II Applying the theory
Divination: The vanishing point of religion
The things that we may or must know without applying any procedures are of many kinds, and they include all the things that deserve to be called the foundations or ultimate grounds of all the rest of our knowledge. ... Wherever there are procedures there are things that can be known without procedures, and whose knowledge is necessary for the devising and validation of the procedures.
(Renford Bambrough, “Intuition and the Inexpressible,” 202—203)
This is an appropriate juncture to begin to alloy the theoretical with a more historical consideration of the topic. The concept of a “common ancestor” of the modern conceptions of art and religion, as adaptive behavior that is attentive to both skilled products of agency and ascriptions of agency to natural phenomena as similarly indicative of potential future benefit, must be of benefit in analyzing observed religious behavior to be of any value. In divination we find religion to be quite evidently associated with conscious attempts to determine behavior. Approaching unseen agencies as a means of determining subsequent actions is usually seen as a primary characteristic of religious behavior. Divination—seeking guidance for one’s future behavior from some physical clue in the environment—is a practice ubiquitous in human history and culture and may be seen to be the place where religion and art most closely meet and serve a practical function. According to the mathematician, psychologist, and cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, “a range of brain circuits, defined by our genes, provides ‘pre-representations’ or hypotheses that our brain can entertain about future developments in its environment” (Dehaene, 7). Recent analysis by Andy Clark, professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh and expert in artificial intelligence and embodied cognition, suggests that “predictive processing” is the very nature of our intelligence. Divination may be native to certain specialized functions of the brain (Clark, 2016).
To look in an older, and more obviously traditional “religious,” setting to establish the relation of religion and divination, the Hastings Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (Vol. IV, 1912) has 56 pages on divination including entries for American, Assyro-Babylonian, Buddhist, Burmese, Celtic, Christian, Egyptian, Greek, Indian, Japanese, Jewish, Litu-Slavic, Muslim, Persian, Roman, Teutonic, and Vedic divination. This indicates both the universality of the practice and the attention paid in the early 20th century to divination as an aspect of religion. The absence of Chinese divination here is notable since the Yijing (I Ching) has become probably the most venerable, widely used, and carefully studied object of divination in the world (see, for example, Richard Smith 2008, 2012). However, the Yijing does not have an entry in the Hastings Encyclopedia. It is mentioned (as the Yih-King) in the entry on Japanese divination where it is called an "obscure book" although it is recognized to be “the basis of the system of divination in use at present” in Japan and treated with marked respect and unusual credulity by the author (Michel Revon, 804). It also appears (as the I King) in the entry on China (Walshe, vol. iii, 551) but is poorly understood by the standards of contemporary scholarship and one has to turn to more recent work for a better understanding of its use.
Divination takes a great many forms other than the use of literary texts like the Yijing. Augury is a general term for all forms of interpreting supposedly objective messages from the unseen world of the "spirits” via natural phenomena. They may appear as signs in the weather (sometimes called aero-mancy and more specifically brontologia—reading thunder), or the behavior of animals (zoomancy). Decoding natural phenomena is a very wide general source of the divinatory reading of portents in the environment and can be seen in the forms of palmistry (or cheiromancy), or astrology. Geomancy, reading the lie of the land for portents, is best known in its Chinese form as feng shui, but in the Hasting Encyclopedia is called one of the two most characteristically Muslim forms of divination (Margoliouth, 817). Ornithomancy, interpreting the flight of birds, is a particularly common and worldwide form of the interpretation of ordinary natural phenomena, whereas the interpretation of extraordinary "prodigies” has been called teratoscopy. Divining from simply random events or haphazard encounters such as the chance words of passers-by—cledonomancy—was not uncommon. A particularly well-known instance is that of St. Augustine, who reports in chapter XII of his Confessions that it was his chance over-hearing of the phrase “take up and read,” that was instrumental in his conversion to Christianity.
Divination has employed glossolalia or “talking in tongues” and the interpretation of dreams (oneiromancy), which dreamers may deliberately induce by sleeping in specific places (a practice known as “dream incubation”). "That a dream may be in some way prophetic is a view held by all races at all times,” according to the Hastings entry by Herbert Jennings Rose (776). The same author also provides the entry on Classical Greek divination. One may use general presentiments and hunches as a simple form of divination, or involuntary body actions (sneezes, twinges, twitches, hiccups, etc.). Painful trials and ordeals may also be used and this includes specifically “wager by battle" (Rose, 777), which warrants the inclusion of the martial arts as among those skills that reveal the unseen—this was clearly a means of recognizing the will of the Hebrew God in the period of the Judges. However, a more common and obvious form of divination is mediumistic possession, which, according to Evan Zuesse in the entry on Divination in the more recent (1987) Macmillan Encyclopedia of Religion,
may be of several theoretical forms: prophetic inspiration, shamanistic ecstasy, mystical illuminations and visions, and mediumistic or oracular trance. They differ according to the degree of ego awareness and lucidity, awareness of the ordinary world, and the theoretical recipient of the divinatory message.
(Zuesse 2370)
It is worthy of note that the Macmillan Encyclopedia entry, originally from the 1987 edition and retained unchanged and unelaborated in the 2nd edition of 2005, is only seven (similarly sized) pages compared to the Hasting’s 56 pages. General consideration of the role of divination in the history of religions has waned significantly—a fact connected to the increasing hegemony of the modern Western logocentric conception of religion and its concomitant separation from conceptions of art behavior. In Jeffrey Kripal’s (2014) Comparing Religions a brief consideration of the functions and purposes of religion (111—141) does not identify divination as a significant function of religious behavior, although it considers divination as a comparativist category that “established ritual practices that attempt to intuit, predict, or fathom the future, usually to some practical end or decision" (130). On the other hand, in the 1980s and 1990s at the University of Chicago, Ioan Culianu, Elia-de’s Romanian protege, taught a course on divination, which was “wildly ambitious.”1 He apparently believed strongly in the significance of the phenomenon. Scholarship continues to produce specific and detailed studies of particular instances of divination, for example (Florida 1995; Savage-Smith 2004; Richard Smith 2008; Annus 2010). The Wikipedia page on divination lists just short of 400 named forms of divination.
