Balaam
Balaam (Fast Facts)
• Stories about Balaam occur in Numbers 22-24.
• He is the son of Beor and a prophet in Pethor near the Euphrates River.
• Scholars are not sure of the meaning of his name.
• Some think it might mean either “glutton” or “foreigner.”
• Others see a compound of “Bel” and “Am.” Both are names of deities.
• It could mean “lord.”
• The king of Moab, Balak, sends messengers to Balaam asking him to pronounce a curse upon the Israelites as they are moving toward settling in the Promised Land.
• The messengers take money to pay Balaam a divination fee.
• Balaam invites them to spend the night; he intends to consult with the Lord and will give them his answer in the morning.
• God comes to Balaam and asks about the men with him.
• Balaam tells God about the request from Balak, the king of Moab.
• God tells Balaam not to go back with them. He tells Balaam not to curse the Israelites “because they are blessed.”
• The following day, Balaam tells the messengers to go home and that the Lord has refused to let him accompany them.
• Balak sends more important messengers in an attempt to change Balaam’s mind.
• Balaam says, “Even if Balak gives me all the silver and gold in his palace, I could not do anything…beyond the command of the Lord my God.”
• Nonetheless, he invites them to spend the night while he again talks to the Lord.
• God tells him he can go that night, but he must only do what God instructs.
• The following day Balaam saddles his donkey and goes with the officials.
• God, however, is upset with his decision.
• On the way, Balaam’s donkey sees an angel of the Lord standing in the road with its sword drawn.
• The donkey turns off the road, and Balaam beats it to get it back on the road.
• Then the angel appears in a narrow passageway.
• In order to avoid the angel, the donkey presses close to one side, crushing Balaam’s foot.
• Balaam again beats the donkey.
• The angel appears again, wholly blocking their path.
• The donkey lies down.
• Balaam beats it again.
• Then the Lord opens the donkey’s mouth, and it speaks to Balaam, “Why have you beat me three times?”
• Balaam answers the donkey, saying he has made a fool of him, and threatens to kill him.
• The donkey asks Balaam if he has ever done this before.
• Balaam says “no,” and sees the angel standing before them at that moment.
• The angel tells Balaam that the donkey has saved his life.
• Balaam offers to return home, but the angel repeats the words of the Lord.
• “Go with these men, but speak only what you are told.”
• When he arrives, Balaam asks Balak to build seven altars. They sacrifice a bull and a ram on each altar.
• Then Balaam goes off to await a message from the Lord.
• The Lord meets with him and gives him a message for Balak: “How can I curse those whom God has not cursed?”
• Balak is very angry.
• They go to another spot where they can see the Israelites camped.
• Balak again asks him to curse them, and they build more altars and make more sacrifices.
• Balaam goes aside to await word from the Lord.
• The Lord tells him, “There can be no divination against Jacob, no evil omens.”
• Everything is repeated a third time.
• Balaam received the spirit of the Lord and pronounced a blessing upon Jacob.
• Then Balak’s anger burns against Balaam; he tells him to go home and refuses to pay him.
• Balaam speaks more prophecies, prophesying that the Israelites will defeat the Canaanite nations.
Introduction
Balaam, a non-Israelite prophet described in chapters 22–24 of the Book of Numbers, the fourth book of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), as a mystic who is pestered by Balak, king of Moab, to place a curse on the people of Israel, who are camped menacingly on the plains of Moab. Balaam states that he will utter only what God, Yahweh, inspires, but he is willing to accompany the Moabite messengers to Balak. He is met en route by an angel of Yahweh, who is recognized only by Balaam’s donkey, which refuses to continue. Then Balaam’s eyes are opened, and the angel permits him to go to Balak but commands him not to curse but to bless Israel. Despite pressure from Balak, Balaam remains faithful to Yahweh and blesses the people of Israel. In later literature (specifically, the Second Letter of Peter 2:15), however, Balaam is held up as an example of one who apostatized for the sake of material gain.
Balaam with angel and donkey, copperplate engraving.
Introduction
Book of Numbers, Hebrew
The book is the sacred history of the Israelites as they wandered in the wilderness following the departure from Sinai and before their occupation of Canaan, the Promised Land. It describes their sufferings and their numerous complaints against God. The people are depicted as faithless and rebellious, and God as one who provides for and sustains his people.
These accounts continue the story of God’s promise that the Israelites will inhabit the land of Canaan. The story, begun in Genesis and continued in Exodus and Leviticus, does not reach its conclusion until Israel successfully occupies the Promised Land. As the books now stand, the promise is fulfilled in the Book of Joshua. Many scholars have thus maintained that the first six books of the Old Testament form a literary unit, of which Numbers is an integral part. At one time, Numbers may have contained an account of the occupation of Canaan that was dropped when the Tetrateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers) was joined to other historical books of the Old Testament.
Occultism
Occultism, various theories and practices involving a belief in and knowledge or use of supernatural forces or beings. Such beliefs and practices—principally magical or divinatory—have occurred in all human societies throughout recorded history, with considerable variations both in their nature and in the attitude of societies toward them. In the West, occultism has acquired intellectually and morally *pejorative overtones that do not obtain in other societies where the practices and beliefs concerned do not run counter to the prevailing worldview.
*Pejorative. A pejorative or slur is a word or grammatical form expressing a negative or a disrespectful connotation, a low opinion, or a lack of respect toward someone or something. It is also used to express criticism, hostility, or disregard. Sometimes, a term is regarded as pejorative in some social or ethnic groups but not in others, or may be originally pejorative but later adopt a non-pejorative sense in some or all contexts.
Occult practices center on the presumed ability of the practitioner to manipulate natural laws for his own or his client’s benefit; such practices tend to be regarded as evil only when they also involve the breaking of ethical laws. Some anthropologists have argued that it is not possible to make a clear-cut distinction between magic—a principal component of occultism—and religion, and this may well be true of the religious systems of some nonliterate societies. However, the argument does not hold for any significant religions, which regard both natural and moral law as immutable.
