Dreaming in Byzantium and Beyond

George T. Calofonos, Christine Angelidi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317148142
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Although the actual dreaming experience of the Byzantines lies beyond our reach, the remarkable number of dream narratives in the surviving sources of the period attests to the cardinal function of dreams as vehicles of meaning, and thus affords modern scholars access to the wider cultural fabric of symbolic representations of the Byzantine world. Whether recounting real or invented dreams, the narratives serve various purposes, such as political and religious agendas, personal aspirations or simply an author's display of literary skill. It is only in recent years that Byzantine dreaming has attracted scholarly attention, and important publications have suggested the way in which Byzantines reshaped ancient interpretative models and applied new perceptions to the functions of dreams. This book - the first collection of studies on Byzantine dreams to be published - aims to demonstrate further the importance of closely examining dreams in Byzantium in their wider historical and cultural, as well as narrative, context. Linked by this common thread, the essays offer insights into the function of dreams in hagiography, historiography, rhetoric, epistolography, and romance. They explore gender and erotic aspects of dreams; they examine cross-cultural facets of dreaming, provide new readings, and contextualize specific cases; they also look at the Greco-Roman background and Islamic influences of Byzantine dreams and their Christianization. The volume provides a broad variety of perspectives, including those of psychoanalysis and anthropology.

Chapter 1
Dreaming in the Life of Cyril Phileotes

Margaret Mullett

There is a single image in twelfth-century art which represents the work of contributors to this volume.¹ In it the mother of Basil I is shown sharing her dream with a woman dream-interpreter. In the same way we lay out our dream narratives, offer our interpretations and wait for the community to comment and lead us to wiser readings. Unlike the Byzantines telling their dreams to a single wise interpreter, or, like emperors on campaign, consulting a single dreambook,² we need reactions from the representatives of many disciplines: history, philology, psychology, psychiatry, anthropology. For dreams can be many things: a view into the future, a manifestation of the personal past, a means of approaching the divine, a mechanism for healing, a plot device, a medieval cinema, or an alternative plane of existence.³

And it seems to me that all these possibilities are open for us: compared with classicists we have but exhausted the potential of dreaming.⁴ Byzantinists have contributed to dreamwork on a wider compass at various conferences and in various volumes,⁵ there have been a few theses,⁶ a Belfast day school, important studies of the oneirokritika⁷ and of Achmet⁸ in particular, and of course the Athens project.⁹ There is a real possibility at present of making plans for future research in the field. But whatever we may do, together or separately, in future, we now do what we do. So my own concern at this point is literary. This is not a bad place to be: after all Meg Alexiou’s brilliant analysis, uninformed as it was by ancient dream theory, of the levels of consciousness in Hysmine and Hysminias made space for MacAlister’s reading, which makes dream an event rather than a level of narrative, where Ingela Nilsson excels; Carolina Cupane’s distinctive voice is to be heard elsewhere in this volume.¹⁰ Rather than the novel where it started, or history, where I have recently made a small contribution,¹¹ or even letters like Jerome’s, so revealing to Patricia Cox Miller,¹² I want to look at how dreams function in an experimental twelfth-century Saint’s Life.

The mid-twelfth-century text is of a suburban portmanteau saint of the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries with ascetic credentials, a quite extraordinary family life and imperial clients.¹³ While we might imagine that visions might be uninteresting, as very much the stuff of hagiography, I have suggested in various places that it is experimental, in the sense that it is generically hybrid, integrating a progressive ascetic anthology with the narrative, and (harder to do) showing more general change in the genre as a result of Bakhtin’s novelisation.¹⁴ What I want to do in this chapter is look at the dreams at a level of story-telling, and decide whether they are experimental in terms of narrative, but also in terms of dreaming. I am prepared to include, as I think it is good practice, enypnia, oneiroi and phantasiai, both waking, hypnagogic and sleeping experiences, onar and hypar.¹⁵

There are 15 cases of dreams or visions in the text. Some strike me as unexceptional and the kind of dream which establishes sanctity, others are more complex and harder for us to read. In two cases we see the reaction of the saint to the dreams of others, while another non-subjective dream advances the plot without highlighting issues of diakrisis, or oneirocriticism. Only one is recounted in any detail, and that is one of the darker and less comprehensible dreams. In the passages quoted below, technical terms for dream type and trigger vocabulary are shown in bold and senses and emotions are italicized.

