divination traditions and controversies, chinese and greek

7/28/2019 Divination Traditions and Controversies, Chinese and Greek

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Monsieur Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd

Divination : traditions and controversies, Chinese and GreekIn: Extrme-Orient, Extrme-Occident. 1999, N21, pp. 155-165.

Abstract

The author outlines the objectives of the research program on divination initiated in the 1950s. His own comparative remarks then

bear on the rhetoric commonly employed by various groups in China and Greece, respectively, to stress either the continuity or

the contrast of their own activities with divinatory practice. To this end, he delineates the available Greek sources and points out

the diversity of attitudes expressed in them with respect to divination. The paper stresses how the rhetoric of demarcation,assisted by the development of epistemological analysis, sometimes concealed actual continuities between the practices.

Rsum

Divination : traditions et controverses en Chine et en Grce

L'auteur rappelle les enjeux du programme d'tude de la divination lanc dans les annes 50 et oriente son examen comparatif

vers la distribution des rhtoriques les plus souvent mobilises par divers groupes sociaux, en Chine et en Grce, pour marquer

la continuit ou l'opposition de leurs activits avec les pratiques divinatoires. cette fin, il fait le tour des sources grecques

disponibles, voque la diversit des attitudes vis-- vis de la divination et souligne comment une rhtorique assez gnralise de

dmarcation, servie par le dveloppement d'analyses pistmologiques, recouvre parfois une relle continuit de manires de

faire.

Citer ce document / Cite this document :

Lloyd Geoffrey E. R. Divination : traditions and controversies, Chinese and Greek. In: Extrme-Orient, Extrme-Occident. 1999,

N21, pp. 155-165.

doi : 10.3406/oroc.1999.1108

http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/oroc_0754-5010_1999_num_21_21_1108
http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/author/auteur_oroc_28http://dx.doi.org/10.3406/oroc.1999.1108http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/oroc_0754-5010_1999_num_21_21_1108http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/oroc_0754-5010_1999_num_21_21_1108http://dx.doi.org/10.3406/oroc.1999.1108http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/author/auteur_oroc_28


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Extrme-Orient, Extrme-Occident 21 - 1999

Divination : traditions and controversies, Chinese and Greek

Geoffrey Lloyd

The ambition to foresee the future is as strong and as widespread today as it hasever been. Nowadays, however, if figures in the public eye, a politician's wife such asNancy Reagan, a football manager such as Glenn Hoddle, are caught consorting withastrologers or mediums, they are lambasted in the popular press, even though the verysame newspapers are happy enough to indulge their readers with regular features onwhat is in their stars . Prediction certainly has its disreputable side. Yet no onederides it in one of its modes. Successful prediction is a feature that we all recognise inscience, where it is sometimes held to be one of its defining characteristics.In the positivist historiography of science, which was where the history of sciencebegan, the frontier between legitimate, and deluded, ambitions to predict had to befirmly policed. The so-called pseudo-sciences were an occasion of mereembarrassment. Most attempts to see into the future, or to discover the hidden secretsof the present or the past, had to be dismissed as essentially deluded. Astrology,physiognomy, later phrenology, were no part of the agenda, even though they might beexemplified not just in the same periods, but in the very same authors, as those thatwere deemed to be central to the story of the upward march of science.A second phase in the study of divination in particular began when its rationalitycame to be recognised. In the debates on the irrational that were common inpsychology, philosophy and anthropology from the 1950s on, it was remarked thattechniques of divination have their own internal coherence and obey certain rules, andon that score and by that criterion do not fail to be rational '.It was further recognised that acquiring special knowledge was not the onlyfunction of practices of divination, nor, in certain circumstances, is it the mostimportant one. Comparative anthropological studies have shown that sometimes, whena particularly tricky decision has to be taken, and it might be invidious for an individualto be solely responsible for it, an impersonal mode of divination may be used as thebasis fo r a consensual verdict as to what to do 2. In which direction should the huntingparty set out ? Divination can resolve the issue without implicating any individual with


