Chapter 13

Holy visitants of Earth and guardians sure of mortal men,

on what principle do we deprive souls while in their bodies of that faculty whereby the daemons know and declare beforehand things to be? It is not likely that any power or new part accrues to souls when they leave the body, which they did notpossess before. Rather, they always have it, but in a weak degree while they are intermingled with the body; it is sometimes quite invisible and veiled, sometimes weak and dim, and, as with those who see through a mist or who try to move in a marshy place, inoperative and dull, demanding much attention to the virtue that is in them, and much pains to raise and remove and purify the obstructing veil. The sun when he chases the clouds away does not then become bright; he is bright always,|432|but to us through the mist his light appears dim and struggling. Even so the soul does not assume the prophetic power when it passes out of the body as out of a cloud; it has it even now, but is blinded by its close admixture with the mortal state. We should not be surprised or incredulous, if only because we see the great energy which Memory, as we call the faculty in the soul which answers to prophecy, exhibits, in preserving and protecting things that are past, or rather things that now are,[184]since of things past none is or has substance; all things|B|come into being and at the same time perish, all actions, words, and feelings, as time like a river bears each along. But this faculty of the soul, I know not how, gets a grasp of them, and invests with appearance and being that which is not present. The oracle given to the Thessalians about Arne[185]bade them attend to

That which a deaf man hears, a blind man sees.

But Memory is the hearing of things to which the ear is deaf, the seeing of things to which the eye is blind. Wherefore, as I said, it is no marvel that, as it grasps things which no longer are, so it should anticipate things which have not yet come into being. For these touch it more nearly, and with these it has sympathy; it confronts the future and attaches itself|C|thereto, whereas it is quit of things past and finished, saving only to remember them.

XL. ‘Having then this inborn power yet dimmed and hardly appearing, souls nevertheless break out and are uplifted, in dreams some of them or when nearing initiation, as the body becomes pure, and takes on a temperature, so to speak, which is suitable, or whether it be that the rational and intellectual part is relaxed and discharged from the present things, and so with the irrational and imaginative they reach towards futurity. That line of Euripides[186]is not true:

The best of prophets he who guesses well.

No, the prophet is the sensible man, he who follows the rational part of his soul in the road where it leads him with probability. Divination, like a scroll with no writing or method, in itself|D|indeterminate, but capable of receiving fancies and presentiments by the feelings, gets touch with the future, yet not by inference, when it passes most completely outside the present. It passes out through such a temperament and disposition of the body as produce a change called by us inspiration. Often the body attains this disposition of itself; but the earth sends up many streams of many potencies, some which bring trances, diseases, or death, others beneficial, mild, and serviceable, as is proved on those who chance upon them. Of all the currents the stream, or breath, of prophecy is most divine and holy,|E|whether it be drawn from the air direct, or come mingled with the moisture of a spring; for when absorbed into the body it produces in souls a temperament unfamiliar and strange, the special quality of which it is hard to state in clear words, though reason suggests many conjectures. Probably, by heat and dispersion, it opens certain passages to admit imaginings of the future, just as the fumes of wine bring many other stirrings, and unveil words and thoughts which were stored away and unheeded,|F|

For in the wine-god’s votary’s mood,As in the madman’s, lies much prophecy,

For in the wine-god’s votary’s mood,

As in the madman’s, lies much prophecy,

says Euripides;[187]when the soul, warmed and set on fire, rejects the caution which human prudence brings, to avert inspiration, as it so often does, and to quench it.

XLI. ‘After all, it might be not unreasonably asserted that a dryness introduced with the heat subtilizes the current and makes it ethereal and pure. “Best a dry soul”, says Heraclitus;[188]moisture not only dulls sight and hearing, but if it|433|touch a mirror or raises[189]a mist upon it, takes away brightness and lustre. As the opposite to this, it is not impossible that, by a sort of chilling and condensation of the breath of air, the organ of prognostication is made tense and keen, like steel out of the bath. Or again, as tin when melted in with copper, itself rarefied and full of apertures, welds it together and condenses it, and yet in the result makes it brighter to the eye and purer, so there is nothing to prevent the prophetic exhalation,|B|wherein is something congenial and akin to souls, from filling up their rarefied places, and inserting itself, and pressing all together. For certain things are congenial and proper to certain other things; thus an infusion of the bean into the dyer’s bath seems to assist its efficacy for purple, of nitre for saffron.