At the beginning, stages in the portmanteau saint’s development are signalled by dreams. Chapters 6–9 show Cyril settling into a pattern of askēsis in the family home after his wife’s decision in chapter 6 to do all the work of the farm so that he can live a quiet life as an ascetic and hesychast in a cell inside the house. Chapter 10 shows him acting on the way-of-life established with a story about his philadelphia in escorting a young woman to visit her mother. As a reward, or to point out his virtue, he receives a vision from the personification of Theocharia who brings him happiness. We are told the following:

And that night, when he handed the young woman back to her mother, the saint saw in a dream-like vision a woman beautiful in aspect, wrapped in a stole as white as snow. Her mantle covered the whole earth. When he saw her, he said to her, ‘My Lady, who are you? And why have you come?’ And she said, ‘My name is Theocharia, and I have come to visit you’. And with this word, see that she embraced him and covered him with her mantle. The inexpressible perfume which he smelt immediately made him come to himself and filled him with joy, happiness, and pleasure. For thus God knows how to give back glory to those who glorify him.¹⁶

So we know he saw a divine personage because she is beautiful, dressed in white with an enormous mantle. He does not know who she is, but asks her and she identifies herself. He both hears and smells her, and we are told his reaction in terms of emotions.

In a pair of chapters on euergesia and philoxenia, chapter 12 offers a vision. It marks the saint’s progression to be an Almsgiver, but also helps the plot, since a traveller thereby finds his way to Cyril’s door. He asks for the house of Kyriakos the Merciful, and Cyril (Kyriakos) replies that he is called Kyriakos, no-one else in the village is called Kyriakos, but he didn’t realize that he was also called the Merciful. The traveller replies:

In this very bad weather I had lost attention and in my daydream found myself in a storm of logismoi. I strengthened myself by trust in God and I asked him to close his eyes on my numerous faults and to show me a way of escape. While I was praying like this, a soldier on horseback, very beautiful, presented himself to me and said, ‘Don’t be distressed: God will take care of you’. And showing me from far-off this place, he added, ‘When you arrive, seek out the house of father Kyriakos the Merciful and he will look after you’. This is how he spoke with me. But I don’t know what happened to the man who was speaking with me. For the love of truth, it is for this reason that I ask you, my Lord.¹⁷

So he is praying, and the vision declares itself through its beauty, though we never identify the horseman, and, its purpose served, we move on. There is no doubt about these visions, nor is there in those where Cyril gains useful skills.

Once Cyril was established as an ascetic in the monastery, there is a group of these. Chapter 26 is about the uses of reading, and it begins with Cyril’s experience of learning the psalms by heart. He had only got halfway when he gave away the book to a poor man, and soon regretted it. He was mourning its loss when he managed to sleep and

a man clothed in white appeared to him and said to him: ‘Father Cyril, why are you not chanting?’ And he replied, ‘My lord, God knows that I have chanted all the psalms and all the prayers that I know’. He said to him, ‘You haven’t chanted the psalter’. And the saint said to him, ‘I don’t have a psalter any more: I chanted what I knew’. And he said to him, ‘Get up and we’ll sing together’. Which they did not once, but twice, then he disappeared.¹⁸

It is simple: we never know the identity of the apparition, sight and sound alone are involved. The result is Cyril’s refound and increased competence.

Later, after the pivotal chapter 29 which marks the transition from Cyril’s development as an ascetic and his mature career, there are further examples of this kind. Chapter 34, the visit of Constantine Choirosphaktes, serves as a foil (as the visit of a good courtier) to the next chapter, the visit of Eumathios Philokales (a bad courtier). But the visionary experience is used to frame the story, and to add force to his argument that he should not be bankrolled by Constantine’s property. The story begins with a heavenly voice quoting Ps 61(62):11: ‘if riches accrue, set not your heart upon them’. Constantine then arrives and makes his offer, and then at the end of the saint’s tactful refusal comes his use of the quotation from the Psalms:

Have you not heard the word of Scripture, if riches accrue, set not your heart upon them? This pious man replied: ‘It is written: if riches INCREASE’. The saint replied, ‘You quote the text as if you had learned it, I...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Prologue
• List of Contributors
• Note on the Spelling of Names
• Abbreviations
• 1 Dreaming in the Life of Cyril Phileotes
• 2 The Morphology of Healing Dreams: Dream and Therapy in Byzantine Collections of Miracle Stories
• 3 Ecstasy as a Form of Visionary Experience in Early Byzantine Monastic Literature
• 4 The Heavenly City: Religious and Secular Visions of the Other World in Byzantine Literature
• 5 A Little Revelation for Personal Use
• 6 Prokopios’ Dream Before the Campaign Against Libya: A Reading of Wars 3.12.1–5
• 7 Dream Narratives in the Continuation of Theophanes
• 8 The Historiography of Dreaming in Medieval Byzantium
• 9 The Dream-Key Manuals of Byzantium
• 10 Byzantine and Islamic Dream Interpretation: A Comparative Approach to the Problem of ‘Reality’ vs ‘Literary Tradition’
• 11 Fluid Dreams, Solid Consciences: Erotic Dreams in Byzantium
• 12 Gender Ambiguity in Dreams of Conversion, Prophecy and Creativity
• 13 Psychoanalysis and Byzantine Oneirographia
• Index