438 



♦ KNOWLEDGE . 



[Nov. 28, 1884. 



DREAMS: 



THEIR PLACE IN THE GROWTH OF PRIMITIVE 

 BELIEFS. 



By Edward Clodd. 

 CONCLUSION. 



REFEEENCE has now to be made to tlie part played 

 by dreams as supposed channels of communication 

 between heaven and earth ; as portents, omens, ifec. The 

 common belief among the nations of antiquity that they 

 were sent by the gods, and the like belief lurking in the 

 miods of the superstitious to this day, are the scarcely- 

 altered survivals of barbaric coufu.sion respecting them. 



When man had advanced from the earlier stages of un- 

 defined wonder and bewilderment concerning the powers 

 around and above him to anthropomorphic conceptions of 

 them, i.e., to making them in his own image, the events of his 

 dreams were striking confirmation of his notions about the 

 constant intervention of spiritual beings, gods, chiefs, and 

 ancestors, in the affairs of life. That personal life and will 

 with which the rude intelligence invests the objects of its 

 awe ; waving trees, swirling waters, drifting clouds, whirlicg 

 winds, stately march of sun and star, seemed especially 

 manifest in dreams and visions. In their unrelated and 

 bewildering, or, on the other hand, their surpassingly clear 

 incidents, the powers indwelling in ail things seemed to 

 come nearer than in the less sensational occurrences of the 

 day, uttering their monitions, or making known their will. 

 They were the media by which this and that thing was 

 commanded or forbidden, or by which guidance and counsel 

 and knowledge of the future were given. To induce them, 

 therefore, became a constant effort. The discovery that 

 fasting is a certain method of procuring them is one reason 

 of its prevalence in the lower culture. Amongst all the 

 indigenous races of North America abstinence has been 

 practised as a chief means of securing supernatural inspi- 

 ration. It is believed that whatever is seen in the first 

 dream thus produced by fasting becomes the nianitou, or 

 guardian spirit of life, corresponding to the " daimon " of 

 Socrates. And whoever by much fasting is favoured with 

 dreams, and cultivates the art of explaining them as bearing 

 on the future, becomes the feared and consulted " Medicine 

 Man " of his tribe. His kee-kee-wins, or records, are 

 finally shown to the old people, who meet together an 

 consult upon them. They in the end give their approval, 

 and declare that he is gifted as a prophet, is inspired with 

 wisdom, and is fit to lead in the councils of the people.* 



Very slender data were needed for the conclusions first 

 drawn from dreams ; let the death of a friend or foe be 

 the incident and the event happen ; let a hunting-path fill 

 the half-torpid fancy and a day's fasting follow ; let the 

 mother of a young sportsman dream that she saw a bear in 

 a certain place, and the son, guided by her account, find 

 the bear where indicated, and kill it, the arbitrary relation 

 is set up forthwith. As Lord Bacon says, " Men mark 

 the hits, but not the misses," and a thousand dreams un- 

 fulfilled count as nothing against one dream fulfilled. Out 

 of that is shaped, as dream-lore shows, a canon of inter- 

 pretation by which whole races will explain their dreams, 



_ * The foUowing Mohammedan recipe for summoning spirits ia 

 given in Kunzinger's "Upper Egypt." "Fast seven days in a 

 lonely place, and take incense with yon, such as benzoin, aloes- 

 wood, mastic, and odoriferous wood from Soudan, and read the 

 chapter 1,001 times (from the Koran) in the seven days — a certain 

 number of readings, namely, for every day one of the five daily 

 prayers. That is the secret, and you will see indescribable wonders : 

 drums will be beaten beside you, and flags hoisted over your head^ 

 and you will see spirits full of light and of beautiful and benio-u 

 aspect." ° 



never staying, when experience happens to confirm it, to 

 wonder that the correspondences are not more frequent 

 than they are. Where the arbitrary act was wrought, the 

 isolated or conflicting influences manifest, there deity or 

 demon was working. So the passage from the crude inter- 

 pretation of his dreams by the barbarian to the formal 

 elaboration of the dream-oracle is obvious. It was only 

 one of many modes by which the gods were thought to 

 hold converse with man, and by which their will was 

 divined. It was one phase of that many-sided belief in 

 power for good or evil inhering in everything, and which 

 led man to see omens in the common events of life, in 

 births, in the objects anyone met in a journey or saw in 

 the sky ; to divine the future by numljers, by the lines 

 in the hand, by the song and flight of birds (lurking 

 in the word OMgury), by the entrails of sacrificed 

 men and animals.* Sometimes the god sends the message 

 through a spiritual being, an angel (literally " messenger "); 

 sometimes he, himself, speaks in vi.-ion, but more often 

 through the symbolism of both familiar and unfamiliar 

 things. To interpret this is a serious science, and skill and 

 shrewdness applied therein with success were |)assports to 

 high place and royal favour. In this, we have the familiar 

 illustrations of Joseph and Daniel, and, indeed, we need 

 not travel beyond the covers of the Old and New Testa- 

 ments for abundant and varied examples of the importance 

 attached to dreams and visions, and of the place accorded 

 to dreams,! an importance undiminished until we come to 

 the literature of the centuries just before Christ. For 

 example, in the Book of Jesus the Son of Sirac, we read — 



Vain and deceitful hopes befit the senseless man, 

 And dreams make fools rejoice. 



Like one who grasps at a shadow and chases the wind. 

 Is he who puts trust in dreams. t 



In the belief that through dreams and oracles Yahweh 

 made known his will, the influence of older beliefs and 

 their literature is apparent. Among the Accadians, a pre- 

 Semitic race in Babylonia, there existed a mass of treatises 

 on magic and divination by dreams and visions, and both 

 from this and from Egyptian sources, blended with survivals 

 from their barbaric past, the Hebrews largely drew. 



In this, too, " there is nothing new under the sun." 

 Homer, painting the vividness and agonising incomplete- 

 ness of the passing %'isions, aflirms that dreams from Jove 

 proceed, although sometimes to deceive men ; Plato assigns 

 prophetic character to the images seen in them ; Aristotle 

 sees a divination concerning some things in dreams which 

 is not incredible ; the answer to oracles was sought in them, 

 as when the worshipper slept in a temple on the skin of a 

 sacrificed ram, and learned his destiny through the dream 

 that came. The Stoics argued that if the gods love and 

 care for men and are all-knowing, they will tell their 

 purposes to men in sleep. Cicero attaches high importance 

 to the faculty of interpreting them : their phenomena, like 

 those of oracles and predictions should, he contends, be 

 explained just as the grammarians and the commentators 

 explain the poets. 



With the influence of these beliefs in the air, and with 

 the legend-visions of Scripture as authority, the divine 

 origin of dreams became a doctrine of the Christian Church. 

 Tertullian says that " we receive dreams from God, there 

 being no man so foolish as never to have known any dreams 

 come true," and in his Dc Anima reference is made to a 

 host of writers of dream treatises. For the most part they 

 are but names ; their treatises have perished, but enough 



* In Roger's Thesaurus, Sect. 511, a curious and instructive list 

 of terms expressive of the different forms of divination is given, 

 t Numbers xii. 6; I. Samuel xxviii. 6, 15, &c. 

 1 Ch. xxxiv. 



