Dreambooks in Byzantium

Six Oneirocritica in Translation, with Commentary and Introduction

Steven M. Oberhelman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754660842
• eBook ISBN: 9781317148173
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Dreambooks in Byzantium offers for the first time in English translation and with commentary six of the seven extant Byzantine oneirocritica, or manuals on the interpretation of dreams. (The seventh, The Oneirocriticon of Achmet ibn Sereim was published previously by the author.) Dreams permeated all aspects of Byzantine culture, from religion to literature to everyday life, while the interpretation of the future through dreams was done by professionals (emperors had their own) or through oneirocritica. Dreambooks were written and attributed to famous patriarchs, biblical personages, and emperors, to fictitious writers and interpreters, or were copied and published anonymously. Two types of dreambooks were produced: short prose or verse manuals, with the dreams usually listed alphabetically by symbol; and long treatises with subject matter arranged according to topics and with elaborate dream theory. The manuals were meant for a popular audience, mainly readers of the middle and lower classes; their content deals with concerns like family, sickness and health, poverty and wealth, treachery by friends, fear of authorities, punishment and honor-concerns, in other words, that pertain to the individual dreamer, not to the state or a cult. The dreambook writers drew upon various sources in Classical and Islamic literature, oral and written Byzantine materials, and, perhaps, their own oneirocritic practices. Much of the source-material was pagan in origin and, therefore, needed to be reworked into a Christianized context, with many interpretations given a Christian coloring. For each dreambook the author provides a commentary focusing on analyses of the interpretations assigned to each dream-symbol; historical, social, and cultural discussions of the dreams and interpretations; linguistic, lexical, and grammatical issues; and cross-references with Achmet, Artemidorus, and the other Bzyantine dreambooks. There are also introductory chapters on Byzantine dream interpretation; the authors, their dates, and sources; the manuscripts of the dreambooks; and a lengthy discussion of the contribution of these dreambooks to psychohistory, cultural history, historical sociology, and gender studies. The book is unique in that it offers a full study, through translation and commentary, of the oneirocritica to a wide audience - Byzantinists, Arabists, cultural historians, medievalists (several of the Byzantine dreambooks were translated into Latin and became fundamental dream-texts throughout the Middle Ages), and psychohistorians, all of whom will find the book useful in their study of dreams, transmission of Arabic sources by Byzantine authors, and cultural anthropology. Together with the Oneirocriticon of Achmet, it offers a complete study of dream-interpretation in medieval Greece.

1 Authors, Dates, and Texts

DOI: 10.4324/9781315578057-1

Humans have an innate desire to gain knowledge of what the future has in store for them. The Greeks of antiquity were no different, and so they placed great emphasis on oracles, omens, necromancy, augury, haruspicy, and visions. Private diviners and soothsayers exercised considerable influence in the social, religious, and political life of the ancient Greek (and Roman) world, and no stigma was attached to the profession of divination. Not everyone was a diviner, however, nor did everyone have access to one, and so the future remained an indecipherable mystery for many. There was, though, one way accessible to anyone of any social and economic class, background, or gender to know the unknown: dreams. Everyone dreams, everyone receives images during their sleep. Thus, since it was agreed in the ancient and medieval worlds that dreams could unlock the future, the decoding of the symbolic images of a dream could accomplish on a personal level what professional diviners or oracles did for kings, governments, and the wealthy. All that a dreamer needed was a dream key manual.

Dream key manuals, or dreambooks (in Greek, oneirocritica), go back several millennia before the Byzantine era (330–1453). We have fragments of an Assyrian dreambook and records of Mesopotamian dream rituals, ¹ while the thirteenth-century bce Papyrus Chester Beatty III from Egypt, now in the British Museum, offers a dream key for dreamers. As we will see in Chapters 2 and 3 below, the Greeks and Romans up through the end of the Hellenistic period produced dreambooks. The Byzantines also sought to interpret their dreams through dream key manuals. The Church and State may have tried to control divination, but even patriarchs and emperors had to admit that dreams had a solid scriptural basis, and tradition and cultural lore insisted that throughout history God has sent prophetic visions and dreams to people whom He favors. Hagiographical writers related how saints and martyrs receive significant dreams, and although there was imperial legislation against divination, emperors like Justinian slept at night in churches in order to receive dream cures. ²

