The Validation of Signs

A COSMOS OF SENSE

Accepting Signs: Divination

The effective use of signs is fundamental in all functions of life, from that of primitive organisms to primates.’ Interactions be­tween single organisms and their environment can be indirect and selective as they are mediated by things that come into the environment, conveying physical or chemical information.

In animals, all sensory perceptions work through the process­ing of signals, to be integrated into a well-structured if complex system of signs. To take a simple but obvious example: birds as well as humans cannot help seeing the stars as forming shapes and patterns—constellations, memorable icons rather than single unrelated dots—and they derive their orientation from them in the dark. If the ancients spoke of “animals” in the sky, the zodia of the zodiac, they were using the primitive hunter’s eye, trained to distinguish, first of all, the different animals in the surround-

mgs; I hey were also relating these “animals” to the main reper­toire of meaning, to mythology. This is projection, in the sense of producing a world picture that is not “real” but that easily assumes the character of familiarity; it keeps the subject tied to the external world observed in its details.

In general, signs function to bridge the distance between the world and the individual, even if they remain intermediates and may even obstruct more direct access.

In the wake of Saussure we are trained to think in terms of I’arbitraire du signifiant: signs are arbitrary, changeable, and re­placeable. In an age of electronics we are all aware that signals can be remodeled in an infinite series of transformations. Mod­ern psychology has studied the phenomena of psychic projection. In the standard Rorschach test, for instance, random sets of dots, marks, or blots are given shape by the person tested, who thus indirectly projects predilections and problems into the accidental arrangement. The meaning of signs is produced by the observer.

Yet this process is the opposite of solipsism. We experience meaning as flowing toward the conscious psyche from the out­side. An external world presents itself through a multiplicity of media. The capacity to find orientation by understanding signs remains an achievement of empathy and intellect. Interpretation is called for, an adaptive attempt at integration with experience past and present to foresee eventual consequences. The human psyche excels in this ability to create sense. This is not merely self-reflective nor arbitrary bricolage; the process requires keep­ing in contact with external reality and being conscious of this connection.

“You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but

not the signs of the time?” Jesus chided his disciples? A current and habitual interpretation of signs takes place in everyday life, but it is especially necessary to be alert to signs in situations of 58 absolute seriousness. The true god, Jesus teaches, presents his

advent through signs no less than pagan gods would do.

The Romans distinguished “natural” signs encountered, for example, in the flight of birds, and “artificial” signs resulting from special actions such as slaughtering sheep.⁷ The borderlines between them are fluid, however, since birdwatching may involve an elaborate apparatus while signs may be observed in the course of everyday butchering. In another sense of the word, John’s Gos­pel consistently speaks of “signs” as “being done” by Jesus (poiein semeia):* His miracles and the amazement they cause are indications of divine reality. Signs should be uncommon, and at all events they must be unpredictable. Even in the simplest forms of divination, however artificial it may be, what is crucial is that the outcome cannot be predicted nor manipulated, that there is a moment of tension, uncertainty, and surprise—like a throw of dice.

Success is achieved when one is ready to accept the sign at the

appropriate moment, integrate it into the particular situation, and thus create or recreate a meaningful cosmos.

Chance events could be turned into signs by “accepting” them. A name pronounced, a person encountered at a critical moment, words overheard accidentally, assume a certain meaning and de­termine the future. After the battle of Plataiai, an envoy from Samos comes to urge the king of Sparta to attack the Persians in Ionia; when he tells his name, Hegesistratos, which means “lead­ing the army,” the king says, “I accept,” and starts the cam­paign.¹⁰ But more subtle than that, the rustling of leaves or the glittering of water may also convey a message.¹¹ Most special is the role of birds. Birds are unpredictable in their flight and yet easy to spot and to describe. Birdwatching may have developed long ago through hunting experience, perhaps among carcass­eating hominids. It is the birds of prey, called oionoi in Greek, that give the important signs, from Mesopotamia to Italy. Twelve eagles appeared when Rome was to be founded, the greatest au­gury (augurium maximum) for Romulus. Homer’s Iliad intro­duces Kalchas, “by far the best of birdwatchers,” to lead the Greek army to Troy “through his divination.” Older Akkadian textbooks specify what the sighting of a falcon will signify for an army on march, flying either to the right or to the left, forward or backward.¹² Later on, in the Hellenistic period, Jews made

fun of this: the thing to do is to shoot the silly bird with an arrow to prove that it does not even know about its own fate.¹³ Yet it remained difficult even for Christian emperors to abolish the aus- 160 fiicia, the “bird watching” ceremonies by which the Roman army had been guided through so many centuries.

