"Seven sarcophagi, some dating back more than 6,000 years, have been discovered at a site on the edge of the pyramid complex in Saqqara, south of the Egyptian capital, archaeology officials announced Saturday." Source: AFP.
"...Three of the tombs had been used for cats ... while one of four other sarcophagi discovered at the site belonged to Khufu-Imhat, overseer of the buildings in the royal palace."
According to Ahram Online, "...that the [archaeological] mission uncovered three plain New Kingdom tombs that had been used during the Late Period as a cat necropolis, along with four other Old Kingdom tombs, the most important of which belongs to Khufu-Imhat, the overseer of the buildings in the royal palace."
King Tut's father, Amenhotep IV, was a mystic and religious revolutionary who turned his back on the traditional Egyptian gods -- not to mention the powerful priesthood associated with them -- and decreed that Aten, the sun god, was the only god who could be worshipped in the country. Known as the "heretic pharoah," Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaten and built a new capitol city at Amarna north of Thebes, forcibly relocating the population of Thebes to populate his new city.
Akhenaten dedicated Armana to the worship of the deified disk of the sun and set himself up as the leader of the new monotheistic cult, living in splendid isolation and basically ignoring the defense and administration of Egypt. His neglect (and later persecution) of the other gods created a lot of enemies. Cities like Thebes--and the priests who controlled them--owed their wealth and political power to their temples, which attracted both private and official benefactions. Akhenaten's revolution wasn't just religious, but also political and economic. My impression is that he was oblivious to the disastrous effects his revolution--and his isolation--had on the rest of his country.
Akhenaten's neglect of the ordinary affairs of Egypt led to its decline and threatened its security. Near the end of his reign, other empires like the Hittites were encroaching on Egyptian territory. When Akhenaten died around 1330 BC, his city at Amarna was destroyed and depopulated and the new rulers began a comprehensive program to restore the traditional gods and their sacred cities.
The moral of the story, if there is one, is that religious fanatics, idealists and true believers, no matter how inspired, make bad leaders. Akhenaten is a classic example.
"Ancient Roman divination was tied to the concept of auspices, which literally means 'looking for fortunate signs in birds'” in Latin. (An individual who looks for these signs is called an augur.) Indeed, the founding myth of Rome involves Romulus and Remus performing bird augury to decide that Rome should be built on the Palatine Hill. Notably, however, like most things in Roman religion, the concept of auspices appears to be 'borrowed' from other religions, specifically the ancient Greeks." Source: Harvard University.
From HBO's Rome. Caesar has bribed the chief augur to show that the gods favor Caesar's rebellion.
"All the nations of antiquity were impressed with the firm belief, that the will of the gods and future events were revealed to men by certain signs, which were sent by the gods as marks of their favour to their sincere worshippers. Hence, the arguments of the Stoics that if there are gods they care for men, and that if they care for men they must send them signs of their will ... expressed so completely the popular belief, that whoever questioned it, would have been looked upon in no other light than an atheist. But while all nations sought to become acquainted with the will of the gods by various modes, which gave rise to innumerable kinds of divination, there arose in each separate nation a sort of national belief that the particular gods, who watched over them, revealed the future to them in a distinct and peculiar manner. " Source: Lacus Curtius.
"Auspicium, literally [means] 'watching the birds ... but the term was applied to various types of divination. Festus [1] ... records five types of auspical signs; from the sky (... mostly thunder and lightning), from birds (... observed were the number, position, flight, cries, and feeding of birds), from sacred chickens, the pulli (... they were kept hungry in a cage; if food dropped from their beaks when they were eating, this was an excellent sign...), from quadripeds (...e.g. a wolf eating grass), and from unusual, threatening occurrences ... Through the auspices the gods did not foretell the future but only expressed their approval or disapproval of an action either contemplated or in progress." Source: Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed. revised.
[1] I think this refers to the 2nd century Roman grammarian Sextus Pompeius Festus, but I could be wrong.
Comment: In the clip from HBO's Rome above, the augurs take the auspices, using bird divination, to see if the gods approve of Caesar's rebellion and -- what a surprise -- they do. Caesar seems pleased at the outcome and he should be since it cost him a fortune.
