Seeing with Different Eyes - Cosmology and Divination

32
Chapter Two
If a man, a lonely man, is one who walks at night in the street, then let him
say, “I am Enki’s messenger, I am Damgalmunna’s messenger, I am the
messenger Asalluhi”. Let him say, “I am the man of Eridu”. 33
As the star, the ritual performer discerns the truth and may, at the
same time, function as an interpreter (hermeneus). He is both a diviner and
a prophet, since both are “readers”, though the latter reads not the starry
text of Heaven (the microcosmic Qur’an), but the purified tablet of the
heart on which Shamash or Adad write the secret name of God. This
entails a kind of mystic encounter with noetic theophanies, or a gaining
proximity to the divine Throne. Obviously, divination should only be
viewed as a secondary activity, since assuming the archetypal or astral
identity implies a union (the Neoplatonic henosis) with both the divine
Intellect (the solar, but essentially invisible, Shamash or Adad), and the
entire noetic cosmos symbolised by the stars.
To conclude, as Tzvi Abush points out, this essentially mystical aim
of Chaldean divination lies at the root of both Jewish and Greek
philosophical theurgy, and is the true purpose of all ritual practice in
which an induced altered state of consciousness may incidentally serve to
foretell the future, but ultimately is directed towards union with the divine:
I need hardly emphasise that the underlying concept of experience here of
ascent to the world of the gods is also found in early Jewish apocalyptic
and hekhalot literatures, where the participant ascends to heaven to join the
divine world, and in early Pythagoreanism and in Hellenistic literature,
where the soul at death returns to the heavens and is to be found among or
as one of the stars. These traditions, it should be noted, are linked in one
way or another, to ancient Mesopotamia and are rooted in an ecstatic
trance or dream experience. 34
1
Julian, Oration VII, 220a.
2
Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica, I.28,1.
3
See Amelie Kuhrt, ‘Nabonidus and the Babylonian Priesthood’, Pagan Priests,
Religion and Power in the Ancient World, Mary Beard and John North, eds.,
(Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1990), 119.
4
See Chan-Kok Wong, ‘Philo’s Use of Chaldaioi’, The Studia Philonica Annual,
Studies in Hellenistic Judaism, David T. Runia, ed., vol. IV, 1992, 5.
5
Iamblichus, De mysteriis, trans. Emma C. Clarke, John M. Dillon and Jackson P.
Herschbell, (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), 7-9.
6
Ruth Majercik, The Chaldean Oracles, Text, Translation and Commentary
(Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1989), 3.
7
John Dillon, The Middle Platonists, A Study of Platonism 80 BC to AD 220
(London: Duckworth, 1996), 384.