Those aspects of occultism that appear to be familiar to all human societies—Divination, magic, witchcraft, and alchemy—are treated in depth below. Features that are unique to Western cultures, and the history of their development, are treated only briefly.
The Western tradition of occultism, as popularly conceived, is of an ancient “secret philosophy” underlying all occult practices. This personal philosophy derives ultimately from Hellenistic magic and pseudoscience on the one hand and from Jewish mysticism. The principal Hellenistic source is the Corpus Hermeticum, the texts associated with Hermes Trismegistos, which are concerned with astrology, other occult sciences, and spiritual regeneration.
The Jewish element is supplied by the Kabbala (the doctrine of a secret, mystical interpretation of the Torah), which had been familiar to scholars in Europe since the Middle Ages, and which was linked with the Hermetic texts during the Renaissance. The resulting Hermetic-Kabbalistic tradition, known as Hermetism, incorporated both theory and magical practice. The latter presented as natural, and thus good, magic, in contrast to the evil magic of sorcery or witchcraft.
Alchemy was also absorbed into the body of Hermetism, and this link was strengthened in the early 17th century with the appearance of Rosicrucianism, an alleged secret brotherhood that utilized alchemical symbolism and taught secret wisdom to its followers, creating spiritual alchemy that survived the rise of empirical science and enabled Hermetism to pass unscathed into the period of the Enlightenment.
During the 18th century, the tradition was taken up by esoterically inclined Freemasons who could not find an occult philosophy within Freemasonry. These enthusiasts persisted, both as individual students of Hermetism and, in continental Europe, as groups of occult practitioners, into the 19th century, when the growth of religious skepticism led to increased rejection of orthodox religion by the educated and a consequent search for salvation by other means—including occultism.
However, those interested turned to new forms of occultism rather than to the Hermetic tradition: on the one hand to Spiritualism—the practice of alleged regular communication between the living and the spirits of the dead through a living “medium”—and on the other to Theosophy—a blend of Western occultism and Eastern mysticism that proved to be a most effective propagator of occultism but whose influence has declined markedly over the last 50 years.
Indeed, despite the 19th-century revival, occult ideas have failed to gain acceptance in academic circles. However, they have occasionally influenced the work of significant artists, such as the poet William Butler Yeats and the painter Wassily Kandinsky, and occultism in Europe and North America seems destined to remain the province of popular culture.
Divination
Divination is the practice of determining the hidden significance or cause of events, sometimes foretelling the future, using various natural, psychological, and other techniques. Found in all ancient and modern civilizations, it is encountered most frequently in contemporary mass society in the form of horoscopes, astrology, crystal gazing, tarot cards, and the Ouija board.
In the context of ancient Roman culture and belief, Divination was concerned with discovering the gods' will. However, scholars no longer restrict the word to the root meaning. Divinatory practices and the beliefs undergirding them are more significant in scope than discerning the gods' will and the fatalistic view of the human condition that inspired so much of early Mediterranean religious thought.
In some societies, Divination is a practice many persons frequently resort to, but never in terms of discovering the gods' will. The idea of a divine providence controlling human affairs in such societies is unusual, although humbler spirits are often thought to intervene in troublesome ways. While Divination is most commonly practiced in the modern Western world in horoscopic astrology, other forms were and continue to be of equal importance for other cultures.
Nature and significance
Divination is universally concerned with practical problems, private or public, and seeks information upon which practical decisions can be made. However, the source of such information is not conceived as mundane, and the technique of getting it is necessarily fanciful. The mantic (divinatory) arts are many, and a broad understanding can emerge only from a survey of actual practices in various cultural settings. However, a short definition may be offered as an introductory guide: Divination is the effort to gain information of a mundane sort by means conceived of as transcending the mundane.
Though the act of Divination is attended by respect and the participants' attitude in the divinatory act may be religious, the subject of Divination (like that of magic) is ephemeral—e.g., an illness, a worrisome portent, a lost object. Divination is a consultative institution, and the matter posed to a diviner may range from a query about a few lost coins to high questions of state. That of the diviner usually matches the casual or solemn nature of the matter in terms of attitude, technique, and style. Where the diviner is a private practitioner, the elaborateness of the procedure may be reflected in the fee. In contrast to the worldly motives of some diviners, the calling of diviner-priest was seen by the ancient Etruscans in Italy and the Maya in Mexico as sacred; his concern was for the very destiny of his people. Divination has many rationales, and it is difficult to describe the diviner as a distinctive social type. He or she may be a shaman (private curer employing psychic techniques; see shamanism), a priest, a peddler of sorcery medicines, or a holy person who speaks almost with the voice of prophecy. To appreciate the significance of the diviner’s art in any culture or era, one must be familiar with prevailing beliefs about man and the world. In Christian times Europe has moved from a horror of necromancy (conceived not as consultation with a ghost but as a literal “raising of the dead”) to an amused tolerance (among the educated) of spiritism as a sort of parlor game. To assert that European religious beliefs have remained the same throughout the Common Era would be to ignore the impact of modern science and secularization. On the other hand, to suppose that Divination has been doomed by science and secularism would be to ignore the continuing popularity of astrology and recurrent fashions for other mantic disciplines—and perhaps to misjudge the security of “modern” beliefs.
