The Manipulation of Chinese Characters Cezi

chapter 1 The Manipulation of Chinese Characters Cezi

1 An Introduction to Cezi Vis-à-vis Divination and the Chinese Writing System

1.1 Cezi Vis-à-vis Divination Chinese character manipulation can be observed in a range of different literary genres, from poetry and fictional prose narratives, through to textual records of history or divination. Some studies of cezi draw a rigid distinction between the manipulation of characters as a rhetorical device and as a divinatory device.1 However, in the primary sources themselves, the demarcation between literary and divinatory utilisation of the method is often blurry and hard to define. While the separation between the literary and divinatory spheres is useful for describing the different genres in which cezi appears, a division that is too rigid can unnecessarily restrict the generation of plausible findings. The study of divination and divinatory methods is meaningful, since it enables an accurate and deep understanding of specific socio-historic settings. Divination is an anthropological constant—it has been, and continues to be, practiced by all societies. Indeed, across societies a plethora of different methods of divination have developed over the centuries. Apart from the afore- mentioned augury and the consultation of oracles, other methods include the casting of lots, readings of specific sets of playing cards, like tarot, analyses of animals’ intestines or bones, observations of stars and other meteorological phenomena, and so on. Even the denigration of divinatory practices as “superstition” in the modern world, a trend that has its roots in the Enlightenment’s championing of rationality over irrationality, did not eradicate the application of these practices. Methods like astrology and tarot continue to be widely practiced. Based on the world-view of the Enlightenment, divination is still understood as “superstition” or “proto-science” by many.This oversimplified understanding of divination has been rightly challenged in contemporary scholarship:

1 See, for example, Bernhard Führer, “Seers and Jesters: Predicting the Future and Punning by Graph”, East Asian Science, Technology and Medicine 25 (2006): 47–68. See also Richard E. Strassberg, “Glyphomantic Dream Anecdotes”, Idle Talk: Gossip and Anecdote in Traditional China, eds. Jack W. Chen and David Schaberg (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2013), 178–193.

Now, however, most scholars agree that divination cannot be understood as an irruption of “the primitive” into an orderly world, but rather offers established forms of modelling reality and social interaction, of dealing with crisis and conflict—and as doing so with a high degree of rationality. Divination is not irrational, but rather an attempt, perhaps a desperate attempt, to extend the realm of ratio, the realm of knowledge and control, beyond the barrier of the future, and the barrier of death, into the misty zones from which normal knowledge and experience is absent.2

Divination has to be understood as one way to deal with doubts and insecurities inherent in all human beings when faced with particular decisions and situations. Its widespread presence in human societies attests to its import- ance in the past and present. Furthermore, its many different forms of application allow insights into specific cosmological notions—in the words of Richard Smith: divination can be seen as a “window to culture”.3 An analysis of different methods of divination, then, allows us to explore and understand the way a specific culture dealt with doubts and insecurities in specific socio-historic circumstances. The term divination (from Latin divinatio) has been defined in many different ways. The “Oxford Dictionaries” website, for example, concisely describes divination as “[t]he practice of seeking knowledge of the future or the unknown by supernatural means”,4 enumerating the terms “fortune telling”, “forecasting the future”, “prophecy”, “prediction”, “soothsaying”, and “augury”, among oth- ers, as synonyms. This understanding of divination is broad, going so far as to define what originally referred to a specific method, augury, as synonym- ous with divination per se. Common popular usage of the term divination mostly concurs with this definition—it does not understand divination more specifically and uses the term interchangeably with other designations, such as “prophecy” or “prediction”. Unsurprisingly, scholarly definitions attempt to explain divination more elaborately. Many of these definitions emphasise the usage of signs in divination as a way to gain understanding about the future,5 some distinguish

2 Walter Burkert, “Signs, Commands, and Knowledge: Ancient Divination between Enigma and Epiphany”, Mantikê: Studies in Ancient Divination, eds. Sarah Iles Johnston and Peter T. Struck (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 30. 3 Richard J. Smith, Fortune-Tellers and Philosophers: Divination in Traditional Chinese Society (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), xi. 4 Oxford University Press, “Divination”, Oxford Dictionaries, 2019, 16.05.2019, https://en.oxford dictionaries.com/definition/creativity. 5 See, for example, Edward L. Shaughnessy, “Arousing Images: The Poetry of Divination and