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blame for failure, and such a procedure may also have the effect of introducing arandom element in the courses of action pursued.Again when Big Men or rulers have to be advised, the context of discussion of whatthe signs foretell may provide a framework for that to happen without any of the partiesto the advice being in danger of losing face. On the surface, the talk is of how tointerpret the omens and what they hold fo r the future : but what is primarily at issue isdeciding what to do. Discussion of what the signs mean will enable different viewsabout what should be done to be expressed.The contexts in which divination may be attempted are as varied as the types ofpractice adopted. At one end of the spectrum, a private individual may attempt someprediction purely for his or her own private purposes - with or without the approval orconsent of state authorities. At the other, there are ritualised, institutionalised occasionswhen those in charge may be high functionaries of state, or even the ruler in person. Insuch circumstances, a challenge to the prediction could hardly fail to be construed as achallenge to the state authorities themselves. When the knowledge claimed fordivination concerns the future, that holds out the promise of influencing it - a prospectthat those authorities could scarcely ignore. The legitimacy or otherwise of thepractices were not just matters of the rationality of aims and methods, fo r issues of statecontrol, or its subversion, might well be at stake.These general remarks serve to identify some of the questions that a study ofdivination in ancient cultures may tackle. Greece and China are among those cultureswhere we can investigate not just the variety of modes of divination and the relationsbetween them, but also what happens as they come to be subject to learned elaborationand to self-conscious reflection 3. I shall focus here on those aspects of thoseinterrelations and elaborations that concern the legitimacy of procedures, theircomparative prestige and status, and the challenges to which they were liable.Since challenge, in this case, may presuppose diversity, it is as well to begin bytaking note of the wide variety of different modes, and roles, of Chinese divination thatthe studies in this number have brought to light. Two of the best known techniques,based on the interpretation of the cracks of fired turtle shells or on that of thehexagrams formed by combinations of broken or unbroken lines derived from sortingsticks of milfoil or yarrow, illustrate, on the one hand, the importance of divination,from earliest times, fo r state concerns, and on the other, the potentiality for elaborationand development. In the turtle shell inscriptions, dating from the 12th century on fromAnyang, the divinations relate primarily to the fortunes and affairs of kings, militaryexpeditions, hunts, births, tribute, the construction of towns 4. No higher legitimationcould be imagined than that conferred on these practices by the direct involvement ofthe ruler himself, often imagined as communicating, by this means, with his deadancestors (though cf . Djamouri). Then the Yijing, which with its commentaries mustrank as the most popular divination text ever, numbering, as is well known, even Jungamong its enthusiastic admirers, provided not just a handbook for predictions, but alsoa guide to the understanding of the world in general, and of the human condition in156


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particular. Yet on one reading of that text, that of the Xici for instance 5, to get the mostout of its elliptical and allusive character required the highest linguistic, literary andphilosophical skills. I note in passing that Yang Xiong's variant, based on 81 tetragramsrather than 64 hexagrams, in the Tai xuan jing, aimed to make explicit what could onlybe derived from the Yijing itself by what Sivin has called heroic feats ofhermeneutics 6.Yet as one contributor after another points out in these studies, the range ofsignificance of divinatory discourse stretches well beyond issues to do with foretellingthe future. Indeed both the practices and the modes of discourse associated withdivination provided models whose repercussions can be detected in a wide variety ofintellectual activities. Henderson explores the parallels with Confucian exegesis. Thosewith the law, both with the commentary tradition there and with discussion of theproblems posed by the application of the general rule to the particular case, are pointedout by Bourgon and by Csikszentmihalyi. Again the introduction of predictions may, asKalinowski remarks, serve narrative functions, as when the reader of such a text as theZuozhuan is given advanced indication of the unfolding of events. Repeatedly, in thatcontext as in many others, the conduct of a divination carries moral significance,whether conveying particular judgements concerning the character of the diviner orgeneral lessons to do with the consequences of good or bad behaviour. Kalinowski'sstudy further opens up fruitful fields of reflection on the relations between divinationand early Chinese historiography - not least fo r the suggestions it may provide on thethorny, but fundamental, question of what precisely we may mean by historiography in the early Chinese context. Djamouri, meanwhile, focuses on therelationships between the development of divination and the development of writingitself.The variety of agents responsible for divinations, ranging from the kingsthemselves to a diversity of marginal, suspect, potentially subversive, types, opens upthe possibility of rivalry and of the critical evaluation of claims to legitimacy. Butbefore I comment on those aspects of the Chinese experience, I should first introducesome of the relevant comparative Greek materials. Although our Greek evidencecannot claim the antiquity of the Anyang oracle bones, a number of different modes ofprediction is attested at least from Homer onwards. Animal sacrifices were made andthe victims entrails (liver, gall-bladder and so on) were inspected for any sign thatmight be thought ominous. The flights of birds were similarly scrutinised. Dreams, orat least some of them, were, as in China, thought to be significant for the dreamer orfor others - one area where elaborate Greek theories came to be developed for theirinterpretation, as we can see from Artemidorus in the second century CE. ParticularGreek sites, such as Delphi and Dodona, often independent of the centres of politicalpower, had oracles that acquired reputations that extended beyond the borders ofindividual states.The reactions to predictions in these and other modes that are ascribed to particularcharacters already in Homer vary from the awestruck to the sceptical. Thus when at

