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

 

Notes from a Reading Life: Jung's Dove Girl and the Black Books

 Just after Christmas 1912 Jung dreamed he was with his children in a tower, at a round table topped by a wonderful green stone, A seagull or dove flew in. It turned into a girl of eight who ran and played with his children among marvelous colonnades. The girl turned back into a bird and gave him a mysterious message.

He knew no way to find the meaning of the dream. He wrote later , “All I could do was just wait, go on with my life, and pay close attention to my fantasies.” [1] The bird dream also convinced him that the unconscious was populated with “living” entities, things with their own life.

So began the long experiment in wakeful fantasy (that he later called active imagination) chronicled in the Black Books. 

I wonder whether Jung knew at the time about the doves of Dodona. The priestesses of the famous oracle of the speaking oak, themsleves called Doves, told Herodotus that the oracle was created because a dove flew from Egypt and spoke from the tree in a human voice, announcing the will of the gods. Jung's dream of the shapeshifting bird girl has the uncanny, numinous quality of what we can easily imagine to have been the experience that brought pilgrims to such places over many centuries.

The call and the movement of birds were closely monitored at Dodona, as throughout the ancient world, and birds were recognized as companions and sometimes adopted forms of deities as well as lesser spirits: the eagle of Zeus, the dove of Aphrodite, the sea-bird and owl of Athena. Carrier pigeons - doves by a different name - were also an important communications system, and when oracles delivered early and accurate news, it may have been because something arrived on the wings of a bird as well as the wind of divine or daimonic inspiration.

I love Jung but am not a Jungian. (Neither was he.) I try to keep up with his literary afterlife in this world as Sonu Shamdasani and others bring out volume after volume of seminar notes and journals. I wrote from my visions of his afterlife in another world in my story "The Other Bollingen" in Mysterious Realities.

I have the Black Books and enjoyed the book-length introduction where I rediscovered the dove girl and her influence on Jung. However, I was exhausted halfway through one of the six volumes of transcriptions in which characters with big names in Jung's wakeful fantasies throw hissy fits at each other and make rude aspersions about each other's genealogy. Not to be read in a reverential way, at all, and generally lacking in the poetry (and the art) of the Red Book.

So I took a break from the Black Books and moved a more accessible posthumous publication,  Introduction to Jungian Psychology harvested from a 1925 seminar on analytical psychology and again edited by the indefatigable Shamdasani, to the top of the Jung section in my current reading piles. And I plunged deep into the sources for what was going on at the ancient oracle of the dove priestesses and the speaking oak at Dodona, using the skills of shamanic dreaming to travel through the texts and the archaeology and practice what Suhrawardi called "the knowledge of presence".

1. C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. ed. Aniela Jaffé trans. Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Vintage Books, 1973, p.172.

Art: Pablo Picasso, "Child with a Dove" (1901)