“And when they shall say unto you, Seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards that peep, and that mutter: should not a people seek unto their God? for the living to the dead? To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them..” (Isaiah 8:19-20)
The priest pushed back Sarai’s veil, and then reached around the back of her head to loosen her hair, as dictated by the laws of Moses. She stood as still as possible even though the old man was now very close to her and his breath was unpleasant. He tugged at her for several seconds, growing frustrated, beginning to redden.
Sarai wondered if she should help him – the strap holding her braid into place was tied, she thought, as simply as possible – but her hands were full holding the grain offering. And she was a woman in the tabernacle, and she was terrified to speak before the Lord without being spoken to.
There was a sudden sharp tug at the back of her head, and her braid went flop onto her shoulder. The priest, relieved, stepped back and unraveled the braid. He nodded at someone over Sarai’s shoulder – her husband, she supposed, had pulled out the strap.
The priest bent down – Sarai heard his knees creak like leather – and scraped dust from the tabernacle floor. He sprinkled it into a jar of water, set the jar aside, took up a scroll, and read from it.
“If you are faithful to your husband, Sarai,” he said, “let this bitter water which carries a curse pass through you without harm. But if you are impure, let it swell your belly and void your womb, and let you be a curse unto your family for your infidelity.”
“Amen,” said Sarai. She was surprised at how clear and strong her voice sounded: she was shaking inside and out.
The priest put the curse-scroll into the jar and pressed down and down, until it was soaked and sank to the bottom. He took the grain offering out of Sarai’s hands, waved it before the altar, then exchanged it for the jar of water. Sarai took it from him, the clay shockingly cool against her hands, and began to drink. The men watched intently. She did not pause until the jar was drained, nor spill a single drop.
I’m Rose Judson. Welcome to Books of All Time.
Books of All Time is a podcast that’s tackling classic literature in chronological order. This is episode 25: The Book of Isaiah, Part 2 – Wizards That Peep and Mutter. As always, if you want to read the transcript of this episode or see the references I used to write it, you can visit our website, www.booksofalltime.co.uk. There’s a link in the show notes if you need it. Let’s begin.
This week, we’re using the Book of Isaiah, our first straight-up work of prophecy, as a springboard for diving into the world of magic, divination, and prophecy as practiced in the ancient world. What I’m hoping to do with this episode is to shed a little more light not just on rituals done by priests in big temples, but also on how everyday people interacted with the world through these practices. I’ll be drawing some examples from most of the regions we’ve visited so far: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, China, and Israel and Judah.
First, let’s establish our terms. While divination, magic, and prophecy all involve connecting to supernatural powers in one way or another, they have somewhat different purposes and practices. Here’s how I would define each of these based on the reading I did for this episode:
Divination is an attempt to understand the divine will, either to get a glimpse of the future or to help with making decisions. Divination can involve ritual practices or the interpretation of natural phenomena, like clouds or the movement of birds and animals. The ability to interpret divinatory signs is often controlled by experts, but not always. Divination can happen on a small, personal scale (you can use it to answer questions about, say, whether you ought to marry the merchant who sells silk to your father), but is often performed for large community issues, too – how do we stop this drought? Should we attack those jerks on the other side of the river? Will the new king’s reign be prosperous?
Magic is any practice that’s intended to act against this divine will, either by warding off evil or attracting good. In her book chapter on Oracles and Divination for the Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion, Sarah Iles Johnston writes that magic is also often performed urgently—my kid is sick now and I want to make her better—and on a personal level—I am trying to heal my kid, not all the kids in the city. (487) Magic can involve all manner of practices, from saying special prayers to eating special foods and, as we’ll see, the wearing of super-fun amulets shaped like hippos or hedgehogs.
Prophecy is specific divine information delivered to a messenger by a god, which is then passed on to the community. Moses and Isaiah were prophets, obviously, but you could also loop oracles like the priestess at Delphi into this category. Sometimes prophetic messages can be missionary in nature – meant to establish a new religion, as they did with Jesus and Mohammed. Sometimes they can be a warning about future events, usually with a call repent and reform – again, like Isaiah. The point is that, while they sometimes require a trance state, they are usually a direct download from a god to one person.