Divination has its special place at sacrifice. In the serious con­text of sacred action, the res divina, all kinds of details acquire meaning: the soaring flames, the bursting of the gallbladder, the cracks in burning bones. The most important parts to watch at the butchering were the entrails, especially the liver; hepatoscopy is in evidence from Mesopotamia to Etruria, taking hold of Greece and Rome as well. There probably was cultural diffusion, but also great variety of local lore.¹⁴ The tendency to observe signs in butchery comes up in other civilizations as well. Even in modern Greece and the Balkans, when a sheep has been slaugh­tered, some will try to “read” the shoulder blade.¹⁵

There are many more categories of signs used by diviners and even commonly observed by laypeople: a stumbling leg, quiver­ings of the body, objects floating or sinking in water, figures formed by the dispersion of oil or flour on water, but also drops of rain, thunder and lightning, or the silent movements and rel­ative positions of the stars.¹⁶ All these are watched and presumed to convey their meaning to those who “know.”

¹

The fundamental form of communication for humans is lan­guage; hence signs are appropriated and translated into the ex­perience of language. The abundance of signs turns into a pleth­ora of voices. A feeling of universal empathy may prevail, as if every being, everywhere, were telling a message—to those who understand. Indistinct sounds tend to become speech for the charismatics. Some oracles worked directly through the voices of persons “possessed,” whose speech was thought actually to emanate from unseen superior partners.

Speech presupposes speakers; signs seem to presuppose some great signatory⁷ a universal signifier who has established the

meanings we are summoned to understand. Relying on language, humans fit signs into a semantic structure with sender and ref­erence; and if the reference of signs noted by special charismatic interpreters cannot be verified, it adds to those provinces beyond experience which have still come into existence in our common world.¹⁸ Divination validates religion: important signs are be­lieved to emanate from divine sources.

What appears to be characteristic of a complex human world may be seen as a form of regression in a biological perspective. In more primitive organisms the sensorial apparatus is perfectly adapted to the needs of the species; hence “signs,” all the signals processed by a simple brain, do have simple and unequivocal “natural” meanings. The frog does not see the whole of the col­orful landscape at an evening sunset, but only the moving black dot which may be a fly, and it jumps for it.²⁰ The process can be analyzed and described by mathematical physics; tests are easy because the sensory apparatus is so easily deceived. Signs of this kind have meaning with direct survival value; they are bound to a closed system in which the less developed animals exist, instinc­tively reacting to specific signs and disregarding the rest of reality. This state has been left behind by the higher animals, and defi­nitely by humans. By means of all the tools the human intellect can master, our world has widened immensely in scope and in diversity. This resulted in a loss of the immediacy of practical meanings. Women and men see landscapes in all their impractical beauty or ugliness; they are subject to a plethora of sense­impressions that stream from a vastly complicated universe. Hu­man brains have no fixed program for structuring and selecting what can and should be known. Experience must be formed

through long and intricate interactions of biological as well as cultural factors; culture becomes more and more important, es­pecially because of the power of language; what should he ex- 162 perienced afresh has in fact been shaped by tradition and is being inculcated by the incessant influences and teachings of culture. Instinctive reactions to the overflowing multiplicity of signs are not possible; humans have to distinguish, to analyze, to combine, to interpret, to integrate details into a context to make some sense of it in the end.