In an honest system, divine approval of Caesar's actions would seem unlikely, to say the least -- he has entered Rome under arms, for one thing, an act of high treason -- but he has wisely taken the precaution of bribing the chief augur to make sure that the signs turn out to be favorable. The propaganda value of having the people believe that the gods are on his side justifies the enormous expense of the bribe (200,000 sesterces in the show).
This kind of religious corruption must have been fairly common in ancient Rome. According to Wikipedia, "...the appointment and inauguration of any magistrate, decisions made within the people’s assembly and the advancement of any campaign always required a positive auspicium," and it's extremely unlikely that practical-minded Roman politicians would have allowed these critical matters to be decided by the random flights of birds.
Negative auspices could also be useful when "[s]ometimes bribed or politically motivated augures would fabricate unfavorable auspices in order to delay certain state functions, such as elections..." (Wikipedia)
It's unclear how the augurs could fabricate the auspices. After all, how could you rig the way a flock of birds crossed the sky or whatever? It's possible that the priests had a system for delivering the results their patrons had paid for, but it seems more likely that the whole matter was so subjective that they could just interpret the signs any way they wanted.
People have been collecting honey from bees since the Stone Age. According to Wikipedia, "[c]ollecting honey from wild bee colonies is one of the most ancient human activities and is still practiced by aboriginal societies in parts of Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. In Africa, honeyguide birds have evolved a mutualist relationship with humans, leading them to hives and participating in the feast. This suggests honey harvesting by humans may be of great antiquity. Some of the earliest evidence of gathering honey from wild colonies is from rock paintings, dating to around Upper Paleolithic (13,000 BCE). Gathering honey from wild bee colonies is usually done by subduing the bees with smoke and breaking open the tree or rocks where the colony is located, often resulting in the physical destruction of the nest."
Honey was an important commodity in the ancient world. According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised), "bee-keeping had the same importance for antiquity that sugar production has now. Honey-gathering preceded the culture of bees which began perhaps in the mesolithic period. The evidence for bee-keeping in classical antiquity is mainly literary, ranging in time from Hesiod onwards and in content from incidental allusions to codifications of the practical experience of Greek, Roman, and Carthaginian bee-masters."
Then, as now, honey was used both as a food and a medicine. Note: Honey is currently used as an antibiotic and a treatment for coughs, wounds and burns. (Wikipedia) The Egyptians and other people in the Middle East also used honey to embalm the dead in some cases.
"Bees provide signs of future events both private and public, when a cluster of them hangs down in houses and temples -- portents that have often been presaged by momentous events. They settled on the mouth of Plato when he was a young child and foretold the charm of his very pleasing eloquence. They settled in Drusus' camp at the time of our great victory at Arbalo; indeed augurs, who always think the presence of bees is a bad omen, are not invariably correct." -- from Book XI, Pliny the Elder, Natural History: A Selection, Penguin Classics.
Note: "The oldest known honey remains were found in the country of Georgia. Archaeologists found honey remains on the inner surface of clay vessels unearthed in an ancient tomb, dating back some 4,700–5,500 years. In ancient Georgia, several types of honey were buried with a person for their journey into the afterlife, including linden, berry, and meadow-flower varieties." (Wikipedia)
Notes: "The archaeological site of Chavin gave its name to the culture that developed between 1500 and 300 B.C. in this high valley of the Peruvian Andes. This former place of worship is one of the earliest and best-known pre-Columbian sites. Its appearance is striking, with the complex of terraces and squares, surrounded by structures of dressed stone, and the mainly zoomorphic ornamentation." Source: UNESCO World Heritage List.
Chavin de Huantar was a ritual center and pilgrim's destination as well as a major trade hub. "More so than its stunning architecture, Chavín de Huántar was a place of great mystical significance. A shaman elite wielded immense power through the use of drugs, architectural conceits, and the aegis (or threat) of divine sanction. Indeed, though religious rites are hardly attestable, this is in part due to their malleability at the hands of the shamans." Source: Global Heritage Fund.Note: I think that last sentence means that the religious practices at Chavin de Huantar are hard to reconstruct because the shamans adapted their rituals to suit the circumstances.