Scarlet is mingled for the pearly weft,

says Empedocles. But about Cydnus, and the sacred sword of Apollo at Tarsus, we used to hear the story from you, dear Demetrius, how Cydnus cleans that steel best, and no other water suits the sword. And again, at Olympia, water from|C|Alpheus is poured on the ashes to make them adhere to the altar in a mass, and the water of no other river which has been found has the power of cementing the ash.

XLII. ‘It is not to be wondered at, then, that of the many streams which the earth sends up, these alone affect soulswith inspiration and give them imagination of the future. Certainly legend agrees with reason as to this. In this very place it is related that the prophetic virtue was first made manifest by the accidental falling into it of a shepherd, who thereupon uttered sounds as of one inspired. These passed at first unheeded by those present; but afterwards, when the things which the man foretold had happened, there was astonishment. The most learned of the Delphians even mention|D|the man’s name, which was Coretas. I am, however, myself strongly of opinion that a soul acquires a temperature congruous with the prophetic current, such as the eye has with light sympathetic to it. Though the eye possesses the power of seeing, this cannot act without light; and the prophetic organ of the soul needs, as the eye does, a congenial medium to help in kindling its flame, or whetting its edge. Hence most of the older generations used to think that Apollo and the sun were one and the same God, while those who knew and honoured that beautiful and wise proportion, “as body to soul, so sight|E|to intellect, so light to truth”, would add the conjecture “so the power of the sun to the nature of Apollo”, declaring the sun to be his offspring and scion, the ever becoming of the ever subsisting. For the sun kindles and enhances and helps to excite the visual power of the sense, as the God that of prophecy in the soul.

XLIII. ‘It was natural, however, that those who take the view that they are one and the same God should have dedicated this oracle to Apollo and Earth in common, thinking that the sun produces in the earth the disposition and temperament from which come the prophetic exhalations out of her. We|F|then, like Hesiod,[190]who understood the matter better than some philosophers, when he called her

Unshaken base of all,

consider her to be eternal and imperishable. But of the powerswhich are about her it is to be expected that some should fail here, and others come into being there, and that there should be shiftings from place to place, and cross-currents, and that such cycles should often revolve within her if we take time as a whole; and the phenomena point to such an inference. For in the case of lakes and rivers, and still more frequently in that of hot springs, there have been failure and entire disappearance in some places, in others a retreat so to call it, and an absorption;|434|then they reappear at intervals of time in the same places, or bubble up in their neighbourhood. Again, we hear of mines where the ore has been exhausted and then renewed, as in the silver mines of Attica, and the copper lodes of Euboea, out of which the chilled sword-blades used to be manufactured, as Aeschylus[191]has said

Th’ Euboean blade, self-tempered, in his hand.

Then there is the rock at Carystus where it is only lately that the yield of delicate thread-like filaments of mineral has ceased. I think some of you will remember having seen towels, and nets, and caps made of these, which were non-inflammable.|B|Any which were soiled by use were placed in a flame out of which they came bright and clear. Now there has been an entire disappearance of these, and scarcely a few fibres or thin filaments run in streaks about the mines.

XLIV. ‘Yet Aristotle[192]holds that exhalation is the operative cause within the earth of all these things, that is, of the natural effects which necessarily fail, shift place, and break out concomitantly. The same view must be taken of prophetic currents; the power which they have is not perennial nor ageless, it is liable to changes. Probably they are extinguished by excessive storms of rain, and dispersed by thunderbolts|C|falling upon them; above all, when the earth is shaken, and subsidence or conglomeration takes place in her depths, theexhalations are shifted or wholly lost to view; thus the effects of the great earthquake which actually overturned the town are said to be permanent here. In Orchomenus they say that there was a pestilence in which many men perished, and that the oracle of Teiresias then wholly failed, and remains to this day idle and voiceless. If the like happened also to those in Cilicia, as we hear it did, there is no one, Demetrius, who could tell us about it more clearly than you.’

