Oracles

Let me just characterize what I mean by an oracle of divination. For the moment I mean any human actions handling a numerical oracle. Afterwards I shall expand to others, but at first I will remain with number oracles.

A number is produced by some arbitrary gesture, for instance, by putting one's hand into a bowl of pebbles and taking some out and then counting them. Or by taking a number of chicken bones, making two sections in the sand, and then throwing the bones at random, afterwards counting how many fell into the red and how many into the white section, or something like that. Or probably most of you are familiar with the I Ching, for which one throws coins which fall heads or tails and one calculates from that, or one throws yarrow stalks, to get information about one's psycho-physical inner and outer situation.

Now, this is a historical age-old first step by mankind to produce what one would call a system by which to investigate reality. Probably, before he invented oracles, primitive man relied only on his dreams and his instinctual unconscious hunches.

The Naskapi's Dreams into Songs

There is, for instance, a North American Indian tribe of the Naskapi Indians who live at the border, near the Alaskan Eskimos. There are only about one or two hundred people left, for they are rapidly starving to death. They live mainly on caribou fat. These people mirror a specifically primitive state of affairs. According to anthropological theories, and I must say I agree with such theories in this respect, we can say that they still mirror a very original state of mankind. Little scattered groups, usually family groups of about fifteen to twenty individuals, wander about in bands, the men hunting and the women collecting berries, etc. They have no agriculture and no civilization and are still completely the original hunter-collector type. Once a year the whole tribe meets at a certain place to sell furs and get munitions from the white man. Otherwise they never meet together, so have no organized religion, no festivals, and no priests, nothing. Since religion is a natural instinctual phenomenon, naturally they have one, though not organized, and for their spiritual orientation they rely on their dreams.

Their interpretation is that in the heart of every man dwells Mistap'eo, the great man who is the sender of dreams. He sends dreams and wants the individual to attend to those dreams, to test them, try them out, and draw their conclusions from them. They say that Mistap'eo also likes it very much if one draws or paints one's dream motifs, so they cut them in wood or they make little bark trays with dream motifs, and with that they have their spiritual orientation. They also sometimes discuss their dreams with one another and if a man or woman has a very impressive dream they spontaneously turn it into a song. If one man has a very good dream song then the others begin to sing it too, but even those songs fade out after a while, and then there is a new song from another individual who has transformed his dream into a song. Such songs are completely primitive. I can give you an example.

A man once dreamt that his wife was sleeping with a stranger. Now, like the Eskimos, they have a custom that if a stranger comes they offer their wives to him for the first night; it is the ius primae noctis in a certain variation. Psychologically, the stranger is a dangerous intruder, something of which the primitive man is always terrified. What will he bring? Will he integrate our life? Their fear is reinforced by the fact that often whites or other strangers bring a new disease. Not long ago these people had an awful wave of flu; one man caught it from the whites and infected the others, and since they have no immunity against flu half the tribe died. That is something which has happened to many Eskimo tribes, as you know. Therefore, their experience is that a stranger is a physiological and psychological threat which they try to meet by offering their wives. There is the feeling that he has thus become one of the family and therefore cannot do any harm, but is now propitious.

So a Naskapi man once dreamt that his wife was sleeping with a stranger. On waking up he thought about that and said: Ha, today I shall shoot a caribou! Frank Speck, the ethnologist who tells the story, unfortunately does not say how he arrived at that conclusion. He didn't squeeze the man and enquire, but if you are primitive enough you will see at once how he did it: namely that something new would intrude into his life and his wife would sleep with it, therefore it must be something positive and not something dangerous so something positive and new was to happen that day.

Since he was nearly starving, the only positive new thing which could happen would be to get a caribou, which would mean survival for the next fortnight. Those people live from fortnight to fortnight. They reckon constantly with death, and live from each bear and each caribou they have killed; the situation is as bad as that and so: I am going to shoot a caribou. He did shoot one and made a song: My wife is sleeping with a stranger and I am going to shoot a caribou. That was a magical song imitated by many, many others of the tribe for a long time to provoke the situation of shooting a caribou, while originally it was just a psychological event, a dream of one Naskapi Indian.

