Interdisciplinary Dreams Seminar 2006
Session: 8th May
Forming a Response to Ancient Oneirology
The story so far: I have been arguing that dreams and dream interpretation in the
ancient world are only comprehensible when viewed within a broader matrix of
understanding based on prediction and the existence of gods who underpin the
cosmos.
Further, I have argued that ancient culture has its own integrity epistemologically, and that dream and sign interpretation had an internal coherency, with many
examples of interpretation being a rational outcome of a whole range of ‘sensible’
considerations, such as the impact of a particular person’s account being accepted,
granting them a dangerously high status (or, conversely, existing high status meant
that the credibility gap was not impassable). Dreams were more credible in conditions that circumvented other less charismatic activities (such as the need to deliver
a complex message verbally or allowing a god to otherwise address/act upon an individual at a shrine) and we can reasonably (if you have accepted my argument)
infer comprehendible principles and considerations. The process can make better
sense than has perhaps been appreciated by scholars.
That aspect of the argument contextualised dreaming within other activities,
such as prodigy interpretation, and borrowed from them to make sense of dreams
and dream interpretation (and that has been my strategy for the most part). This
also applies to a set of ideas put forward at the last session in connection with the
assertion that the healing god Asclepius ‘learned medicine’: I suggested instead
that the rules for acceptable and credible instances of epiphany (I use the word in its
original, more literal, sense of the appearance of a god rather than a term indicating
a more nebulous ‘inspiration’) had shifted over the centuries that mark the apparent
change from ‘miraculous’ to ‘rational’ evidence, and that the way epiphany (divine
healing) was expected to operate had changed in broad terms throughout society,
altering the way Asclepius was expected to have an effect on his patients and thus
generating different dream narratives.
This suggestion (which would require a vast literature review to be made credible, a review which was certainly lacking in the session and which perhaps cannot
be easily undertaken by one person) met with either genuine misgivings or polite
professional opposition – it is a very strong claim. One reason it is difficult to
substantiate is that the dream narratives, rather than forming a subset of epiphany
narratives that was influenced rather passively by other epiphanic accounts, were
probably one of the central, actively influential, aspects of ancient culture. We cannot separate dreams from other religious phenomenon and posit one-way influence
from one to the other: rather we must consider even more broadly, and watch the
different intellectual and social forces swirling around and forming local patterns
Jason Davies May 5, 2006
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Interdisciplinary Dreams Seminar 2006
Session: 8th May
as much as any unified picture: some aspects were transient, others longer-lived.1
Nonetheless, after arguing for most of the series that the structures around
dreams that gave them credible form and meaning were based in the broad culture of prediction (implying strong unity), a strategy that aimed to overcome the
strong isolation of the dreams in the scholarship, it is now possible without losing
that context to concede that there was a weak ‘balkanisation’ within the culture
of prediction – a tendency for certain modes of prediction or worship to move towards ‘typical’ models (such as incubation at a healing shrine). People came to
expect certain things of dreams, and other things of (eg) prodigies and these were
dynamic situations that changed over time, often (but not always) becoming more
or less entrenched.
Hopefully the net effect of this is that ancient dream culture makes more sense
to us as a human venture than when it was treated as a mixture of political propaganda, credulity and superstition (unless you are minded to find comfort only in
the perennial appearance of such things in human society).
This leads to a more nebulous area: on what terms do we frame our response?
The Range of Responses
It might be argued that our account (that has ancient oneirology seem to make better sense) so far is sufficient in some ways: but it does assume a particular set of
values and desideranda. Though we have not claimed that people of the ancient
world are entirely ‘just like us’ (because their interest in prediction is not one we
generally share), we have moved them away from being uncaringly (embarrassingly) ‘irrational’.