The structure of Divination
The extent to which a practice such as Divination should be called a corollary of the beliefs entailed and the extent to which the opposite might be true (i.e., the beliefs deriving from the practice as an after-the-fact explanation) is difficult to ascertain. Among the great cultures, the Chinese tradition has given the broadest scope to Divination; yet there is no single Chinese religious cosmology, or theory on the ordering of the world, comparable to those of the Mayan, Sanskritic (Hindu), or Judeo-Christian traditions, from which the variety of popular practice can be seen to derive. Sometimes, as with the flourishing business of astrology in Christian countries since the Renaissance, the metaphysical (transcendent) presuppositions of mantic practice may have been muted to minimize conflict with official religious and scientific doctrines. Generally, however, the philosophical underpinnings of Divination need not be deep or well worked out. However, where they are, they will afford clues to fundamental beliefs about man and visible or invisible nature. Some traditions of Divination—such as astrology, geomancy (Divination employing figures or lines), or the Chinese divinatory disciplines—are so old and established that it is virtually impossible to discover their original contexts. Over the centuries, such practices have survived many changes and have become perennial attempts to answer recurring questions about the human condition.
Established long ago in the hieratic (priestly) discipline of primitive theocracies, this tradition still marks the specialists who worked out its systematic techniques. Since the practice is now observed only as folk or popular tradition, it would be rash to suppose that any legitimate philosophical tradition undergirding Divination survives. Only in the case of the, I Ching, the Chinese “Classic of Changes,” has scholarly commentaries of any tremendous intellectual substance accumulated over the millennia. Systematic studies of geomancy are recent, and the literature of astrology is as perishable as it is massive. Babylonian astrology, from which later forms are derived, arose in an agrarian Mesopotamian civilization concerned with the vicissitudes of nature and the affairs of the state. The mercantile, seafaring, and individualistic Greeks absorbed the mantic system of the collectivistic floodplain civilization of Mesopotamia, elaborated on it by adding the horoscopic discipline and transmitted it through Hellenistic, Egyptian, and Islamic science to Europe. In the course of this transformation, a two-way relationship between a society’s view of the world and its system may be seen. Various priests and scholars have made their contributions to the system. However, there also is a clear correspondence between the general character of a culture and the uses it finds for Divination. The worldview implicit in the divination system itself may reflect the historical rather than the current context of use. It requires only practical understanding to consult an Ouija board or use a forked stick to decide where to drill for water. Hence, people of very different beliefs may adopt the same practices. A complete correspondence between practice and belief can be expected only where both have developed in the same cultural context. Where much of the popularity of mantic art derives from its “exotic” flavor, its symbolism may be little understood. However, by its very nature, Divination tends to develop as a discipline, becoming the tradition of an organized body of specialists. This is because of the means to which diviners must resort generally set them apart. That is the case even among such peoples as the Zande of the Nile-Congo divide in Africa, where the resort to Divination is frequent, and the most common techniques utilized are recognized to be within the competence of ordinary individuals. Divination Few societies are as enthusiastically given to Divination as the Zande, who routinely employ it to explore their thoughts and who will not consider any important undertakings without oracular confirmation in advance. Among the Zande, the ordinary person could be considered a divinatory specialist. Elsewhere, Divination is reserved for extraordinary crises, and a recognized expert must be consulted to guarantee an accurate answer.
Types of Divination
As schools of dramatic art range from those relying on precise technique to those teaching intuitive identification with a role, mantic skills range from the mechanical to the inspirational but most often combine both skills in a unique, dramatically coherent format. The comparative study of divinatory practices is at least as old as the 1st-century-BC Roman orator and politician Cicero’s treatise De divinatione (Concerning Divination), and the convenient distinction there drawn between inductive and intuitive forms designates the range. An intermediate class, interpretive Divination, allows a less rigid classification, since many divinatory disciplines do not rely strongly either upon inductive rigor or upon trance and possession.
Inductive Divination presupposes a determinative procedure, apparently free from mundane control, yielding unambiguous decisions or predictions. The reading of the “eight characters” of a Chinese boy and girl before arranging a marriage—the year, month, day, and hour of birth of the two persons to be betrothed—illustrates this class of procedures. The “characters” are all predetermined by the accidents of birth date and hour, and it is supposed that all proper diviners would come to the same conclusions about them.
Interpretive Divination requires the combination of the correct procedure with the unique gift of insight that sets a diviner apart. The contemporary Mayan diviner of Guatemala, seeking to diagnose an illness, will carefully pass several eggs over the patient’s body to draw into them an essence of the affliction. The intact contents are then collected in water, and the diviner withdraws into a darkened corner to bend over the receptacle and read the signs of the eggs. His recitation then interprets the origin and nature of the disease.
Intuitive Divination presupposes extraordinary gifts of insight or the ability to communicate with beings in an extramundane sphere. The “Shaking Tent” rite of the Algonquians of Canada illustrates the use of uncanny phenomena to lend credence to a mediumistic performance. The diviner, bound and cloaked, is no sooner placed in his barrel-shaped tent than the tent begins to shake with astonishing vigor and to fill the air with monstrous noises, and this continues with significant effect until, all of a sudden, the communicating spirit makes its presence known from within the tent and undertakes to answer questions. It is difficult to explain the phenomena of spirit possession as products of deliberate instruction.
The cosmological and psychological conditioning that affects divinatory practices within a cultural tradition will similarly influence all its religious practices. The Greeks tended to the intuitive, or “oracular,” style, and the Etruscans, in contrast, elaborated upon the more systematic but less versatile inductive practice of Mesopotamia—developing an authoritative state religion in which the ruling class monopolized the positions. Greek Divination was eccentric in that sanctuaries were located apart from the centers of political power (see oracle); the Etruscan system, on the other hand, was concentric, focused at the summit itself. Rome eclectically incorporated Greek and Etruscan elements, such as the ecstatic cult and the expert “reading” of livers—i.e., haruspicy. Rome, however, never allowed Divination to become the central preoccupation of society as it had been for Etruria, nor did it become an autonomous force in society as it had been for the Greeks. In this, Rome represented a balance that is more congenial to modern Western thought. Throughout the ancient Mediterranean world, with the notable exception of Egypt, Divination was tied to expiration and sacrifice: fate was perceived as dire but not quite implacable, and the function of Divination was to foresee calamity to forestall it. The religion centers on expiation and sacrifice in trans-Saharan Africa, and Divination is a pivotal institution, but the Mediterranean notion of fate is not developed. Instead, a person's trouble is attributed to witchcraft, sorcery, or ancestral vexation—all of which are believed to be arbitrary and morally undeserved. Divination is employed to discover the source of trouble to remove it, whether by sacrifice, counter sorcery, or accusation and ordeal. However, the mind is turned to past events or hidden motives of the present time, and not to the future—that would be to borrow trouble.
