Of the Divine in Ancient Greece

9 Divination and the ‘Real Presence’ of the Divine in Ancient Greece Michael A. Flower In the introduction to the third edition of his justly famous book, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem,RobertOrsi,oneofthe leading scholars of modern American religious experience, observes: We scholars of religion have become better over the past twenty-five years at approaching the density of practices, objects, gestures, and so on, that constitute religious worlds. We have taken the point of the embodiment of the religious practitioner. But the essential reality of the shrine on 115th Street in the experience of practitioners is that the Madonna is really there, in that church, in her image, on that street; that she and her devout are present to each other; and that she listens and responds to their needs. Yet, as Orsi points out, this way of understanding the Madonna is at odds with normative modern scholarship, in which ‘absence’ is the dominant assumption: ‘By the persistent logic of modern ways of understanding religion, culture, and history, the Madonna is a symbol, a medium of exchange, and a tool in the hands of people working on their cultural environments. But she is not a real presence.’¹ For many Roman Catholics the ‘real presence’ of the divine in things, such as in the Eucharist, statues, and relics, is not something that is culturally constructed, but is considered to be a numinous causal agent in its own right. This agent is autonomous and independently operative in history. One does not have to accept the strong ontological claim that the numinous power of the Virgin Mary is actually present in her statue in order to accept that for believers this presence is, in fact, based on their own personal experience. The Greeks, of course, may or may not have conceived of the I would like to thank the editors of this volume, as well as Nathan Arrington, Harriet Flower, and Kathleen Cruz, for their helpful comments and suggestions. ¹ Orsi 2010: xviii–xix. He is especially critical of Steiner 1989: 121, 123, and 228. Michael A. Flower, Divination and the ‘Real Presence’ of the Divine in Ancient Greece In: Ancient Divination and Experience. Edited by: Lindsay G. Driediger-Murphy and Esther Eidinow, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198844549.003.0009 204 . relationship between cult statue and divine presence in the same way that some modern Catholics do.² But that is not my concern here. What I am proposing is that we should take real presence seriously, as something that most Greeks took for granted, when investigating the various rites of divination that they practised. Of course, this is not going to be easy, and not just because of the impossibility of doing the sort of anthropological fieldwork in which Robert Orsi is able to engage. It is also difficult because only a handful of sources address the experience of divination in such personal terms. Will a focus on real presence make any difference in the way that we understand Greek religious experience? Orsi addresses this type of question in his introduction (xx–xxi). He asks what it means to think from the assumption of real presences, and concludes: Its arrival now marks for me the next stage in a theoretical development that has been unfolding through this past quarter century, from ‘popular religion’ to lived religion to what I am now thinking of as ‘abundant history.’ I mean by this an empiricism open to the realness of the gods in the company of men, women, and children in the circumstances of their times. Orsi himself went on to provide an example of this kind of history in his magisterial study of the experience of ‘real presence’ (including apparitions of the Virgin Mary) in postwar Roman Catholicism.³ What follows is an attempt at writing an ‘abundant history’ of ancient Greek religion. Now I first want to neutralize what some will assume is a fatal objection to this entire project. It has been argued, and rightly so, that we can never have direct access to another person’s religious experiences. Those experiences, it is claimed, are culturally constructed and only exist in the act of reporting them. As Robert Sharf has expressed it in a highly tendentious essay, ‘I have suggested that it is a mistake to approach literary, artistic, or ritual repre- sentations as if they referred back to something other than themselves, to some numinous inner realm.’⁴ Or as Brent Nongbri has more recently asserted in his controversial book Before Religion: A History of a Modern ² It does seem safe to say that Greeks believed that a divine figure (a cult statue or even a votive statue) could be a ‘seat’ through which the divinity’s presence became manifest. Athena was not always ‘in’ her cult statue, but could use it as a vehicle of presence. See further, Scheer 2000 and Hölscher 2005. ³ Orsi 2016. ⁴ Sharf 1998: 113. But see Gyatso 1999, who contests his controversial view that meditative experience plays no role in Tibetan Buddhism. 