Struck - Divination and human nature: a cognitive history of intuition in classical antiquity

Divination and Human Nature

Divination and Human Nature

A COGNITIVE HISTORY OF INTUITION IN CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY

Peter T. Struck

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2016 by Princeton University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Struck, Peter T., author.

Title: Divination and human nature : a cognitive history of intuition in classical antiquity / Peter T. Struck.

Description: Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016005144 | ISBN 9780691169392 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy, Ancient. | DivinationGreece. | Intuition.

Classification: LCC B171 .S85 2016 | DDC 133.3093dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016005144

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Minion Pro

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

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For Roger and Sally

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project has benefited enormously over the years from generosity of many kinds. I thank the National Humanities Center where the early work began, and the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, which provided an orientation toward the evidence that informed the whole of the work. A project that began aimed at semiotics took on a cognitive dimension under the eye-opening tutelage of colleagues there. Further, I have benefited greatly from responses to presentations at universities I list here in alphabetical order: the Acadmie Royale Belgique, Brown, Chicago, University of Cincinnati, Columbia, Corpus Christi College Oxford, Dartmouth, Fordham, Florida State, Indiana University, Kent University, Leiden, Harvard, University of North Carolina, Ohio State, the Scuola Normale Superiore, Smith, Stanford, Toronto, Texas, University of Washington, and Wesleyan. Conversations with colleagues on the Journal of the History of Ideas have been continuously challenging and enlightening and helped to reshape the framing of the introduction. And finally, the inspiring community of classicists at the University of Pennsylvania was essential at the many inflection points of the project. Penns Department of Classical Studies provides continuous evidence of the pleasure of study and discovery, and the salutary benefits of supportive challenge and intellectual rigor. Earlier versions of some parts of the chapters have been previously published. Parts of the introduction appeared as A Cognitive Approach to Divination in Antiquity, in the Journal of the History of Ideas (January 2016); sections of work she did for me on Stoic notions of the seed; Alex Ramos for help preparing the manuscript; and graduate students Roshan Abraham, Jae Han, and Daniel Harris-McCoy for their stimulating discussions; but especially Natalie Dohrmann and Adam Struck, who continue to be the prime movers.

INTRODUCTION

Divination and the History of Surplus Knowledge

Divination is like this: By the visible it knows the invisible, and by the invisible it knows the visible, and by the present it knows the future, and by dead things it gains knowledge of the living, and it becomes aware from things that have no awareness. The person who knows it is always correct, while the person who doesnt sometimes is and sometimes isnt. In this way it imitates human life and human nature.

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The Hippocratic treatise On Regimen 1.12

From all corners of the ancient Mediterranean, people that had run up against the limits of their own knowledge brought their remaining questions to a frail, illiterate woman housed in a massive stone temple at Delphi. She was Apollos human embodiment on earth and the most revered source of wisdom in the classical world. As they prepared for their consultation with the mysterious Pythia, seekers would have read an enigmatic, deceptively simple two-word sentence cut into the temple wall, Know yourself. saying came from or what exactly it was supposed to mean, but this only heightened the aura around it. Why should the god advise those consulting him to know themselves? Wasnt it precisely their lack of knowledge that had led them to him? Perhaps the god was trying to tell us that, in some way or other, knowing oneself is the key to knowing anything at all, and that any inquiry could start only from a condition of self-awareness. Maybe it meant that self-knowledge is not the beginning but rather the end of true wisdom. While we may be looking for answers to other things, what we really come to know in the end is ourselves. Whatever it meant, the position of the inscription, over the entry hall to the inner sanctum, invited those reading it to look at it as some kind of key to the place they were entering. The riddle of the cryptic abundance of divine knowing they were about to experience had been rephrased as a riddle about self-understanding.

The idea of knowing oneself takes a bit of unpacking. From a contemporary vantage, we might first think of knowing ones own tastes and proclivities, the kind of self-discovery that is the stuff of the modern Bildungsroman . But for the Greeks it was not so much a question of knowing oneself as a sui generis individual but rather of developing an understanding of oneself as a member of the order of things. To know yourself meant to pursue what it is to be human. Ideas on that question are thick and varied in the ancient sources, but a few shared points of reference set them on the trail. As humans we are composite creatures. On the one hand, we possess an extraordinary intelligence, a knowingness that is so mysterious as to seem to have something to do with the divine. On the other, we also have a bodily nature, a creaturely self, that we share with the other self-propelled organisms we see around us. Although they do not partake in our intelligence, like us they do eat, metabolize, reproduce, and eventually die. For most of day-to-day life in Greek antiquity, this pair of considerations produced three very broadly understood layers of reality, with humans somewhere between the divine realm of gods in the heavens and the world of animal nature.

These are distinct zones, whose boundaries are enforced by foundational taboos, such as hubris on the one hand and cannibalism on the other. But the cultural walls that separate them have cracks. Greek myth is filled with figures that blur the lines. Satyrs, centaurs, and other hybrids split the difference between us and the animals, while heroes and spirits populate the other boundary. In more complex cultural formations as well, we find both barriers and bridges. I will argue in this book that the kind of thing that took place not just in consultations with the Pythia, but in a kaleidoscopic array of common ancient divinatory practices, performed a similar kind of organizing function. Such practices orient us between our weird knowingness, which we share with the divine, and our creaturely selves, which traverse the terrestrial world alongside the other animals. Divination does this by drawing a connection between the two.

For many millennia and across the whole Old World, from Eastern to Western Eurasia, and from the tip of southern Africa to the highlands of Britannia, people were in the habit of practicing divination, or the art of translating information from their gods into the realm of the human. On a scale whose breadth we have yet to fully appreciate, they assumed that clandestine signs were buried in the world These practices were not, for the most part, considered esoteric or marginal. The inclinations of the divine, like the weather, were simply a part of the ancient atmosphere, and just about wherever we look in the sources, we find people trying to gauge the prevailing winds. Scholars have yet to take account of the extraordinary diffusion of the phenomenon. It belongs to a small group of rather widely shared cultural forms from antiquityalongside things like myth or sacrifice. Although no global answer to why this is so will easily be found, it is also true that better local answers will emerge if scholars make a fuller reckoning of this near universal diffusion.