Seeing with Different Eyes - Cosmology and Divination

18
Chapter One
serves to reinforce the one-sided character of the conversation—the point
of the exercise is to hear the answer. In fact this disproportionality is an
irreducible factor of divination—it is what separates it from all other forms
of semiosis, from human communication to the observation of nature. The
figure at the centre of this paper, the signifying pneuma, produces at the
same time its human inverse, the living creature as receiver of signs.
It may even be possible to suggest that the creation of this human
figure—let us call him homo interpretans—is the real point of divination,
when considered from the vantage of the human individual. The abilities
to generate signs and to receive them are two entirely different ones,
which evolutionary biologists have discovered to have become adaptively
useful to organisms according to different trajectories. 34 There is no doubt
that the capacity of receptor is older, and that it belongs to a very old
evolutionary layer. It is present in all living creatures, down to the singlecelled
organism. Walter Burkert has already suggested a link between such
an early evolutionary state and a divinatory mentality. 35 This topic brings
us to very deep waters indeed and we cannot hope to cross them, but it
may be that this perspective provides a means to understand the evident
grip that divination has had on nearly all members of the human species.
This offers an “answer” to divination, if you will, which stands parallel to
that offered by those who have so fruitfully explored divination within the
operations of a society, where the point of divination seemed so clearly to
be the marshalling of social power.
To a degree stronger than in any other communicative situation, the
unique disproportionality in divination places the human being in the
posture of a passive receiver of the message, a message which,
furthermore, verges on a kind of “triggering mechanism” whose
efficacious power over the recipient ought to be automatic. The pathos that
typically surrounds the human recipient of the divine message may
actually arise from the necessary intrusion of the sign, where one hoped
the signal might again reign, since a human can no longer operate
automatically, that is, can no longer descend from self-consciousness to
pure, natural, intuitive response. Divination provides a channel in which
we can witness signals transmogrify into signs, but we are always haunted
by the insecurity that sign producers may not be the divinities we wish
them to be. Humans sacrifice the perfect coalescence of signifier and
signified as the price of becoming self-aware sign producers. We have
stolen from the gods our abilities to communicate at our will, while our
expectant ears await, like a modern-day Prometheus, the return of Zeus’
eagle.