As against this, the supposition that every incoming signal might be a sign conveying sense is regressive—a superstition in the very sense of the word. Characteristically, people tend to be­lieve this especially in states of alarm or panic. As the self­sufficiency of a normal, closed cultural system is shattered, it gives way to uncommon openness to signs hitherto disregarded, which may offer a chance for reorientation. Heightened anxiety makes us watch out with fearful attention and shiver at every rustling leaf. Periods of crisis are the high time for oracles and seers. There are even recognized forms of frenzy and ecstasy, producing messages bearing a new divine content. The sensitivity born of anxiety leads to an enlargement of the recognizable world, directed by the premise that everything has meaning. This amounts to a reprise of the sort of closed world in which less developed animals exist, though at a higher level. While these animals are experiencing nothing but contacts that impinge di­rectly upon their life, man may stand up to postulate a totality of sense within his universe. The dialectic of the widening of insight and the closing of the universe may be found in ancient philosophy: Plato, in his Timaeus, builds up a divine kosrnos for humans in which every detail has its timeless correspondence, place, and function; nothing is meaningless. Stoics went on to draw the picture of a kosrnos held together and pervaded by an intelligent pneuma, in which everything is held in “sympathy” with everything else; hence even the divinatory meaning of a bird’s flight would be ratified. Ptolemy found that the “sympa­thy” of the kosrnos fully justified astrology.²¹ The kosrnos is a

universe of signs: a philosophical given that appears to be pre­determined by a more ancient biological heritage.

It is still the natural world which comes into direct view in these processes. They do not involve gods or abstractions but 163 simply trees, flying birds, water, and stars, while uncommon phe­nomena such as comets and meteors are believed to be all the more portentous. Integrated in nature, interpreting incoming messages, humans construe their kosmos of sense. It hints at the divine.

Decision through Signs: The Ordeal

A special instrument to make gods speak out through nature in the context of impending conflict is the ordeal.²² This procedure goes beyond divination insofar as it constitutes an intervention in a situation of social crisis, of imminent fight, or at least of a legal process, when high-ranking individual or group interests and even lives are at stake. The crisis has a special aura of seri­ousness and urgency. In consequence, the sign to be obtained must be realistic in the extreme. To reach beyond interpretation and arbitrary intellectual adaptation, it is necessary to work on the body.

One way to express utmost seriousness is to have a fight for life and death, be it single combat or battle.²³ But the more strik­ing forms of ordeal entail submitting to a test from nature, the outcome of which decides between the rivaling claims. The re­sult, as in normal divination, cannot be predicted or manipu­lated. In this way, language is imputed to nature in a cultural context, with the hypothesis of divine supervision. Quite diverse civilizations have recourse to very similar proceedings.

Two natural forces, the bases of life and of technology, are usually summoned for the ordeal: water and fire, both known to be potentially dangerous. A water test, “going to the river,” ap­pears in texts from Mesopotamia; details are unknown, but it may have been similar to the witch test applied in medieval and premodern Europe, when the person accused of magic was

thrown into the water and considered guilty if he or she did not sink.²⁴ Touching melted metal is another very old practice; there seems to be in fact an unpredictable chance of not getting 64 burns.²⁵ In Iran, this procedure came to dominate eschatological fantasy: at the end of time, streams of burning metal will flow over the earth and destroy the wicked but leave the just un­touched.²⁶ Walking through fire was a dreaded test known also in Greece;²⁷ it was still practiced during the Crusades.²⁸

Less spectacular and more common, but still affecting the ba­sic process of life, was to make the person to be tested eat or drink some special and supposedly poisonous substance. Sick­ness would immediately strike the culprit, manifesting itself through a swollen body, pain, and swoon; the innocent would be left unharmed. Moderns will grant some psychosomatic effi­cacy to such a form of lie-detector. An elaborate description of the method is found in the Pentateuch. Hesiod describes a similar procedure, of “drinking Styx,” forced upon a god caught in per­jury.²⁹ The use of such an ordeal is also documented in the Near East and in Iran.³⁰ A simpler and more benign form, making the suspect swallow bread and cheese with the expectation that the culprit will exhibit swallowing difficulties, was generally prac­ticed in the ancient church, even by a bishop.³¹ The procedure is reported from other parts of the world too: “The Massai of East Africa bite off a few blades of grass, then exclaim ‘May this grass prove poisonous to me if I have lied before God!’ ”³²

As in divination, tricks may well enter the ordeal, “giving words” for truth; best known from medieval literature is the or­deal of Isolt in Gottfried’s Tristan romance. The lovers contrive a trick whereby Isolt’s proclamation is literally true though false in the sense required; thus Christ, the divine supervisor, is found to be “pliable as a windblown sleeve.”³³ Real cases were less funny. During the first Crusade, the “sacred spear” of Christ was allegedly excavated at Antioch. Enthusiasm was soon followed by skepticism, and clerics made the happy discoverer walk through fire with his spear; he died of his burns.³⁴ The fire’s tes-

timony was efficacious. Death is irrevocable; the purported sa­cred spear ignominiously disappeared from history.

