Lithomancy

views updated

Lithomancy

A species of divination performed by stones, but in what manner it is difficult to ascertain. Thomas Gale, in a "Note upon Iamblichus," confessed that he did not clearly understand the nature of it; whether it referred to certain motions observable in idols, or to an insight into futurity obtained by demons [familiars] enclosed in particular stones. That these supernatural beings might be so commanded is clear from a passage of Nicephorus.

The old rabbis attributed Leviticus 25:1 to lithomancy, but the prohibition of stones given there is most probably directed against idolatry in general. J. C. Boulenger showed from Tzetzes that Helenus ascertained the fall of Troy by the employment of a magnet, and claimed that if a magnet be washed in spring water and interrogated, a voice like that of a sucking child will reply.

The pseudo-Orpheus related at length this legend of Helenus:

"To him, Apollo gave the true and vocal sideritis, which others call the animated ophites, a stone possessing fatal qualities, rough, hard, black, and heavy, graven everywhere with veins like wrinkles. For one and twenty days Helenus abstained from the nuptial couch, from the bath, and from animal food. Then, washing this intelligent stone in a living fountain, he cherished it as a babe in soft clothing; and having propitiated it as a god, he at length gave it breath by his hymn of mighty virtue. Having lighted lamps in his own purified house, he fondled the divine stone in his hands, bearing it about as a mother bears her infant; and you, if ye wish to hear the voice of the gods, in like manner provoke a similar miracle, for when ye have sedulously wiped and dandled the stone in your arms, on a sudden it will utter the cry of a new-born child seeking milk from the breast of its nurse. Beware, however, of fear, for if you drop the stone upon the ground, you will rouse the anger of the immortals. Ask boldly of things future, and it will reply. Place it near your eyes when it has been washed, look steadily at it, and you will perceive it divinely breathing. Thus it was that Helenus, confiding in this fearful stone, learned that his country would be overthrown by the Atridae."

Photius, in his abstract of the life of Isodorus by Damascius, a credulous physician in the age of Justinian, wrote of an oracular stone, the boetulum, to which lithomancy was attributed. A physician named Eusebius used to carry one of these wonder-working stones about with him.

The story is told that one night he had an unexplained impulse to wander out from the city Emesa to the summit of a mountain dignified by a temple of Minerva. There, as he sat down fatigued by his walk, he saw a globe of fire falling from the sky and a lion standing by it. The lion disappeared, the fire was extinguished, and Eusebius ran and picked up a boetulum. He asked it to what god it appertained, and it readily answered, to Gennaeus, a deity worshiped by the Heliopolitae, under the form of a lion in the temple of Jupiter. During this night, Eusebius said he traveled not less than 210 stadia (more than 26 miles).

He never became the perfect master of the boetulum but was obliged very humbly to solicit its responses. It was of a handsome, globular shape, white, a palm in diameter, though sometimes it appeared more, sometimes less; occasionally, also, it was of purple color. Characters were to be read on it, impressed in the color called "tingaribinus." Its answer seemed as if proceeding from a shrill pipe, and Eusebius himself interpreted the sounds.

Damascius believed its animating spirit to be divine; Isodorus, on the other hand, thought it demoniacal, that is, not belonging to evil or material demons, nor yet to those which are quite pure and immaterial.

It was with one of these stones, according to Hesychius, that Rhea fed Saturnus, when he fancied that he was devouring Jupiter, its name being derived from the skin in which it was wrapped, and such the commentator supposed to have been the Lapides divi, or vivi, which the insane monster Heliogabalus wished to carry off from the temple of Diana, built by Orestes at Laodicea (AEL. Lampid, Heliogab, 7 '). In Geographia Sacroe (ii, z, 1646), Samuel Bochart traced the name and the reverence paid to the boetylia, to the stone which Jacob anointed at Bethel. Many of these boetylia, Photius assured us from Damascius, were to be found on Mount Libanus.