The function of Divination
The function of Divination needs to be understood in its motivational context. It is not enough to say that information won from the diviner serves to allay uncertainty, locate blame, or overcome misfortune. Divination is motivated by the fact that information will please a client, whether spurious or genuine. Unless one assumes that the information is usually accurate, one would expect clients to be displeased and subsequently skeptical. A careful assessment of the kinds of information that divinatory systems are required to yield is thus in order. The two main kinds are general information about the future and specific information about the past as it bears upon the future.
The first kind of information is yielded by horoscopic Divination. It is usually so general that it cannot be tested appropriately. If such information were precise, the prediction could interfere with its fulfillment, acting as a warning or breeding overconfidence. The other information demanded from diviners is specific enough to be tested and often is, but testing a particular diviner’s competence is seldom seen as putting the institution to the test. Indeed, it is common in trans-Saharan societies for a troubled client to consult a series of diviners until one of them seems convincing. Again, many divination systems have a double-check built into them: the question is posed first in the positive and then in the negative, and the oracle must (obviously without manipulation) answer consistently. The chances are that any oracle will fail to do so, yet the credibility of such oracles seems not to be lost. Technically, this means that false information can be given without weakening the client’s belief in the source. Early students of divinatory practice concluded that clients must be gullible, superstitious, illogical, or even “prelogical”—i.e., culturally immature. Ethnographic studies do not confirm this, suggesting instead that what a client seeks from the diviner is information to confidently act and, thus, public credibility for that course of action. Consistent with this motive, the client should set aside any finding that would seem to lead to doubtful action and continue the consultations until they suggest a course that can be taken with confidence. The diviner’s findings are judged pragmatically.
Clients seek out a diviner when they are unsure how to behave—when there is an illness, drought, death, or the fear of death; when there is suspicion of malevolence, theft, or breach of faith; when dreams or other symptoms are disturbing or the signs of the time seem bad. Divination serves the purpose of circumscription, marking out and delimiting the area of concern: the nature of the crisis is defined, the source of anxiety is named. The concern becomes an allegation, bafflement decision. The diviner may function as a stage manager, speeding up the action, rejecting false moves in advance, or indicating the secret fear or the hidden motive. The divinatory practice is a recognized resource; the individual who ignores it is considered arbitrary, and one who heeds it needs no further justification. In this sense, the ultimate function of Divination is the legitimation of difficult decisions.
Varieties of Divination
Because the dramatic effect is essential, Divination takes many forms and employs a wealth of devices. In a general way, it may be said that inductive Divination employs nonhuman phenomena, either artificial or natural, as signs that can be unambiguously read. The prime condition is that the signs appear to be genuine, not manipulated. Interpretive Divination commonly combines the use of nonhuman phenomena with human action, employing devices so complex, subtle, or fluid that the unique gifts of the diviner seem required if the meaning is to be known. It is here that Divination takes its most characteristically dramatic forms. Intuitive Divination usually places little reliance upon artificial trappings, except for dramatic effect. Excellent performers may exhibit gifts that in a different context would have made them compelling actors, writers, or political leaders. Where diviners can produce other voices, they can generate the impression that the gods or spirits speak.
Inductive Divination
Speculating that inductive Divination from natural phenomena must be very old—i.e., it arose from an early intimate acquaintance with nature—is tempting but inaccurate. In fact, there is little evidence that preliterate peoples viewed nature as a system, and this is particularly true concerning astral observation. Divination from the skies is preeminent with the future but presupposes a concern with cycles of time and history. Quite distinctive attitudes were taken toward the celestial clock by the ancient Mayan astronomers and those of Mesopotamia, and distinct. However, related forms of astrology were developed in the Western, Indian, and Chinese civilizations. However, the relation between astrology and scientific astronomy is quite apparent, and the two “sciences” were inseparable in the West until early modern times.
Associated with the observation of the heavens is the reading of signs in the weather and the movement of birds. The interpretation of lightning as a decipherable message from the gods—not simply as an outburst of divine anger—was brought to the level of pseudoscience by the Etruscans. Being suited to less exact observation, Winds and clouds invited interpretive rather than inductive Divination. Weather phenomena were also conceived of as having a special status relative to humanity. Rain, drought, and natural disasters are forces that people seek not simply to read but to control. Nonetheless, Hindu scripture discusses the art of interpreting “castles in the air”—celestial cities seen in towering clouds.
Augury, the art of interpreting omens, attempts to discover divine will in phenomena of animate nature. In Mesopotamia, augury was associated with sacrifice and perhaps developed from it. As the priests watched the rising smoke to divine the answer to a ritual query, they observed the movement of birds as auspicious or inauspicious. As a further augury, the viscera of the sacrificial victim were examined, particularly the liver, which (rather than the heart) was conceived as the vital center. The discipline of augury mapped cosmic space with the sacrificial altar at the center, and each sector was assigned a definite meaning. Every event in the heavens could thus be charted and pondered. Similarly, haruspicy, the study of the liver, was developed by mapping it as a microcosm and reading it as one may read the palm.