The site was occupied by pre-Chavin peoples as long ago as 3000 BC. The Chavin Culture built the temple sometime during the mid 2nd - mid 1st millenium BC and it became a major ceremonial center with its own oracle, shamans and a small elite with a direct pipeline to the gods. The Chavin civilization began to decline around 500-300 BC, perhaps as a result of a general loss of political unity in the Andean world.
In 2012, Popular Archaeology reported that "... a recent archaeoacoustic study suggests that the ancients of the 3,000-year-old Andean ceremonial center at Chavín de Huántar, in the central highlands of Peru, practiced a fine art and science of manipulating sound with architecture to produce desired sensory effects. With the assistance of architectural form and placement, and sounds emitted from conch-shell trumpets, the oracle of Chavín de Huántar 'spoke' to the ancient center's listeners."
In other words, the "voice of the oracle" was an acoustical trick. In fact, if there was a voice, it had to be a trick (unless you think that oracles are real). The shamans and temple priests were probably running a con on the gullible pilgrims who visited the temple and the pronouncements of the oracle could have been one of the ways they exerted control over their neighbors.
Comment: The narrator was talking too quickly for me to catch the name of this particular Balkan vampire. Whoever he was, he definitely isn't the "earliest recorded vampire," unless the narrator meant that he's the earliest named vampire or the earliest vampire in the modern sense of the word, which could be true for all I know. Vampires have been around for thousands of years, but the picture of the vampire we have today is only a few centuries old and apparently originated in eastern Europe:
"The notion of vampirism has existed for millennia. Cultures such as the Mesopotamians, Hebrews, Ancient Greeks, and Romans had tales of demons and spirits which are considered precursors to modern vampires. Despite the occurrence of vampire-like creatures in these ancient civilizations, the folklore for the entity we know today as the vampire originates almost exclusively from early 18th-century southeastern Europe." Source: Wikipedia.
The modern concept of the vampire appears to be based on very ancient legends which first appeared in the Near East thousands of years ago. I don't have any evidence for this, but I wouldn't be surprised if the legends could be traced all the way back to the Paleolithic.
"Among the elaborate and extensive demonology of Babylonia and Assyria the Vampire had a very prominent place. From the very earliest times Eastern races have always held that belief in the existence of dark and malignant powers, evil spirits and ghosts which is, we cannot doubt it, naturally implanted in the heart of man and which it remains for the ignorance and agnosticism of a later day to deny. The first inhabitants of Babylonia, the Sumerians, recognized three distinct classes of evil spirits, any one of whom was always ready to attack those who by any accident or negligence laid themselves open to these invasions." Source: The Vampire, His Kith and Kin, by Montague Summers, Chapter 4: "The Vampire In Assyria, the East and Some Ancient Countries."
"The most famous vampire is, of course, Bram Stoker's Dracula, but those looking for a historical 'real' Dracula often cite Romanian prince Vlad Tepes (1431-1476). Stoker may have modeled some aspects of his Dracula character on Vlad, but he probably just borrowed the name (Vlad Dracula). The characterization of Tepes as a vampire, however, is a distinctly Western one; in Romania, he is viewed not as a blood-drinking sadist but as a national hero who defended his empire from the Ottoman Turks." Source: Live Science (2014).
The legend of the vampire seems to have originated in the very ancient and widespread belief that "blood is life." It's no accident that blood sacrifice was also an integral part of ancient pagan rituals. According to Montague Summers (who believed that vampires are real), many cultures saw blood as a medicine. Several African tribes, for instance, treated the sick and dying by giving them human blood to drink. Blood has always been thought to have rejuvenating powers that could bring the shades of the dead back to a semblance of life. In the Odyssey, for example, when Oddysseus enters Hades to learn how to get home, he makes a blood offering to the dead. The spirits have to drink the blood of his sacrifice before they can become substantial enough to talk to him.
Vampires, the Undead, are essentially dead bodies which require regular infusions of blood to maintain their strange existence and keep from decaying. They are physical manifestations of the occult power of blood to restore youth and vitality. The transformation of these bloodsucking corpses into sex symbols in the modern world is truly bizarre, but it obviously has something to do with the fact that the victims in vampire movies (and the female vampires) tend to be voluptuous women and the vampire attacks are usually presented as a kind of seduction.