The Birth of the Magic View

That is probably how man oriented himself originally, before he invented oracles, for the invention of oracles would imply a further progress and is the beginning of science since it poses the question of how these probabilities could be systematized in some form. If I dream that my wife sleeps with a stranger then there is the probability that I shall shoot a caribou! That was how the tribe understood it. Now if they evolved culturally, which they do not though we must assume that that has happened somewhere in the world at one time then they would, for instance, try to sculpt a caribou and sing the song hoping that would magically result in the shooting of a caribou. That is hunting magic; it is not yet using an oracle, but those people know even hunting magic sometimes works and sometimes does not.

People who live on the level of the magic view of the world never believe that magic is like an absolute law; they will say they perform their hunting ritual, or hunting or some other magic, because of the hope and probability that it will come off, but though there is a strong probability of success it might not come off and they would explain that by saying some evil powers had interfered. If it does not work, they explain it by saying that an evil sorcerer has used some negative magic and disturbed the process, or they take it upon themselves and say they have not done the magical ritual with quite the right psychological attitude, and then it sometimes does not work. So they reckon with failure: it is only a probability, not an absolute natural law.

Therefore let us assume that they carve a caribou in wood and make some magic with it, singing the song, after which sometimes they shoot a caribou and sometimes they do not. For the searching human mind then comes the next step: Could we find some means of knowing ahead if it will work or not?

Now there the concept of chance is introduced; to a certain extent it is a question of luck, or of chance, which for the primitive man means the action of a god, or a sorcerer, or one's own psychic powers they do sometimes fail and therefore could they not find out ahead? One could, for instance (I am jumping now) throw a coin, and if the coin falls wrong then I am wrong, or the gods are not willing to help, and even if I use my hunting magic now it will not help. That is a short cut which saves me from exerting myself in drawing or dancing; I know ahead that the odds are against me, so I can save my energy and try to circumvent my bad luck in some other way. That would be the first dim dawning of a scientific mind. It consists in counting probabilities, in using some mathematical or other means to establish probabilities, and by that save energy and get the dark situation in which man lives in nature a bit more under his control. That is probably the origin of many, many oracle techniques which exist all over the world.

Now, I come to the difference between a number oracle and another divination technique. There are innumerable divination techniques which to my mind are techniques to catalyze one's own unconscious knowledge. These do not use number, but some chaotic pattern; still much used among white men are tea leaves and coffee grounds, but you can use any other such pattern. As I told you before, there is an African technique of divination in which after eating a chicken its bones are thrown on the ground and from the way they fall, the chaotic pattern they make, may be read what is going to happen.

There is a village in the Swiss canton of Uri where church and cemetery are on the other side of a little river, so for a funeral they have to carry the coffin over the bridge to the church and cemetery. A dry mud path leads towards the bridge; in good weather it has cracks, and all the village people still look at those cracks nowadays as they follow the coffin, and by them can tell who will be the next, by looking at that chaotic pattern of cracks in the dry mud. Once many years ago I consulted a palmist named Spier, a Dutchman who wrote a famous scientific book on palmistry. He had an enormous scientific apparatus and knew all the various lines in the hand. He didn't look at your hand but put soot on it, and then you had to make an imprint on paper and he read from that. He was a fantastic medium. I did not let him tell me my future; I thought I owned my own future and that was none of his business, so I bound him down only to tell me my past. He told it most accurately; he even saw an operation I had had two years before and he didn't say some accident, he said an operation. He was just fantastic. So then I got interested and had coffee with him and squeezed him and asked him exactly how he did it. Finally he confessed, he told me that he was a medium and that when a person came into the room to consult him, he knew all about him; he just knew it, but did not know what he knew, and this whole performance with the cracks and the handlines was to bring up the knowledge he had. In that way he could project his unconscious knowledge into these lines and inform his client, so they were a catalyzer to make him conscious of what he already knew. Really, he drew on what Jung calls the absolute knowledge of the unconscious, which we know exists, as we can see from dreams.

