Page:EB1911 - Volume 20.djvu/126

 original meaning seems to be a pancake of a thin flat shape. Omelettes are made with eggs, beaten up lightly, with the addition of milk, flour, herbs, cheese, mushrooms, &c., according to the requirement, and cooked quickly in a buttered pan.  OMEN (a Latin word, either connected with os, mouth, or more probably with auris (Gr. , ear; apparently, meaning “a thing heard” or “spoken”), a sign in divination, favourable or unfavourable as the case may be (see , and ). The taking of omens may be said to be a part of all systems of divination, in which the future is predicted by means of indications of one sort or another; and tradition has thus gathered round many subjects—events, actions, colours, numbers, &c.—which are considered “ominous,” an adjective which generally connotes ill-fortune.

One of the oldest and most widespread methods of divining the future, both among primitive people and among several of the civilizations of antiquity, was the reading of omens in the signs noted on the liver of the animal offered as a sacrifice to some deity. The custom is vouched for by travellers as still observed in Borneo, Burma, Uganda and elsewhere, the animal chosen being a pig or a fowl. It constituted the most common form of divination in ancient Babylonia, where it can be traced back to the 3rd millennium Among the Etruscans the prominence of the rite led to the liver being looked upon as the trade-mark of the priest. From the Etruscans it made its way to the Romans, though as we shall see it was also modified by them. The evidence for the rite among the Greeks is sufficient to warrant the conclusion of its introduction at a very early period and its persistence to a late day.

The theory upon which the rite everywhere rests is clearly the belief, for which there is an abundance of concurrent testimony, that the liver was at one time regarded as the seat of vitality. This belief appears to be of a more primitive character than the view which places the seat of life in the heart, though we are accustomed to think that the latter was the prevailing view in antiquity. The fact, however, appears to be that the prominence given to the heart in popular beliefs dates from the time when in the course of the development of anatomical knowledge the important function of the heart in animal life came to be recognized, whereas the supposition that the liver is the seat of vitality rests upon other factors than anatomical knowledge, and, being independent of such knowledge, also antedates it. Among the reasons which led people to identify the liver with the very source of life, and hence as the seat of all affections and emotions, including what to us are intellectual functions, we may name the bloody appearance of that organ. Filled with blood, it was natural to regard it as the seat of the blood, and as a matter of fact one-sixth of the entire blood of man is in the liver, while in the case of some animals the proportion is even larger. Now blood was everywhere in antiquity associated with life, and the biblical passage. Genesis ix. 3, which identifies the blood with the soul of the animal and therefore prohibits its use fairly represents the current conception both among primitive peoples as well as among those who had advanced along the road of culture and civilization. The liver being regarded as the seat of the blood, it was a natural and short step to identify the liver with the soul as well as with the seat of life, and therefore as the centre of all manifestations of vitality and activity. In this stage of belief, therefore, the liver is the seat of all emotions and affections, as well as of intellectual functions, and it is only when with advancing anatomical knowledge the functions of the heart and then of the brain come to be recognized that a differentiation of functions takes place which had its outcome in the assignment of intellectual activity to the brain or head, of the higher emotions and affections (as love and courage) to the heart, while the liver was degraded to the rank of being regarded as the seat of the lower emotions and affections, such as jealousy, moroseness and the like.

Hepatoscopy, or divination through the liver, belongs therefore to the primitive period when that organ summed up all vitality and was regarded as the seat of all the emotions and affections the higher as well as the lower—and also as the seat of intellectual functions. The question, however, still remains to be answered how people came to the belief or to the assumption that through the soul, or the seat of life of the sacrificial animal, the intention of the gods could be divined. There are two theories that may be put forward. The one is that the animal sacrificed was looked upon as a deity, and that, therefore, the liver represented the soul of the god; the other theory is that the deity in accepting the sacrifice identified himself with the animal, and that, therefore, the liver as the soul of the animal was the counterpart of the soul of the god. It is true that the killing of the god plays a prominent part in primitive cults, as has been shown more particularly through the valuable researches of J. G. Frazer (The Golden Bough). On the other hand, serious difficulties arise if we assume that every animal sacrificed represents a deity; and even assuming that such a belief underlies the rite of animal sacrifice, a modification of the belief must have been introduced when such sacrifices became a common rite resorted to on every occasion when a deity was to be approached. It is manifestly impossible to assume, e.g. that the daily sacrifices which form a feature of advanced cults involved the belief of the daily slaughter of some deity, and even before this stage was reached the primitive belief of the actual identification of the god with the animal must have yielded to some such belief as that the deity in accepting the sacrifice assimilates the animal to his own being, precisely as man assimilates the food that enters into his body. The animal is in a certain sense, indeed, the food of the god.

The theory underlying hepatoscopy therefore consists of these two factors: the belief (1) that the liver is the seat of life, or, to put it more succinctly, what was currently regarded as the soul of the animal; and (2) that the liver of the sacrificial animal, by virtue of its acceptance on the part of the god, took on the same character as the soul of the god to whom it was offered. The two souls acted in accord, the soul of the animal becoming a reflection, as it were, of the soul of the god. If, therefore, one understood the signs noted on a particular liver, one entered, as it were, into the mind—as one of the manifestations of soul-life—of the deity who had assimilated the being of the animal to his own being. To know the mind of the god was equivalent to knowing what the god in question proposed to do. Hence, when one approached a deity with an inquiry as to the outcome of some undertaking, the reading of the signs on the liver afforded a direct means of determining the course of future events, which was, according to current beliefs, in the control of the gods. That there are defects in the logical process as here outlined to account for the curious rite constitutes no valid objection to the theory advanced, for, in the first place, primitive logic in matters of belief is inherently defective and even contradictory, and, secondly, the strong desire to pierce the mysterious future, forming an impelling factor in all religions—even in the most advanced of our own day—would tend to obscure the weakness of any theory developed to explain a rite which represents merely one endeavour among many to divine the intention and plans of the gods, upon the knowledge of which so much of man’s happiness and welfare depended.

Passing now to typical examples, the beginning must be made with Babylonia, which is also the richest source of our knowledge of the details of the rite. Hepatoscopy in the Euphrates valley can be traced back to the 3rd millennium before our era, which may be taken as sufficient evidence for its survival from the period of primitive culture, while the supreme importance attached to signs read on the livers of sacrificial animals—usually a sheep—follows from the care with which omens derived from such inspection on occasions of historical significance were preserved as guides to later generations of priests. Thus we have a collection of the signs noted during the career of Sargon I. of Agade (c. 2800 ), which in some way were handed down till the days of the Assyrian king Assur-bani-pal (668–626 ). One of the chief names for the priest was bārū—literally the “inspector”—which was given to him because of the prominence of his function as an inspector of livers for the purpose of divining the intention of the gods. It is to the collections formed by these