The importance of divinatory behavior for the history of religions cannot be over-emphasized. Consulting the dead (necromancy) is a well-documented attempt to divine the best course of actions, to which is connected consulting the entrails (extispicy or haruspicy), or liver (hepatoscopy) of a sacrificial victim, which was the principal method employed by the Sumerians and also used by the Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans. The victims’ last movements before death could be “read” for guidance. One may also “read" the random manipulation of small objects such as dice, drawing long or short stalks from a bundle, and so on. This is generally called sortilege, although the specific use of rods or sticks is called rhabdomancy, of which belomancy, the even more specific act of reading arrows pulled from a quiver, is a sub-set. A form particularly popular in Victorian England was reading tea-leaves (tasseomancy). Using playing cards (cartomancy) is best known in the more specific form of Tarot card-reading. One might also stare into a mirror or a crystal ball
(scrying), which is closely related to trance-like staring into any medium such as water (hydromancy) or oil (lecanomancy). When the liquid in question is contained in a cup of some sort, it is known as cylicomancy. Gazing into a burning fire or lamp (lychnonomancy) seems to be a form of self-induced hypnotic divination, a.k.a. "prophecy by hypnotism" (Spence in Hastings 1912, 782), although, like libanomancy (also known as livanomancy and knis-somancy)—divination from the movement of incense smoke—it may involve more deliberate interpretation. Pyromancy is sometimes applied to divination by staring into a fire (for example, Barns 1912, 789), but that term (or empy-romancy) is more properly used for reading the way that things burn or react when heated. This latter was the preferred form of early Chinese divination, most popular amongst which were the reading of the heated shoulder-blades of oxen (scapulimancy or omoplatoscopy) and of tortoise shells (plastromancy). These were inscribed with specific questions, then heated until they cracked, providing readable answers and are often called “dragon bones.” Many forms of divination use devices akin to the modern planchette and Ouija board and there is a notable form of divining by a sieve held suspended and communicating its information by turning, known as coscinomancy.
The purpose of this potentially tedious listing of the forms of divination is simply to demonstrate the extent and variety of its use. The fact that in Uruk in Mesopotamia, one of the world’s oldest cities, divination was of great importance, demonstrates its antiquity. Only slightly later than Uruk.
in the reign of Urukagina, king of Lagash (c. 2800 BC), we have evidence of the wide-spread practice of divination by oil. From augural texts of a later period (c. 2000 BC), we know that in this particular form of divination the procedure consisted in pouring out oil upon the surface of water, the different forms taken by the oil on striking the water indicating the course which events would take. A professional diviner was naturally required to carry out the accompanying ritual and to interpret correctly the message of the oil.
(King 783-784)
Leonard King in the Hastings Encyclopedia specifically argues that the Babylonians “inherited many of their augural beliefs and practices from the earlier Sumerian inhabitants of Babylonia, whom they eventually conquered and absorbed" (King, 783), and
[t|he practice of divination entered very largely into the religious life of the Babylonians and Assyrians. Not only was it carried on by unofficial augurs and seers, whose services could be secured for a comparatively small fee by anyone desirous of reading the future or of learning the interpretation of some portent which had been vouchsafed to him, but it also formed one of the most important departments of the national religion.
(King, 783)
A considerable portion of the literary and religious texts in the library of Ashurbanipal (668—626 BCE) in Nineveh were works on divination in its various forms (King, 783). Thus the process of divination was already a specialized, skilled, and politically significant profession in the earliest urban civilizations. The majority of the 1912 authors on divination refer to it as an “Art" (Rose, 775, 777; Spence, 781, 783; Waddell, 786; Dottin, 787; Jacobi, 800; Revon, 802, 804, Gaster, 809—812, Gray, 819, Wissowa, 823, 826, Bolling, 827), as did the Latins before them (see Barns, 789-792). My immediate point, however, is not just that divination is an art. It is that the practical function of such art responds to an obviously universal demand for such divination and the guidance of behavior. This is art that can be seen to be becoming religious in the way I have suggested. It is skillful and salient behavior that is part of an extended matrix of stylistically related objects and acts that cumulatively engage "theory of mind,” communicate a perception of the “personality” of reality, and inspire an assured behavioral response to the agency ascribed to the environment. In earlier times, divination was even regarded as fairly lowly among the arts;
The (.tdvTl^ [mantis, or seer] is not, as a rule, an inspired prophet, but rather a craftsman ... classed with leeches and carpenters in a famous verse of the Odyssey (xvii. 384, [idVTlig, f| ir|Tfjpa KOKCOV f] TEKTCOVCt Soupov).2 He practises seer-craft, pavroouvt], then later jiavTIKl] (TEKVIj), as a doctor practices physic, and by the favour of the gods he has more skill in it than ordinary men. But anyone can interpret an omen on occasion.
(Rose, 1912b, 796)
Before we can draw any conclusions from this, we need to consider carefully what “divination” actually is. According to Rose:
By “divination” is meant the endeavour to obtain information about things future or otherwise removed from ordinary perception, by consulting informants other than human. While mostly directed to foretelling coming events, it is not confined to this, but may seek to find out, e.g., what is going on at home while the inquirer is abroad.