The Absolute Knowledge of the Unconscious

The unconscious knows things; it knows the past and future, it knows things about other people. We all from time to time have dreams which inform us about something which happens to another person. Most of you who analyse will know that prognostic and telepathic dreams occur quite frequently to practically everybody, and this knowledge of the unconscious Jung calls absolute knowledge. A medium is a person who has a closer relationship, one might say a gift, by which to relate to the absolute knowledge of the unconscious, generally by having a relatively low level of consciousness. This explains why mediums are very often very queer and often even morally odd people, not always, but often [enough] or they are slightly criminal, or take to drink, and so on. They are generally very endangered personalities because they have that low threshold and are so near to the absolute knowledge of the unconscious.

Almost all non-number divination techniques are based on some kind of chaotic pattern, which actually is exactly like the Rorschach test. One stares at a chaotic pattern and then gets a fantasy, and the complete disorder in the pattern confuses one's conscious mind. We could all be mediums, and [we] all have absolute knowledge, if the bright light of our ego consciousness would not dim it. That is why the medium needs an abaissement du niveau mental and has to go into a trance, a sleep-like state, to pull up his or her knowledge. I have myself observed that in states of extreme fatigue, when I am really dangerously physically exhausted, I suddenly get absolute knowledge; I am much closer to it then, but as soon as I have slept well for a few nights then this wonderful gift is gone again. Why? Absolute knowledge is like candlelight, and if the electric light of ego consciousness is burning, then one cannot see the candlelight. If one looks at a chaotic pattern, one gets befuddled, one cannot make head nor tail of it. If one looks for a moment at a Rorschach card with its accumulation of dots, that blots out the functioning of the conscious mind, and then an unconscious fantasy comes up Oh, that looks like an elephant, or something like that.

So one can get information from the unconscious by looking at a pattern. Now the diviner, the sorcerer, is generally a mediumistically gifted personality and he may use tea leaves, or coffee grounds, or look into a crystal. Different lights flicker if one looks in a crystal; it has a chaotic pattern as well as an order, but the light effects are chaotic.

Primitive societies very frequently look into a bowl of water, or like the people in Uri whom I mentioned, they look at the cracks in a mud path, or any such random pattern. That blots out one's conscious thoughts. One cannot make head nor tail of a chaotic pattern; one is bewildered and that moment of bewilderment brings up the intuition from the unconscious. That is what the palmist pulled out. His confession when I squeezed him made clear to me why so many, many divination techniques all over the world use a chaotic or half-ordered pattern to get information. That, to my mind, is a primitive divination technique and it has been rediscovered, for example, in the Rorschach test.

There are many other ways of doing it. For instance, it is of great value to encourage an analysand to paint abstract or random paintings. He makes a few dots first (as in the Rorschach test) and thinks, That looks like an elephant, and he puts a trunk on. Generally if you ask an analysand how he made his pictures he can tell you exactly how he began, with a dot, say, which looked like a rabbit, so he put a tail on, and then invented the whole picture and so an unconscious fantasy unfolds. That is one source of divination. Another is like provoking a dream in daytime. Instead of waiting till one dreams in the night, one can provoke a dream in daytime by fantasying into a dot or into a chaotic pattern and so get the daytime dream. Probably we dream all the time, not only in the night but also in daytime, but because of the brightness of our conscious life we are not aware of it.