Creating Signs: Territory and Body

Action and passive acceptance come together in the use of signs. While humans tend to perceive signs from the environment and to credit them with hidden meanings, they are no less able and ready to change their environment to adapt it to the presuppo­sitions and categories of their common mental world. This means that people create perceptible signs which act to stabilize the common world as it has been formed by language and cultural tradition. Processes of perception, as established through biolog­ical evolution, generally work by selection and adjustment of data taken out of a fluid and ambiguous assortment. In the same way, manmade marks, consciously applied, help make a world that is “good to perceive” because they reduce complexity.³⁵ Marks delete ambiguities and make reality correspond to instinc­tive needs and to conscious concepts.³⁶ Often they are applied both to the surroundings and to individual persons, marks of territory and marks of the body. As explanatory markings mingle with the opportunities for deception, there are overt as well as secret signs in both realms of application.

Marking territory is common to many mammals, usually by spreading scent marks. By analogy, humans follow these behav­ioral tracks in marking stones by oil libations.³⁷ There are many more ways to mark a landscape, especially by manipulating its most solid components, stones. Piles of stones or large stones set up in uncommon positions are signs of human presence through­out the world. The stone arrangements help people to find their way; and in general such marks evoke feelings of familiarity. It is striking how often and how easily such territory marks are drawn into a religious context. Stones bearing the marks of oil libation are sacred, and a single stone set upright is called the “house of god,” baitylos, Beth-El.³⁸ Real estate is marked by stones which are themselves sacred. Babylonians set up phallus-

shaped stones with inscriptions and divine symbols in relief to record property, kttdurrus.™ Roman boundary stones were su­pervised by a special god called “Boundary,” Terminus. It is true 166 that visible signs, even big stones, can be moved or destroyed intentionally. Hence hidden signs can be introduced, secret mark­ers to testify for the boundaries, relics of sacrifices and charcoal covered with earth.⁴⁰ There may be secret tombs referred to in local myth, uncovered at regular intervals by individuals who confirm their territorial power by arcane knowledge.⁴¹ Sanctu­aries of the gods are conspicuous in the landscape, marked by stone and tree and thus becoming markers themselves. Returning to Athens from the sea, you see first the temple at Sunion and sometime later the blinking tip of Athena’s spear at the Acrop­olis.⁴²

The production of figurines and pictures, which starts in the Upper Paleolithic, has created a new category of signs, icons whose visual modeling suggests a clear and seemingly direct ref­erence to the object. In fact they create a second level of reality, a world of pictures more manageable than reality and subject to willful creativity,⁴³ with nonobvious references coming up im­mediately.⁴⁴ Later observers are left with the problem of inter­preting these early representations, following the realistic or the fantastic indications, in a context of art, magic, or religion. In particular, the question of how far gods are represented can hardly be answered before the advent of high cultures, which speak to us through writing. At this stage no doubt is left that gods are represented through images, on which worship will con­centrate. Much later, the Jews and Christians bitterly denounced the worship of manmade idols, and Islam remained adamant in the condemnation of images.⁴⁵ Yet originally it was not the im­ages that created worship, but religious rituals that created im­ages for common orientation—rituals of veneration made ex­plicit and special by the visible “sign” produced by the artist. Note that in Latin a divine statue is just called the “sign,” signum.

The link between the mental world and natural environment is the body. Rituals are strategies to control the body’s behavior.

Hence the mental world tends to assert its seriousness by work­ing its will on the body.

We may find it natural that special groups have their special signs or emblems, flags, mascots, or songs. Handling them may still be taken quite seriously, especially in situations of crisis: “The flag is more than death,” a Nazi hymn proclaimed. And even when we do it unconsciously, nay unwillingly, we all react to clothing styles. But such signs can be dropped or exchanged, unless they are made corporeal. The mental world, which is changeable and fragile or excessively shaped by privacy and in­dividual freedom, thus turns upon itself and seeks confirmation from the body. Body marking seems to have been invented at the same prehistoric period which saw the emergence of represen­tative art, and this is hardly a coincidence.⁴⁶ Man was shaping his world through self-created signs.

