Hepatoscopy in Greece and Rome (Continuity of Magic from East to West, Part 2B)
Divination using the innards of various sacrificed animals was done on a massive scale in the Ancient Near East (ANE). Huge numbers of clay models of sheep livers—on which these praxes particularly focus—and libraries packed with the corresponding omina, among many other things, attest this.The fact our English words for the praxis, hepatoscopy and haruspicy were handed down to us from Greek and Latin, respectively, shows these cultures also had some familiarity with the practice. I’ve noted haruspex was the Latin term for the priest-practitioner, while in Ancient Greece it was a μάντις (mantis), whence of course the insect—thus “praying mantis” is pleonastic—but also all the -mancies, via the verbal form, μαντεία (manteía).
That the art was widespread is clear, but the serious ick factor of fishing around in a pile of steaming viscera to learn the will of the gods is pretty high. Given the general esteem in the West for these mother cultures, this has led to a downplaying, if not full-on expungement of the gory details. Historian and archaeologist Sir William Reginald Halliday, writing near the turn of the last century, certainly fits this pattern, saying:¹
To attempt to classify or to enumerate exhaustively [divination using sacrificed animals’] almost unlimited possibilities of variation is a difficult and unprofitable task. Of the most important of them, however, extispication or the examination of entrails, something must be said. Into great detail or the discussion of technicalities it will fortunately be unnecessary to go.
Nonetheless, as a more recent scholar, Derek Collins, notes of the centrality of these rites Halliday so begrudges discussing:²
Next to the Delphic oracle, the most important form of divination in classical Greece was extispicy.
Indeed, the importance of the rite can be gauged by the fact it was also part of the preparation for a consultation with the famous oracle. Additionally, just as in the Ezekiel passage about Nabû-kudurri-usur I quoted in the previous Part, divination was most commonly performed before and during military campaigns where it was termed in Greek σφάγιον (sphágion, “sacrifice”), governing weighty issues such as when to begin a march, who was to command, etc.
Halliday also notes some form of extispicy has sprung up among many far-flung peoples, trying again to trivialize these rites within Greek culture as well as to cast doubt on their origins.³ But there is neither Greek literature nor iconography, let alone physical evidence, to support an autochthonous origin of the practice.
Rather, it’s entirely absent before 700 BCE when it appears in the final version of the Homeric epics, while older strata are devoid of such mentions. Art presents seers examining the liver from about 530 BCE and not until following the Persian Wars (499–449 BCE) does literature feature it as the dominant form of divination. Let’s recall that in 700 BCE, we’re only 100 years past the Greek Dark Age, and that date is important for another reason, as we’ll see later.
When Halliday finally manages to hold his nose long enough to discuss other possible origins of extispicy, he still attempts to downplay it, terming it a “sub-rite”:⁴
The Greeks themselves assigned the origin of extispication as of augury to mythical figures, to Delphos son of Poseidon, to Prometheus, to Sisyphos or Orpheus; and among the peoples supposed by antiquity to have invented the art are Etruscans, Egyptians, Cyprians, Cilicians, or Chaldeans.
The abovementioned Titan as the source of the art figures in Prometheus Bound as a gift given to the mortals along with fire, which again reinforces its importance:⁵
[…] σπλάγχνων τε λειότητα, καί χροιν τίνα
ἔχουσ᾽ ἂν εἴη δαίμοσιν προς ἡδονην
χολή, λοβοῦ τε ποικίλην εὐμορφίαν.[…] the smoothness of animal entrails, what color the gallbladder must have to please the gods, and the dappled symmetry of the liver lobe.
Modern archaeology has fully debunked Herodotus’ supposedly historical claim extispicy originated in Egypt and moved thence to Greece,⁶ as there is no attestation in Egypt prior to the Hellenistic period.
As to the tradition pointing to Cilicia and Cyprus, the priest clan of the Tamiradae at Paphos claimed to have brought the art with them from Cilicia, and to have passed it on to the Cinyradae. This last term refers to the chief priests there, who were actually of Phoenician rather than Greek origin, and so ultimately trace back to the source I’ve suggested. Collins concludes:⁷
[E]xtispicy originated in Mesopotamia among Babylonians and Assyrians, from where it moved west to the Hittites in Asia Minor and from there to Greece.
So despite some confusion remaining in Halliday’s work near the turn of the last century as to where Graeco-Roman augury came from, Collins delivers the above statement as being “commonly accepted” as of a decade ago. Furthermore, many of the same terms of art are used in the East and West, with many of those in Ancient Greek appearing to be almost direct translations from Akkadian, referring to features of the liver, such as the “gate”, “head”, “path”, and “river”.
Turning to Rome, the practice enjoyed similar ubiquity such that in the late Republican era, Cicero wrote:⁸
extis enim omnes fere utuntur
nearly everyone uses entrails in divination
Indeed, while in the Mesopotamian practice, sheep were mainly used, though oxen and goats also sometimes provided the wiggly material, in the West the practice was extended to sacred chickens, and even the guts of frogs and dogs could be consulted on occasion.
As to Latin literature, Vergil mentions a famous seer, Asilas:⁹
[…] ille hominum divomque interpres Asilas,
cui pecudum fibrae, caeli cui sidera parent
et linguae volucrum et praesagi fulminis ignes […].[…] Asilas, interpreter between gods and men, whom the victims’ entrails obey, and the stars of heaven, the tongues of birds, and prophetic lightning fires […].