Inductive Divination from nature is associated with the reading of artificially contrived events, such as the movement of sacrificial smoke, the fall of an arrow shot upward, or the cast of dice or lots. A much-used natural-artificial technique consists of braising bone or shell to produce a system of signs. Scapulimancy—Divination from a fire-cracked shoulder blade—was widespread in North America and Eurasia. The related but more elaborate Chinese technique of tortoiseshell divination was inspired by the idea of equating the carapace (back) and ventral (lower) shell with their view of a rounded sky over the flat earth. Only the “earth” was inscribed and heated to produce signs. In general, however, artificial systems of signs are likely to be manipulatory, as they will be used artfully by the professional diviner—and in such cases, interpretive techniques have to be taken into account.
Interpretive Divination
Interpretive Divination involves, in the main, the reading of portents, omens, or prodigies. To the scientifically minded, no event is without a cause. However, random events occur in an ordered world, and such events are subject to various interpretations. Manipulated events are an element of interpretive Divination, but the less active forms depend on projection, introjection, and free association and thus are associated, to some degree, with intuitive techniques.
Pyromancy (Divination by fire) may be highly dramatic in a society dependent on fire for nighttime light and safety. In some trans-Saharan societies, the diviner may test an accusation at a séance around the fire, which will explode upon the “guilty” one. Elsewhere, objects may be overtly cast into the fire, and signs read in the reaction. Hydromancy (Divination by water) is usually less dramatic, ranging from the reading of reflections in a shallow surface, in the manner of the crystal gazer, to construing the movements of floating objects, as in the reading of tea leaves.
A range of related mantic practices may be grouped under the terms cleromancy, or Divination by lots, and geomancy, which may involve casting objects upon a map or a figure drawn on the ground. Cleromantic practices in trans-Saharan Africa may rely on the supposedly magical—or indeed horrifying—qualities of objects in the diviner’s bag or basket. When they are thrown, the proximity of one piece to another—for example, a dried bit of intestine from a murdered child and a man-eating animal’s tooth—may be regarded as having meaning, or the position of a particular piece at the center or apart from the others may be picked out. Often, the diviner must first prove his ability by discovering the client’s problem through a line of patter accompanying the throws—suggesting this, questioning that, leaping from one matter to another—until the client's reactions betray an interest. At this point, the diviner may be said to introject ideas and attitudes, while the lots act for the diviner and client alike as a projective device, the meaning of which is only half-formed in the objective pattern cast. A far more elaborate practice is the geomancy of West Africa, in which elegant equipment is combined with impressive erudition in a séance in which lots are used to select verses, wherein the client is expected to find answers. The nature of the lots employed, the number lore on which the selection of verses is based, and the verses themselves are entirely distinct from their counterparts in the Chinese yarrow (an herb with finely dissected leaves) tradition embodied in the I Ching. However, the general equivalence of the two elaborations is noteworthy. The parallel has perhaps been obscured by using the term geomancy in China and elsewhere to signify only a specialized art by which propitious locations are selected.
Sometimes a diviner can interpret signs so characteristic of a client that the practice falls between interpretive and intuitive arts. Somatomancy, or body divination, is interpretive in most forms, whether in China or the West, though the employed sign system comprises personal attributes of the client’s physique. Examples are phrenology, which employs features of the head that are usually unnoticed, and the reading of moles, where the body is treated as a microcosm bearing astrological signs. However, oneiromancy, dream interpretation, employs explicitly psychic phenomena; in this case, the diviner may be said to assist the intuition of meaning by the client as often as to introject. The Ojibwa and Bella Coola people of North America were characteristically preoccupied with the meanings of their dreams.
Intuitive Divination
The prototype of the intuitive diviner is the shaman or curer who uses trance states. These are achieved idiopathically (i.e., arising spontaneously) or induced by drugs or autokinetic (self-energized) techniques, such as hand trembling among the Navajo. As a mantic art, trance is associated with oracular utterance and spirit possession. An impressive performance will represent the actual voice of a god or spirit addressing the client directly, and Divination in this mode is known from diverse religious traditions, including Christianity. The idea that the gods may be importuned to speak on temporal human concern seems to be very ancient. In early Egypt, incubation was practiced—i.e., sleeping in the temple inspired by the resident God. The idea behind Mayan maiden sacrifice was the same: some maidens were cast into a sacred cenote, or deep well, and those who survived after some hours were brought back to recite the messages received during their ordeal—a virtual enactment of the journey into the underworld. As oracular utterance became regular, special techniques or contraptions were developed to make God’s image show assent or denial or amplify the sound of an unseen priest’s voice. In nomadic societies today, however, the diviner may still achieve personal authority by passing into a trance before his fellows, trembling and speaking “as if possessed”—that is, as if his spirit had ceased to inhabit his body and had been replaced by another.
Related to belief in possession is the conviction that malevolent persons are essentially unlike innocent, though not outward. When a test is devised for discovering malevolence, commonly conceived of as witchcraft or as a nonhuman force disguising itself in human form, the test takes the form of an ordeal. This may demonstrate invulnerability to harm, the presence of blessed qualities being viewed as inconsistent with malevolence; among the many types of the ordeal are walking on coals and retrieving an object from boiling liquid. The ordeal may even involve death: in the ordeal by water, a witch was expected to float and be spared for burning, but an innocent person would be accepted by the water and drown. In trans-Saharan poison ordeals, the innocent person is expected to survive.
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Intuitive Divination may also be a wholly private affair. A Roman might hear a warning from the gods in a piece of conversation; the Aztec might discern a portent in an animal’s howl. A Native American who sought a private vision through isolation, self-mutilation, and fasting would preserve the memory of that vision throughout life, turning to it as his unique guardian spirit.
