Truth comes with goosebumps from Delphi to the next street corner

It's a rule of skin, for me, that truth comes with goosebumps (or chicken skin, if you like). There is a science of shivers, which involves learning to recognize and respect what is going on when something exceptional is in the air and your body responds even before your mind can make sense of it.
    For the ancients, and in shamanic traditions, trembling for reasons other than cold or external danger has always been regarded as a sign of the advent of the numinous, the coming of gods or spirits. A dream seemed to take me deep into this realm:

How to Know When the God is Present

I am explaining to a large group of students how to read the signs that announce the advent of the god Apollo at his oracle, and confirm that true messages will be delivered by his priestess. The sacrificial goat starts shaking from the hooves up when the holy water is poured over it. Everything in the environment begins to tremble as if stirred by an unseen wind. The priestess called Pythia, who has been drinking from the sacred spring, sees movement in the bowl of spring water she holds in her lap as she sits on the tripod. The laurel leaves on the branch in her other hand are shaking and murmuring.
    Inside the dream, I felt educated pleasure in being able to explain these things clearly. I woke with a mild shiver of recognition, and a deep sense of satisfaction.

Dreams set us research assignments, and this one sent me back to the books, to refresh my memory on the practice of divination in the ancient world, especially at the famous Greek oracle of Delphi, where the priestess known as the Pythia, or Pythoness, was consulted by the rulers of cities and nations.
    Through the surviving sources, starting with Aeschylus' play The Eumenides, I confirmed my dream self's version of the operations of the Pythia. In preparing to become the oracle, she bathes in the sacred spring and invokes all the deities associated with Delphi by name, starting with Themis and Phoebe, daughters of the Earth goddess Gaia, and continuing through Zeus, Poseidon, Dionysus and Apollo, who she hopes will speak through her in the presence of a client. She makes burned offering of laurel leaves and barley meal on an altar of the temple. She enters the adyton(sacred chamber) and mounts the golden tripod chair.
    In one hand she holds a laurel branch, in the other a shallow bowl. She sits quietly until the laurel leaves start to quiver. The trembling seizes her hand, moves up her arm to her shoulders and chest. Her whole body starts shaking violently as it has been seized by giant hands. This is confirmation that the god is present and that his speaker is in the necessary state of enthousiasmos to deliver true messages.

The bit about the goats fascinated me. In Diodorus of Sicily's World History, I reviewed again the legend of the foundation of the oracle of Delphi. Long before the great temple was built, when the area was wilderness, a goat herder noticed that some of his animals were behaving strangely. They were shaking and throwing their heads back, croaking and bleating.
    The herder approached them and saw they were at a crack in the rock from which vapors were rising. When he peered down, a strange exaltation seized him. He started shaking too. Knowledge of many things streamed through him. His family, alarmed by his long absence, searched for him and found him under a tree. He began to tell people their secrets without being asked. He had become clairvoyant. News of the chasm and the power of the vapors spread far and wide, until those in authority determined that things should be put on a orderly business footing. A priestess of blameless life would be chosen as speaker for the oracle, and access to the adyton would be banned to everyone except her attendants.
    It would probably be mistaken to attribute the Pythia's powers of truth-seeing to sulphurous vapors from the earth, or chewing laurel leaves, or any other chemical assistance. For one thing, recent archaeology summarized in Robert Temple’s Oracles of the Dead suggests the historical oracle of Delphi operated at a different site from the place - called Likoreia - where the goats were set trembling by whatever was rising from a fissure in the earth.

But there was something else to be learned and remembered about quivering goats. Ah yes, it has to do with divination by animal sacrifice, indirectly referred to my dream-lecturer self. Goats and sheep were the preferred animals used in haruspicy, divination by the entrails, a practice common throughout the ancient world and held to be of high importance in establishing the divine will in relation to human decisions. The Mesopotamian baru, a specialist in these matters, held high rank. So did the Etruscan haruspex counselor to Greeks and Romans, under both the Republic and the Empire. The liver was the preferred organ for divination, because it was thought to be a vital seat of an aspect of soul, and a kind of anchor between the spiritual world and the world of the body.
     For the haruspex, the best liver for divination was one that had been just carved from the animal victim, still warm and quivering in the diviner's hand. The Hittites liked to observe the spasms of the dying animal as its organs were removed.

These tales of savage times say it again: truth comes with goosebumps. Personally, I can do without looking at animal livers. It's enough to notice those little - or large - shivers that come when something is going on beyond the range of ordinary perception. They are a part of what the bleep we know that we (often) don't know that we know.