205 Concept, ‘Strictly speaking, people who claim to study religious experience are actually studying narratives of experiences.’⁵ Yet to me at least, it is far from self-evident that our inability to have direct unmediated access to another’s experience (that is, an access unmediated by language) should stop us from speaking about ‘religious experience’ as a particular category of human experience. After all, we cannot have direct access to another person’s thoughts, but that does not keep us from forming opinions about their motives, beliefs, and plans—all of which are largely, but not exclusively, accessed through language. At the level of material culture, beliefs may be inferred from the objects that people possessed and the rituals in which they engaged.⁶ The many portable images of deities and moveable altars that were kept in Greek houses as well as the dedications made at Greek sanctuaries, especially votive reliefs, may reflect both particular beliefs as well as an overarching worldview.⁷ In other words, religious experience is not so uniquely a subjective, elusive, and remote object of investigation that any attempt to understand it is a fool’s errand.⁸ Investigating religious experience is nonetheless extraordinarily difficult. Yet a good place to look, and arguably one of the best places, is in the ubiquitous practice of divination. For it is in the context of the divinatory ritual that the real presence of the divine was commonly to be experienced.⁹ It was the venue in which the gods were expected either to manifest themselves directly (through dreams and epiphanies) or to make their presence known indirectly (through signs, omens, and ecstatic utterances). A very succinct, and I assume normative, definition of divination is expressed by Xenophon’s Sokrates in the Memorabilia: ‘In so far as we are unable to foresee what is advantageous for the future, the gods themselves work with us, indicating through divination to those who consult them what ⁵ Nongbri 2013: 23 and 166 n. 26 uncritically accepts Sharf ’s position. ⁶ Fogelin 2007 surveys different theoretical approaches to the archaeology of ritual. ⁷ See Huysecom-Haxhi and Muller 2015 for an attempt to reconstruct the ritual function and meaning of the terracotta anthropomorphic figurines that were ubiquitous in Greek houses. For votive reliefs, see Platt 2011: 31–50. For the religion of the Greek house, see Boedeker 2008 and Sofroniew 2015. ⁸ See especially Taves 2009, who proposes a new method for studying religious experiences, one that considers religious experiences to be special psychological experiences the interpret- ation of which depends on their cultural and social context. Bush 2014, on the other hand, contends that religious ‘experience’ (both in the narrow sense of particular episodes of aware- ness and in the boarder sense of the emotional life of practitioners) is an essential theoretical category for the study of religion. ⁹ For a discussion of comparative evidence for this question in ancient Chinese divination, see Raphals, this volume. 206 . is going to happen and teaching them how to obtain the best results.’¹⁰ As Xenophon makes clear both here and in many similar passages, the reason for performing a divinatory ritual is to receive advice and assistance from the gods.¹¹ Nonetheless, as modern anthropological studies have revealed, the divinatory ritual also has consequences that are social, political, and psychological, such as resolving indecision, building consensus, and boosting morale.¹² Although some Greeks, such as military commanders, were fully aware of these secondary functions, one should not conflate or confuse the by-products with the fundamental purpose.¹³ First and foremost, divination is a system of communication.¹⁴ But, like other religious practices, divination also has various direct and indirect consequences, which are, in effect, its secondary functions. In what follows, I am going to discuss some incidents that give us an ‘indication’ of the presence of the divine. I use the word ‘indication’ delib- erately, since we do not have access to actual experience but merely to a verbal, or linguistically coded, representation of it. No single example is completely transparent, but one would have to be very cynical indeed to read all of them as cases of self-interested or literary invention. Of course, the decision of an individual or a community to advertise an encounter with divinity is going to be variously motivated; but these motives do not negate the perceived reality of the divine presence. It is essential to keep in mind that according to the Greeks’ ontological conception of how reality is put together, the gods took an interest in the welfare of human beings and were both willing and able to interact with them.¹⁵ ¹⁰ Xen.

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