1 See A. L. Oppenheim 1956; Butler 1998. 2 On all these points, see Chapter 3 below.

But where could one find a dream key manual in Constantinople? That would have been a problematic issue in itself. The dreambooks of antiquity and the Hellenistic period had not disappeared, but they were thoroughly pagan and contained extended discussions of gods, mythology, sexuality, and (to the Church) deviant morality. In short, they were hardly the sort of tool that a good Christian, wishing to seek God’s counsel and guidance in his dreams, would want to consult. What a Christian needed was a dreambook penned by a famous Church leader or saint for the godly.

To meet this need for Christianised dream key manuals, a number of oneirocritica were written during the early and later periods of Byzantium. ³ The most famous example dates to the tenth century, when a Christian living on the eastern borders of the empire immersed himself in early Arabic dream manuals. Calling himself Achmet, this writer, as I will discuss below, Christianised his Arabic materials and published one of the longest and most comprehensive works on dream interpretation in Greek history. Intended for the current emperor or his court, this dreambook has attracted much scholarly attention. ⁴ But there were other dreambooks available to the Byzantines. Boasting authorship by biblical personalities, famous patriarchs, and even emperors, they did not display the paganism of pre-Byzantine works and therefore were appropriate for use by a Byzantine Greek audience. Indeed, as I hope to make clear in this chapter, these dreambooks were sought out and consulted by people of all backgrounds, from members of the imperial court and educated savants to the “everyman” walking the streets of the Byzantine capital.

3 As we will see below, no dreambook seems to have been written between the fifth and early ninth centuries, as this was a time of resistance and hostility to dreams. 4 Recent excellent studies are Lamoreaux 2002, Mavroudi 2002 and 2007, and Sirriyeh 2006.

The Daniel dreambook is commonly accepted as the earliest Byzantine oneirocriticon; some scholars even consider it the basic source text for all medieval dreambooks in both the East and the West. ⁵ Ascribed to the Hebrew prophet Daniel, under whose name a book of visions and prophecies has come down in the Hebrew canon, ⁶ the original text of the Daniel dreambook is post-Hellenistic or proto-Byzantine. ⁷ The most advocated date for the dreambook’s writing is the fourth century, ⁸ although the sixth and seventh have also been suggested. ⁹ The terminus ante quem, according to some scholars, is the seventh century, when the Greek text was translated into Latin in southern France. ¹⁰ I would note, however, that there is no extant manuscript of the Latin translation (called the Somniale Danielis) until the ninth century, ¹¹ and so the seventh century may not be a reliable means of dating the Greek Daniel dreambook. ¹² Overall, there are over 70 surviving Latin versions of the Daniel dreambook, but three early versions are important for recovering the text of the original Latin translation. The early eleventh-century British Library, MS. Tiberius A.III (=T) contains the Somniale on folia 27^v–32^v; the codex contains altogether 22 works dealing with dream interpretation, prognostication through thunder, calendar divination, omens, and lunar phenomena as they relate to medicine, bloodletting, and prophecy. The Somniale contains 302 dreams and interpretations, each entry listed alphabetically. Max Förster published (Förster 1910) both this text and an Old English interlinear gloss that appeared with it in the codex. The second main witness is the Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS. 271 (tenth century, with 158 dreams), which was published by Förster in 1911. Both traditions contain dreams not found in the other, and at times will contradict the other in interpretations. Problems remain, however, even with these best representations of the two traditions. T, for example, is structured in a puzzling fashion. Its first 249 entries are given in the usual format, in that each dream symbol is listed alphabetically and then followed by an interpretation applicable to all dreamers. Another 21 entries, not alphabetised, follow. These are extracts from another version of the dreambook, as some of the interpretations differ slightly or even contradict the interpretations in the first part. A final set of 32 dreams are composed in a wholly different style: the symbol is written as a conditional si somniaveris … (“If you have seen in your sleep that …”) protasis, and then the interpretation is stated as an apodosis. ¹³ A third early witness was claimed by Martin (1979) to be the ninth-century British Library, MS. Harley 3017. The text is fragmentary. We have one dream starting with the letter “d,”, then a series of symbols with an initial “e” through the letter “m,”, and then three symbols beginning with “n.” Altogether, there are 76 dreams, written in two columns on the front and back of the first folium of the codex. A third of the lines are incomplete or unreadable. However, more recent scholars like Epe (1995) have argued that a superior witness to the third tradition is, in fact, Uppsala, Universitätbibliothek, MS. C (ninth century). The reasons are two. First, the Uppsala version (=C) is the earliest of all witnesses to the Somniale, predating even the Harley codex. Second, all of the Harley is found in C, in terms of both order of arrangement and contents. The Latin Somniale Danielis became extremely popular in Western Europe and was subsequently translated into languages like Old English, Middle English, Italian, French, German, Old Icelandic, Welsh, and Irish. ¹⁴