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Iliad 12 200ff the seer Polydamas interprets a fight between an eagle and a snake thatit has captured as an omen that the Trojans will be thwarted of victory, Hector rejectsthis with a famous outburst : One omen is best : to defend one's country. But thatapparently fine expression of unconcern for the seer's prediction must be put intoperspective. Hector, for his part, gains his confidence from the promises he says that hehas had from Zeus. Besides in the event, of course, Polydamas turns out to be correct.Many of the seers, diviners, prophets, represented in early Greek literature aregreeted, like Polydamas, with disbelief, suspicion, derision, contempt - where parallelsin the reactions to the predictions offered by Chinese wu are not hard to find.Cassandra's fate is to foretell the future, but never to be believed. Teiresias, inSophocles'Oedipus Tyrannus, is accused of malice, envy, corruption I. The possibilityof political intervention, influencing the predictions made, was recognised. TheDelphic oracle, or at least the priestess or the interpreters of her pronouncements, couldbe suborned 8. Many assumed that when the outcome of a state sacrifice was reportedas unfavourable, that was just an excuse for doing nothing - as was often the case whenthe Spartans refused to leave their own territory on the grounds that the omens wereinauspicious.Yet the fact that individual seers were frequently accused of cheating, obfuscation,charlatanry, should certainly not be equated with any general Greek disbelief in thepractice of divination as such. On the contrary, a number of texts imply that it washighly regarded. Solon, 1 53ff, mentions seer-craft alongside medicine and poetry asarts or skills under divine aegis. In Aeschylus Prometheus Vinctus 484ff, Prometheusincludes divination (mantike), alongside medicine, navigation and metal-work, amongthe arts (technai) and resources (poroi) that he bestowed as benefits on humans. Nor isit just in poetry that we find such a theme. In the Hippocratic treatise On Regimen, fromthe early fourth century BCE, when the arts and crafts (technai) are used to throw light,by analogy, on the human body, the first to be mentioned is divination (mantike) 9.But another Hippocratic work introduces us to another side to the picture. Theauthor of On Regimen in Acute Diseases (ch. 3 Littr, II 238-244) does all he can todistance medicine, as he wants to practise it, from divination. He criticises his medicalcolleagues for their disagreements with one another. This gives the medical art a badname among lay people, to the point where some might even say it resemblesdivination. Doctors disagreeing over diagnoses and treatments seem to be no betterthan seers quarrelling over the interpretations of the flight of birds or the signs to befound in the entrails of sacrificial victims.Similarly in the later Hippocratic work Prorrhetic the writer opens with an attackon the idea that marvellous and exact predictions are possible in medicine (Book IIchhl-2, Littr IX 6-10). He says he will not engage in such divinations but will setout the reliable signs by which one can recognise which patients will recover and whichdie. On the one hand, he wants to dissociate himself from marvellous , superhuman predictions. On the other, he still insists one can use reliable signs. Whodecides which are which ? Well, of course, he does himself. But it is notable that the