Dracula does the job on Mina in stylish fashion.
The figure of the vampire is so fascinating that an entire Goth-style subculture of "real-life vampires" has emerged. These people claim to be actual vampires and the most extreme of them have gone so far as to have fangs surgically implanted. Technically, I guess, this makes them part of the larger body-modification culture. Basically they're LARPING in a group fantasy world and most of them don't make very convincing vampires.
Many people still believe that vampires are real. For instance, the following news report (2012?) describes how a Serb village was living in fear of a local vampire, Sava Savanovic, believed to be loose in the countryside after the collapse of his ancestral home.
"'People are very worried. Everybody knows the legend of this vampire and the thought that he is now homeless and looking for somewhere else and possibly other victims is terrifying people,' Miodrag Vujetic, local municipal assembly member, told ABC News. 'We are all frightened.'" -- ABC News (2012). For more information, see The Bloody Truth About Serbia's Vampire.
It would be easy to make fun of these people and call them superstitious peasants, but that would be kind of hypocritical considering how superstitious Americans are. This is also a pretty religious country. Millions of Americans believe in the supernatural in one form or another. For instance, many Christians believe in demons and angels and spirits. They believe that Jesus raised the dead and came back from the dead himself, but they'd probably laugh at the idea of vampires or call them demons, which is pretty close to the definition in many ancient cultures. One way or another, if you believe in the supernatural that opens the door to all sorts of things, including vampires.
Note: It has been scientifically proven that Christopher Lee was the greatest Dracula of all time.
Finally, despite all the vampire novels that have been written since his time, Bram Stoker's Dracula is still the best. Written in 1897, this is Stoker's Gothic masterpiece, a fantastic product of the Victorian imagination. No modern novel even comes close.
Comment: How accurate is this description of the origins of Halloween? It's hard to say. "The three main sources for Celtic religion are Romano-Celtic epigraphy and iconography, the comments of classical authors, and insular Celtic tradition as represented by recorded Irish and Welsh literature." Source: The Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD), 3rd ed, revised.
From what I can tell, most of what we know about Celtic mythology was written down during the medieval period. According to Wikipedia, "[t]he Celtic peoples who maintained either their political or linguistic identities (such as the Gaels in Ireland, and the Brittonic tribes of Great Britain) left vestigial remnants of their ancestral mythologies, put into written form during the Middle Ages." (Emphasis added)
The Roman conquest and the gradual conversion of the Celts to Christianity created a kind of syncretic muddle that makes it difficult to separate the facts of Celtic religious practices from the myths that grew up around them. The problem is "one of reconciling [the] very different modalites and frames of reference [of the different sources], and of matching insular myth to Romano-Celtic image." (OCD)
The picture we have of the Celts is also complicated by Roman war propaganda, the most famous example of which is Julius Caesar's commentaries on the Gallic War. Caesar, for instance, described the practice of human sacrifice by the Druids, though he probably never witnessed such a sacrifice himself. Apparently, there's still some question about whether these sacrifices actually occurred and, if they did, who was responsible for carrying them out:
"How widespread human sacrifice was among the cultures that the druids served is another mystery," according to Live Science (2014). "It’s important to note that much of the writing that survives comes from Roman writers who could be hostile toward the druids and the cultures they served." Historical distortions, if not outright fabrications, could have easily crept into the descriptions of the Celts recorded by Christians hostile to pagan practices in general.
The bottom line, I guess, is that we don't really know if our standard history of the origin of Halloween is accurate or a mixture of truth and legend complicated by distortions introduced by later writers. The only thing certain is that the rituals practiced by modern "neopagans" probably don't have much to do with real pagan rituals and beliefs.
"Researchers at the University of Dundee have recreated the face of an 18th-century 'witch' who died in jail before she could be burned for her 'crimes'." Source: Archaeology News Network (2017).
"Lilias Adie, from Torryburn, Fife, died in 1704 while held in prison for her 'confessed' crimes of being a witch and having sex with the devil."