Obviously there’s the potential for overlap among all three of these categories, and I’m sure legitimate scholars of religion or history or archaeology would have several issues with how I’m defining them, but for a podcast that you’re probably listening to while you vacuum, I think that’s enough to be going on with. So. Let’s start with divination.
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Whether we like to admit it or not, I think most of us like to look for “signs” about the future as we go about our everyday lives. I often run along a canal in the morning, and if I see a heron, I take it as a sign that it’ll be a good day. Sometimes I see other birds, though. For example, on the last day of 2024 I came across a crow pecking out a dead fish’s eyeball, and judging by the progress of this year so far, I’d say the interpretation of that omen is pretty obvious.
This sort of personal observation is little more than superstition, you might say – and, incidentally, “superstition” comes from the Latin superstitio, which was a pejorative term referring to any form of divination or belief that the Roman state didn’t sanction. (Rochberg 24) Or if you’re feeling more generous, you might attribute my habit of reading birds as omens to human evolution: how the brain has optimized over time to recognize patterns in the environment. In the ancient world, these kinds of encounters had all kinds of deep meanings baked into them. The Mesopotamians – that’s the catch-all term we use for the civilizations that came out of Iraq, remember: the Sumerians, Assyrians, and Babylonians – left many, many clay tablets that detail these kinds of every-day omens and portents, along with records of more ritualized practices. When we talk about “Mesopotamian divination” we are talking about many different practices that changed over a very long period of time. However, there are some things we can make some generalizations about.
Amar Annus of the University of Chicago, in the introduction to the 2010 book Divination and Interpretation of Signs in the Ancient World, notes that “Mesopotamian divination was an all-embracing semantic system designed to interpret the whole universe.” (Annus 2) The Mesopotamian cultures left behind immense systematized lists of omens that cover everything from the meaning of meteorites to the implications of a club-footed newborn or the nodules on the liver of a sacrificial sheep. The weather, the seasons, the pathways of rivers and the blooming of plants – it’s probably appropriate that the first cultures we know of to use writing would feel compelled to read the world like a book.
Irving Finkel, an Assyriologist and curator at the British Museum, writes in his book The First Ghosts that “noticing, classifying, and recording of ominous observations was practically tantamount to a science.” (Finkel 48) Mesopotamian omens took on the form of if-then statements: if sign A appears, then the result is likely to be B.
There’s a collection of tablets that records hundreds of these if-then statements known as the If a City tablets. That title comes from their opening statement: If a city is located on a height, then living in that city could be unpleasant. (Finkel 48) Any listeners in Denver, Colorado, please let us know your thoughts on that one. Here are a few more of those “if-then” statements from Finkel’s book, which all relate to what will happen if you build your family tomb in a given month or on a given day:
“If a man builds his tomb in the second month, that man will die in his prime.
If a man builds his tomb in the tenth month, he will escape from hardship.
If a man builds his tomb on the 12th day of the month, Ishtar will harass him in his prime.
If a man builds a tomb on the 28th day of the month, his wife will rebel against him.” (Finkel 48-51)
Finkel notes that if you read the entire set of tomb-building omens for all the months and all the days, there are only four good months to build a tomb in, and only good three days in each of those months. So these probably weren’t widely accepted as fact – or, if they were, some magician somewhere was making bank doing counterspells to ward off the bad energy that came from building your tomb on, say, February 28th.
Outside of project management for tomb-building, we find that some Mesopotamian omens are pun-based. This wouldn’t be obvious to you or to me as we read them in translation, but the Assyriologists get a kick out of it. Here are two from Divination and Interpretation of Signs in the Ancient World:
“If a man dreams he is eating a raven (āribu), he will have income (irbu). If a man dreams he is eating human flesh (šerû), he will have great riches (šarû).” (Annus 9)
I am fond of the Mesopotamians. I’m glad to have the excuse to spend more time with them, especially now that I know about their dark dad jokes of destiny.
Obviously lists of omens were just one type of divination. The Mesopotamians deployed many other practices. Generally, the importance of a sign was directly proportional to how visible and rare the sign was. Did you see a comet or an eclipse? The nation shudders. Did one of your ewes give birth to a three-legged lamb? Bad luck for your household.