(Rose, 1912a, 775, emphasis added)
Although we might think of it as a very distinct category, that which is removed from ordinary perception by time (that is, the past or future) is not fundamentally distinct from that which is so removed by distance, obstacles, imperceptibility, or any other limitation of ordinary perception. According to Zuesse, the interrogation of future events is of less importance to the practice of divination than those otherwise removed from perception. Thus, divination "is the art or practice of discovering the personal, human significance of future or, more commonly, present or past events. A preoccupation with the import of events and specific methods to discover it are found in almost all cultures” (Zuesse, 2369, emphasis added). So, most accurately, divination is the attempt to “see the unseen," to elicit information about partitions of the real that are simply not available to direct sense perception but whose disposition or nature may be implied by, or abducted from, things in the available world. Such information will determine ensuing behavior, which, as "behavior as if ...,” may be interpreted as indicating the presence of certain beliefs. However, since those beliefs are underdetermined by the material evidence, conflicting statements of belief could be found in a single community, even one exhibiting highly consistent behavior.
Zuesse continues: “Divination involves communication with personally binding realities and seeks to discover the ‘ought’ addressed specifically to the personal self or to a group” (2369). He recognizes three general types of divination: "those based on the immediate context when interpreted by the spiritual insight of the diviner (intuitive divination); those based on spirit manipulation (possession divination); and those reflecting the operation of impersonal laws within a coherent divine order (wisdom divination)” (2370). In his Introduction to the Prophets (2007), Thomas Leclerc refers to the Platonic distinction between inductive or instrumental divination, which requires an obvious application of human skill, and intuitive or mediated divination, in which the diviner simply receives an irresistible message in a dream or vision, sometimes in an altered state of consciousness or ecstasy. Biblical prophecy, according to Leclerc, is most akin to the latter (27—29), and this will be more closely considered in a later chapter. In the era of Biblical prophecy we see an increase of “historical divination,” that is, consulting textual chronicles to determine present behavior. This might be considered a mix of the best of both voluntary and involuntary forms of divination. While the events of history certainly force themselves upon us, the specific texts recording those events are voluntarily worked and sought out as sources of information. While the stark event of history in the raw, so to speak, may defeat our attempts at interrogation, the skillful and creative (all expression and representation being ultimately creative) chronicling of those events is highly likely to yield a fertile field for interpretation for those who follow. After all, “[ajnything can be used to divine the meaning of events. It is very common to assign spontaneous and arbitrary meaning to signs or omens when one is deeply anxious about the outcome of a personal situation" (Zuesse, 2369).
King recognizes this same distinction between “voluntary" and "involuntary" divination. "Under the former the diviner deliberately sought out some means of foretelling the future; under the latter he merely interpreted the meaning of portents, signs, or phenomena which, without being sought out, forced themselves on his notice” (King, 784). Rose points out that “divination should be treated as a branch of sympathetic magic, and regarded as a deduction or series of deductions from a vaguely conceived principle of something like the uniformity of Nature" (Rose, 1912a, 776, emphasis added). “Something like the uniformity of nature” must be assumed in order to motivate an assured response to it and it is our emotional intelligence, through something like “theory of mind,” that is best adapted to intuit this "uniformity." According to Iain McGilchrist, it is predominantly the right hemisphere of the brain that exercises both emotional intelligence and imitation and “the ability to extract a face or other meaningful form from highly degraded information" (McGilchrist, 205 n.23, and 58—64).3 Such perceived "uniformity" or invariance cannot be inductively inferred (in the logical sense of induction as reasoning to probable, but never to certain, conclusions) from that which is “directly observed,” especially when one recalls that even that which is “directly observed" unavoidably reflects the nature of the observing self. It can, at best, only be abducted. That is, we can make an inference to a possible explanation and identify what we consider the best candidate explanation, but multiple such "best explanations" will be forthcoming, underdetermined by the available material evidence, and thus finally determined largely by the cultural context working on genetic predispositions. In the end, it is the assurance with which the response is undertaken, rather than the factual accuracy of the representation of uniformity, that is the value of the behavior.
Things that attract and retain attention will be more likely to be used this way, and skillfully wrought items and skillfully performed activities are enormously salient. Artistically constructed objects or performed activities are thus much more likely to be the focus of divinatory activities, and skilled writing concerning actual events will be both salient and informative. Human skill is, at its most generalized, the ability to coordinate “inner thoughts” accurately and appropriately with the “outer world”—this is the basis of all forms of skill from warfare to clairvoyance. All skill is at base a certain indication of “clarity of sight.” being able to cognize both situation and response. Skill as the ability to succeed in one’s endeavors is of the greatest possible survival value and so would unquestionably be selected for and imitated. Whether it is throwing a projectile at a specific target so as to hit it with the greatest possible force (Calvin 1983), or rendering an accurate representation of a thing that is not present, or producing particularly compelling sounds to which others are drawn to listen, all skill brings into present reality an entity or event that was previously removed from perception—by time, distance, or imperceptibility. The ability to make, or to make happen, externally, perceptibly, physically, that which was previously only internal—imaginary—and to make the external represent the internal as closely as possible, may be seen as the very definition of skill. Skilled performances will thus unavoidably become a perceived source of reliable divination, of the ability to get things right, and to see so clearly that one’s vision is communicable. Clairvoyance has thus been seen as inextricably linked to artistic ability—or, to be more accurate, it is only recently that we have begun to see them as distinct, which is why it is still to this day sometimes unreflectively supposed that skill goes hand-in-hand with clarity of cognition—as the continued consultation of actors and musicians on topics of politics and ecology attests.