XLV. Demetrius said: ‘I cannot say how things are now, for it is a long time since I left home, as you know; the|D|oracle of Mopsus was in full force when I was there, and also that of Amphilochus. I can tell you of a very remarkable thing which happened to that of Mopsus, in my presence. The propraetor of Cilicia was himself still of two minds about religious questions; from the weakness of his scepticism, I imagine, for his general character was violent and bad; but he had about him certain Epicureans, professed mockers at all such things on the strength of their fine physiology. He sent in a freedman, equipping him like a spy going into an enemy’s land, with sealed tablets inside which was written the question, but no one knew what it was. The man spent a night in the|E|sanctuary, as the custom was, and went to sleep. The following day he reported a dream, which was this. He thought that a handsome man stood over him, and said the one word “Black”, nothing more, and went straight away. This appeared to us strange, and caused much perplexity. However, that propraetor was struck with consternation, and worshipped; then he opened the tablets and showed us this question written inside: “Shall I sacrifice a white bull or a black?” Even the Epicureans|F|were confounded at this, and he himself completed his sacrifice, and ever afterwards held Mopsus in reverence.’

XLVI. After saying this, Demetrius was silent. As I wished to bring the discussion to a head, I glanced again at Philippusand Ammonius, who were sitting together. They appeared to me to wish to exchange some remarks, and again paused. Then Ammonius spoke: ‘Philippus has also something to say on our past discussion; his own view, as that of most people, is that Apollo is not a different God from the sun, but the same.|435|My own difficulty is a greater one, and turns on greater matters. Just now we managed to let the argument take its own way with due solemnity, to transfer prophetic art simply from Gods to daemons. But now it seems to me that we are thrusting the latter out in their turn, chasing them hence from oracle and tripod, and resolving the origin—I would rather say the existence and power—of prophecy into winds, and vapours, and exhalations. What we have heard about temperatures, and|B|heatings and sharpenings, withdraws no doubt the credit from the Gods, but thereby suggests the inference as to cause which the Cyclops in Euripides[193]draws:

The earth by force, whether it will or no,Bringing forth grass, fattens my flocks and hinds.

The earth by force, whether it will or no,

Bringing forth grass, fattens my flocks and hinds.

Only he says that he does not sacrifice to Gods,

but to myself,And this great belly first of deities,

but to myself,

And this great belly first of deities,

whereas we sacrifice and pray to get our oracles; and why do we do it, if souls carry within themselves a power of prophecy, which power is stirred up by temperature of some sort in air or breeze? And then the condition of the priestesses, what does|C|that mean, and the refusal to respond unless the whole victim from the hoof-joint up be set quivering when it is sprinkled? For it is not enough, as in other sacrifices, for it to shake the head, the shivering must be in all the parts, and with a tremulous sound; otherwise they tell you that the oracle is not giving responses, and do not bring in the Pythia. Now, if theyascribe the cause mainly to a God or daemon, it is reasonable to do and think thus, but on your view it is not reasonable. For the exhalation, if it be there, will produce the transport whether the sacrifice quiver or not, and will affect the soul,|D|not only of the Pythia, but equally of any chance comer who has physical contact with it. Thus it is mere folly to employ one woman only for the oracles, and to take trouble to keep her chaste and holy all her life. For that Coretas who fell in, as the Delphians tell you, and was the first to make evident the virtue of the place, was in no respect different, as I think, from the other goatherds and shepherds, always supposing that this is not a story and an idle fiction, which I think it is. Then, when I reckon up the great benefits of which this oracle has been the cause to the Greeks, in wars, in the founding of cities, in|E|times of pestilence and of failure of crops, I think it dreadful to ascribe its discovery and origin, not to God and Providence, but to Chance and automatic causes. It is this point’, he added, ‘that I want Lamprias to argue; will you not wait?’ ‘Indeed I will,’ said Philippus, ‘and so will the others, the discussion has stirred us all.’