Comment: This isn't ancient or medieval history, but I can't resist posting stories involving sex with the devil. If this reconstruction is accurate, Lilias Adie looks like she was a sweet old grandma, which just makes the wicked old trollop's behavior all the more shocking. But never mind that. Reading her tragic story made me think, in my usual roundabout way, that it's about time to bring back the medieval witch hunts.
Witchcraft, at least in a watered-down, New Age, politically-correct and feminazified form, is alive and well in the modern world. Witchcraft is now a brand, according to Buzzfeed (2017) in an article about how "entrepreneurs [have blended] a passion for the occult with an understanding of e-commerce to capture a share of the new economic activity surrounding witchcraft." Magic, it seems, is a hot market these days:
"The owner of one such business, Goddess Provisions, said her customer base has grown from 300 subscribers to almost 6,000 in the last year and a half."
The goddess who runs this online store sells everything from crystals to aromatherapy, superfood snacks and spiritual growth tools, and her customers are undoubtedly a pack of rabid Third-Wave feminists who see themselves as being oppressed by the non-existent patriarchy. I have no evidence to back this up, but I imagine that the majority of them are -- among other things -- suffering from extreme forms of Post Trump Stress Disorder.
May the Great Cthulhu save us all from this plague of modern witches and neopagans in general.
It's amazing that in the 313 years since Lilias Adie died in a Scottish prison after her confession -- three centuries that saw the rise of modern science and technology -- witchcraft has become a widespread, public, relentlessly left-wing and completely legal subculture with a thriving market for witchy products like mouse bones and pentagram pins. These feminist witches and white-magic practitioners are kind of boring, though. Maybe some of them dabble in curse spells and the like, but you'd be hard pressed to find any modern equivalents of Wizard Whateley in The Dunwich Horror or the evil sorceress Queen Taramis in Conan the Destroyer. As far as I can tell, modern witchcraft is more of a pose and a fashion statement than anything else.
Back in Lilias Adie's time, people took witchcraft seriously. Guilty or not, that's why she was in prison. The modern witchcraft brand, if nothing else, shows how much Christianity has degenerated over the centuries. Many modern Christians still believe that witches are real, but they're not inclined to do anything concrete about it. These days, even the most fundamentalist congregations have succumbed to creeping liberalism. For instance, they would never even think of actually going out and burning one of their local goddesses at the stake. That's too bad, if you ask me. Granted, it's hard to take these modern witches very seriously, but considering how obnoxious they are a revival of the medieval witch hunts would not only be a positive benefit to society, but highly entertaining.
What we need is a New Inquisition. The Catholic Church has become a squalid viper's nest of corruption. pedaresty and Cultural Marxism, so the responsibility would fall on the shoulders of fundamentalist congregations around the world. Modern witches aren't hard to locate; most of them have Facebook and Twitter pages and so on. Once the Inquisition Intelligence Service identifies them, the IIS could send out howling mobs with torches to burn down every upscale witchcraft boutique they could find and round up all the Goddesses and Pop-Culture Heroines they could get their hands on. Teenage girls with a pack of Tarot cards, Goth chicks wearing pentagram necklaces, shady characters like this little girl -- no one would be immune except for Elvira. They would all have to stand trial, preferably by ordeal:
The guilty could then be disposed of humanely, just like they were in the Middle Ages:
"In England and New England Witches were hanged; elsewhere the most common form of execution was burning. Burning, by the way, didn't mean being burned alive. If you recanted (admitted you'd made a mistake and were sorry), you were killed beforehand, and then your body was consigned to the flames. Nobles were beheaded, commoners were hanged -- being burned alive was an extreme and unusual punishment except in Spain and Italy where the Inquisition did regularly burn people alive." Source: Summerlands. (Firefox is giving me an Untrusted Certificate warning about this site, but it's probably OK.)
Witches weren't always executed. Sometimes they were banished, imprisoned or forced to do penance. When they occurred, the executions were usually public because they were thought to be valuable "teaching tools," which I'm sure they were. The religious courts handed the condemned over to the secular authorities in order to keep the church's hands clean, but in the modern world I suppose the New Inquisition would have to do the dirty work itself. I imagine a lot of people out there would object to this, but look at it this way: The executions would not only rid us of all these LARPING New Age witches, but they would be good for the tourist economy wherever they took place:
"Executions were popular events. The largest had thousands of attendees, who often traveled many miles to see the deaths. Crowds were so large that the Inquisition would sometimes erect bleachers, so that everyone could see and hear." (Summerland)
Bring back the medieval witch hunts. It's just a suggestion.