Art: "Priestess of Delphi" by John Collier (1891)

The haruspex flight

I'm not always overjoyed to be upgraded to first class on airplanes, because the stories I hear are usually better in coach. But on my way home from a very short trip to England this week, I was delighted to be promoted to the front cabin, expecting nothing more than extra legroom, free drinks and edible food. My rewards proved to be greater than these.
    The pleasant woman who took the seat next to me spoke in a soft Southern accent. When she told me she was from Mississippi. I could not resist telling her that within the past week, I had recorded a dream in which I was making my way to Grant, Mississippi. I noted that "Grant" seemed an unlikely name for a place in Mississippi, given its history with General Ulysses S. Grant in the Civil War. "Oh, I don't know," she responded. "My daughter would like a grant for her research."
    She explained that her daughter was majoring in Latin at the University of Mississippi, and had broader interests in archaeology and the religions of the ancient world. "She just wrote a paper on Etruscan divination that her professor thinks is wonderful. There were a special class of Etruscan priests who got messages by looking at the livers of animals. There's a term for that which I forget."
    "Haruspicy," I suggested.
    "That's it!" My neighbor's eyes widened a little. "What are the odds in meeting a stranger on a plane who would know about that?"
     I started rattling off a few things I had learned about methods of divination in the ancient world. Haruspicy - which the Greeks called hepatoscopy, or hepatomancy - was the inspection of the liver of sacrificed animals. Extispicy was a broader term for examining the entrails, especially the intestines. Scapulomancy was the study of the shoulder blade of a slain animal. All these methods, probably first developed in early Mesopotamia, were regarded as critical in making major decisions. Babylonian kings and generals went to war with a baru priest in their entourage, ready to kill a sheep to check from the folds and color of the liver which side the gods were on. The supposedly rational Athenians behaved the same way. The Hittites looked at animal livers to get a second opinion on the meaning of royal dreams.
    I noted that my first job was as a junior professor of ancient history at the Australian National University and that I had written on ancient divination in my book The Secret History of Dreaming. Since first reading about the history of Rome, I had been fascinated by the special role of the Etruscan priestly caste, under both the Republic and the Empire, in decisions of state. As I understood these things, the haruspex (literally "the reader of the victim") who examined livers was consulted on matters of high policy, such as war and peace, and was always an Etruscan. An interesting paradox, that Romans turned to an order of divination priests drawn from a people they had conquered.
    "Oh, you have to talk to Juliana," my neighbor said. "I'll swap seats with her after lunch." It seemed that her two daughters, who had gone with her to London for a week of theater-going, were back in coach.
    After the meal, the switch was made. Juliana proved to be a brilliant student with a searching mind, who introduced me to sources and aspects of the subject that were previously unknown to me. She had recently attended a seminar with Jean Mackintosh Turfa, the author of a recent scholarly book Divining the Etruscan World: The Brontoscopic Calendar and Religious Practice. It was my turn to receive an unusual word under unlikely circumstances.  "Brontoscopic" refers to a method of divination by listening to the sound of thunder. The Etruscans kept a calendar that linked thunder and lightning to outbreaks of disease and social events, day by day, through a lunar year. The fulgurator was a specialist in divination by thunder and lightning.
    I was soon scribbling notes. My new rowmate was very knowledgeable about Near Eastern parallels and precedents for the Etruscan diviners consulted by the Romans. She described an Etruscan bronze mirror that shows a haruspex with one foot on a rock and wings on his back as he inspects a liver, clearly depicted as a link between the worlds of men and gods. She compared models of livers, made in clay by the Babylonians and in bronze by the Etruscans, used to guide the diviner on what to look for in a liver. An Etruscan model, intricately divided by many crisscrossing lines, appears to have the name of a deity inscribed in each section.

    My young mentor had fascinating views on why the liver was regarded as so important for people wishing to know what was going on and whether the deities were on their side. A sacrificial animal may have been exposed to similar ailments and parasites as humans in the same environment, and may have consumed some of the same foodstuffs.
    The liver was understood to be a vital organ, not least for its role in cleansing the blood. It was seen as a seat of emotions and even of the soul.
     We laughed over Cicero's comments about divination by animal innards. The Etruscans, he noted, were "raving mad about entrails." Yet while his equestrian nose twitched over superstitious mumbo jumbo, Cicero allowed that since "the gods are real", they may choose to make their wishes known even through the state of a slaughtered animal's entrails. He spoke of the Etrusca Disciplina - the name the Romans gave to Etruscan divination - with respect and narrated the myth of its founder, Tages, in his essay "On Divination." Well might Cicero treat the craft of the haruspex with caution and respect. It was a haruspex, Vestrinius Spurinnia, who delivered the famous warning to Julius Caesar to beware the ides of March.

I have a fresh list of reading and research assignments that I will happily pursue, though maybe at a comfortable remove from future meal times. I see that the best liver for haruspicy was one that had been just carved from the animal victim, still warm and quivering in the diviner's hand. As I embark on fresh research, I find that the Hittites also liked to observe the spasms of the dying animal as its organs were removed. I won't be eating liver, with or without onions, any time soon.

For more on travel synchronicity: My book The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination opens with narratives of what flowed from five chance encounters on airplanes, typically after an original plan got changed.


Graphic: 4th century BCE Etruscan bronze mirror showing a haruspex identified as Calchas, a diviner mentioned in the Iliad, in the Gregorian museum at the Vatican.