H
ermes and Prophecy[add: Cicero/Socrates]
P
essomancy(telling the future... with pebbles!)
In the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, Hermes is given by his elder brother Apollo a gift "of minor prophecy" that involved somehow the use of pebbles. No further mention is made of it.Now pebbles, though small, may be mighty: the biblical Urim and Thummim of the breastplate of Aaron are thought to have been divine sorts of pebbles. Joseph Smith is said to have received the book of Mormon via just such pebbles (which he borrowed from an angel.) Thus we may find:
"DID JOSEPH SMITH USE GHOST
WRITER FOR BOOK OF MORMON?
The Saints Herald, May 19, 1888: One of Joseph Smith's many wives, Emma Smith, assisted with the transcription of the Book of Mormon. She confesses: "In writing for your father, I frequently wrote day after day...He sitting with his face buried in his hat, with a 'peepstone' in it, and dictating for hour after hour...."
(The above is from an anonymous anti-Mormon tract I found somewhere.)
K
ledonomancy1Here is Pausanias' description of Kledonomancy, a divination that became associated with Hermes the messenger;
"The market-place of Pharae is of wide extent after the ancient fashion, and in the middle of it is an image of Hermes, made of stone...It is called Hermes of the Market, and by it is established an oracle. In front of the image is placed a hearth, which also is of stone, and to the hearth bronze lamps are fastened with lead. Coming at even tide, the inquirer of the god, having burnt incense upon the hearth, filled the lamps with oil and lighted them, puts on the alter...a local coin...and asks in the ear of the god the particular question he wishes to put to him. After that he stops his ears and leaves the marketplace. On coming outside he takes his hands from his ears and whatever utterance he hears he considers oracular."
Pausanias, Descriptions of Ancient Greece, 7.22.
The overheard word - the Kledon - a sort of inversion of that accidentally uttered significance , the Freudian slip - the same principle extended outward, projected, to encompass all of one's general vacinity within earshot. As though the entire world were an emanation of one's own consciousness (or subconscious, as it were.)
* * * * *
1-
I first discovered information about the 'cledon' in Lewis Hyde's book, Trickster makes this world: Mischief, Myth and Art, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998, pp. 35.