Divination at the end of the 20th century
The immense popularity of horoscopes in the urban West today illustrates the almost exclusive concern with individual fortune-telling that characterizes Divination in a mobile and competitive mass society. Chiromancy, tarot (fortune-telling) cards, and crystal gazing represent respectively body divination, cleromancy (Divination by lots), and trancelike performance in styles suitable for what might be called a half-serious attempt to learn one’s fate. Necromancy, in its modern spiritualist form, represents a slightly more serious and sustained effort to establish contact with extramundane beings. But astrology, in its various popular forms, is the form of Divination best suited to mass consumption, since it is based on a well-articulated body of lore, touches matters of high destiny as well as individual fortune, and “personalizes” its advice without the client having to be interviewed. On the other hand, the more obscure mantic arts appeal to discipline—an individual may enter into the lore profoundly and make it a part of a personal worldview. Study of the I ching for divinatory purposes can involve this sort of commitment.
prophecy
ARTICLE
• Introduction
• Nature and significance
• Types of prophecy
• Prophecy in the ancient Middle East and Israel
o The ancient Middle East
o Origins and development of Hebrew prophecy
o Prophecy and apocalyptic literature
o Prophecy and prophetic religion in postbiblical Judaism
• Prophecy in Christianity
o Divination and prophecy in the Hellenistic world
o New Testament and early Christianity
o Prophetic and millenarian movements in later Christianity
• Prophecy in Islam
o The centrality of prophecy in Islam
o The Qur?anic doctrines of prophecy
o Later theological and philosophical doctrines
o Prophetic figures after Muhammad
• Prophecy in other religions
o Prophetic movements and figures in the Eastern religions
o Prophetic movements and figures in the religions of nonliterate cultures
Prophecy, in religion, is a divinely inspired revelation or interpretation. Although prophecy is perhaps most commonly associated with Judaism and Christianity, it is found throughout the world's religions, both ancient and modern.
In its narrower sense, the term prophet (Greek prophetes, “foreteller”) refers to an inspired person who believes that his God has sent him with a message to tell. He is, in that sense, the mouthpiece of his God. In a broader sense, the word can refer to anybody who utters the will of a deity, often ascertained through visions, dreams, or the casting of lots; the will of the deity also may be spoken in a liturgical setting. The prophet, thus, is often associated with the priest, the shaman (a religious figure in tribal societies who functions as a healer, diviner, and possessor of psychic powers), the diviner (the foreteller), and the mystic.
Types of prophecy
Types of prophecy can be classified based on inspiration, behavior, and office. Divinatory prophets include seers, oracle givers, soothsayers, and diviners, all of whom predict the future or tell the divine will in oracular statements by means of instruments, dreams, telepathy, clairvoyance, or visions received in the frenzied state of ecstasy. However, predictions and foretellings may also be the result of inspiration or of common sense by the intelligent observation of situations and events, albeit interpreted from a religious point of view.
Of broad importance to the religious community is the cult prophet, or priest-prophet. Under the mandate of the cult, the priest-prophet (who may be an ordinary priest) is part of the priestly staff of a sanctuary, and his duty is to pronounce the divine oracular word at the appropriate point in a liturgy. As such, he is an “institutional” prophet. The difference between a cult prophet and a prophet in the classical sense is that the latter has always experienced a divine call, whereas the cult prophet, pronouncing the word of the deity under cultic mandate, repeats his messages at a particular moment in the ritual. Because of the timeless character of cultic activity, however, every time he prophesies, his message is regarded as new.
Missionary (or apostolic) prophets are those who maintain that the religious truth revealed to them is unique to themselves alone. Such prophets acquire a following of disciples who accept that their teachings reveal the true religion. The result of that kind of prophetic action may lead to a new religion, as in the cases of Zarathustra, Jesus, and Muhammad. The founders of many modern religious sects also should be included in this type.
Another type of prophet is of the reformative or revolutionary kind (looking to the past and the future), closely related to the restorative or purificatory type (looking to the past as the ideal). The best examples are the classical prophets from the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament); e.g., Amos and Jeremiah. Many of those so-called literary prophets were working to reform the religion of Yahweh, attempting to free it from its Canaanite heritage and accretions. In the Arab world Muhammad is included in this category. The social sympathy found among such prophets is rooted in their religious conscience. What may have been preached as religious reform, therefore, often took on the form of social reform. This kind of prophecy is also found in India and Africa, where prophets in modern times have arisen to restore or purify the old tribal religious forms, as well as the customs and laws that had their sources in the older precolonial religious life. Many of those movements became revolutionary not only by force of logic but also by force of social and political pressure (see eschatology).
Though there may be several categories of prophecy according to scholars, no sharp line of demarcation differentiates among these different types. Any given prophet may be both predictive and missionary, ecstatic as well as reformative.
Prophecy in the ancient Middle East and Israel
The ancient Middle East
In ancient Egypt, charismatic prophecy apparently was not commonplace, if it occurred at all, though institutional prophecy was of the greatest importance because life was regarded as depending upon what the gods said. Some ancient texts contain what has sometimes been regarded as prophetic utterances, but those are more often considered to be the product of wise men who were well acquainted with Egyptian traditions and history. Among Egyptian sages, historical events were thought to follow a pattern, which could be observed and the laws of which could be discerned. Thus, times of hardship were always thought to be followed by times of prosperity, and predictions were made accordingly.
In Egyptian mantic (divinatory) texts there are prophetic sayings, but the particular concerns of those texts are more political than religious. Some are fictitious, and many are considered to have been prophesied after the event has already taken place. The papyrus text “The Protests of the Eloquent Peasant” is considered by some authorities as a prophecy, since the peasant is forced to deliver speeches, saying: “Not shall the one be silent whom thou hast forced to speak.” That compulsion to speak in the name of the divine is called by some scholars the “prophetical condition.”
In a Hittite text, King Mursilis II (reigned c. 1334–c. 1306 BCE) mentions the presence of prophets, but there is no information about the type of prophecy. More informative are texts from Mari (Tall al-?ariri, 18th century BCE) in northwest Mesopotamia, where some striking parallels to Hebrew prophecy have been discovered. The Mari prophets—believed to be inspired—spoke the word of the God Dagon just as Israelite prophets spoke the word of Yahweh.
