russian Folk-Tales, p. 347, for similar Bulgarian legend about St. George.
25 Haug’s Essays on the Parsis, tr. Vendidâd, pp. 225 ff.
26 Cf. Isaiah xlv. 7, 1 Kings xxii. 21-23, Amos iii. 6.
27 Iliad, Book xxiv. 663 ff., and cf. Lang’s tr., p. 494.
28 Vide my Jesus of Nazareth, p. 144.
29 Notably Tobit and Baruch, and cf. Book of Wisdom, ii. 24, for earliest indications of the belief. The Asmodeus of Tobit, iii. 8 and 17, appears to be the Aeshmô dâevô of the Zend-Avesta.
30 Exodus xxii. 18.
31 For details of witch trials in this island cf. Mrs. Lynn Linton’s Witch Stories, passim.
32 Knowledge Library.
33 Vide Chips, ii. 1-146.
34 Cf. Professor Keane’s Appendix to Sir A. C. Ramsay’s Europe, p. 557
35 Cf. “Little Saddlehurst” in Mr. Geldart’s Folk-Lore of Modern Greece, p. 27.
36 Cf. on this matter Whitney’s Oriental and Linguistic Studies, p. 203.
37 Mythology of the Aryan Nations, i. 108.
38 Mental Physiology, p. 315.
39 Spenser says—
“Such, men do changelings call, so changed by fairies’ theft.”
40 An Algonquin legend begins: “In old times, in the beginning of things, men were as animals and animals as men; how this was, no one knows.”—Leland’s Algonquin Legends, p. 31.
41 And cf. Bourke’s Snake Dance of the Moquis, passim.
42 Cf. Mahaffy’s Prolegomena to Ancient History, p. 392.
43 Vol. i., Trübner and Co. See for some valuable illustrations from early English and other sources an article by Rev. Dr. Morris, in Contemp. Rev., May 1881, and the Folk-Lore Journal, 1884-85, for translations of Jâtakas, also by Dr. Morris.
44 Travels in N.W. and W. Australia, ii. 229.
45 Bourke’s Snake Dance of the Moquis, p. 136.
46 Cf. Art. “Family,” Encyclopædia Britannica.
47 De Bell. Gall., v. c. 12.
48 Elton’s Origins of English History, p. 297.
49 Germania, ix. 10.
50 Principles of Sociology, p. 413.
51 Edinburgh Review, Jan. 1869, p. 134. Article on Rilliet’s “Origines de la Confédération Suisse: Histoire et Légende.”
52 Times’ telegram from Geneva, June 25, 1883.
53 Book x. p. 166. Cf. Baring Gould’s Curious Myths, p. 117, and Fiske’s Myths and Myth-makers, p. 4.
54 Baring Gould, p. 119.
55 Cf. Prof. Rhys’s Arthurian Legend, passim.
56 Academy, Nov. 17, 1877, p. 472.
57 Mythology among the Hebrews, and its Historical Development (London: Longmans), 1877.
58 Goldziher, p. 392 ff.
59 Ibid., p. 103.
60 The following paragraph from Professor Huxley’s Observations on the Human Skulls of Engis and Neanderthal is extracted from Lyell’s Antiquity of Man, p. 89 (4th edition).
“The most capacious healthy European skull yet measured had a capacity of 114 cubic inches, the smallest (as estimated by weight of brain) about 55 cubic inches, while, according to Professor Schaaffhausen, some Hindu skulls have as small a capacity as about 46 cubic inches (27 oz. of water). The largest cranium of any gorilla yet measured contained 34.5 cubic inches.”
Commenting on this paper Sir Charles Lyell remarks that “it is admitted that the differences in character between the brain of the highest races of man and that of the lowest, though less in degree, are of the same order as those which separate the human from the Simian brain,” and that the statements of both Professor Huxley and Dr. Morton show “that the range of size or capacity between the highest and lowest human brain is greater than that between the highest Simian and the lowest human brain.”
61 Spencer’s Principles of Sociology, p. 147.
62 The peculiar feature of the Semitic languages is that the consonants are everything and the vowels nothing, every word consisting, in the first instance, merely of three consonants, which form, so to speak, the soul of the idea to be expressed by that word. And as in ancient times the consonants only were written, the name Jehovah appeared as JHVH. Its exact pronunciation is utterly lost, and such veneration gathered round it, that when the Jews came to it they substituted some other name—usually Adonai. Afterwards, when vowels were added to the Hebrew text, those in Adonai, or its phonetic form Edona, were inserted between the letters of the sacred name, and thus JHVH was written Jehovah.
