be good for the dweller within that town.
If black ants are seen on the foundations
which have been laid, that house will get
built; the owner of that house will live to
grow old.
If a horse enters a man's house, and bites
either an ass or a man, the owner of the
house will die and his household will be
scattered.
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If a fox runs into the public square,
that town will be devastated.
If a man unwittingly treads on a lizard
and kills it, he will prevail over his
adversary.12
And so on endlessly, bearing on all those aspects of life that in a previous age would have been under the guidance of gods. They can be construed as a kind of first approach to narratization, doing by verbal formulae what consciousness does in a more complex way. Rarely are we able to see any logical dependency of prediction on portent, the connection often being as simple as word associations or connotations.
There were also teratological omens beginning, "If a foetus, etc.," dealing with abnormal births both human and animal.13
The science of medicine is actually founded in medical omens, a series of texts that begin, "When the conjuration priest comes to the house of a sick man," and follow with more or less reasonable prognoses correlated with various symptoms.14 And omens based on the appearance of facial and bodily characteristics in the client or in persons he encounters, which, incidentally, give us the best description we have of what these people looked like.15 And omens in the time dimension: menologies which stated which months were favorable or unfavorable for given undertakings, and hemerologies that concerned themselves with propitious or unpropitious days of each month. And omens that are the beginning of meteorology and astronomy, whole series of tablets being devoted, to phenomena of the sun, the planets, the stars and the moon, their times and circumstances of disappearance, eclipses, omens connected with halos, strange cloud forma-12 These illustrations are all taken from Saggs, pp. 308-309.
13 Erie Leichty, "Teratological omens," La Divination en Mesopotamie Ancienne et dans les Regions Voisines, pp. 131-139.
14 J. V. Kinnier Wilson, "Two medical texts from Nimrud," Iraq, 1956, 18: 1 3 0 - 4 6 .
15 J. V. Kinnier Wilson, "The Nimrud catalog of medical and physiognomical omina," Iraq, 1962, 24: 52-62.
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tions, the divine meaning of thunder and rain, hail and earth-quakes as predictions of peace and war, harvest and flood, or the movement of planets, particularly Venus, among the fixed stars.
By the fifth century B.C., this use of stars to obtain the intentions of the silent gods who now live among them has become our familiar horoscopes, in which the conjunction of the stars at birth results in predictions of the future and personality of the child.
History also begins, if vaguely, in omen texts, the apodoses or
"then-clauses" of some early texts perhaps preserving some faint historical information in a unique and characteristically Mesopotamian variety of historiography.16 Mankind deprived of his gods, like a child separated from his mother, is having to learn about his world in fear and trembling.
Dream omens became (as they still are) a major source of divination.17 Particularly in the late Assyrian period during the first millennium B.C., dream omens were collected into dream books such as the Ziqiqu where some associative principle between the dream event and its apodosis is apparent, e.g., a dream of the loss of one's cylinder seal portends the death of a son. But omens of whatever type can only decide so much. One has to wait for the portent to occur. Novel situations do not wait.
Sortilege
Sortilege or the casting of lots differs from omens in that it is active and designed to provoke the gods' answers to specific questions in novel situations. It consisted of throwing marked sticks, stones, bones, or beans upon the ground, or picking one out of a group held in a bowl, or tossing such markers in the lap of a tunic until one fell out. Sometimes it was to answer yes or no, at other 16 See J. J. Finkelstein, uMesopotamian historiography," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 1963, pp. 461-472.
17 See A. Leo Oppenheim, "Mantic dreams in the Ancient Near East," in G. E.
von Grunbaum and Roger Caillois, eds., The Dream and Human Societies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), pp. 341-350.
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times to choose one out of a group of men, plots, or alternatives.
But this simplicity — even triviality to us — should not blind us from seeing the profound psychological problem involved, as well as appreciating its remarkable historical importance. We are so used to the huge variety of games of chance, of throwing dice, roulette wheels, etc., all of them vestiges of this ancient practice of divination by lots, that we find it difficult to really appreciate the significance of this practice historically. It is a help here to realize that there was no concept of chance whatever until very recent times. Therefore, the discovery (how odd to think of it as a discovery!) of deciding an issue by throwing sticks or beans on the ground was an extremely momentous one for the future of mankind. For, because there was no chance, the result had to be caused by the gods whose intentions were being divined.
As to the psychology of sortilege, I would call your attention to two points of interest. First, this practice is very specifically invented in culture to supplement right hemisphere function when that function, following the breakdown of the bicameral mind, is no longer as accessible as when it was coded linguistically in the voices of gods. We know from laboratory studies that it is the right hemisphere that predominately processes spatial and pattern information. It is better at fitting parts of things into patterns as in Koh's Block Test, at perceiving the location and quantity of dots in a pattern or of patterns of sound such as melodies.18 Now the problem that sortilege is trying to solve is something of the same kind, that of ordering parts of the pattern, of choosing who is to do what, or what piece of land goes to which person. Originally, I suggest, in simpler societies, such decisions were easily made by the hallucinated voices called gods, which were involved primarily with the right hemisphere. And when the gods no longer accomplished this function, perhaps because of the increasing complication of such decisions, sorti-18 D. Kimura, "Functional Asymmetry of the Brain in Dichotic Listening," Cortex, 1967, 3: 163. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1971, 23: 46.
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lege came into history as a substitute for this right hemisphere function.
The second point of psychological interest is that the throwing of lots, like consciousness itself, has metaphor as its basis. In the language of I.2, the unexpressed commands of the gods compose the metaphrand which is to be lexically widened, and the metaphier is the pair or assembly of lots, be they sticks, beans, or stones. The paraphiers are the distinguishing marks or words on the lots which then project back into the metaphrand as the command of the particular god invoked. What is important here is to understand provoked divination such as sortilege as involving the same kind of generative processes that develop consciousness, but in an exopsychic nonsubjective manner.
As with omen texts, the roots of sortilege go back into the bicameral age. The earliest mention of throwing lots appears to be in legal tablets dating from the middle of the second millennium B.C., but it is only toward its end that the practice becomes widespread in important decisions: to assign shares of an estate among the sons (as at Susa), or shares of temple income to certain officials of the sanctuary, to establish a sequence among persons of equal status for various purposes. This was not simply for practical purposes, as it would be with us, but always to find out the commands of a god. Around 833 B.C., the new year in Assyria was always named after some high official. The particular official to be so honored was chosen by means of a clay die on the faces of which the names of the various high officials were inscribed, the various sides of the cube being inscribed with prayers to Ashur to make that particular side turn up.19 While many Assyrian texts from this time on refer to various types of sortilege, it is difficult to estimate just how widespread the practice was in decision-making, and whether it was used by the 19 An illustration of this may be found in W. W. Hallo and W. K. Simpson, Ancient Near East (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p, 150; see also Oppenheim, p. 100.