Divination experiments also varied depending on the problem they were addressing. Small-scale issues such as the marriage of a well-to-do merchant might warrant the use of libanomancy – interpreting the patterns in smoke from a special fire or incense – or lecanomancy, which involved dropping oil into water and observing its behavior and appearance.
For the big stuff – should we go to war, is this the right place to build a temple, should the king marry his son to that other king’s daughter – the preferred method of divination in ancient Mesopotamia was extispicy. Extispicy was the practice of ritualistically cutting open an animal (usually a sheep) and looking for signs in its organs (usually the liver). Records of this practice go back as far as 2500 BCE. In addition to keeping records about this practice on clay tablets, the Mesopotamian cultures also produced models of sheep livers that were inscribed with various tips about how to interpret the color, texture, and appearance of the liver.
The Babylonians in particular were famous for consulting a liver whenever they were in a pickle. In the Hebrew Bible, the book of Ezekiel mentions the king of Babylon trying to decide something by “looking at the liver.” (Ez. 21:21) Another interesting aspect of the Babylonian records of how to interpret signs from livers is that they show us how our habit of interpreting left and right or dark and light as good and bad go back a long way. (Annus 11) In most of the texts about extispicy interpretation, strong signs on the right side of the animal (from the perspective of the haruspex—the person doing the cutting) are interpreted as positive, and so is a lighter appearance of the organ being interpreted.
Intestines were also important to the Mesopotamians. The scholar Francesca Rochberg records a few interpretations of intestinal appearances in her chapter of Divination and Interpretation of Signs in the Ancient World. One of these features an old friend of ours from the Epic of Gilgamesh, quote:
“If the coils of the intestine look like the face of [Humbaba], it is the omen of the usurper king… who ruled all the lands.” (Rochberg 20)
She also mentions priests interpreting intestines that fall in the shape of an eagle as being connected to the myth of Etana. (Rochberg 21) Etana was a legendary king of Sumer who had been unable to sire an heir until he rescued an eagle from dying. The eagle flew him into the sky, where Etana found a plant that reversed his fortunes, and he and his wives were able to have sons. So I’m guessing, although Rochberg doesn’t elaborate on this, that the sign of Etana could be read as presaging a royal birth, or success in an endeavor through the making of an alliance, or some other hopeful interpretation.
While archaeologists can’t be completely sure, the weight of evidence seems to suggest that extispicy was one of Mesopotamia’s top cultural exports. Cultures all over the near east and Mediterranean took up the practice over the centuries in ways that resembled the Babylonian and Assyrian methods.
The ancient Chinese were another culture that used animal parts to try to read the divine will. In their case, the preferred method was pyromancy. This involved taking the bones of an ox or the plastron of a turtle – that’s the bottom part of the poor guy’s shell – heating them in a fire, and then interpreting the way the bones or shells cracked or broke. Then the diviner would write directly on the burned item what the prediction was. Examples of these divinatory objects go back as far as 1200 BCE, and the practice probably persisted until about 250 BCE or so. (Shaughnessy 61-62)
Inaya Alkhatib of Muhlenberg University in Pennsylvania writes that as literacy spread through China, people began to use lighter, less expensive materials for writing down their predictions, such as bamboo. From about 800 BCE onwards, people in China also began to cast dried sticks of yarrow and sort them into shapes that corresponded to a predictive saying – this was the beginning of the Yijing or I Ching, which we will be spending time with on this show later this coming year. The I Ching was a particularly sophisticated form of casting lots, or picking random objects out of a container, to predict something – a practice that seems to have existed in nearly every culture you can think of.
We know that the Babylonians and the Greeks, among others, practiced belomancy, another type of lot-casting but with arrows. What you did was take a bunch of arrows, and you wrote down magic 8 ball-style phrases on them: “yes,” “no,” “try again later,” that sort of thing. Then you had two options. You could shoot all the arrows, taking the one that flew furthest or had the best hit on a target as your answer. Or you would put the arrows into a quiver onto your back and draw one at random. Sounds to me like it was the ideal form of divination for the busy warrior on the go.