XLVII. I turned to him. ‘Stirred us, Philippus? It has confounded me, to think that before so large and so grave a company I should seem so to forget my years as with a show of plausible rhetoric to upset and disturb any view about religion which is established in truth and holiness. I will|F|defend myself by producing Plato, as witness and advocate in one. Plato[194]found fault with old Anaxagoras because he attached himself too much to physical causes, and because, in his constant pursuit of the working of necessary law in all which affects bodies, he dismissed the better causes or principles, the Final and the Efficient. He himself, first of the philosophers or more than any of them, went into both sets, attributing to God the origin of all things which are according to reason, but|436|refusing to deprive matter of the causes necessary for their production; he recognized that in some such way the whole sensible universe is organized, yet is not pure nor free from admixture, but has its origin in matter involved with reason. Now look at this first in the case of the artists. Take, for instance, the famous base or stand, called by Herodotus[195]“cup-stand”, of the bowl here; it had its physical causes, iron, steel, fire to soften and water to temper it, without all which the object could not possibly be produced; but the more potent principle|B|which stirred the others and was working through them, was furnished to it by Art and Reason. Now the name of the maker or artificer has been inscribed on these several figures or works of imitation:

Here Polygnotus, son of Aglaophon,The Thasian, painted towering Ilion’s sack.

Here Polygnotus, son of Aglaophon,

The Thasian, painted towering Ilion’s sack.

You may see it for yourself. But without pigments crushed and compounded it would be impossible to present such a composition to the eye. Does then the man who seeks to grasp the physical principle, investigating and laying down the effects and|C|the changes of a mixture of Sinopic red earth with yellow, or Melian gray with black, rob the painter of his glory? Or he who follows out the processes of tempering or softening steel, how it is weakened by fire and submits itself to be drawn and hammered, then, plunged into fresh water and compressed and densified by the cold, because of the softness and rarefication induced by the fire, acquires temper and consistence—“the iron’s might” Homer[196]calls it—does he any the less preserve for the artist his part in the causation? I think not! There|D|are those who criticize the properties of medical appliances; they do not overthrow the art of Medicine. As, for the matterof that, Plato[197]in proving that we see by means of the flash of our eyes mingling with that of the sun, and hear by the pulsations of the air, did not rule out the fact that we have received our sight and our hearing in accordance with Reason and Providence.

XLVIII. ‘The whole matter, as I maintain, stands thus. All becoming has two causes, of which the most ancient theologians and poets chose to turn their attention to the stronger only, pronouncing over all things the universal refrain:

Zeus first, Zeus middle, all things are of Zeus,[198]

while they never approached the necessary or physical causes. Their successors, called physicists, did the very reverse; they|E|strayed away from that beautiful and divine principle, and refer everything to bodies, and pulsations, and changes, and temperaments. Hence the systems of both are deficient; they have ignored or neglected, the latter the person through whom and the agent by whom, the former the things from which and the means through which. He who first distinctly grasped both, and attached by necessary law the subject affected to the rational Maker and Mover, relieves us as well as himself from any charge of contempt or detraction. We do not make|F|prophecy a godless or irrational thing, when we assign to it for its matter the soul of man, and for its instrument, or harp-quill, the inspiring current and the exhalation. For, in the first place, the earth which breeds the exhalations, and the sun who gives to earth all power of temperature or of change, are reckoned Gods in the traditions of our fathers. Further, in leaving daemons to preside over and guard this temperature, as though it were a melody, to relax the strings in due course|437|or to tighten, to clear away that excess of ecstasy and agitation which it causes in the worshippers, and to leave excitementa painless and harmless compound, we shall not be thought to do what is irrational or impossible.

XLIX. ‘Nor can we allow that in offering the previous sacrifice, or crowning the victim, or pouring on it lustral draughts, we do anything repugnant to this view. For when the priests and holy men sacrifice the victim, and sprinkle it, and watch its movement and its trembling, they do not profess to get from it an intimation of anything but the one fact that the God is giving answers. For the thing offered in sacrifice must be pure both in body and in soul, and free from any injury or taint. As to body, it is not very difficult to make|B|out visible proof; the test of soul is to offer corn to the bulls, pease to the he-goats; an animal which refuses is reckoned out of health. For the she-goat it is cold water; a soul in a normal state cannot be apathetic and motionless under the sprinkling. For my own part, even if it be certain that trembling is a sign that the God is ready to give responses, the contrary that he|C|is not, I see no disastrous consequence. As I said before, every natural force produces its result better or worse according to season; if the right season is escaping us, it is to be expected that the God should signify the fact.

