Seeing with Different Eyes - Cosmology and Divination

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Chapter Two
from the entrails of the sacrificial animal which was read by the baru, or
examiner. Alongside this seemingly rational system, at Mari in the Old
Babylonian period and in Assyria, one finds the occurrence of an atypical
intuitive divination or prophecy. This kind of divination consisted of an
informal “hearing” of the word of God through apilum (answerer or
respondent, from the verb apalum, “to answer”); muhhum, nabum (from
which stems the Hebrew and Arabic word for prophet, nabi); or raggimu
(fem. raggimtu). The term raggimu, meaning “the pronouncer or speaker”,
stands for “prophet” in the Neo-Assyrian Empire. The ecstatic activity of
the apilum centres upon a sanctuary, or in the case of semi-nomadic
Amorites and Arameans, a tent-shrine (mashkanum). We read in a text
from Mari:
Through oracles, Adad, Lord of Kallassu [spoke] to me, as follows: “Am I
not Adad, Lord of Kallassu, who reared him (the king) between my loins
and restored him to the throne of his father’s house?” 13
For Plato, convinced that his knowledge (episteme) makes him a theios
aner, a divine man (in accord with the ancient paradigm of the King-
Magician, anthropos teleios), divination, as a technique claiming to use
human reason for the interpretation of signs sent by the gods, is an
illusion. However, as a kind of inspiration or divine madness (mania),
divination is anchored in a realm which transcends sensible existence. As
Jean-Pierre Vernant says:
If this is a domain that respects the philosopher’s victorious rationalism, it
is also scrupulously conservative in the area of religious practices to which
divination belongs, and it does so because it recognized in the irrational a
kind of trace left there by the world of Ideal Forms. 14
But the reading of signs and omens (the divine script of which the
created cosmos is woven) also implies an intelligible structure which
serves as the invisible background of visible things, themselves regarded
as symbols of the invisible. Astronomical knowledge, related to the
mathematical methods required to predict the behaviour of the planets and
eclipses, emerged from the background of divinatory practices under the
auspices of royal support in the eighth century BCE. David Brown regards
this real or imagined emergence as a paradigm shift from a science of
celestial divination without astronomy (that is, without accurate
prediction) to one with it, and dates the invention of predictive astronomy
(which presumably occurred on the basis of competition among the
scholars in the Neo-Assyrian court) to the period around 700 BCE.