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epithets he uses to denigrate the predictions he disapproves of relate specifically to thework of diviners.Similar direct criticisms of common beliefs figure in Greek writers of manydifferent kinds and are a particular feature of the polemics in which, from the late sixthor early fifth century BCE onwards, the proponents of new styles of inquiry advocatedtheir, naturalistic , approach to the phenomena over against what they nowsometimes labelled the superstitions and magic of traditional ideas andpractices. Thus the poet and philosopher Xenophanes undermines any belief that thepersonified Iris (the rainbow) is a messenger from the gods. She whom people callIris also is a cloud, purple and red and yellow to behold 10 . So what had been assumedto be a presage is a natural phenomenon, just as a whole Hippocratic treatise, On theSacred Disease, was devoted to showing that that disease had a natural cause just likeany other. Similarly Plutarch in his life of Pericles (ch. 6) recounts a story in which thephilosopher Anaxagoras challenges the view of the soothsayer Lampon who hadinterpreted a monstrous, one-horned, ram, as an omen. Athens, according to Lampon,,currently the scene of a power-struggle between Pericles and a rival (a general namedThucydides), would shortly be dominated by Pericles alone. To hat, Anaxagoras'ripostewas to have the ram's head opened, to show that the deformity had a perfectly naturalexplanation. For that, Plutarch tells us, Anaxagoras won the people's admiration, eventhough -r- as Plutarch continues - when Lampon's prediction turned out to be correct,he came to be the object of their admiration.The bid to establish what Aristotle was to call natural philosophy (phusiologia)generally involved not just constructive, but also destructive, moves. On the one hand,naturalistic explanations - often, it must be said, pretty fanciful ones r- were to beattempted for every kind of phenomenon, from rainbows, lightning, eclipses, todiseases, deformities and monsters. On the other hand, the forces that had beenassumed to be at work in such phenomena, sending them as punishments, or at least asportents, to mortals, had to be dismissed as irrelevant. Nature itself could be, and oftenwas, believed to be divine : but that left no room for the personal, wilful, interventionsof individual gods, goddesses, demons (daimones) or whatever. Even though, asCsikszentmihalyi shows, there is a parallel move away from the view of the universegoverned by anthropomorphic deities in Chinese thought, what came to replace it therewas a conception of the justice of the cosmos that differs from the Greeks'idea in oneimportant respect, that, for those Greeks, the divine nature they postulated was rathermatter for study and for admiration than any guarantor of justice in human affairs.If the ambitions of the naturalists were clear, the question of the limits ofpossible naturalistic inquiry remained, at points, highly disputed. In particular, the issueof what the study of the heavens could reasonably be expected to comprise came to bedebated in ways that cannot be paralleled in China or in any other ancient society. It istrue that the Greeks did not distinguish between what we call astronomy and astrologyin those terms. Both the Latin terms astronomia and astrologia, and the Greek onesfrom which they were derived, were generally used interchangeably. However we do

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find clear distinctions drawn between two different types of inquiry. Ptolemy, in theopening chapter of the Tetrabiblos, does so, for example, in terms of two kinds ofprognosis or prediction. On the one hand there was prediction directed at foretellingevents in the heavens themselves, the movements of the sun, moon and planetsespecially. The claim he makes in the Syntaxis is that this can yield irrefutabledemonstrations, based on the methods of arithmetic and geometry.On the other hand there was a second mode of prediction, it too, in his view,legitimate, directed at predicting events on earth on the basis of the study of theheavens. That too used mathematics, in the casting of horoscopes. Yet it depended ontraditional assumptions, concerning such matters as which planets, or theirconfigurations, were beneficent or maleficent. They could not claim certainty, and sothe inquiry as a whole was conjectural, even though potentially, he thought, of verygreat utility, since the prospect of foreknowledge it held out could be of great practicalbenefit as well as encouraging (he hoped) steadfastness and peace of mind in the faceof what the future held.Neither the ancient Chinese, nor the Babylonians, nor, come to that, the Egyptiansnor the Indians, saw any need to mark off one branch of the study of the heavens as theconjectural investigation of omens. It is true that the Chinese contrast between Ufa andtian wen separates a mainly computational inquiry (the regulation of the calendar,eclipse cycles, and so on) from the study of the pattern of the heavens , essentiallyqualitative in character, but including cosmography as well as a variety of ominousphenomena. Yet that does not equate with a contrast between astronomy and astrology,nor does it correspond to an interest in differentiating between the epistemologicalstatuses of the studies in question. It was just that kind of interest, namely inepistemology, that led to the Greek - and Roman - recognition of a contrast betweendifferent modes of prediction. But if we ask where that interest comes from, part of theanswer lies in the preoccupation with foundational questions with which the attempt toset up the inquiry into nature was associated from the beginning. It was byundermining the entire basis of the supernaturalists'or magicians claims to know thatthose new styles of inquiry hoped to establish their own independence and superiority.Yet as soon became clear in the philosophical tradition especially, claims toepistemological superiority were no more immune to challenge than the positions theysought to outdo.There was no stable Greek, or Roman, consensus on the status of those two modesof prediction that were clearly distinguished by Ptolemy. He certainly thought bothstudies have their place. But some considered astrology to be subversive, while othersheld it to be deluded. Cicero's De Divinatione rehearses, at considerable length, thearguments pro and contra on just that issue. Moreover we know of yet others whodoubted or denied the validity not just of astrology but also of astronomical theorisingitself. For the Epicureans, much of what passed as such was overly dogmatic anddegenerated into myth (Letter to Pythocles 87). For the Pyrrhonian sceptics, anyinquiry that went beyond the phenomena and tried to determine the hidden causes or160