The success or failure of the skillfully wrought items and events used in this way can ultimately only be measured by the extent to which they are retained and repeated or discarded and abandoned. As Rose points out, we are more influenced by the recollection of a single successful prediction than we are by the forgetting of a thousand unsuccessful ones (Rose, 775). A good example is the motivations of astronomers during the Renaissance. "Astronomers, even those who regarded physical objects as desirable for theoretical astronomy, continued to regard prognostication as their primary objective” (Westman 684).4 Despite a burgeoning scientific objectivity, astronomers remained entrenched in the practice of divination. Astrology’s predictions have (then as now) a very low success rate. Yet astrology (astromancy) was often held in higher esteem than astronomy, and it offered a more lucrative salary (Brackenridge and Rossi, 85). Astrology’s undeserved credibility resulted not only from both straightforward predictions of the physical movements of heavenly bodies and occasional lucky prognostications concerning the rich and powerful, but also from other skills with which astrologers performed their art.
In 1528, a Carmelite monk in Prato by the name of Giuliano Ristori foretold the death of Duke Alessandro de’ Medici (1510—1537), in line to become the future ruler of the Florentine Republic. Nine years later, the Duke was found strangled to death in his bed (Westman, 255). Forecasting the early death of Duke Alessandro significantly enhanced the perceived reliability of astrology and Ristori’s astrological reputation was established, just as many other astrologers’ credibility would be after making a single such accurate prediction (Westman, 255). In 1601, Johannes Kepler wrote in his On the More Certain Fundamentals of Astrology that mathematicians were obliged to publish annual prognostications, as their demand was increasing, partially because of Ristori’s success (Brackenridge and Rossi, 91).
In those pamphlets some matters will be foretold which the event will make credible; but many more will be foretold which time and experience w'ill refute as false and worthless. The latter will be written on the winds, the former very deeply inscribed in the memory, as is the way of the world.
(Kepler, quoted in Brackenridge and Rossi, 91)
Unsuccessful prognostications were simply overlooked. “One success betokened the probability of more; and in the wildly unregulated world of astrological forecasting, there were different ways to blur, rectify, or simply ignore false predictions" (Westman, 257). Despite its fallibility, astrology—and divination in general—was deeply influential in the Church. Finally, what is important in assuring the retention of divinatory items is not their success or failure in accurately predicting the future or even in recommending appropriate behavior, but their production of confidence and assurance in the adherents who use them. The Yijing may today be the most obvious example of this, but the Biblical text and all other sacred scriptures, are also examples of the same dynamic.
Despite the huge range of types of divination, and the ease with which they are understood as a form of “reading,” types of divination that specifically involve the reading of prepared texts, what one must call “grapho-mancy” or “bibliomancy,” are not particularly well-represented in the literature. Searching online for references to these terms led only to obscure and exoteric sites such as “darktarot.com" and role-playing sites that inform us that graphomancers have a rank of 5, with 9 or more mana and an ability to absorb a “document" spell. Once again, our present logocentric perspective persuades us to think of writing almost exclusively as concerned with the assured, accurate, and reliable communication of pre-existent data, rather than as concerned with the chancy business of “revealing the unseen order,” and inducing an emotional response to current affairs. However, that writing has been and continues to be used as a form of divination is indubitable. As mentioned previously the Yijing is the most striking example of graphomancy, but it is a recognized fact that books have been used in this way also in the West. For example:
To the class of divination by mechanical means we must add, among peoples who possess sacred writings, or books for any reason esteemed to contain great wisdom (such as was attributed to the works of Vergil in the Middle Ages), a form of sortilegium which consists in opening such a book at random and taking an omen from the first passage met with. The prestige won for the Bible by the establishment of Christianity in Europe has resulted in the sortes Bihlicce, still used, we believe, among uneducated people.
(Rose, 1912a, 780)
Christianity supposedly discouraged all forms of divination except for the immediate prompting of the Holy Spirit, and St. Paul particularly emphasized self-control, discouraging mediumistic or oracular trance: “The spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets," he insists (1 Cor 14:32). Yet some mechanical forms of divination continued to claim Apostolic authority, such as divination by lot, for example, Acts 1:26, in which Matthias is added to the apostles by lot. Most divinatory practices were prohibited with a frequency and vigor throughout the history of Christianity as to indicate that they continued to be practiced with equal frequency. The Emperor Gratian (359—383) collaborated with another former Emperor, Valentinian II (371— 392), and the current Emperor Theodosius I (347—395), to produce the Edict of Thessalonica declaring Christianity the official religion of Rome in 380. In his Decretnm Gratiani he declared that “[Even] if it is demonstrated that there is nothing evil in [the use of] divination, nevertheless it is forbidden to the faithful, lest under the guise of divination, [the faithful] return to the ancient practices of idolatry" (Barns, 788).5 Yet not all were entirely prohibited. Barns provides numerous examples of early Christian authorities who practiced forms of graphomancy or bibliomancy. The election of St. Martin
(316—397) to the Bishopric of Tours was decided by such a use of the Psalter. The open practice of such modes of divination in the Church is again illustrated on the occasion of the visit of Chramnus to Dijon (c. 556). The clergy determined to tell his fortune from random opening of each of the three Lections of the Gallican Mass. In fact, the practice of learning by such means the character and administrative ability of a newly elected Bishop became in early times an established Church custom known as the Prognos-ticon. The sortes Sanctorum is recorded with approval in a Life oj St. Hubert of Liege (c. 714 CE). Here two books were placed on the altar—a Book of the Gospels and a Sacramentary—and they were simply opened at random to provide direction. It can easily be argued that, rather than simply prohibiting all such divination in principle, the Church sought to subject divination to its own authority.