5 Förster (1921, 58) calls the Daniel dreambook “the ultimate source for all European dreambooks up to the present day” (“die Urquelle für alle europäischen Traumbücher bis zum heutigen Tage”). 6 The reason for the attribution of the dreambook to Daniel was his reputation for interpreting dreams and signs; see, e.g., the interpretations of Nebuchadnezzar’s visions in Chapters 2 and 4 of the Book of Daniel, the first six chapters of which are historical in nature and may date to the period immediately after the Jews’ return from exile in Babylon in 527 bce. The final chapters (7–12), apocalyptic in nature, have been used in conjunction with the Book of Revelation by some Christian theologians, especially Dispensationalists with premillennialist and futurist theories, to outline the end of the world and the return of Christ. Many scholars, however, date the second half of the Book of Daniel to the second century bce, specifically to the time of the Maccabean revolt. For a good overview of this argument (the so-called Maccabean thesis), see Ferch 1983; also DiTommaso 2005. 7 The dreambook, in my opinion, certainly does not go back so far as Artemidorus (second century ce); Artemidorus customarily cited the writers of those dreambooks he consulted, and we have no citation of, or reference to, the Daniel text. Detorakis (1996), who calls the Daniel dreambook παλαιό, notes the strong similarities between the two dreambooks, although he offers no proof of direct borrowing; many parallels can be explained simply by both authors using the same oneirocritic tradition. Guidorizzi (1980, 29) states that the dreambook in its original recension dates to the later imperial period (“risale, nella redazione originaria, all’epoca del tardo Impero”). 8 So Förster 1921, 58 (“etwa im 4. Jahrhundert n. Chr. entstanden sein mag”). See also Brackertz 1993, 213–14; Guidorizzi 1977, 139–50 and 1980, 14; Detorakis 1996, 67; see the comments below to Daniel 53 and 83 (dreams involving animal sacrifices). 9 Turville-Petre 1968, with bibliography; De Stoop (1909, 94, 100) argues for a late Byzantine date. I would point out, however, that De Stoop also speculated that the dreambooks of Astrampsychus and Nicephorus were the sources for the Daniel text, a situation that is just the opposite of what we now know (see below), and that the Daniel dreambook was the last, not the earliest, of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Authors, Dates, and Texts
• 2 The Art of Interpreting Dreams
• 3 The Cultural, Historical, and Social Background
• 4 The Oneirocriticon of Daniel: The Dreambook of the Holy Prophet Daniel with the Help of Holy God, according to the Alphabet
• 5 The Oneirocriticon of Nicephorus: The Dreambook of Nicephorus, Patriarch of Constantinople
• 6 The Oneirocriticon of Astrampsychus
• 7 The Oneirocriticon of Germanus: The Dreambook of Germanus, Patriarch of Constantinople
• 8 The Anonymous Oneirocriticon: An Additional [Dreambook] Drawn from the Experience of the Wise
• 9 The Oneirocriticon of Manuel II Palaeologus: A Dreambook by Manuel Palaeologus
• Bibliography of Works Cited
• Index of Dream Symbols
• General Index