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underlying reality of things was to be rejected, not on the grounds of a claim that suchdetermination was impossible (for to claim that would be to fall into negativedogmatism) but rather on the argument that it was useless.The complications of Greek demarcation disputes, on the status of modes ofprediction and on other scores, were not just a matter of ongoing epistemologicalpolemics. There was sometimes a good deal more in common between the positions ofrival groups than their overt rivalry allowed to appear. Medicine yields our richestmaterials on the theme. While some Hippocratic writers, as we have seen, wereadamant that medicine was not to be confused with divination, certain commonHippocratic techniques of prognosis, and the claims made for prognostic ability itself,have more in common with traditional patterns of belief than we might expect. Dreamswere the key indicator used in temple medicine, in the shrines of Asclepius for instance.The faithful passed the night in the shrine (that is they incubated ) and their dreamswere then interpreted as suggesting a remedy - or in certain cases, better still, thepatients awake already cured. But dreams are also included among the signs the doctorshould attend to in Epidemics book I ll, and On Regimen book IV is devoted to givingdetailed guidelines for their interpretation, although there is this important difference,that dreams are now indicators of the physical condition of the body, not signs fromgod. Dreaming of a star falling towards the sea, fo r instance, is correlated with diseasesof the bowels n.The treatise entitled Prognosis spcifies the signs the doctor should use in arrivingat his diagnosis, including the famous Hippocratic facies (Prognosis ch 2) and theinferences to be drawn from the examination of the excreta, stools, urine, sputa, vomit.Yet in setting out both the defensive and the promotional roles of prognosis in chapter1, the writer echoes the language used of Calchas in Homer or the Muses in Hesiod 13.The doctor should tell in advance the present, the past and the future , termsechoed also in Epidemics I ch 5. Defensively, prognosis helps in that if the doctor hasforetold the death of the patient, he will not be blamed. In the promotional role, if thedoctor tells his patients not just the outcome of the disease, but also its past course andtheir present condition, then they will be more likely to entrust themselves to his care.But that trust comes from a prestige that, long before Hippocratic naturalism, had beenthe prerogative of the prophet or diviner.

The ambivalence of naturalistic medicine, claiming to deal purely with factors thatare capable of rational explanation, and yet still on occasion using the discourse ofseercraft, continues right down to Galen, in the second century CE, and beyond. Galenremarks that he was so successful in prognosis that his rivals slandered him as amagician 14 . He explains his own success by his skill in the interpretation of the pulseand the like, but it is clear that he exploited every opportunity to impress, indeed toamaze, his clients. On the one hand, the secret of his success is just his superior medicalability. On the other hand, his repeated references to the reputation he won as a wonderworker suggest that he was not above relishing that reputation.

