Today’s effort will be devoted to bibliomancy, a word so recondite as to have been overlooked in the tenth edition of the Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. But bibliomancy is a perfectly good word, and used to be a real thing. It means the use of books in divination. Such a topic, naturally, requires this blog’s customary meandering treatment, as it has risen in my consciousness in a rather erratic fashion. (Remember that erratic derives from Latin erro, meaning “to wander or stray about”).
A couple of days ago, I was interviewed by a television producer concerning occultism in the Enlightenment, and its possible practice among the founders of our nation. The topic of bibliomancy came up. Just before that, in putting together last week’s blog I experienced a personal little bibliomantic tweak I now feel I should mention, along with a much more forceful one on Sunday, associated with seasonal change.
The book most frequently used for its supposed predictive powers has naturally been, for the last fifteen centuries or so, the Bible, and I shall return to the Bible presently. But in Antiquity the epics of Homer, and especially Vergil, were commonly used. We have especially good evidence for the widespread use of the sors Vergiliana (the “Vergilian lottery”) in which randomly selected lines from the Æneid were searched out for their predictive potential with regard to particular persons and circumstances. This was quite a craze among the Roman imperial élite. In the Christian Middle Ages Vergil was known not merely as a very great poet but also as a wizard or magician. Not too many famous poets have alternate spellings for their name, but Vergil is often Virgil. That may be because the Latin words virga and virgula (a tree branch or twig) were used of a magician’s wand or the divining rod of a water witch. I suppose that in a pinch any famous book of sufficient gravitas could serve for purposes of bibliomancy. Many years ago we had a great family vacation in the beautiful Northwest, roughly in the latitudes between Portland and the Canadian border. Somewhere in the Washington State boonies we spent a night at a hostelry called the Moby Dick Hotel. In supplying the metaphysical needs of their guests the literate and possibly eccentric proprietors of this place had supplanted the once standard Gideon’s Bibles in favor of copies of Moby Dick. There was one in every room, including the public jakes.
The world’s Christians, beleaguered as we are, are still fairly numerous, so that some hundreds of millions of people have just observed, or at least been vaguely aware of, the beginning of a new year in the religious calendar, namely the first Sunday of Advent. The season of Advent is the brief preparatory and penitential season anticipating Christmas, the legendary date of the birth of Jesus being December 25, according to the Western calendar. There is some really great Advent music, and an Advent calendar can whet the interest and anticipation of the young.
Loyal readers of my blog, and there are some, may recall my nut obsession, most recently exemplified in a post about gathering hickory nuts. Well, the fun (gathering) phase is essentially over, and I now face the daunting task of getting a sufficient amount of actual nut meats out of the shells to justify the effort. I have had it quite definitely in my mind that I want enough for one really great, rich nut cake. My specific and challenging goal as prefixed in my mind: one pound of nuts. (For one cake?) Well, for last week’s blog I was thinking not about nuts but the American criminal justice system. In choosing courtroom scenes famous in literature, I invoked the most powerful I knew, that in The Brothers Karamazov, a novel I would have claimed to know very well. Yet I had completely forgotten that the third chapter of the “trial book” is called “The Medical Experts and a Pound of Nuts.” This chapter of the book is of great psychological and theological importance, and doubtless one of the passages that made Freud believe that Karamazov was the most brilliant novel ever written. It has to do with the testimony of a kindly old German doctor, Herzenstube, concerning an experience he had had twenty-five years earlier when the defendant, Dmitri Karamazov, now accused of parricide, was a sadly neglected child. He had shown the boy a trivial kindness apparently unique in the lad’s bleak life. He had given him a pound of, of…and here Herzenstube, though fluent in Russian, lost the word he needed. It had to be teased out of him: “Apples?” No. “Nuts?” Yes! “I bought him a pound of nuts.” Unconscious bibliomancy.
One mode of proceeding for the bibliomancist was to open the book randomly (Æneid, Bible, whatever), stick a finger on one of its leaves, and then apply the specific text touched upon to the question at hand. Successful application often required considerable ingenuity. But in societies in which the distinction between the aural and the written was not so marked as today, the fortuitous hearing of a text could also be oracular. Both hearing and reading are relevant to the most consequential instance of bibliomancy in western cultural history, and both are highly relevant to one of the set readings for the first Sunday in Advent (Romans 13:11-14,) crucial parts of which are the following: ...it is now the hour for us to rise from sleep…The night is past and the day is at hand. Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness…In this exhortation to spiritual wokeness Paul anticipates, somewhat prematurely as it has turned out, the second advent of Christ. That is why it is the inevitable Advent text.
The historical personage this text most famously woke up was Augustine of Hippo, whose conversion to orthodox Christianity had large consequences for the intellectual history of Europe. On the verge of his dramatic moment of final submission he already knew in his heart he wanted to be a committed Christian, but his attachments to sexual pleasure and neo-Platonism still stood in his way. This is a dilemma every reader will be able at least to half understand. (Who among us hasn’t suffered the itch of neo-Platonism?) In a paroxysm of nervous indecision, a copy of the Pauline epistles in his tunic pocket, he stepped out of the house into the garden and sat down beneath a fig tree. From beyond the garden walls he heard the sing-song voices of children playing some game. Their words were “Pick it up and read it, pick it up and read it…” So he did. He took out his book and opened it at random. The first words his eyes fell upon were it is now the hour for us to rise from sleep. The rest is history.
I have recounted this story rather breezily, but the eighth book of Augustine’s Confessions, where it is related, is a masterpiece of subtle and complex literary construction. By Augustine’s day random lectionary readings had already played a major role in the legendary sacred history that was forming around heroic asceticism. Fortuitous episodes of bibliomancy could be highly consequential. You might just happen to hear a lectionary reading that would change your life immediately and forever. One of the most consequential passages you could stumble upon would be the nineteenth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. I think of it as the all-star chapter of the whole New Testament. Along with a whole lot of other great stuff (self-made eunuchs being among my favorites) we get Jesus’s answer to a really Big Question: “What good thing shall I do that I may have life everlasting?” The answer includes a clause that turns out to be a deal-breaker for the earnest young man who asked the question: “Sell all your possessions and give the proceeds to poor people.” But many others, including Anthony of the Desert and Francis of Assisi, were able to sign up for the whole program. It is alarming that the “voices of the page,” whether read silently by oneself or heard read by another, could have such dramatic or lurid results. When we talk about “the power of books” these days we can hardly have such instantaneous, life-altering consequences in mind. Perhaps one should be cautious in asking any questions inviting possible answers that one does not want to hear. Still, I have half a mind to offer Herman Melville a role in determining my dinner menu just as soon as I finish writing this.
