Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/316

 accompany men's petitions, a curious conception of human sacrifice in particular which I once encountered is also a relic of ancient religion.

The survival of divination then in its several branches first claims our attention. The various modes employed are for the most part enumerated by Aeschylus in the passage where Prometheus recounts the subjects in which he claimed to have first instructed mankind: dreams and their interpretation; chance words ([Greek: klêdones]) overheard, often conveying another meaning to the hearer than that which the speaker intended; meetings on the road ([Greek: enodioi symboloi]), where the person or object encountered was a portent of the traveller's success or failure in his errand; auspices in the strict sense of the word, observations, that is, of the flight and habits of birds; augury from a sacrificial victim, either by inspection of its entrails or by signs seen in the fire in which it was being consumed. To these arts Suidas adds 'domestic divination' ([Greek: oikoskopikon])—the interpretation of various trivial incidents of domestic life—palmistry ([Greek: cheiroskopikon]), and divination from the twitching of any part of the body ([Greek: palmikon]). Finally of course there was direct inspiration ([Greek: mantikê]), either temporary, as in an individual seer, or permanent, as at the oracle of Delphi.

Whether the common-folk ever distinguished the comparative values of these many methods of divination may well be doubted. The Delphic oracle, I suspect, attained its high prestige more because it was ready to supply immediately on demand a more or less direct and detailed answer to a definite question, than because personal inspiration was held to be in any way a surer channel for divine communications than were other means of divination. Some thinkers indeed, chiefly of the Peripatetic school, were inclined to draw distinctions between 'natural' and 'skilled' divination. The 'natural' methods, including dreams and all direct inspiration, were accepted by them; the 'skilled' methods, those which required the services of a professional augur or interpreter, were disallowed. But the division proposed was in itself bad—for dreams do not by any means exclusively belong to the first class, but probably in the majority of cases require interpre-*.]