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It is not hard to parallel this combination of hard-hitting polemic and a certainambivalence in attitudes among the rival parties to it, if we refer to other aspects ofGreek intellectual activity that do not involve a particular interest in divination 15. Thequestion, for the comparativist, is, then, whether or to what extent such a combinationis a distinctively Greek phenomenon. To answer that, we need to refer back to more ofthe Chinese materials set out in the papers of this collection.There is an interesting tension between some points that emerge from Harper'sdiscussion and those suggested in Levi's paper. Both studies tackle aspects of rivalryand criticism between groups and individuals. Harper writes first of the relationshipbetween what he calls the proponents of the new cosmological theory , associatedwith the new use of hexagrams, and earlier milfoil divination, where he puts it that theformer did not render the latter obsolete, but rather accommodated it (p. 95). Again henotes that both physicians and diviners could be called gong, craftsman (p. 96), thatwhile the Huangdi neijing rejects the attribution of illness to demonic activity, it stopsshort of denying the existence of the world of spirits and demons (p. 99) and thatLingshu 58 in particular does not exactly condone incantation in the contemporaryworld, but neither does it condemn incantation (p. 107, note 29). Thus far, and in thosecontexts, there are more signs of drawing back from, than of engaging in, polemic.Yet some of Levi's examples modify that picture. Hanfeizi criticizes somedivinatory practices as perverse. Sunzi rejects them in the context of waging war. Tothose two clear examples of explicit criticism, others can be added. Xunzi suggests thatexpenditure on divination may be a waste of resources 16 , while Wang Chong asks whatis so special about turtles or milfoil that they can yield predictions ".Rivalry in China from the Warring States to the end of the Han is not just a matterof a certain competitiveness between individual practitioners who recognise each otheras engaged in broadly the same activities 18 , for it also existed - as it did in Greece -across boundaries. Criticism of the wrong-headed or of those marginalised as deviantcan be unrestrained, and not just where the grounds are moral ones or when thosecriticised are imagined as threatening disorder.All of that might seem to lead to the conclusion that the circumstances ofdeveloping modes of inquiry in general, and of divination in particular, were broadlysimilar, at least in ancient Greece and China, and that the differences that may bedetected are no more than ones of emphasis or of tone. That there are such broadsimilarities provides the necessary bridgehead for comparative studies to be furtherpursued. But where contrasts are concerned, between individuals, or groups, within, orbetween, Greece and China, I would argue that we are not limited to evaluating merelydifferences of degree. We can do more than just assess just how eirenic or howpolemical Chinese and Greek writers tended to be.To so limit ourselves would be to ignore a potential double pay-off. The first pointrelates to our reading of the various Chinese and Greek texts we encounter - where wecan and should be alert to the types of rhetoric deployed. By that, I mean we can lookbeyond the stance that may be adopted just for rhetorical purposes. On the one hand,162


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some Greek writers, especially, explicitly emphasise their objections and points ofdisagreement with those they polemicise against, even when, below the aggressivesurface, they share more with their opponents than they let on. On the other hand, someChinese authors, especially, give the impression of following earlier models even whenthey depart from and go well beyond them. In both cases, my addition of the term especially is to allow for Chinese texts in the first category (Wang Chong would beone example) and for Greek ones in the second (Galen's appropriation of Hippocratesand casting himself as his follower would be the most notorious instance of that). Thatserves to remind us that there are exceptions to the general rule, both among theChinese and the Greeks. But more importantly, perhaps, we should see that the generalrules, of stances that may express an eirenic or a polemical mode, may be adopted asmuch fo r tactical reasons, in the rhetoric of exchange, as for any more deep-seatedones.But then the second point concerns what is fo r us a substantial issue, insofar as thecultivation of those contrasting rhetorics tells us something about the characters of theintellectual exchange that were favoured. We are dealing not just with matters ofliterary style, but with perceptions as to how intellectual ambitions should be catered

for, careers advanced, the goal of true knowledge or wisdom achieved. As for thereasons for the development of some characteristically aggressive Greek patterns ofexchange, the argument I have offered elsewhere is that this corresponds to the need tomake a name for yourself in public debate 19 . That was the primary context in whichcompetitions for prestige, and fo r pupils, were played out. But where, as often in China,the target of persuasion was not a potentially hostile peer group, but the ruler or someother promising source of patronage and even stable employment, there the tactics ofadversariality could be less advantageous than those of more muted disagreements andan official adherence to the spirit of consensuality.I shall not here elaborate such a line of argument, which, in any event, needsadaptation to the particular complexities of the data concerning divination. To mentionjust the most obvious qualification that needs to be entered, in the admonitory functionof divination (alluded to above, p. 156), when the test of the discourse on theinterpretation of signs was not whether a certain result ensued but whether the advicewas sound, no amount of epistemological sophistication would rate as highly as theuprightness or practical wisdom of the counsellor. Overt criticism and polemic, or theiravoidance, themselves have different modes, some orthogonal to others, depending onwhether the perceived goal was one of truth - in the sense of correspondence to whatwere, or were represented to be, the facts - or one of utility and appropriateness. Yet ifthat serves to complexify the issues, it may underline, rather than undermine, the pointthat the insights that divinatory practices and their reception can throw on the characterof the relevant communicative exchanges may offer one possibly fruitful avenue fortheir further investigation.