63 Rink’s Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo, p. 45.
64 Vide Custom and Myth; Art. “Moly and Mandragora,” p. 146.
65 Popular Antiquities, ii. 85.
66 Dyers Folk-Lore, p. 179.
67 Arnobius adv. Gentes., v. 19.
68 De rerum Natura, Book iv. 453-468.
69 According to Professor Skeat, from A.S. niht, night; mara, lit. “a crusher,” from Aryan root, MAR, to crush. Cf. Etymol. Dict.
70 Among the Indians of Guiana, pp. 344-346.
71 W. G. Black: Folk-Medicine, p. 13.
72 Teut. Mythol., 1165.
73 Cf. Grimm, Teut. Mythol. 1177.
74 “Voilà autant de rapports que les Bouddhistes ont avec nous,” adds the traveller, for hinting at which analogies between Buddhists and Catholics the Pope put his book on the Index.
75 In a Finnish legend, which is the subject of Southey’s “Donica,” a maiden of that name moves about seemingly alive after her death in virtue of a parchment as magic spell, which is fastened to her wrist, until a sorcerer finds out the secret of the connection and unfastens the parchment, when the counterfeit life departs.
76 Mythology of the Aryan Nations, i. 140.
77 Brinton’s Myths of the New World, p. 51 (second edition).
78 I am indebted to the Rev. Richard Morris for this reference.
79 Jacob Grimm remarks that whilst the more palpable breath, as spirit, is masculine, the living, life-giving soul is treated as a delicate feminine essence. Soul is the Icelandic sála, German seele, Gothic saiwala, akin to saivs, which means “the sea.” Saivs is from a root, si, or siv, the Greek seio, to shake, and this choice of the word saivala may indicate that the ancient Teutons conceived of the soul “as a sea within, heaving up and down with every breath, and reflecting heaven and earth on the mirror of the deep.”—T. M. p. 826.
80 Prim. Culture, i. 412.
81 Brinton, p. 271.
82 Iliad, xxiii. 103 (trans. Lang and others).
83 Cf. Lecky’s History of Rationalism, i. 340.
84 Prim. Culture, i. 411. See Soul Shapes (Fisher Unwin, 1890).
85 “To the ear of the savage, animals certainly seem even to talk. This fact is universally evident, and ought to be fully realised.”—Im Thurn’s Guiana, p. 351.
86 Dorman, pp. 287, 288.
87 Grimm’s Teutonic Mythology, p. 827.
88 Cox and Jones, Popular Romances, p. 139.
89 Brinton, p. 107.
90 Cf. Ante, pp. 110-114.
91 More correctly, “that engenders it.”
92 Hibbert Lectures, 1884, pp. 39, 40.
93 The Society’s advertisement is as follows:—
“Thought-Transference, Apparitions, etc.—The Society for Psychical Research will be grateful for any good evidence bearing on such phenomena as thought-reading, clairvoyance, presentiments, and dreams, noted at the time of occurrence and afterwards confirmed; unexplained disturbances in places supposed to be haunted; apparitions at the moment of death or otherwise; and of such other abnormal events as may seem to fall under somewhat the same categories. Communications to be addressed to E. Gurney, 14 Dean’s Yard, S.W.; or to F. W. H. Myers, Leckhampton House, Cambridge. Applications for information or for membership to be addressed to the Secretary, at the Society’s Offices, 14 Dean’s Yard, S.W.”
94 Matthew Arnold, Empedocles on Etna.
95 Hume, p. 50.
96 Dr. Carpenter’s Mental Physiology, p. 27.
97 St. Geo. Mivart’s Genesis of Species, p. 325. In the second edition of this work Professor Mivart cites with satisfaction the authority of S. Thomas Aquinas and of Cardinal Newman on the matter!
98 For criticism of this pseudo-scientific theory see Professor Clifford’s brilliant paper in Lectures and Essays, i. 228, ff.; and a review of “The Unseen Universe” by the present writer, Fraser’s Mag., Jan. 1876.
99 The following Mohammadan recipe for summoning spirits is given in Klunzinger’s Upper Egypt. “Fast seven days in a lonely place, and take incense with you, such as benzoin, aloeswood, mastic, and odoriferous wood from Soudan, and read the chapter 1001 times (from the Koran) in the seven days—a certain number of readings, namely, for every day one of the five daily prayers. That is the secret, and you will see indescribable wonders; drums will be beaten beside you, and flags hoisted over your head, and you will see spirits full of light and of beautiful and benign aspect.”—(P. 386).
100 In Roget’s Thesaurus, sect. 511, a curious and instructive list of terms expressive of the different forms of divination is given.
101 Numb. xii. 6; 1 Sam. xxviii. 6, 15, etc.
102 Chap. xxxiv.
103 Cf. Ency. Brit., Art. “Dreams.”