Divination
Proper divination requires the collaboration of at least two different people:1 the oracle, and the interpreter.
As for the oracle, they do not understand the message as they are conveying it.2 Rather, their purpose is to convey it as directly as possible, with as little interference and resistance as possible. To convey a message from the gods requires an amazing degree of attunement, which involves stepping out of the lower part of one’s soul and letting oneself be picked up and carried along by the ambient dream-currents that are always surging through the aether.
On the other hand, interpretation requires a very different kind of concentration: Here, one must be able to calmly watch the deluge of symbols without putting oneself at risk of drowning in the whirlpool. And, no less importantly, one must be able to infer, with sufficient precision, the connections between those symbols and the events of the ordinary world and the part of the soul dealing with speech. This requires being in a kind of in-between state that partakes in both dreaming and logical thought. The in-between state does not go deeply enough to reach through time, even if it is useful for other purposes.
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- Or, possibly, one especially talented person acting in two different modes. ↩
- See Synesius' On Dreams. Plato also remarks on this phenomenon in various places, for example in the context of poets, and how it can be that poets write myths that say something truly insightful about reality, without themselves understanding what the myths mean. ↩