A similar “sortes Koranicae ... is said to go back to very early times” in Islam (Margoliouth, 818). In fact, all such practice of determining behavior by consulting ancient scripture can be seen to fall on a scale from, at one end, the clearly magical/mechanical bibliomancy of such methods as “divination by Bible and key," in which a Bible is suspended by a key tied with its wards between the leaves and the key supported on two persons' forefingers, by which the whole may turn and, in answer to questions posed of it, provide direction (described by E. B. Tylor (1878) in the Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th edition, sub “Divination"). In such a case "we doubt if the people who use this method could say definitely whether they suppose the answer to be sent by God or to come from some quasi-magical power inherent in the book itself” (Rose, 776). What might be called spiritual/interpretative graphomancy, in which the reader seeks guidance from a more careful reading of the text, is simply at the other end of the same spectrum.
It is hardly surprising that the Western tradition of scholarship, descended as it is from devout religious scholarship, has been reluctant to recognize this—such a understanding of the use of the text (and of its evolution through time) is liable to render the Biblical text as ultimately impossible to decipher indubitably as is the text of the Yijing (v. Richard Smith 2008, 3, 14-15, 23, 29). For example, take JoAnn Scurlock’s (2010) attempt to identify the “real” referent of the name of Sennacherib in Isaiah 37. She concludes that the referent must, in fact, be Nebuchadnezzar—“Despite the specific references to Sennacherib and kings of Assyria, the religious policy expressed again marks the actual referent clearly as Nebuchadnezzar” (Scurlock 2010, 292). If this “divinatory” understanding of the use and development of the text is correct, the “actual referent” of the text could be any element of any situation that led any supplicant to approach the text for guidance—the text itself being formed, constructed, and reconstructed under the pressures of such usage—as was the Yijing. “Sennacherib” could refer to any oppressive power. It might mean anything, although it unquestionably contains some reference to historical actualities (as does the Yijing), certain portions have been so conditioned by such use as to become inherently indecipherable as historiography. I am not suggesting that the attempt should be abandoned, as I said in the introduction, impossible tasks remain worthwhile, but it does call for a certain humility in the attempt. Also we need to recognize that
much of science itself has evolved from forms of divination and may be said to continue certain aspects of it. Astronomy, for example, is deeply indebted to ancient Near Eastern and Hellenistic astrological researches; mathematics and physics were advanced by Indian, Pythagorean, and Arabic divinatory cosmological speculations; and several leading Renaissance scientists were inspired by the divinatory schemes of Qabbalah and hermetism in their search for the moral harmonies and direction of the universe.
(Zuesse, 2369)
The fact that, even in scriptural/interpretive graphomancy, we read the nature of the invisible from marks that we have made ourselves seems to be the very model of the art of divination—what I have called epistemological echolocation. We read the nature of the invisible from things that we have ourselves created out of the raw materials of the physical world, and the reaction of the physical world—especially other people—to them. We are driven to create in order to have something adequately nuanced to interpret. The more that specific forms and sources of interpretation persist, the more they are consulted. When we exercise our skill and create something that did not previously exist, we express personality most intensively.6 Our perception of the real world is structured by our consciousness, so in becoming acutely aware of the nature and structure of our consciousness we can in some ways become more acutely aware of the nature and structure of the real world that is perceived through it, and vice versa. This is how altered states of consciousness, such as in shamanism, could provide information that is useful and effective in the real world. The more such sources are consulted with any degree of satisfaction, the more widespread their consultation and utilization becomes. Again, the satisfaction of the client is the real end product of the process, no matter what else the outcome. That clients can be, and continue to be, satisfied in this way is attested by the remarkable success of “self-help” books, among other, more explicitly religious behavior.
This is not, of course, an entirely conscious process. Su Shih (1037—1101 CE) was one of the major Chinese poets of all time, an important official (when not in political exile) who was leader of the conservative faction in Sung Dynasty (960—1279) politics, and an amateur painter. His paintings were apparently created spontaneously after attaining an alcoholic trance, according to Jordan Paper (1985, 14). Su Shih said of his friend:
When Yii-k’e paints bamboo
He sees bamboo, not himself
(quoted by Paper, 14)
![Yii-k’e [Wen Tong 1018-1079] paints bamboo](/htm/img/21/3571/14.png)
Figure 9.1 Yii-k’e [Wen Tong 1018-1079] paints bamboo.
This is an example of the process ofbecoming aware of one’s own consciousness so that one can reduce its effects on one’s perception (as was Emerson’s infamous “transparent eyeball”)—an ultimately impossible task, but at least Su Shih was aware of the entry of the self into the act of perception and representation. Similarly, Paleolithic visitors to the caves of France and Spain sought insight into the “invisible order" suggested by flickering light on the contours of the cave walls, yielding evidence of the nature of the invisible order (the “spirit world” according to David Lewis-Williams, 2002) via the nature of their consciousness. This can be seen as the earliest recorded instance of using skills of representation as a means of divination—art and religion seamlessly combined in a practical attempt to produce effective behavior—itself a behavior that would be selected for if it were successful and which would spread culturally by imitation.