Corporeal distinctions commonly apply to sex and to age clas­ses as well as to secluded and closely knit societies. “Rites of passage” allow for recruitment while stabilizing cultural mean­ings and values even through the change of generations. As the crisis of transition is made manageable, the status attained must be irreversible, beyond some special attire or adornment, beyond language and imagination.

Some bodily markers are reversible, especially hairstyle. We all know how effectively hairstyle is used to mark “alternatives,” whether for monks or rebellious juveniles. Hair is part of the natural body, and as it interacts with the individual face, its var­iations give the impression of a change of personal identity. While this can be undone in a few weeks, other marks cannot be undone. Branding, scarring, and tattooing are both common and old; other operations are also performed.⁴⁷ Many tribes in vari­ous parts of the world have or had the strict custom dictating that to become a full member of the group an individual must have some operation performed on the body, normally at an in­itiation ceremony; these include breaking of teeth, perforations of lips or nose, elaborate forms of scarification, and especially circumcision or subincision of genitals.

Initiation marks admit various codes of interpretation. Se- miologists chart the system of “making differences,” function­alists speculate about group solidarity, and psychoanalysts dwell 168 on Oedipal conflicts and castration phobia. At any rate, it is not sufficient to establish a person’s identity just by decision, pro­nouncement, or act of imagination. It does not even suffice to make an unforgettable imprint by psychic terror.⁴⁸ The nonob- vious must become obvious, and what is inside must be turned outside. There must be visible differences that persist. Note that the other paraphernalia of initiation, the change of place and costume, dietary rules, tests, and maltreatments have their bodily reality too; initiatory beatings do hurt.

According to Herodotus, when Lydians and Medes make an oath of alliance, they “cut the skin of their arms and then lick each other’s blood.” Arabians make a pledge in this way: a man stands between the two people pledging, makes an incision at the inner side of their hands at the thumb, then takes a hem of the garment of each and anoints seven stones with their blood, invoking Dionysus and Uranie.⁴⁹ Intimacy mingles with pain and terror, scars will remain to remind them of the act, and the blood­ied stones endure; language then adds the divine partners, names associated with regular worship. The instinctive shudder and conscious symbolism combine in another attempt at “imprint­ing,” as it were, to create a definite and long-lived partnership, beyond the vagaries of imagination and language.

Marks, qua signs, are made to attract notice. Forms of scari­fication or mutilation of teeth cannot be disguised. Yet secret signs may become even more powerful. Common to Jews and Moslems—but not confined to them—is circumcision, which is “the sign of the covenant” made between Jahweh and Abra­ham.⁵⁰ This is an irrevocable mark which is invisible to the public because of the code of normal decency. But everybody knows about it, and it catches attention all the more once it comes to the fore. The process of turning the inside out is reversed super­ficially, gaining force by the disguise.

Goddesses in Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Syria had groups

of eunuchs as their special worshipers, either at their sanctuaries or wandering abroad. Castration is a drastic, irreversible sign, normally hidden by decency but exhibited in uncommon pres­entations; it upsets the normal categories of male and female. The only Akkadian text which refers to the institution says that these men “changed their masculinity into femininity to make the people of Ishtar revere her,” or rather “fear” her: awe con­firms religion.⁵¹ The more perplexing the sign, the more it is taken to refer to a higher, invisible authority.

The term character indelebilis was coined in the Christian tra­dition, from Augustine to Thomas, to describe the effect of sac­raments, in particular of baptism.⁵² Augustine took his metaphor from the way soldiers were marked. Christian tradition has taken recourse to metaphysical “sealings” without further operating on the body, though not without prescribing appropriate garments and hairstyle; and touching the body with water has still re­mained indispensable in Christian ritual.⁵³ The spiritual world articulated by verbal constructs does not exist as a closed system but is broken up and reconstituted by signs that affect reality beyond language.