We could spend this entire episode talking about divination methods – scrying in water, looking at bird movements, throwing handfuls of grain on the ground – but I want to move on. Let’s turn our focus to what you do when you get a bad omen and want to prevent it from coming to pass: magic.
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Magical practices abound in the ancient world – even in cultures that tended to frown upon it. For example, that magical ritual I described in the opening of the show – the one where the woman has to drink some water to show the community whether or not she’s been unfaithful to her husband? That comes from ancient Israel. It’s described in chapter 25 of the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Numbers.
However, everyone’s favourite ancient magicians have to be the Egyptians. If you listened to our episodes on the Egyptian Book of the Dead you would have – well, you would have developed a burning hate for the British Egyptologist E.A. Wallis Budge. But you would also probably have clocked that the Egyptians love them some spells. Love them. Especially if they’re written down – you may recall that Thoth, the god of writing, also ruled magic – and especially if they’re written on an object.
The amulet was perhaps the most widespread magical item in all ancient Egyptian society. According to Ashley Fiutko Arico and Kierra Foley of the Johns Hopkins University Archaeological Museum, amulets have been found in Egypt that date all the way back to 4400 BCE – more than six thousand years ago. Egyptians put amulets on their children to protect them; they tucked them into bandages next to wounds, they wore them on specific types of journey or for specific types of ailments.
Written evidence from throughout the ancient Egyptian period suggests it was common for amulets to need to be activated – either by the owner of the amulet, or by a priest or even an “amulet man” – a specialized professional magician who could select the right amulet for your personal needs and say the words or do the ritual necessary to activate the amulet’s powers. (Arico and Foley)
Depending on their social status, Egyptians might have amulets made of anything from precious metals and gems to inexpensive faience – crushed stone or sand that was pressed together and glazed. Interesting items such as animal claws or teeth could also be used as amulets, as could tightly-rolled scraps of paper with spells written on them. Amulets could be made in the shape of gods, or parts of gods – the eye of Ra was a famous motif – and in all manner of delightful animal forms.
There is a lovely article on the Art Institute of Chicago’s website, written by Hannah Fuller, which gives some examples of ancient Egyptian amulets. I really do recommend you find it in the reading list on our website, booksofalltime.co.uk, and have a look at the photos when you’re done listening here. I have three favorites. First, the hippos.
Hippos live in the Nile and are famously aggressive. Hippopotamus amulets may have been used as a way of warding the genuine article off if you lived near or were planning to travel on the river. However, during certain periods, these amulets may also have been intended to invoke the protection of the goddess Taweret, who protected pregnancy and childbirth.
Frogs were also a common amulet charm. While Greek culture – at least as reflected in Aesop’s Fables – seems to have found frogs amusing, the Egyptians may have tended to see them as signs of fertility and rebirth. Frogs, explains Hannah Fuller, seemed to the ancient Egyptians as if they came out of the mud, while their innumerable tadpoles would also have made quite an impression.
Finally, the Art Institute has a charming amulet shaped like a long-eared hedgehog. While you might think that a protective amulet should depict a ferocious creature – a lion, a falcon, a scorpion – it makes sense to choose the spiky hedgehog, too. I love what these items show us about the Egyptian worldview, as well as the other creatures they interacted with in their daily lives.
As I said, spells mattered to the Egyptians. In our Book of the Dead episodes we encountered many spells and charms intended to safely convey a soul through the many perils of the afterlife – particularly the weighing of the heart, which decided whether you would be immortal or be annihilated. But there were more day-to-day spells for all manner of occasions. For example, dinner parties.
The University of Chicago’s Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures – we’re awfully Chicago-heavy this week, aren’t we? – has a list of “practical” Egyptian spells for various dining situations compiled by Robert K. Ritner. There’s a general “thank you for this food” prayer. There’s one to ward off food poisoning, which involves wishing it on your enemy instead of you. Then there is a spell for when someone at the table is choking on a fishbone. Another diner takes a piece of cake and says the following over it:
“The Unique One belongs to me as my servant! The Unique One belongs to me! My bread is in town, my portion of meals is in the field – bone, get right!” (Ritner)
You are then supposed to give the magically charged cake to your choking friend and get him to swallow it in hopes it’ll dislodge the bone. I don’t know about you, but the last thing I’d want when choking on a bone is someone shoving a lump of magical cake in my face. Hook your finger, sweep the airway for the foreign object – that’ll make that bone get right.