What I wish to explore in this session is the question of ‘what suffices as an
explanation?’ Explanation, the point at which the subject ‘makes sense’ is teh
point at which it coincides with what we consider to be universals. It is when
our discussion reaches a level beyond which we do not question. Since this is
an interdisciplinary series, I cannot leave this issue alone (as I would probably be
permitted to do by an audience of historians, who generally feel that a complex
depiction of sophistication with just a pinch of naive foolishness qualifies as an
explanation for the most part). It is not generally acceptable to praise the level of
sophistication, which would be a version of ‘going native’. Admiration is generally
1
I still maintain that the broad argument can be made: that Greek society (and later, Roman
society) had complex ‘rules’ about how epiphany ought to function, what was credible and reasonable
and so on: but I cannot plausibly make the case in a seminar: the idea can only function as the opening
of a possibility in this series, rather than a platform on which to build. Thus, for now, I leave the
puzzle of the changing discourse of Asclepian epiphany on the shelf where it has sat for some time.
Jason Davies May 5, 2006
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Interdisciplinary Dreams Seminar 2006
Session: 8th May
not implausible but still slightly grudging.
Thus a Modernist approach (as exemplified by many scholars) would locate the
discussion within a broad sense of progress towards the Enlightenment, and then
on into modern science. The Greek (and to a lesser extent, Roman) ‘attempts’ to
find out ‘the truth’ about dreams and the cosmos in general have frequently been
treated as the infancy of modern science. That they ‘failed’ should not surprise us:
what is lauded (and found valuable) is the awkward first steps in a long teleological
process whose eventual success is underpinned by reality, which we are trying to
describe to ourselves and explore, predominantly (most usefully) through science.
Done badly, this approach merely restates that ancient people were rather limited
in their ability to see what was in front of their noses; done well, it endeavours
to locate ancient thinking within the world that they inhabited – in other words,
it gives them credit, with awareness of the impossibility of leaping straight to a
modern idiom without any intervening steps.
A postmodern approach, on the other hand, would invoke an overlapping set of
references, sets of meanings in the ancient world that deployed dreams and other
phenomena to construct a world full of (made by, designed by, reflective of) deities.
Like us, they posited a cosmos that was intelligible and framed themselves in the
context of an ongoing, realisable project of assimilating humanity to ‘the truth’.
Progress was possible, and indeed demonstrable. Though it seemed to them that
they were finding out ‘how it really is’, they were (‘actually’) constructing ever
more sophisticated cosmic models out of the raw matter of their own experience,
re-using past models and poetically reinventing that world, inventing both tradition
as bedrock and as inferior endeavour, whose failures confirmed the ‘success’ of the
‘new’ version of reality.
Other possible formulations might be drawn in response to particular anthropological writers:
Roy Rappaport might well have said that in a society given order by rituals,
which function to mark out analog (indivisible) time by imposing digital markers
(eg initiation into adulthood), speech acts such as the declaration of an assured sign
(ie one that had stood the test of intellectual scrutiny) function to order the cosmos
and life: it locates those affected by a sign and gives an opportunity for a society
to create an organising point for other issues. So, for instance, a society on bad
terms with their neighbours that accepted a dream dealing with the desirability of
war would have used the dream as a point around which to negotiate. (This is my
guess from my reading of his work: it is also similar to the approach taken by Jung
in his introduction to the I Ching.)
Robin Horton might well stress that it is a universal human phenomenon to
attempt to predict and control the conditions in which we live: thus the ancient
attempt to use dreams to make predictons and thereby begin the process of conJason Davies May 5, 2006
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Interdisciplinary Dreams Seminar 2006
Session: 8th May
trolling life fits into his general theory. Though he attempted to define distinctions
between modern western science and non-western societies, he eventually agreed
that these distinctions were unconvincing when made into definitions.
This session is therefore intended to be an opportunity to experiment with the
process of explanation: what makes explanations complete or incomplete? Why is
internal coherency rarely enough, for instance? What counts as an explanation in
other disciplines, and what does not? Our central reference point is these ancient
dreams, but promising leads (with necessary background provided ad lib in other
areas where similarity and difference can be demonstrated are very welcome.
Jason Davies May 5, 2006
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