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ordinary people in more mundane decisions. We know that it became common among the Hittites, and its occurrence in the Old Testament will be referred to in a later chapter.
Augury
A third type of divination and one that is closer to the structure of consciousness is what I shall call qualitative augury. Sortilege is ordinal, ordering by rank a set of given possibilities. But the many methods of qualitative augury are designed to divine a great deal more information from the unspeaking gods. It is the difference between a digital and an analog computer. Its first form, as described in three cuneiform texts dating from about the middle of the second millennium B.C., consisted of pouring oil into a bowl of water held in the lap, the movement of the oil in relation to the surface or to the rim of the bowl portending the gods' intentions concerning peace or prosperity, health or disease.
Here the metaphrand is the intention or even action of a god, not just his words as in sortilege. The metaphier is the oil moving about the surface of the water, to which the movements and commands of the gods are similar. The paraphiers are the specific shapes and proximities of the oil whose paraphrands are the contours of the gods' decisions and actions.
Augury in Mesopotamia always has a cultic status. It was performed by a special priest called the baru, surrounded with ritual, and preceded by a prayer to the god to reveal his intentions through the oil or whatever medium.20 And as we enter the first millennium B.C., the methods and techniques of the baru break out into an astonishing diversity of metaphiers for the gods' intentions: Not only oil but the movements of smoke rising from a censer of incense held in the lap of the diviner,21 or the form of 20 See Oppenheim, pp. 208, 212.
21 A lack of later cuneiform tablets referring to oil on water suggests this practice went out of use fairly early. An exception is the reference of Joseph in Genesis-44:5
to the precious silver cup which he uses for drinking and for private divining, the date of this being about 600 B.C. See my II.6, note 4.
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hot wax dropped into water, or the patterns of dots made at random, or the shapes and patterns of ashes, and then sacrificed animals.
Extispicy, as divining from the exta of sacrificed animals is called, becomes the most important type of induced analog augury during the first millennium B.C. The idea of sacrifice itself, of course, originated in the feeding of the hallucinogenic idols as we saw in II.2. With the breakdown of the bicameral mind, the idols lost their hallucinogenic properties and became mere statues, but the feeding ceremonies now addressed to absent gods remained in the various ceremonies as sacrifices. It is thus not surprising that animals rather than oil, wax, smoke, etc., became the more important media of communication with the gods.
Extispicy differs from other methods in that the metaphrand is explicitly not the speech or actions of gods, but their writing. The baru first addressed the gods Shamash and Adad with requests that they "write" their message upon the entrails of the animal,22
or occasionally whispered this request into its ears before it was killed. He then investigated in traditional sequence the animal's organs — windpipe, lungs, liver, gall bladder, how the coils of the intestines were arranged — looking for deviations from the normal state, shape, and coloring. Any atrophy, hypertrophy, displacement, special markings, or other abnormalities, particularly of the liver, was a divine message metaphorically related to divine action. The corpus of texts dealing with extispicy outnum-bers all other kinds of augury texts and deserves much more careful study. From its earliest and very cursory mention in the second millennium, to the extensive collections of the Seleucid period around 250 B.C., the history and local development of extispicy as a means of exopsychic thought is an area where the tablets are simply awaiting the ordering of proper research. Of particular interest is that in the late period the markings and 22 See J. Nougayrol "Presages medicaux de Tharuspicine babylonierine," Semittca, 1956, 6, 5-14.
244 The Witness of History discolorations are described in an arcane technical terminology similar to what occurred among medieval alchemists.23 Parts of the exta of the sacrificed animal are referred to as "door of the palace," "path," "yoke," and "embankment" and symbolize these locations and objects, creating a metaphor world from which to read out what to do. Some of the late tablets even have diagrams of the coils of the intestines and their meaning. Clay and bronze models of the liver and lungs, sometimes elaborate, sometimes crude, have been unearthed in various sites; some were probably used for instructional purposes. But since the raw organs themselves were sometimes sent to the king as proof of a particular divine message, such models may also have served as a less redolent way of reporting an actual observation.24
Please remember the metaphorical nature of all such activity, for the actual functions here are similar to though on a different level from the very inner workings of consciousness. That the size and shape of the liver or other organ is a metaphier of the size and shape of the intentions of a god is, on an ultrasimple level, similar to what we do in consciousness in making metaphor spaces Containing' metaphor obj ects and actions.
Spontaneous Divination
Spontaneous divination differs from the three preceding types only by being unconstrained and free from any particular medium. It is really a generalization of all types. As before, the gods' commands, intentions, or purposes are the metaphrand while the metaphier is anything that might be seen at the moment and related to the concern of the diviner. The outcomes of undertakings or the intentions of a god are thus read out from whatever object the diviner happens to see or hear.
23 See Mary I. Hussey, "Anatomical nomenclature in an Akaadian omen text,"
Journal of Cuneiform Studies, 1948, 2: 21-32, as mentioned by Oppenheim on p. 216.
24 Robert H. Pfeiffer, State Letters of Assyria (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1935), Letter 335.
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The reader may try it for himself. Think of some problem or concern in a vague kind of way. Then look out the window suddenly or around where you are and take the first thing your eye lights upon, and try to 'read' out of it something about your problem. Sometimes nothing will happen. But at other times the message will simply flash into your mind. I have just done this as I write and from my north window see a television aerial against a twilight sky. I may divine this as meaning I am being much too speculative, picking up fleeting suggestions from flimsy air — an unfortunate truth if I am to face these matters at all. I again think vaguely of my concerns and, walking about, suddenly cast my eyes on the floor of an adjoining room where an assistant has been building an apparatus, and see a frayed wire with several strands at the end. I divine that my problem in this chapter is to tie together several different strands and loose ends of evidence.