Another spell from this collection is a hangover prevention charm. Really. It’s addressed to the goddess Hathor, whose portfolio of heavenly responsibilities includes drunkenness. It goes like this:
“Hail to you Lady of Hetepet! There is no restraining Seth when he has set his heart on conquering a heart in that name of his, of “Beer,” to confuse a heart, to conquer the heart of an enemy, a fiend, a male ghost, a female ghost.” (Ritner)
Then the writer of this spell goes on to explain that, “This spell is said during the drinking of beer; to be spat up. Truly effective, (proved) millions of times!” Apparently even Ancient Egyptian magicians weren’t above doing infomercials.
India has more of a reputation for mysticism in the West than it does for magic. However, it is there if you look for it. During antiquity, what we would think of as spells or charms were woven into works of religious devotion. That is how most religions evolve – the scholar Ann Jeffers writes that “Magic is religion until some parts of it are taken over by a religious group and the rest redefined . . . in a derogatory way, as a separate and destructive ‘opposite’.” (Jeffers 634)
In the case of India, we have the Atharvaveda, the latest of the four Vedic scriptures – we looked at the Rig Veda, the oldest, last spring. Other early Indian scriptures contain magical formulas, but the Atharvaveda has entire sections devoted to them.
A great many of these spells and hymns have to do with healing sicknesses or injuries, and some of them contain practical instructions for wrapping wounds, nursing someone with a fever, or administering herbal medications – both scholars and devout Hindus alike believe that the Atharvaveda is an origin text for ayurveda, Indian traditional medicine, and for medical practice more generally. But there are also some straight-up magic incantations.
Here’s one for stopping the flow of blood from a wound, taken from an 1897 translation by the Austrian-American scholar Maurice Bloomfield:
“The maidens that go yonder, the veins, clothed in red garments, like sisters without a brother, bereft of strength, they shall stand still! Stand still, thou lower one, stand still, thou higher one; do thou in the middle also stand still! The most tiny (vein) stands still: may then the great artery also stand still! Of the hundred arteries, and the thousand veins, those in the middle here have indeed stood still. At the same time the ends have ceased (to flow). Around you has passed a great sandy dike: stand ye still, pray take your case!” (Bloomfield I, 17)
Here’s one for getting a woman to fall wildly in love with you, just in time for Valentine’s Day:
“Hanker thou after my body, my feet, hanker after my eyes, my thighs! The eyes of thee, as thou lustest after me, and thy hair shall be parched with love!” (Bloomfield VI, 9)
It’s been a while since my hair was parched with love, to be honest. In fact I don’t think that’s ever happened to me in my life. Finally, we have a spell for curing retention of urine, also just in time for Valentine’s Day:
“That which has accumulated in thy entrails, thy canals, in thy bladder – thus let thy urine be released, out completely, with the sound bâl! I split open thy penis like the dike of a lake – thus let thy urine be released, out completely, with the sound bâl! Relaxed is the opening of thy bladder like the ocean, the reservoir of water – thus let thy urine be released, out completely, with the sound bâl! As an arrow flies to a distance when hurled from the bow-thus let thy urine be released, out completely, with the sound bâl!” (Bloomfield, I, 3)
I think that’s as good a place as any to leave magic for now, don’t you?
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Finally we come to prophecy. Prophecy could be seen as a form of mediumistic divination – a person transmitting messages about the will of god – but there’s an experimental aspect to divination that I think sets it apart from prophecy. Prophecy is more about inspiration from above. In fact, the ancient Greeks had a word for the divine inspiration a prophet would receive: mania. (Johnston 485)
The Oracle at Delphi – the ancient Greek priestess known as the Pythia, who received direct messages from Apollo to give to visitors – were the most celebrated prophetesses in the Ancient Greek world. Unlike the Hebrew prophets, who generally lived within their communities and had occasional access to elite members of society, the Pythias were cultic figures who operated at the center of a large organization dedicated to protecting their gifts.
