Oracles Full of Omphê

 

There's oomph and then there's omphê. In ancient Greek, omphê [ὀμφή] is the divine voice. It may speak through an inspired priestess, or through a special tree, or the cry of birds, or a lightning storm. Before you can hear it, you may feel your world shaking.

Philostratus wrote of Dodona, the place of the great oak oracle of Zeus and Dione, "this place is full of omphê."  It is un univers sonore, Stella Georgoudi takes up the chorus. [1]

The divine voice is different from the human voice though it may use human vocal chords. Homer's gods might seem to feel and behave like humans, especially in their domestic dramas, but they have powers that mortals cannot understand: amazing speed and strength; an endless capacity to shapeshift or disguise themselves; invisibility. Then there is the voice thing. The voice of a god can be thunder or leaping fire or the roar of ocean or a graveyard hiss that stills the breath. "Whereas gods have the power to imitate the voices of mortals, no mortal without divine assistance can speak with the voice of a god: a mortal voice (Homer uses the term audê) is different from omphê or ossa, a divine voice. Gods not only have different and remarkable powers of voice production, they also have (or once had) their own language." [2]

Omphê is the voice of the Pythia when she speaks for Apollo. In the Argonautica it is also the voice of a talkative crow who speaks to the seer Mopsos [Apollonius of Rhodes III 927-939]. Even at Delphi, famous for prophecies delievred in poetic speech, omphê could be heard in the voices of birds, especially crows and herons and wrens. [Plutarch, Pythia].

In the Odyssey,the hero visits Dodona to ask the oak whether he should go home or remain in hiding. Zeus speaks to him from the oak. It is not specified whether the divine voice was heard through the rustling of leaves or the creaking of bark or the birds among the branches. One way or another, the will of Zeus was audible from the oak.

In Ovid, an oak at Aegina sprung from an acorn from Dodona speaks when it starts to tremble and its branches shake without wind. [Metamorphoses VII 629-630]

Athena, the daughter of Zeus who sprang fully-armed from his head, carved an oak bough from Dodona into the prow of the Argo, endowing Jason’s ship with prophetic power in the perilous voyage for the Golden Fleece.

Sophocles calls the oracle oak poluglossos: polyglot, many-tongued, many-voiced. To hear it can be like hearing a crowd. The voices may rise and swirl in any language, and of course in the language of the birds. Wasn't the oracle founded by three black doves who flew here from Egypt?

The Hesiodic Catalogues speak of three doves who lived in the oak tree. They may correspond to three female shaman-seers known as the Black Doves. The far-seers at Dodona prophesied in a shamanic ecstasy, and “afterwards they do not know anything about what they have said.” [3] Herodotus called them the Black Doves, Peleia Mêlaina. [Herodotus II.55]

The oracle at Dodona was older than the Olympians, always dedicated to the Goddess as well as the God. In its heyday, it was full of noises at the trembling edge of omphê. There were the many voices of the variable winds in the leaves, the rush or babble of nearby streams, the chanting of barefoot priests sworn to live close to Earth Mother, the prophetic speech of the black doves advising clients. In later times there was also the  clash and clang of bronze cauldrons suspended from the trees. They sounded like gongs when the winds pushed them together. 

References

1. Stella Georgoudi, “Des sons, des signes et des paroles : la divination à l’oeuvre dans l’oracle de Dodone”in Stella Georgoudi et al (eds) La raison des signes. (Leiden: Brill, 2012). P.71

2. Elizabeth Minchin, "The words of gods: Divine discourse in Homer's Iliad" in Sacred Words: Orality, Literacy and Religion (Leiden: Brill, 2011)  pp.17-35.

3. Walter Burkert, Greek Religion. trans. John Raffan. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) p.114

Photo: Remains of the oracle of Zeus and Dione at Dodona in Epirus

 