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Notes1 . The essays edited by J. P. Vernant et al., as Divination et Rationalit, Paris 1974, were,

in this regard, a landmark.2. See especially O. K. Moore, Divination - A New Perspective , AmericanAnthropologist 59, 1957, p. 69-74 ; G. K. Park, Divination and its social contexts ,Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 93, 1963, p. 195-209 ; and W. Bascom,If Divination, Bloomington, Indiana, 1969.3. A third ancient culture area of cardinal importance fo r the investigation of these topicsis Mesopotamia. I hope to return to these questions in a wider comparative perspectiveon a later occasion.4. See, fo r example, D. N. Keightley, Late Shang Divination : The magico-religiouslegacy , in H. Rosemont (ed.), Explorations In Early Chinese Cosmology, JAARThematic Studies 50.2, Chico, California, 1984, p. 11-34, Shang divination andmetaphysics , Philosophy East and West, 38, 1988, p. 367-397.5. However, as Karine Chemla reminds me, and cf. Harper, that was not the only way inwhich the Yijing was used by those who consulted it.6. See M. Nylan and N. Sivin, The First Neo-Confucianism : an introduction to YangHsiung's Canon of Supreme Mystery , revised version (orig. 1987) in N. Sivin,Medicine, Philosophy and Religion in Ancient China, Aldershot 1995, Chapter III.7. For example OT 387ff. Accusations of greed and fraudulence against prophets andsoothsayers of various types are common in Aristophanes, e.g. Peace 1045-1126, Birds958-91, Knights 115ff, 1002ff.8. See, for example, Herodotus V 90ff, VI 75.9. Book I ch 10, Littr VI 488. Hippocratic treatises are cited according to the volume,chapter numbering and pagination in the edition of E. Littr, uvres compltesd'Hippocrate, 10 volumes, Paris 1839-1861.10. This is fragment 32 in the edition of H. Diels and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente derVorsokratiker, 6th edition, Berlin 1951-52.

1 1 . Epidemics 1 10, Littr II 670, cf Humours ch. 4, Littr V 480, On Sevens ch. 45, Littr1X460. .12. On Regimen IV ch. 86, Littr VI 640. In ch. 87 the author distances himself fromspecialist interpreters of dreams held to be divine and to give foreknowledge to citiesor to individuals about coming evil or good events. I have discussed this text, inrelation in particular to Aristotle's treatise on divination through dreams (DeDivinatione per somnia), in The Revolutions of Wisdom, California 1987, p. 32-37.13. Prognosis ch. 1, Littr II 110, cf. Iliad 1 70, Hesiod, Theogony 32.14. This is a recurrent theme in Galen's treatise entitled Prognosis, e.g. CorpusMedicorum Graecorum V 8.1, 84.5ff, 94.18f, 106.21ff.15. Thus there is a similar spectrum of attitudes on the question of the applicability ofmathematics in general and of number in particular to the understanding ofphenomena. Aristotle already polemicises against some of the excesses (as he seesthem) of ideas he associates with certain Pythagoreans and Platonists, Metaphysics Nchh. 5-6, 1092b8ff, b26ff. But such criticism failed to deter such a writer as

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Iamblichus, who, much later, at the turn of the third-fourth century CE, saw number asthe key to the understanding of the universe, and all its parts (De CommuniMathematica Scientia). Cf. ch. 5, Measurement and mystification , in TheRevolutions of Wisdom. In view of Henderson's comments on Confucian exegesis, itis noteworthy that Aristotle cites the work of Homeric scholars as an example where aconcentration on trivial points of detail leads to an oversight of matters of substantialimportance (Metaphysics 1093a26f).16. Xunzi 21.17. Lunheng 71. Yet Wang Chong holds that, as a matter of fact, fortunate people doencounter auspicious omens, unfortunate ones inauspicious ones.18. It is striking that in the medical case-histories set out in the biography of Chunyu Yi inthe Canggongzhuan, Shiji, 105, on no fewer than nine occasions (out of the twenty-five cases) Chunyu Yi criticises the diagnoses or therapies of other doctors, twicenaming the particular doctor with whom he disagrees.19. This is one of the principal themes in my Adversaries and Authorities, Cambridge,1996.

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divination traditions and controversies, chinese and greek

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