As graphomancy has gradually become the most popular form of divination, especially in the Modern West, we may have begun to transgress the second commandment in the sense suggested earlier, and confused our representations of reality with reality. Such may be seen in Paul Tillich’s contribution to Apostolos-Cappadona’s anthology (1984). Here Tillich claims that “[u]ltimate reality underlies every reality, and it characterizes the whole appearing world as non-ultimate, preliminary, transitory and finite" (219). Thus "the deceptive character of the surface of everything ... drives one to discover what is below the surface ... the truly real which cannot deceive us” (220). So far, so good. Given the understanding of neurological processing of cognition, I would agree with this. However, Tillich goes on to talk of “the arts in which ultimate reality is expressed in artistic forms" (220). This general claim that art expresses the ultimate/infinite in and through the contingent/finite is repeated several times throughout Apostolos-Cappadona’s volume as we have seen (for example, 9, 26, 138, 189, 205, 206, 208-210, 288) and, as we have also seen, it constitutes one of the unexplained mysteries of the relationship of art and religion (which I hope the present work is beginning to unravel). The problem, of course, is that what may “express" ultimate reality cannot itself be ultimately real, and thus it necessarily both reveals and conceals.7 Despite his admirable ability for systematic thought, Tillich (1886—1965)—who might be seen as in this way typical of the German Protestant theologians so influential in the establishment of the early academic study of religion—exhibits some confusion in his attempt to classify expressions of this ultimate reality. There are, he says, “three ways in which humanity is able to experience and express ultimate reality," philosophy, art, and religion (221). Philosophy expresses it indirectly by expressing “encountered reality” in “cognitive concepts,” art does the same in "esthetic images," but in religion “ultimate reality becomes manifest through ecstatic experiences of a concrete-revelatory character and is expressed in symbols and myths” (221—222), and thus “ultimate reality” is expressed “directly.”
But what are symbols and myths but “esthetic images”—visual and verbal respectively? And how does one have any “ecstatic experience” without having first encountered these aesthetic images in the expressions of one’s own religious tradition? In fact, for Tillich here “religion" is evidently synonymous with what he calls “sacramental and mystical experience” (223). More commonly the word is used to denote the very symbols and myths that are said to “express" this experience, and it can easily be argued that the “sacramental and mystical experience” is a product of the experience of prior expression in symbol and myth, located within and determined by the matrix of stylistically related expressions, rather than any "direct” experience of anything that, unaffected by historical context, gives rise to subsequent expression of that thing.8
A large part of this problem, which has become endemic in the Modern Western understanding of religion and art, can be seen in Tillich’s fundamentally incoherent concept of “the sacred, namely, the direct symbols of ultimate reality” (222). If a symbol expresses ultimate reality, and if, as he says, the expression is not the thing expressed (221) and there is a necessary divide between the two, then what sense does it make to identify such a thing as a “direct symbol" that can “express in a direct way the fundamental relation of humanity to ultimate reality” (223)? What could this even mean? Tillich is simply asserting the privileged status of those symbols that he apprehends as most effectively communicating “sacrality” to him.
It is particularly revealing that this same questionable assumption of some kind of “direct mediation" is at work when Tillich assumes that philosophy, the first of his “indirect expressions of ultimate reality” (221), expresses itself in “cognitive concepts." Cognition and concepts are what happens in the subjective consciousness mediated by communication. In fact, philosophy expresses itself in words, which are abstract audible/visual signs in response to which we may (or may not) form concepts. Similarly, art expresses itself in aesthetic images, which may or may not provoke “concepts” in the audience. “Concepts" are not necessarily verbal, as Thomas Franklin O’Meara. John Dixon, and Leo Steinberg go to considerable length to establish in the same anthology.
A great deal of religion does express itselfin words, especially since the Protestant Reformation and the academic study of religion (see, for example, John Hinnells’ salutary consideration of this problem, Hinnells 2005, 509). Written words are both visual symbols and coded, conventional representations of audible words, which are themselves coded representations of both sensory experiences and associated abstract concepts (see Dehaene, 187). Philosophy is thus equally distant from “cognitive concepts” as is “art” (and it should now be clear that Tillich almost exclusively means “the visual arts" when he says “art,” separating as he does, words from art). Tillich’s classification here is both typical of the Modern West and profoundly dubious. He ranks expression hierarchically: religion is direct experience, philosophy is the indirect expression of concepts, and “art" is the expression of aesthetic images. But all three rely upon the expression of aesthetic (that is, sensory, perceptible, whether audible or visible) prompts—which, as expressions, cannot possibly be “ultimate reality,” nor can they express it “directly,” although they can communicate, by association or resemblance, some appropriate behavioral response to that reality. In all cases, they communicate through the medium of perceptible experience and never “immediately,” never “directly.” For Tillich “religion" is equivalent to some assumed subjective but nonetheless “direct" experience of the “really real.” What we normally call religion, however, he relegates to “the expression in myth and symbol” of that presumed experience. One has to ask: how can experience be “expressed” in symbols? This is a little like asking, how can I be happy unless the word “happy" exists?—which may, at first, seem like a foolish question. It is not. There may be “natural sorts”: I am 5' 10" tall, and my actual height remains unchanged whether or not the rather weird Imperial system of feet and inches exists to express it or not. I’m also getting a little short of hair, whether or not the word “bald” exists. But there are other than natural sorts: I am also “married.” Can I actually be that without some associated word and the social convention to which it refers? I am also “British” and a “resident alien." There are some categories that are created by the very words used to describe them, created by the very symbols used to "express" them and it is a significant argument that cannot be ignored that any specific “sacramental and mystical experience" may be of that sort. However, that is not my primary concern here. What is of importance to my argument is that words have become increasingly apprehended as something quite other than an artistic medium and far removed from any process of divination. This is logocentrism..