In Mari the two key words for prophet are mu??um (“ecstatic,” “frenzied one”) and apilum (“one who responds”). Both may be connected with the cult, but there are incidents indicating that the mu??um was not bound to the cultic setting but received his message in a direct revelation from his God. The apilum usually acted within a group of fellow prophets. Many of their sayings are political in nature, but there are also oracles that deal with the king’s duty to protect the poor and needy, indicating that an ethical dimension was present among the Mari prophets. The messages could also contain admonitions, threats, reproofs, accusations, and predictions of either disaster or good fortune.
The Mari texts are important in the history of prophecy because they reveal that inspired prophecy in the ancient Middle East dates back 1,000 years before Amos and Hosea (8th century BCE) in Israel. From Mesopotamia there is evidence of the ma??u, the frenzied one, known in Sumerian texts as the lú-gub-ba. Mention also is made of some prophets who spoke to Assyrian kings, and their message is sometimes introduced with the clause “Do not fear.” Omina (omens) texts containing promises or predictions are also known. In one of the maqlu (“oath”) texts, in which an ašipu priest is being sent forth by his God, the deity first asks “Whom shall I send?”
The baru (a divinatory or astrological priest) declared the divine will through signs and omens, and thus is considered by some to have been a prophet. Though he might possibly have had visions, he was not in actuality an ecstatic. The art of Divination became very elaborate in the course of time and required a long period of training.
The ancient Iranian prophet and religious reformer Zarathustra (also known by his Greek name Zoroaster; died c. 551 BCE), whose teachings gave rise to the religion that bears his name (Zoroastrianism), is one of the least well-known figures associated with the founding of a religion because of the character of the existing textual materials and because some scholars have argued that he is a mythical figure. He may have been, however, an ecstatic priest-singer, or zaotar, who used special techniques (especially intoxication) to achieve a trance. Zarathustra found the priests and cult of his day offensive and opposed them. He preached the coming of the kingdom of the God Ahura Mazda (Ormazd), who is claimed to have revealed to Zarathustra the sacred writings, the Avesta. In the Yasna (a section of the Avesta), Zarathustra refers to himself as a Saoshyans (“Saviour”). Messianic prophecies of the end of the world are found in Zoroastrian literature, but those are more a literary product than actual prophetic utterance.
Prophets were a common phenomenon in Syria-Palestine. In an Egyptian text (11th century BCE), Wen-Amon (a temple official at Karnak) was sent by the pharaoh to Gebal (Byblos) to procure timber. While Wen-Amon was there, a young noble of that city was seized by his God and in frenzy gave a message to the king of Gebal that the request of Wen-Amon should be honoured. In another instance, an Aramaic inscription from Syria records that the God Baal-shemain told King Zakir (8th century BCE) through seers and diviners that he would save the king from his enemies. Those chapters reveal the close connection between sacrificial rites and divine inspiration. In the Hebrew Bible, verses 22 through 24 of the Book of Numbers mention the Mesopotamian prophet Balaam (who may have been a ma??u) from Pethor, whom the Moabite king Balak had asked to curse the invading Israelites. In the Book of Jeremiah, it is said that prophets, diviners, and soothsayers were in the neighbouring countries of Judah: in Edom, Moab, Ammon, Tyre, and Sidon (27:9). Since so little is known about those prophets, the question of the uniqueness of Hebrew prophecy is difficult to assess (see also Middle Eastern religion).
Origins and development of Hebrew prophecy
The Hebrew word for prophet is navi?, usually considered to be a loanword from Akkadian nabu, naba?um, “to proclaim, mention, call, summon.” Also occurring in Hebrew are ?oze and ro?e, both meaning “seer,” and nevi?a, “prophetess.”
Though the origins of Israelite prophecy have been much discussed, the textual evidence gives no information upon which to build a reconstruction. When the Israelites settled in Canaan, they became acquainted with Canaanite forms of prophecy. The structure of the prophetic and priestly function was very much the same in Israel and Canaan. Traditionally, the Israelite seer is considered to have originated in Israel’s nomadic roots, and the navi? is considered to have originated in Canaan, though such judgments are virtually impossible to substantiate. In early Israelite history, the seer usually appears alone, but the navi? appears in the context of a prophetic circle. According to the First Book of Samuel, there was no difference between the two categories in that early time; the terms navi? and ro?e seem to be synonymous. In Amos, ?oze and navi? are used for one and the same person. In Israel, prophets were connected with the sanctuaries. Among the Temple prophets officiating in liturgies were the Levitical guilds and singers. Other prophetic guilds are also mentioned. Members of those guilds generally prophesied for money or gifts and were associated with such sanctuaries as Gibeah, Samaria, Bethel, Gilgal, Jericho, Jerusalem, and Ramah. Jeremiah mentions that the chief priest of Jerusalem was the supervisor of both priests and prophets and that those prophets had rooms in the Temple buildings. In pre-Exilic Israel (before 587/586 BCE), prophetic guilds were a social group as important as the priests. Isaiah includes the navi? and the qosem (“diviner,” “soothsayer”) among the leaders of Israelite society. Divination in the pre-Exilic period was not considered to be foreign to Israelite religion.
In reconstructing the history of Israelite prophecy, the prophets Samuel, Gad, Nathan, and Elijah (11th–9th century BCE) have been viewed as representing a transitional stage from the so-called vulgar prophetism to the literary prophetism, which some scholars believed represented a more ethical and therefore a “higher” form of prophecy. The literary prophets also have been viewed as being antagonistic toward the cultus. Modern scholars recognized, however, that such an analysis is an oversimplification of an intricate problem. It is impossible to prove that the nevi?im did not emphasize ethics, simply because few of their utterances are recorded. What is more, none of the so-called “transitional” prophets was a reformer or was said to have inspired reforms. Samuel was not only a prophet but also a priest, seer, and ruler (“judge”) who lived at a sanctuary that was the location of a prophetic guild and furthermore was the leader of that navi? guild. In the cases of Nathan and Gad there are no indications that they represented some new development in prophecy. Nathan’s association with the priest Zadok, however, has led some scholars to suspect that Nathan was a Jebusite (an inhabitant of the Canaanite city of Jebus).