L. ‘I think, further, that the exhalation is not always the same, it has times of relaxation and of intensity. In proof, I can bring forward witnesses, many of them strangers, and all the members of the temple staff. For the room in which they place consultants of the God, is, at intervals, which are not frequent or fixed, but come as it may happen, filled with fragrance and a sweet gale, such as the most costly spices might emit, which are thrown up, as out of a well, from the sanctuary.|D|We may suppose that they burst out by the action of heat or of some other force within. Or, if this does not seem to you convincing, you will at least grant that the Pythia herself appears to show at different times different states and moods ofthat part of the soul which is in contact with the current, and does not present throughout one temperament, like a melody which never changes. Many conscious troubles and excitements, more which are unnoticed, seize her body and stream on into the soul; and when she is charged with these, it is better for her not to go in, not to present herself to the God when she is not perfectly pure, like an instrument well strung and tuneful, but is passionate and disordered. Wine does not always affect|E|the hard drinker in the same way, nor the flute one susceptible to its music; the same men are stirred to tipsy revelling, now less now more, according to difference of temperament. The imaginative part of the soul seems, more than any other, to be controlled by variations in the body, and to change with it. This is clearly shown by dreams; sometimes we find ourselves among many visions of every sort in our sleep, at others again there is a perfect calm and relief from such illusions. We know|F|ourselves Cleon here of Daulia, who says that in the many years which he has lived he has never once seen a dream-vision. In an older generation the same is recorded of Thrasymedes of Heraea. The cause is bodily temperament, just as, on the other side, there is that of melancholic persons, all dreams and phantoms; although these are supposed to have the gift of dreaming right, for their imagination turns them this way or that,|438|just as those who shoot often, often hit.

LI. ‘When then the imaginative and prophetic faculty of the soul is attempered to the current as to a drug, the inspiration must be brought about in the persons who are to prophesy, when not, not; otherwise the result will be a distortion by no means free from trouble and disturbance, as we know was the case with the Pythia who lately died. A deputation came from abroad to consult the God; the victim remained motionless and impassive under the first sprinkling, then the priests in|B|excess of zeal persisted, and at last it did give in when drenchedwith their shower-bath. What happened to the Pythia? Unwillingly and with no alacrity, they say, she went down into the vault. In her very first answers she made it clear by the hoarseness of her voice that she could not bear up; she was like a ship driven by the wind, filled with a dumb bad spirit. At last she became all agitation; with a terrible cry she made towards the door of exit, and dashed against it, so that not only the members of the deputation fled, but also the prophet Nicander and the holy persons present. However, after a short|C|time, they went in and recovered her. She was then in her senses, and lived on for a few days. For these reasons, they keep the person of the Pythia free from intercourse, and from any sort of communication or contact with strangers; and they take the signs before proceeding to the oracle, thinking that it is quite clear to the God when she has the temperament and condition which will allow her to undergo the inspiration with impunity. For the force of the exhaled air does not affect all persons, nor the same persons always in the same way; it only provides fuel, a foundation, as has been explained, for|D|those who are fit to be subjected to the change. It is essentially divine and daemonic, not however exempt from failure, or destruction, or age, nor is it capable of enduring through that infinite space of time in which all things between moon and earth are exhausted, according to our theory. Some go on to say that the things also which are above the moon do not endure, but fail in presence of the eternal infinite, and suffer abrupt changes and new births.

LII. ‘These things’, I continued, ‘I commend to your repeated consideration, and my own, as offering many openings for objection and many suggestions of an opposite view, which the present opportunity does not allow us to follow out in their|E|entirety. Let them stand over then, and also the problem raised by Philippus about the sun and Apollo.’

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