Per Sarah Iles Johnstone in the Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion, once a Pythia began her term in office, she lived quite a sequestered life. (Johnstone 481) She only served for nine months of the year, and when she was on call, she would undergo regular purification rituals prior to making herself available to deliver prophecies. Ancient sources describe practices like fasting, bathing, and having prayers said over her.
Once she was ceremonially prepared, there would be a procession to the temple. At an altar before the entrance, the priests of Apollo would perform a quick extispicy to determine whether the god was prepared to commune with the Oracle. If the liver looked favorable, into the temple the Oracle went, ready to accept visitors. Those visitors would themselves have undergone a series of interviews with the priests and conducted their own cleansing rituals prior to arriving at the temple.
All this rigamarole was intended to protect the Pythia from any undue influence from outsiders that could interfere with or taint the messages she received from Apollo during her mania. Ancient Greeks were often very wary of the messages they received from prophecy or divination. Greek myths, as we’ve seen, are full of slippery statements from gods that turn out to have a sting in the tail. It was no different with the real-life Pythia. Like the Mesopotamian oracle lists, the utterances of the Pythia at Delphi often contained wordplay – wordplay that could be lethal.
One example: The ancient Greek historian Herodotus tells a story about Croesus, King of Lydia, going to visit the Oracle at Delphi to find out how secure he was on his throne. The Pythia told him that his reign would last, quote, “until a mule sat on the throne of the Medes.” (Johnstone 481) Croesus took this in the sense that we would take an expression like “when Hell freezes over” or “when pigs fly”.
Unfortunately for him, that’s not what the Pythia meant. It turns out that she was referring to a person of mixed racial heritage. A person like Cyrus the Great of Persia, as it turns out. He conquered the Medes, and soon after he crushed Croesus as well.
However, as carefully managed as the Pythia’s gifts were, she wasn’t above a little light divination now and then. Sources occasionally record the Pythia or her priests finding answers for suppliants by pulling different-colored beans out of a jar.
You would never catch Isaiah or any of the other Hebrew prophets resorting to such low tricks. While the Oracle of Delphi sat on the blurry borders of magic, divination, and prophecy, Judahite and Israelite holy men like Isaiah were building a hard fortification between themselves and the polytheists who surrounded them. It’s in the Hebrew Bible, according to the scholar Martti Nissinen, that we begin to see an attitude which regards “prophecy [as] the privileged way of God’s communication with humans, while other forms of divination are generally condemned.” (Nissinen 342).
This prophecy differentiated itself from earlier types of prophecy in a few different ways. First, prophecy as it came to be defined by the Hebrew writers didn’t involve as much bling and ceremony as the Oracle at Delphi. While it’s true that earlier prophets in the Bible, like Moses and Samuel, had priestly garb and special priestly duties, later prophets were, well, voices in the wilderness. Isaiah, for example tells us in chapter 6 how he received his prophetic mission directly from God in a vision.
But he doesn’t talk about special clothes, or fasting or praying or ritualistic baths – at least none that went above and beyond any ritual practices other people living in Jerusalem would have followed. He doesn’t talk about leading worship at the temple, even though he does mention he goes there. His role is more like that of an advisor to the king than anything else.
How Isaiah came to obtain that role, outside of being inspired in his vision, isn’t clear to us. Martti Nissinen notes that we know almost nothing about how prophets were prepared for their missions. (343) Divinatory priests in other cultures had initiations and long apprenticeships in which they studied restricted texts that helped them interpret omens. Isaiah and other prophets from the Bible may have had access to earlier scriptures – if they could read – but they did not pursue secret knowledge the way some divinatory priests in other cultures would have.
Finally, the form and content of the messages was different. While Greek- or Mesopotamian-style prophecy relied on the presence of signs that could be interpreted, prophecy as practiced in the Hebrew Bible was more of a direct message. Signs could be part of prophecy – Isaiah speaks about the moon and the sun, about ravens and owls at various points in his book – but signs weren’t the basis of it. It wasn’t even always about telling the future, even though it had predictive elements. Instead, prophecy aimed to, as Nissinen writes, “proclaiming the divine will at each particular moment . . . to the king and through him the whole kingdom.” (Nissinen 345)
What isn’t different is the goal. Divination, magic, and prophecy in the ancient world were all ways of making sense of life – especially in dark and troubled times.