Notes: Pontius Pilatus was the prefect of Judea from 26 - 36 AD, according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised). We know more about Pilate and his term in office than we do about other provincial governors of the period, but the descriptions of his character by ancient writers are unreliable at best. The muddled New Testament accounts present him as a generally sympathetic, but weak administrator, while Josephus describes him as a cruel tyrant, insensitive to local traditions, who used force to crush dissent. Neither version is particularly accurate.
The picture of Pilate that emerges from the ancient sources is complex and open to interpretation. From what I've read about him, I wouldn't call him either weak or tyrannical, but simply unsure about how to handle his chaotic, rebellious province. The impression I get is that he didn't know a lot about Judea when he took control, but whatever the case, there's no doubt that his term of office was characterized by a series of blunders and disturbances:
"Offenses against religious sentiment, perhaps not deliberate, created several serious disturbances which Pilatus handled badly. He yielded to determined protests against image-bearing standards being brought into Jerusalem by troops. Shields set up in the palace, treated also as iconic, were removed at Tiberius' behest (1). Control of a crowd objecting to the use of Temple funds for the building of an aqueduct was achieved with heavy violence." (OCD)
(1) Note that the Roman government was trying not to create more problems in an already volatile province by stirring up popular resentments.
Pilate could reasonably be charged with incompetence, though it's probably more accurate to say that he didn't understand the zealotry he would encounter in Judea and couldn't decide how to deal with it. He tended to blunder into controversies and then either back down or over-react, and in the case of the "iconic" shields he set up in his own palace, the emperor had to intercede to restore some semblance of order. Finally, "a military attack [he ordered] on Samaritans gathering at Mt. Gerizim led ... to Pilatus' recall [to Rome]." Jewish sources describe this as a massacre and Rome decided to replace Pilate in an attempt to restore order. Pilate had made a mess of things, but it's hard to tell if anyone else could have done any better.
The New Testament account of Jesus' trial before Pilate is absurd (2) and as far as I know there are no accounts or even mentions of the trial in pagan writings. Diplomatically, the OCD says that "a reliable account of [Pilate's] conduct of the trial of Jesus ... cannot be extracted from the conflicting Gospel accounts." It's a reasonable assumption that the trial is complete fiction.
(2) According to the OCD, "John's portrayal of [Pilate] giving judgement from a tribunal in front of his praetorium is plausible," so if the story of the trial is fiction, whoever made it up was at least familiar with some aspects of Roman legal procedure.
Christian forgers claimed that Pilate was so impressed by Jesus that he later converted to Christianity. According to the OCD, "later Christian tradition and an apocryphal literature proliferated around him and his wife." There's an excellent novel, "Pontius Pilate" by Paul L. Maier, which combines these mythical traditions with the historical record, such as it is. Highly recommended.
Comment: If nothing else, this huge labyrinthine archive proves that the Vatican, like any other bureaucracy, generates tons of paperwork. I suspect, though, that this "secret archive" isn't the real secret archive and I'm sure they've got more interesting -- and dangerous -- material hidden away in some underground, climate-controlled bunker that very few people know about.
The Vatican, after all, is a state in its own right with a very long history of intrigue, corruption and the occasional murder. I'm sure this book about the secret archives (The Vatican Secret Archives, Vdh Books) only contains documents that the Church decided can be safely shown to the public. Even though it's an interesting and historically important book in its own right, it's also a kind of PR effort by the church designed to counter popular conspiracy theories and show they have nothing to hide.
Nonsense. They've probably got all sorts of juicy documents hidden away somewhere. I'd love to know, for example, what kind of information they have about the early days of the church--how it was actually founded, who the original Popes were, how they managed to accumulate so much power and wealth. The real story, I think, will turn out to be radically different from anything we've been told so far.