Elijah was a “prophet father” (or prophet master) and a prophet priest. Much of his prophetic career was directed against the Tyrian Baal cult, which had become popular in the northern kingdom (Israel) during the reign (mid-9th century BCE) of King Ahab and his Tyrian queen, Jezebel. Elijah’s struggle against that cult indicated a religio-political awareness, on his part, of the danger to Yahweh worship in Israel—namely, that Baal of Tyre might replace Yahweh as the main God of Israel.
The emergence of classical prophecy in Israel (the northern kingdom) and Judah (the southern kingdom) begins with Amos and Hosea (8th century BCE). What is new in classical prophecy is its hostile attitude toward Canaanite influences in religion and culture, combined with an old nationalistic conception of Yahweh and his people. The reaction of those classical prophets against Canaanite influences in the worship of Yahweh is a means by which scholars distinguish Israel’s classical prophets from other prophetic movements of their time. Essentially, the classical prophets wanted a renovation of the Yahweh cult, freeing it from all taint of worship of Baal and Asherah (Baal’s female counterpart). Though not all aspects of the Baal-Asherah cult were completely eradicated, ideas and rituals from that cult were rethought, evaluated, and purified according to those prophets’ concept of true Yahwism.
Included in such ideas was the view that Yahweh was a jealous God who, according to the theology of the psalms, was greater than any other god. Yahweh had chosen Israel to be his own people and, therefore, did not wish to share his people with any other god. When the prophets condemned cultic phenomena, such condemnation reflected a rejection of certain kinds of cult and sacrifice—namely, those sacrifices and festivals directed not exclusively to Yahweh but rather to other gods. The prophets likewise rejected liturgies incorrectly performed. The classical prophets did not reject all cults, per se; rather, they wanted a cultus ritually correct, dedicated solely to Yahweh, and productive of ethical conduct. Another important concept, accepted by the classical prophets, was that of Yahweh’s choice of Zion (Jerusalem) as his cult site. Thus, every cult site of the northern kingdom of Israel and all the sanctuaries and bamot (“high places”) were roundly condemned, whether in Israel or Judah.
Amos, whose oracles against the northern kingdom of Israel have been misunderstood as reflecting a negative attitude toward cultus per se, simply did not consider the royal cult of the northern kingdom at Bethel to be a legitimate Yahweh cult. Rather, like the prophet Hosea after him, Amos considered the Bethel cult to be Canaanite.
Prophets of the ancient Middle East generally interjected their opinions and advice into the political arena of their countries, but in that regard the classical Hebrew prophets were perhaps more advanced than other prophetic movements. They interpreted the will of God within the context of their particular interpretation of Israel’s history, and on the basis of that interpretation often arrived at a word of judgment. Important to that interpretation of history was the view that Israel was an apostate people—having rejected a faith once confessed—from the very earliest times, and the view that Yahweh’s acts on behalf of his chosen people had been answered by their worship of other gods. In that situation, the prophets preached doom and judgment, and even the complete destruction of Israel. The source of prophetic insight into those matters is the cultic background of liturgical judgment and salvation, wherein Yahweh judged and destroyed his enemies, and in so doing created the “ideal” future. What is totally unexpected is that the prophets would go so far as to include Israel itself as among Yahweh’s enemies, thus using those ideas against their own people. Usually, however, the prophets allowed some basis for hope in that a remnant would be left.
The future of that remnant (Israel) lay in the reign of an ideal king (as described in Isaiah), indicating that the prophets were not antiroyalists. Though they could and did oppose individual kings, the prophets could not make a separation between Yahweh and the reign of his chosen king or dynasty. Their messianic ideology, referring to the messiah, or anointed one, is based on old royal ideology, and the ideal king is not an eschatological figure (one who appears at the end of history). In that respect, the prophets were nationalistic. They believed that the ideal kingdom would be in the promised land, and its centre would be Jerusalem.
With the Exile of the Judaeans to Babylon of 586 BCE, prophecy entered a new era. The prophecies of what is called Deutero-Isaiah (Isaiah 40–45), for instance, were aimed at preserving Yahwism in Babylonia. His vision of the future went beyond the pre-Exilic concept of a remnant and extended the concept into a paradisiacal future wherein Yahweh’s new creation would be a new Israel. That tone of optimism is continued in the prophetic activity (late 6th century BCE) of Haggai and Zechariah, prophets who announced that Yahweh would restore the kingdom and the messianic vision would come to pass. Prerequisite to that messianic age was the rebuilding of the Temple (which was viewed as heaven on earth). When, however, the Temple had been rebuilt and long years had passed with neither the kingdom being restored nor the messianic age initiated, Israelite prophecy declined.
There is a tendency in prophetic preaching to spiritualize those aspects of religion that remain unfulfilled; therein lie the roots of eschatology, which is concerned with the last times, and apocalyptic literature, which describes the intervention of God in history to the accompaniment of dramatic, cataclysmic events. Since the predictions of the classical prophets were not fulfilled in a messianic age within history, those visions were translated into a historical apocalypse, such as the Book of Daniel. Why prophecy died out in Israel is difficult to determine, but Zechariah offers as good an answer as any in saying that the prophets “in those days” told lies. Prophets did appear, but after Malachi none gained the status of the classical prophets. Another reason may be found in Ezra’s reform of the cult in the 5th century BCE, in which Yahwism was so firmly established that there was no longer any need for the old polemics against Canaanite religion.