He’s talking about the Etruscans, whose Disciplina Etrusca contains these things and more: haruspicy, divination via the stars (astrologia), interpretation of bird cries (linguae volucrum), and lightning (fulguratura). Note the Etruscan language and literature around these praxes are largely lost, and now known only through Latin sources, just as with the above terms. Etruscan, Hellenistic, and Roman archaeology specialist Nancy de Grummond notes:¹⁰
Etruscan ritual […] was informed by a constant preoccupation with fate and destiny, and centered on attempts to learn the will of the gods and somehow to affect their decisions and thus the outcome of human affairs. The well-known Etruscan science of haruspication, involving the scrutiny and interpretation of the entrails of a sacrificial animal, epitomizes Etruscan praxis […].
Sounding familiar? Now we can return to the liver model from Piacenza about which I’ll come clean: I’ve misled you slightly. While it is in fact “relating to the Roman culture” as I said, it’s actually Etruscan, as that was the dominant culture on the Italic peninsula during Rome’s formative years and therefore a huge cultural donor—the Greek influence was to come later. What struck me about the liver models naturally did not escape the notice of scholars:¹¹
The correspondence between Etruscan and Assyrian hepatoscopy became evident as soon as the Etruscan bronze liver found at Piacenza was compared with the Assyrian clay model of a liver in the British Museum […].
And as in the Near East, this liver model isn’t unique in the Etruscan world—there are others in both bronze and terracotta, the Piacenza Liver is just an excellent example, which is unique in that it also attempts to correlate omens in the liver and the sky. I’ve also sneakily held back a bit of Collins’ tracing of the art from East to West:¹²
In the case of liver divination, the only exception to [the] pattern is that some of the technical information concerning the manufacture of model livers for instruction seems to have bypassed the Greek mainland and flowed by way of Lydia to Etruria.
However, it seems he’s actually gotten it wrong. Remember when I said the date of 700 BCE when hepatoscopy entered Ancient Greek literature was important? It’s the Orientalizing period of Etruscan history:¹³
[T]he internal tradition of the Etruscan disciplinae goes back to the seventh century […]—that is, to precisely that period whose glory is reflected in so many oriental imports.
Collins should have cast a still wider net as it seems the entire art bypassed Greece, caught on in Etruria, and then doubled back from there. This can be seen from various linguistic traces: First, there is vacillation between ⟨i⟩ and ⟨u⟩ in the second syllable of haruspex, as seen in Latin attestations of (h)arispex and in its close cousin, Faliscan’s 𐌇𐌀𐌓𐌉𐌔𐌐[𐌄𐌗] (harisp[ex]). This ties in with a feature of the Etruscan language; its emphasis on the initial syllable meant other vowels, especially in the second syllable, were often lost, as seen in the shift from AG Ἡρακλῆς (Herakles) to Latin’s (and its descendants’) Hercules because of the Etruscan intermediary 𐌄𐌋𐌂𐌓𐌄𐌇 (Hercle). This term of possible Etruscan origin was also borrowed into Hellenistic Greek as άρούσπηκα (harouspeka) while no Latin forms of the Greek words exist. Even the exonym for the Etruscans the Greeks invented and we still use a form of—Tusci—may derive from θυοσκόος (thyoskóos), “sacrifice-diviner”. The Etruscans’ name for themselves was 𐌀𐌍𐌔𐌀𐌓 (rasna), which just means “people” as many autonyms do.
The source I’m quoting above, The Orientalizing Revolution, backs up at least this aspect of my hypothesis much of Western magic stems from the Near East and I plan to read it further to see what else it reveals. The final verdict reached on this topic in the book is this:¹⁴
[T]o build a system specifically on the slaughter of sheep, to manufacture demonstration models of sheep livers from clay and metal and to provide them with inscriptions for the sake of explanation, is something peculiar found precisely along the corridor from the Euphrates via Syria and Cyprus to Etruria. It can even be shown that both the Assyrian and the Etruscan models diverge from nature in a similar way; that is, they are derived not directly from observation but from common traditional lore.
And, at least in Rome, the art continued to be Etruscan long after their hegemony of the area had elapsed; the art was passed from father to son. Thus, when the Romans refer to haruspices, they essentially mean this group of Etruscan specialists who continued to officiate in Rome.
Read subsequent articles in the Continuity of Magic from East to West series
Part 3B: Devoted More Than All Others
Part 4A: Romancing the Hellenes
Part 5: Hellenism, Schmellenism
Part 6: Myth and Magic in the Cultural Koiné
Part 8: No Ewoks, Only the Dead
Read previous articles in the Continuity of Magic from East to West series
Part 1: The Griffin and the Phoenix
Notes
- W. R. Halliday, Greek Divination: A Study of its Methods and Principles, 1913.
- Derek Collins, “Mapping the Entrails: The Practice of Greek Hepatoscopy”, The American Journal of Philology, 2008.
- Halliday, 1913.
- Ibid, 1913. By calling it a “sub-rite” he’s insinuating animal sacrifice is the main rite, with hepatoscopy being an adjunct thereto—contrary to all evidence.
- Αἰσχύλος (Aeschylus) (?), Προμηθευς Δεσμώτης (Prometheus Bound), 493–495, ca. 479–424 BCE. I’ve used M. L. West’s 1990 translation, finding no fault with it. Also, this site doesn’t support all the Ancient Greek accents and breathing marks—my apologies to any readers interested in those details.
- Collins, 2008.
- Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Divinatione (Concerning Divination), I.10, 44 BCE.
- Ἡρόδοτος (Herodotus), Ἱστορίαι (Histories), 2.57.3, ca. 430 BCE.
- Pūblius Vergilius Marō (Vergil), Aeneis (Aeneid), X.175, 29–19 BCE. Using H. Rushton Fairclough’s 1918 just fine translation.
- Nancy de Grummond, “Etruscan Religion”, The Cambridge History of Religions in the Ancient World, 2013.
- Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age, 1995.
- Collins, 2008.
- Burkert, 1995.
- Ibid.
Deru Kugi 