Language Validated: The Oath

Why must people have religion? In the ancient world, the obvi­ous answer would have been, for the validation of oaths.⁵⁴ With­out gods there would be no oaths, and hence no basis for trust and cooperation, for legal action, or for business.⁵⁵ “Oaths are encountered among all peoples and in all cultures. They are a primal symbol of religion.”⁵⁶ Oaths were indispensable in social interactions at all levels, economic and juridical, private and pub­lic, intra-tribal and international. No contract, no treaty, no ad­ministration of justice proceeds without an oath. This was the one place where religion, morality, and law definitely met.

Oath is a phenomenon of language which owes its existence to the very insufficiency of language. The weakness of the word is the possibility—the likelihood—of lying, of fraud and trickery

in all of the social games. It is survival fitness regulated by selfish genes to outwit the others. There has been growing interest in these phenomena even at the prehuman level.⁵⁷ Chimpanzees, 170 taught to use sign language, immediately tried to trick their train­ers by lying.⁵⁸ It is safe to conclude that at the very beginnings of civilization, lying and language were there together. Tales of deceit and deception are favorites in many civilizations.⁵⁹ It may be natural that children are tempted to lie. But collaboration and interchange within society require trust and the means to prevent deception, to make fellow men predictable, and to give stability to a common world of values.

The purpose of an oath, sworn by responsible partners, has always been to exclude lying in all its forms, tricks, distortions, and fantastic elaborations. It is “to tell the truth and nothing but the truth,” or to take on an obligation to be fulfilled without change or subterfuge. In other words, taking an oath means a radical “reduction of complexity,” in an effort to establish univ­ocal meanings and create a world of sense that is dependable, with clear divisions between true and false, right and wrong, friend and adversary, ally and foe.

It is true, and characteristic, that tricky humans immediately take the next step and make cheating by oaths a fine art.⁶⁰ Homer has it that Autolycus, Odysseus’ grandfather, was “famous for thievishness and oath”; there are various tales about how well he managed that craft.⁶¹ He was not alone. “To give words,” verba dare in Latin, means to deceive; the very word “sense,” sensus, means the opposite of verba. The formula “what I feel I am saying” was introduced to give weight to mere words.⁶² But how to be sure about feelings?

To achieve reduction of complexity, to establish fixed and univocal meaning, acts of speech cannot suffice. To add to a statement that it is true and that alternatives are wrong and ex­cluded is at best a rhetorical device to impress the naive, but useless from a logical point of view; it will fail to convince the experienced. Add terrifying expressions to demonstrate serious­ness and provoke hair-raising anxiety; even this will leave well­

versed partners rather cool. It is necessary to get beyond the closed semantic universe of language.

For this purpose two concomitant strategies have been de­vised: the use of witnesses to guarantee a shared mental world, and the use of ritual to create realistic signs, to affix an ineradi­cable seal by the imprinting function of awe. At both levels re­duction of complexity is met by a “surplus” from the supernat­ural sphere.⁶³ Unseen partners share the knowledge, and nonobvious causality wields coercive power. Both are accepted in an atmosphere of absolute seriousness.

As our mental world is controlled by common knowledge, so do independent witnesses guarantee the truth. Note that the same Indoeuropean root wid-, meaning “to see” and hence “to know,” is used both in the English word witness and in the ancient Greek word histon But humans are frail, both physically and mentally; they are likely to forget or even to lie in the future. A first step to attain a higher level would be to invoke “the oath of the king”—which makes monarchy itself indispensable.⁶⁴ But how will the king “know”? A common expedient is to choose what is most evidently present, even if this imputes knowledge to in­animate objects. Thus Odysseus, in disguise, swears “by the host’s table and the hearth of Odysseus.”⁶⁵ International treaties ever since the Bronze Age refer to the most permanent phenom­ena of the natural surroundings, the sun and the sky, heaven and earth. The sun “who sees everything” holds special rank: for Bab­ylonians Shamash is the main guarantor of oaths. Hittite treaties routinely invoke “the mountains, the rivers, the springs, the great sea, heaven and earth, the winds and the clouds—let these be witnesses to this treaty and to the oath.”⁶⁶ Homer has the Trojans offer one sheep to the Sun and one to the Earth at their oath ceremony and invoke the sun, the rivers, the earth, and the pu­nitive powers of the netherworld.⁶⁷ Through an ingenious lan­guage game of personification, the most obvious object is pro­vided with functions that are anything but obvious.