Religious traditions try to make people “aware of” a reality beyond appearances, a truth that is not visible, and they do so by means of all possible art media, including words. All language tries to communicate more than is physically present in the medium employed, and all art likewise seeks to make one apprehend more than is actually, physically present in the piece— be it an object, an event, or an emotion. The thing that the ancestor of art and religion has long been called upon to reveal is something that is more significant than the physically visible world (hence Tillich’s naming it "ultimate reality”), and that is, considering the present evidence, the best way to respond to that world. Of course, neither art nor religion can simply induce a “direct experience" of "ultimate reality" or “the infinite" nor can they reveal any indubitable divination of the best behavior. They both suggest it with conventional symbols, empowered by their location in an extended matrix of stylistically related media just as the flickering light in the Paleolithic cave may once have suggested "the spirit world,” and we respond as best we can and keep, assuming our survival, coming back for more. The biggest question of all is precisely “what do I do now? ... What should I do? ... What is the right thing to do?" and divination seeks to answer that. By “reading” the implications, initially of skillful observations of nature but increasingly of fascinating, skillfully wrought objects and actions that arrest our attention, and seeking to emulate the skill that they manifest—either skills of presentation or of discernment—we seek to answer those questions and to select the wisest course of action. This process can be seen to have been at work in the whole history of what has now become religion (and art).
The emphasis of the Post-Reformation Western Church has been on theology composed of categorical propositions: "Words have dominated contemporary theology," as O’Meara said (1984, 206) and it was written words that came to dominate. One Orthodox theologian, Dumitru Staniloae, goes even further, saying that "Protestant theologians consider the word as the only means of divine revelation" (2002, 34). Yet, while "the propositional language of traditional theology is a great imaginative achievement" it cannot represent “the whole of human experience,” according to Dixon (1984, 277). As we have seen, O’Meara also points out that non-verbal creative art “suggests a mode of subjectivity that not only rejects the technocracy of words but which unleashes, bestows, and discloses the more of Presence” (1984, 206), and so the other arts have not been entirely supplanted. They, too, can give an “aesthetic intuition of ineffable presence ... the aesthetic illustrates human theological interpretation of divine revelation ... [and] can describe religion, revelation, faith, and thinking-about-faith with a strength and clarity equal to the categorical style" (O'Meara 1984, 205). But words themselves are “aesthetic images." In his masterful analysis of comic art Scott McCloud points out that written words are the most abstract of visual images (1993, 47), so O’Meara, by juxtaposing words to "the aesthetic" illustrates the same malaise. There cannot finally be a clear distinction between the “categorical style" and the aesthetic. This is the false dichotomy that we often impose between words and images. As Derridean deconstruction correctly points out, in the binary couplet of words and images, as in all such binaries, we assume one—in this case words—to be superior. However, verbal symbols are almost entirely conventional and arbitrary. We could have chosen any shape to indicate the sound that is now conventionally represented by the shapes “a" or “A” (or 3J, K etc.). Visual symbols, like blue for heavenly or a circle for completion, may have at least some reference to common experiences, even so. their meaning is set more by convention than by resemblance. With traditional icons meaning is determined more by their conformity to the narratives of the stylistic matrix that they inhabit than to any actual resemblance to an historical saint or religious figure, so the transition from Eastern Orthodox Icons to post-Reformation verbal/propositional theology is not as radical as often thought. It came about by way of the Italian Renaissance and Tuscan visual theology and we can trace at least some small part of that complex trajectory.
The neurology of reading and writing in part explains both its extreme salience and its potentially deleterious effect. It involves intensely the three areas of skill that I identified earlier—the skills of (representation, of cognition, and of reception—which makes graphomancy a dramatically salient art and a form of relatively easily achievable self-hypnotic divination. It also induces a powerful impression of an ever-closer approach of representation to the represented. As any serious reader knows, reading can conjure up worlds of astonishing conviction, compulsion, and enchantment. In the art of divination there is necessarily a creative element—it is not supposed to be an exact representation or the operative element of divination, the moral response, the answer to “how ought I to respond?” is lost. Graphomancy, like other forms of divination, co-opts remarkably sensitive skills and abilities that have allowed humans to achieve a sensitivity to our environment and that have permitted us to recognize, from vanishingly small clues, too small, too fast, and too subtle to process consciously, what our best behavior is most likely to be—what we ought to do. As Dehaene, says, the “visual word recognition process, from retinal processing to the highest level of abstraction and invariance, ... unfolds automatically, in less than one-fifth of a second, without any conscious examination” (Dehaene, 93). That is remarkable sensitivity, and it must have preceded our ability to develop and use writing (Dehaene, 4). Employing such sensitivity humanity had flourished and spread into almost every environmental niche of the globe well before the development of written scripts. Our instinctive creativity leads us to enhance and highlight clues provided by our environment that suggest to us the disposition of the environment and hence our most appropriate response to it, employing the same (or very closely related) neurological processes that enable "theory of mind.” Those enhancements and highlights led to our representation of the invisible order of reality.
It is not just metaphorical to suggest that we respond emotionally to our physical environment in a fashion fundamentally similar to that by which we respond to our social environment. It does seem to be the case that our most sensitive, subtle, fast and frugal response systems have evolved in the context of that social environment. The enhancement of the clues and suggestions of the physical environment permits the representation of an invisible reality functionally equivalent to the “personality” of reality, the “emotional disposition of the gods," the communication of which enables a coordinated social, rather than simply individual, response to the promptings of the environment. In a competing market of perception, enchantment, insight, enhancement, and expression, those representations that will effectively seize the attention and compel imitation are reproduced and flourish. The behavior that they induce flourishes likewise. In any community that continues to survive and reproduce, that behavior will be perpetuated. However, the process is unavoidably creative, bringing into the environment something which, while suggested by an environment (which increasingly comes to consist of items of our own creation), did not actually exist previously. This is neither necessarily problematic nor entirely misleading, since such creativity permits heightened sensitivity to our own cognitive processes, to the structural overlay that our own neurology imposes upon our perception of reality, and thus permits, at least potentially, a clearer and more sensitive response to the reality that is independent of our perception. Our representations, while creative and ahistorical, can thus be seen as true in a pragmatic sense.