[music]
That’s it for this week’s episode. I hope you enjoyed this little survey of magical and divinatory practices. Many of these facts were left out of previous episodes, and I didn’t want to let them languish in a file somewhere – they’re meant to be shared. I feel like we may have given the ancient Greeks short shrift in this episode, but don’t worry – we’re heading back there very soon. For our next episode, we are heading back to the TWDU – the Trojan War Dramatic Universe – and reading our very first plays: the Oresteia by Aeschylus. And it’s hard to believe, but we are speeding, hurtling toward the first anniversary of the show. So join me on Thursday, February 20th for episode 26: “The Oresteia, Part 1: Torment Bred in the Race.”
Books of All Time is written and produced by me, Rose Judson. The Disclaimer Voice of Doom is Ed Brown. Lluvia Arras designed our cover art and logo. Special thanks to Yelena Shapiro, Cathy Merli, Matt Brough, John Cole and the Books of All Time Advisory Council: Ed Brown, Beck Collins, Neil Dowling, Caitlin McMullin, Hugh Parker, and Jonathan Skipp. You can support the show by subscribing and leaving a rating or review at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also follow us on social media: we’re on Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook. Thanks for listening! I’ll be back in two weeks.
References and Works Cited:
Alkhatib, Inaya. “Divination in Early China.” Chinas Magical Creatures, 19 Aug. 2022, open.muhlenberg.pub/chinasmagicalcreatures/chapter/the-classic-of-changes-yijing/.
“Divination and Interpretation of Signs in the Ancient World.” Edited by Amar Annus, Internet Archive, Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2010, archive.org/details/divinationinterp0000unse/page/n9/mode/2up.
Foley, Kierra, and Ashley Fiutko Arico. “Ancient Egyptian Amulets.” JHU Archaeological Museum, 17 Sept. 2021, archaeologicalmuseum.jhu.edu/staff-projects/ancient-egyptian-amulets/.
Fuller, Hannah. “Animal Amulets: Ancient Egyptian Art and the Natural World.” The Art Institute of Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, 15 Nov. 2023, http://www.artic.edu/articles/1088/animal-amulets-ancient-egyptian-art-and-the-natural-world.
“Hymns of the Atharva-Veda.” Translated by Maurice Bloomfield, Internet Archive, Yale University Press, 1 Jan. 1893, archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.44825/.
Jeffers, Ann. “Magic and Divination in Ancient Israel.” Wiley Online Library, Religion Compass, 15 Nov. 2007, compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1749-8171.2007.00043.x.
Johnston, Sarah Iles, ‘Oracles and Divination’, in Esther Eidinow, and Julia Kindt (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion (2015; online edn, Oxford Academic, 7 Mar. 2016), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199642038.013.33
Noegel, Scott B. “On Puns and Divination: Egyptian Dream Exegesis from a Comparative Perspective.” Through a Glass Darkly: Magic, Dreams, and Prophecy in Ancient Egypt, The Classical Press of Wales, Swansea, Wales, 2006, pp. 95–119, https://faculty.washington.edu/snoegel/PDFs/articles/Noegel%2045%20TGD%202006.pdf.
Nissinen, Martti. “Prophecy and Omen Divination: Two Sides of the Same Coin.” Divination and Interpretation of Signs in the Ancient World, edited by Amar Annus, Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, Chicago, Ill, 2010.
Shaughnessey, Edward L. “Arousing Images : The Poetry of Divination and the Divination of Poetry.” Divination and Interpretation of Signs in the Ancient World, edited by Amar Annus, Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, Chicago, Ill, 2010.
Stünkel, Isabel. “Ancient Egyptian Amulets.” The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, 1 Feb. 2019, http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/egam/hd_egam.htm.
“Types of Prophecy.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., http://www.britannica.com/topic/prophecy/Types-of-prophecy. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.
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