Close encounters with gods and angels

In Homer’s world, gods and goddesses hover close to mortals, and frequently intercede in their lives. It is rare for a human to see a deity in its true form. Most often, perceiving the gods is a matter of sensing a presence, or noticing a light or pattern of vibration, or awakening to the fact that a stranger – an uncannily beautiful youth or maiden, or an old beggar or shepherd in rags – is a divine being going around in drag. The Greeks say that the gods love to travel in disguise.
   Old Priam, scared and defenseless, makes his way through a hostile army to Achilles’ camp. The king is helped by a charming young man who appears out of nowhere and acts as his guide. “Some god has held his hand over me!” Priam exclaims, not realizing that his escort is Hermes. Even the hero Odysseus, famed for his intimacy with Athena, fails to recognize her when she appears in some of her disguises. The gods hardly ever identify themselves by name, and when they disclose their presence to mortals, it is an act of “voluntary self-revelation”. As Circe says, “Who would ever see a god, going to and fro, unless he wished to be seen?” When they show themselves, gods take on forms appropriate to the understanding of humans.
    While it is hard to see gods as they are, in the ancient world seeing the gods was regarded not only as possible, but as highly desirable. Through ritual and invocation, the Greeks asked the gods to reveal themselves in specific forms, and in a good mood. “Come in kindly mind and in easily recognizable form,” the chorus chants in Sophocles’ play Ajax, reflecting a mode of prayer in common use outside the theater.
    When Greeks invoked gods, they hoped that their divine patrons would come and stand over them and surround them with the protection of their aegis. Above all, they sought close encounters in dreams, in the sacred night. As Robin Lane Fox observes in Pagans and Christians, “in their dreams, pagans of all classes and backgrounds kept the closest company with the gods.” Dreams were regarded as a nightly screening of the gods.

    Certain individuals brought gods and humans closer together.

“Ever since she has taken on her priesthood the gods have been appearing in visitations as never before, to the girls and women, but also to men and children. What does such a thing mean? Is it a sign of something good?”

-     Question of Alexandra, priestess of Demeter, to the oracle of Apollo at Miletus. 3^rd century.

“The angels will come among you, like the prophets,” Jesus promises in the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas. By “prophets” he means not only the venerated characters of the Old Testament, but the seers who were active and highly respected in early Christian communities. Often women, they were believed to consult with angels on familiar terms, to go on otherworldly journeys, and to see into the future. In some Christian communities, such prophets may have been honored above priests and bishops. “When you open a jar of wine or oil,” advised the early Teaching of the Apostles, “take the first fruits and give them to the prophets.”

Art: Giuseppe Bottani, Athena Appears to Odysseus to Reveal Ithaca

Gates of Horn and Ivory

In Homer’s Odyssey, we first learn, with Penelope, about the two gates of dream: the Gate of Ivory and the Gate of Horn. Dreams that come through the Gate of Ivory are “dangerous” and may not be manifested; dreams that come through the Gate of Horn are clearer, and may be embodied in events. The difference seems to be a matter of clarity rather than deception. Carved ivory is totally opaque; polished horn is translucent.

Synesius of Cyrene wrote a marvelous treatise on dreams around 405 in which he asserted that it is the weakness of our understanding, not confusion or deception in dreams themselves, that makes some dreams seem false. "The Penelope of Homer assumes that there are two gates of dreams, and makes half of them deceptive dreams, only because she was not instructed in the matter. For if she had been versed in their science, she would have made them all pass out through the gate of horn." Penelope was "guilty of ignorance" about her own power of inner sight, distrusting her dreams without reason. Therefore "we should not confuse the weakness of the interpreter with the nature of the visions themselves". 

The Gates of Horn and Ivory reappear in the Aeneid but Virgil changes the characterization in his account of Aeneas’ descent to the underworld to visit his dead father Anchises. Now dreams that come through the Gate of Ivory are designated “false”, while those that come through the Gate of Horn are “true”. This becomes a standard distinction for centuries in the minds of Westerners raised on the classics.

However, there is a mind-trap in Virgil's story. Anchises sends his son back from the Underworld through the Gate of Ivory. Aeneas and the Sybil return to the regular world through the gate of empty dreams. Is the poet hinting that our ordinary experience of reality is the false dream?

Image: Aeneas and the Sybil return to the ordinary world through the Gate of Ivory.  Codex Vaticanus Folio 57r  

Elemental divination with the Odyssey

..So the man prayed
and the god stemmed the current, held his surge at once
and smoothing out the swells before Odysseus now,
drew him safe to shore at the river's mouth.

- Odyssey Book 5, lines 497-500 Fagles translation

This was the result of my morning stoicheomancy.
    The term combines the Greek words Greek stoikheion, "element", and manteia, prophecy. Ancient Greeks used this term for a very special branch of bibliomancy or book-dipping: consultation of the works of Homer, considered "elemental" among literature. You open the Iliad or the Odyssey anywhere, and read aloud the first lines that you see. As I opened the Odyssey today, my left thumb fell on the lines I quoted. 
    I felt a warm shiver as I recognized the blessing. After all his misadventures, shipwrecked Odysseus has been washed up safe on the shore of Phaecia, the land of a people of dreams. Princess Nausicaa, alerted by a dream in which the goddess Athena speaks to her in the guise of a girlfriend, will meet the naked stranger and give him safe haven.

Art: "Ulysses and Nausicaa" by Louis Gauffier (1798)