I also suspect that they've got a lot of documents relating to more modern scandals like the alleged connections between the Vatican Bank and the Mafia and the death of "God's Banker," Roberto Calvi, who was found hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge near the financial district in London back in 1982. (Take a look at the Wikipedia photograph of Calvi on his Wikipedia page; he looks like a mafiosi.) It would be interesting to read those documents, to say the least, and I'd also like to read the transcripts from the trial of Giordano Bruno, the 16th Century philosopher who was burned at the stake.
The thing I'd most like to find out, however, is how much the Vatican knows about the origins of Christianity. It's possible, I suppose, that they don't know anything more than we do, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they have secret histories that go all the way back which are locked up because they're too dangerous for the world to see. This assumes, of course, that the documents weren't destroyed long ago.
The Roman Auspices
"Ancient Roman divination was tied to the concept of auspices, which literally means 'looking for fortunate signs in birds'” in Latin. (An individual who looks for these signs is called an augur.) Indeed, the founding myth of Rome involves Romulus and Remus performing bird augury to decide that Rome should be built on the Palatine Hill. Notably, however, like most things in Roman religion, the concept of auspices appears to be 'borrowed' from other religions, specifically the ancient Greeks." Source: Harvard University.
From HBO's Rome. Caesar has bribed the chief augur to show that the gods favor Caesar's rebellion.
"All the nations of antiquity were impressed with the firm belief, that the will of the gods and future events were revealed to men by certain signs, which were sent by the gods as marks of their favour to their sincere worshippers. Hence, the arguments of the Stoics that if there are gods they care for men, and that if they care for men they must send them signs of their will ... expressed so completely the popular belief, that whoever questioned it, would have been looked upon in no other light than an atheist. But while all nations sought to become acquainted with the will of the gods by various modes, which gave rise to innumerable kinds of divination, there arose in each separate nation a sort of national belief that the particular gods, who watched over them, revealed the future to them in a distinct and peculiar manner. " Source: Lacus Curtius.
"Auspicium, literally [means] 'watching the birds ... but the term was applied to various types of divination. Festus [1] ... records five types of auspical signs; from the sky (... mostly thunder and lightning), from birds (... observed were the number, position, flight, cries, and feeding of birds), from sacred chickens, the pulli (... they were kept hungry in a cage; if food dropped from their beaks when they were eating, this was an excellent sign...), from quadripeds (...e.g. a wolf eating grass), and from unusual, threatening occurrences ... Through the auspices the gods did not foretell the future but only expressed their approval or disapproval of an action either contemplated or in progress." Source: Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed. revised.
[1] I think this refers to the 2nd century Roman grammarian Sextus Pompeius Festus, but I could be wrong.
Related: The Sacred Chickens of Rome.
Comment: In the clip from HBO's Rome above, the augurs take the auspices, using bird divination, to see if the gods approve of Caesar's rebellion and -- what a surprise -- they do. Caesar seems pleased at the outcome and he should be since it cost him a fortune.
In an honest system, divine approval of Caesar's actions would seem unlikely, to say the least -- he has entered Rome under arms, for one thing, an act of high treason -- but he has wisely taken the precaution of bribing the chief augur to make sure that the signs turn out to be favorable. The propaganda value of having the people believe that the gods are on his side justifies the enormous expense of the bribe (200,000 sesterces in the show).
This kind of religious corruption must have been fairly common in ancient Rome. According to Wikipedia, "...the appointment and inauguration of any magistrate, decisions made within the people’s assembly and the advancement of any campaign always required a positive auspicium," and it's extremely unlikely that practical-minded Roman politicians would have allowed these critical matters to be decided by the random flights of birds.
Negative auspices could also be useful when "[s]ometimes bribed or politically motivated augures would fabricate unfavorable auspices in order to delay certain state functions, such as elections..." (Wikipedia)
It's unclear how the augurs could fabricate the auspices. After all, how could you rig the way a flock of birds crossed the sky or whatever? It's possible that the priests had a system for delivering the results their patrons had paid for, but it seems more likely that the whole matter was so subjective that they could just interpret the signs any way they wanted.
Posted at 07:00 AM in Commentary, Culture, Religion, Rome, Videos | Permalink