If we fail to recognize our creative input into this process, however, if we fail to see our creativity as creative, if we begin to confuse our representations with that which they represent, then it seems unavoidable that this process will become problematic and misleading. It may be the case that we have, on some level, been aware of this potential pitfall—hence (among other things) the injunction of the Biblical second commandment, the Muslim attempt to avoid figurai representation, and René Magritte’s La Trahison des Images. However, unfortunately, the monotheistic traditions are closely connected with a profound fascination with graphomancy. In the attempt to sidestep the temptations of visual and figurai representation, we seem to have fallen headlong into a pit of our own creation. The graphical representation of language in visual form exercises such compelling conviction that the reality it represents is nothing other than reality itself, independent of our creativity, that, in far too many cases, it is taken to be precisely that. The written word is taken "literally." This not only leads, in its most obvious manifestation, to bibliol-atry and scriptural literalism—a conceit into which even some Hindu traditions now appear to be drawn—but may also dramatically impair our ability to take an effective emotional “reading” of the environment independent of our perception. While secular scientific representations of the environment empower a truly astonishing ability to manipulate that environment mechanically for our own ends, we suffer from a simultaneous cultural blindness that has disabled us from responding appropriately to the promptings of the environment that might restrain such activity to more sustainable levels. Instead, we forge on with industrial exploitation despite clear evidence that it is unsustainable. We seem no longer to be capable of apprehending the clues and suggestions of the environment as “the wrath of God” or some such emotional condition to which we feel constrained to respond. This may well be connected to the fact that the neurological processes most intimately connected with reading are “strongly lateralized in the left hemisphere” of the brain (Dehaene, 78) and that hemisphere is primarily devoted to analytic functions which do not attend to the unique and the new, while it is the right hemisphere that identifies emotional expression and enables creative mimesis (McGilchrist, 59, 248).
If we fail to distinguish between the invisible order and what our consciousness brings to it in our representation of the invisible order, we cannot “see the world better.” If we believe that we simply see it as it is—even if we do become increasingly enabled to manipulate it—we cannot divine how best to behave in response to it. If the right hemisphere is dominant in our ability creatively to imitate and thus make present what is not present, then a reliance on graphomancy could significantly weaken the imitatio dei that is the crucial adaptive feature of the art/religion complex—left-hemisphere dominated, writing-driven divination can only encourage an ability to copy mechanically, which may have elevated us to the status of mechanically creative beings while neglecting the compassionate and emotional aspects of our traditions. This might portend that modern secular culture will be even more hidebound and blindly conservative than its traditional forebears. But how did we get here? How did a function that appears to have been genetically selected for as an adaptation that increased our effective ability to interpret and respond persistently and sustainably to our environment, come to develop behavior that seems an unsustainable threat to that environment? A chronological consideration of the workings of ancient art and religion may begin to answer that question.
Notes
1 Gregory Spinner, when he was visiting assistant professor of religion at Skidmore College, remembered his experience as a PhD student studying with Culianu at the University of Chicago. Culianu was, according to Spinner, a warm, supportive, and unconventional teacher.
The reading course on divination was a wildly ambitious attempt to chart the vast continent of the occult sciences. This topic deserves a longer hearing, so let me just simply assert that Mike and I were not only expected to read about divination techniques. We were asked to perform them. Seriously—1 would be graded on how well I performed divination.
http://chicagomaroon.com/2016/05/13/25-years-later-assassinated-professor-remembered/
- 2 "... some universal art: a seer, or physician, or architect, or perhaps a divine minstrel ...” note that the minstrel is seen as more divine than the seer (mantis). (From Poetry in Translation.)
- 3 I repeat the footnote from Chapter 2 for those who may have missed it: I am aware of the significant volume of wildly speculative theories that have arisen from the basic fact of brain hemisphere asymmetry—to the extent that I am reluctant to refer to it. However, McGilchrist is a very significant scholar and psychiatrist whose opinions are well supported by considerable evidence and experience.
- 4 I must thank a former student, Troy Holden, for bringing this material to my attention.
- 5 Although the text of the Decretum Gratiani can be dated to the 12th century, at least some of the imperial decrees compiled within it appear to be authentic to the 4th century. My thanks to Prof. A. Dwight Castro for his invaluable assistance with both the Latin and the history of the text.
- 6 No-one else would perform a skilled task quite exactly alike and we are most fully ourselves—this is me, this is mine, and nothing and no one can stop it from being me and being mine—when we exercise creative skill, hence the importance of art and creativity to the oppressed and downtrodden (see. for example, Kirk-Duggan 2014 and De Gruchy 2014).
- 7 Although this dichotomy has been recently employed by Jan Assmann (see Assmann 2008, 70—72; Kripal 2014, 15), it is one of the most characteristic features of the entire oeuvre—both theoretical and fictional—of Mircea Eliade (Eliade 1936, Introduction, 6-7, 1978, xvi; see Idel, 2010, and Rennie 2013).
- 8 “The jury is still out” on this controversy and neither those who insist that the experience is a product, sometimes called constructivists or contextualists, nor those who insist that the experience pre-dates and determines its expression rather than vice versa, have been able to convince their opposite numbers. See particularly the work of Steven Katz.
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