The accepted language game goes further in postulating ever higher-ranking witnesses, more reliable than those actually pres-

ent, to represent inflexible truth. This is when gods enter the scene. It would not be correct to say that gods are just invented in this context. Rather, it is that all the gods and powers vener- 172 ated by established tradition who guarantee hierarchical order, who are made partners in gift exchange, who are experienced in terror and held responsible for the well-being or illness of the individual, the family, tribe, or country, are used in the context of oath-taking and prove to be useful indeed. The guarantee of absolute truth is with god.⁶⁸

It is better still when obvious reality and superior gods can both be integrated in the proceedings. The sun is a brilliant phe­nomenon in the sky and held to be a god in many civilizations. If for the Greeks Helios is a lesser god, Zeus the preserver of oaths, called horkios in this function, originally was a designa­tion of the shining sky, a fact which Greeks did not totally forget. It is to Zeus that the Achaeans sacrifice, according to Homer; likewise, Odysseus gives Zeus the first place in his oath, to be followed by the table and hearth.⁶⁹ The Athenian youngsters who enter military service, the ephebes, take their oath by a series of gods of the city and end it by “the boundaries of the fatherland, wheat, barley, vines, olives, and fig trees.”⁷⁰ This evokes a mean­ingful, familiar world in which the citizens live and for which they will have to fight. The boundaries of the fatherland, with all that the soil provides for the sustenance of life, are summoned before the young men’s eyes and named witnesses to validate the pronouncement, together with the gods for whom sanctuaries and temples have been installed.

Gods are powerful, and if annoyed, they will retaliate with relentless punishment. They are expressly summoned to do so in the oath formulas, in Mesopotamia as in Egypt, Greece, or Rome. “Their power will kill,” an Egyptian oath formula holds.⁷¹ “Zeus throws his thunderbolt at the perjurers,” the Athenians are wont to believe.⁷² In Akkadian, the oath itself is said to turn into a demon and “grasp” the transgressor ⁷³ Special demons are summoned to watch the oath and to punish perjury; for the Greeks these are the Erinyes, personifications of the curses that

accompany an oath. They ‘‘circle around the Oath as he is born,” Hesiod warns, and will chase the transgressor and exact punish­ment even beyond the grave.⁷⁴

All this is not enough. The unseen, with all those superhuman witnesses, gods, and avenging powers, must be bound back again to obvious reality. Beyond the word is action, in the form of ritual to enact what is meant or felt in the linguistic exercise, to give validity to the assertions, imprecations, and curses, and to dem­onstrate irreversibility. In traditional religious ritual, the verbal­ized culture structures the environment in order to modify hu­man lives accordingly and to secure dependable behavior.⁷⁵ If the formulas reach for the fantastic, the sense of reality is never lost in the process.

Oath rituals principally enact irreversibility. At Alalakh in Sy­ria, a transaction of property is accompanied by slaughtering a sheep: “Let me die in this way if I take back that which I gave you.”⁷⁶ Sheep are slaughtered also in the oath ceremony in the Iliad, and as Agamemnon cuts their throats, the other partici­pants pour wine to the ground from their goblets and pray: “Whoever does wrong against the oath, his brain shall flow to the ground as does this wine, his and his children’s, and their wives shall be given to others.”⁷⁷ Flowing blood, flowing wine, flowing brain are brought together; as the one is enacted, the other is conjured to follow suit. Actions and prayers of this kind are quite common. In an Assyrian treaty from the middle of the eighth century B.C., we read: “If Mati’ilu sins against this treaty, then just as the head of this spring lamb is torn off, and its knuckle placed in its mouth... so may the head of Mati’ilu be torn off.”⁷⁸ Bronze-Age Hittites, in the soldiers’ oath, spill wine while saying “this is not wine, this is your blood.”⁷⁹ The Roman fetiales, performing their treaty ritual, proclaim: “If the Roman people should fail (to fulfill this treaty)... then you, Jupiter, shall hit this Roman people just as I here and today shall hit this pig; you shall hit it all the more the more able and potent you are.” Then they kill the pig with a stone.⁸⁰ “When the Molossians make an oath, they bring forward an ox and a drinking vessel

filled with wine; they then cut up the ox into tiny pieces and pray that the transgressors may be cut in this way; they pour the wine from the drinking vessel and pray that the blood of the trans* 174 gressors may be poured out in this way.”⁸¹ Another way to rep­resent the threat of destruction in a graphic form is to burn im­ages of wax or asphalt, with accompanying curses: as the wax melts down, annihilation shall befall the transgressor. This prac­tice too is known from the ancient Near East as well as from Greece.⁸²

These are clear cases of symbolism, but the symbols are made as real as can be: wine and blood, wax and fire, and animals expiring in agony. Touch is important. The entrails of the victims are taken in hand—this is done in Mesopotamia as in Greece⁸⁵— weapons are dipped into the blood,⁸⁴ or a ring is dipped into the blood and held during the swearing of the oath.⁸⁵ One gory detail commonly enacted in Greek oaths was to cut the genitals of the sacrificial victim and to step on them. Biological continuity shall be abolished if the oath is violated, so that perjury will extinguish a whole family.⁸⁶ At the Athenian Areopagus, the court that tried cases of intentional homicide—with Orestes as the most famous mythical example—the priests slaughtered a boar, a ram, and a bull and the defendant had to tread on the severed genitals and recite the oath in which he called down utter destruction on his house and on his line if he failed to speak the truth.⁸⁷

Less spectacular is the ritual of throwing an object away. Achilles swears an oath to retreat from battle “by the wooden scepter” he is holding in his hand, which will never grow leaves again—and he throws it to the ground.⁸⁸ In the Roman oath “by Jupiter the stone,” per lovem lapidem, which evidently harks back to very old tradition, the oath-taker grasps a stone and speaks the usual formula. “If I hold to the oath, good things shall come to me; if I should plan or act differently, all the others shall be safe... but I alone shall fall off as this stone does now,” and he throws the stone away. In a strange way, by its name this oath seems to identify stone and god.⁸⁹ The unseen is bound to objec­tive reality. Assyrians, for example, have to tear out a god’s sym-

bol.⁹⁰ Absolute irreversibility is graphically demonstrated by sinking iron bars into the sea. In this way lonians and Athenians sealed their alliance against Persia in 478 B.c.; Phocaeans had used the same ritual when they left their home for good.⁹¹ Such an action can develop into pure magic, as the curse is emanci­pated from the oath and used with direct intent. Jeremiah writes all the evil that shall befall Babylon on a sheet of leather and orders his servant Seraia to take it to Babylon, to recite what it says, and then tie it to a stone and throw it into the Euphrates: “In this way shall Babylon sink and not rise.”⁹²

Oaths are primitive and sophisticated at the same time. Oath rituals have been called pre-deistic—a stone taken for Jupiter!— and attributed to primitive mentality. But at the same time they are strategies of tricky humans endowed with language, who will match every attempt at validation with new attempts at decep­tion. Gods have been part of the proceedings since time imme­morial, in the most diverse cultural systems. Somehow the proper use of oaths must have outweighed the misuse.

Some religious reforms or revolutions have tried to reduce or even to forbid the use of oaths, as Pythagoras is said to have done.⁹³ Jesus explicitly did forbid them, but the prohibition failed to guide later Christian practice.⁹⁴ Oaths have been kept up to the present day; there are oaths of allegiance and oaths at court (which even preserve some of the ritual by touching the Bible), and perjury is subject to legal prosecution. The use of written documents should have made the oath superfluous long ago, but that did not happen. Already Akkadians referred to the “oath of the tablet,” without ever disregarding “the god of the oath.”⁹⁵ Roman oath ceremonies, for the sake of precision, were executed “from tablets or wax,” but they still used the stone instead of a knife for ritual slaughter. The age of literacy employs Stone Age implements.

The practice of oaths may be a model example of attempts at imprinting by construing a common cosmos of meaning, with anxiety lurking at the fringe. They are based on the belief in unseen superiors and make use of these powers while binding

them to practical life through signs of utmost realism. The use of oaths entails the necessity of religion. “Those who deny the existence of the Deity are not to be tolerated at all. Promises, 6 covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can

have no hold upon or sanctity for an atheist. For the taking away of God, even only in thought, dissolves all.” These are words of John Locke, at the threshold of the Age of Enlightenment.⁹⁶