This idea is substantiated by the following fact. If one watches the mistakes in speech, or in thinking, which people make, one can observe that the dream they had the night before or the night after is generally related. Or if perhaps one wants to say Mr. Miller and by sheer idiocy one says Mr. Johnson, one wonders why one made that silly mistake one knows Miller is Miller, why did one say Johnson? That's a slip of the tongue, and generally one notices that either the night before or the night after one dreams of Johnson. He was already there. Sometimes in such a slip of the tongue one mentions someone not thought of for thirty years, and promptly one dreams of that person. Probably one already dreamt of that man in the daytime, but without being aware of it, and it only pushes itself up in a mishap, in a lapsus linguae.

Freud noticed this fact and pointed out that mistakes in speech and dream motifs are akin. One should go even further and say that both give the same information about something going on in the unconscious. It is therefore rather probable that a dream process continues in daytime. Looking at a chaotic pattern is like putting one's mind to sleep for a minute and getting information about what one is fantasying or dreaming about in the unconscious. Through the absolute knowledge in the unconscious one gets information about one's inner and outer situation.

One gets to see traits in others that one already possesses

Now why should that palmist, Spier, get information about my past, which is, so to speak, my memory possession? My past is my own and only I know it, how can he get that? I noticed that though he told the truth about my past he also told me a lot about my character. He pointed out certain things and I thought: Oh brother, you are the same type! Then I did a check on that and had many hand readings made for me, many horoscopes made, if possible by people I more or less knew, and I found out that they were all true. When I read them I could always say: Yes, that's true, that is a true diagnosis. But if you were to read them, you would see that they are most different, and if you read them with more understanding you would see that it is typical for that person to notice that in me, and it is typical for that other person to notice something else. So the information is filtered by the personality of the medium, or the diviner, or the horoscope maker, or the palmist, and so on; they get within the area of another's psychic constellation that is akin to theirs. All are true, but all are only partial.

That is my experience. I cannot make a theory of it for I have not enough comparative material, but it seems right to me that it should be so, because we know that is also true in everyday life. We can only answer to those facets of another personality when we have a certain amount ourselves. That is why there are certain people whom we cannot analyse. We have not their number, to use that expression again. We can analyse only those people whose number we have. We can contact them to a greater or lesser extent, but we can only to a certain extent understand the other. The more conscious we are, the more people we can understand, but never everybody, and the more we are conscious of the many, many inner possibilities we have, the more likely we are to be able to get the number of other people; otherwise we are one-sided analysts who can only analyse a certain type of person, or a certain type of neurosis, or other disease. There we are good specialists and can do really good work but in another field we cannot.

For instance, I cannot analyse hysterical people. I have not had an hysterical case in my practice for over twenty years, but it does not matter because they do not come to me. I have no chance to fail with them because they smell a rat, they do not come to me, and if I meet them socially I am up against a blank wall, I have no empathy. In many many other forms of madness I have full empathy, but in that one I fail and I know from talking with colleagues that it is the same with them. One has empathy only into certain human states and there are some which you miss. I still hope that I'll develop some hysterical traits one day and understand them; it is one of my great ambitions, but I have not reached that yet. I experience it as a lack but one cannot do much about it except go on till one has it.

As far as I have seen, the same thing applies with divination techniques as in my own life. Diviners always get something out of one number of my personality, but I have never had a horoscope or a hand reading of which I could say: Now that defines me completely. One can say, Yes, yes, that is true, I can see that, that is what I am like, but then one reads another and it is also correct. Now how is that? Then one notices that it has been just one photograph, for it is just the same as with photographs. Photographs of people always give one moment's facet of the personality, which explains why one cannot look at photographs for a long time. If you have a photograph of a beloved person on your writing desk, you have to put it away after a while for it becomes dead. For a while it speaks and then suddenly one has the feeling that it is just a piece of dead paper and no longer that person. One would have to put up 365 different photographs of that person, one for every day of the year, to always have a fresh impression, because a photograph is like a divinatory guess of the personality and only one facet is filtered.

Schicksalsgemeinde

The same thing applies to divination not about a person but about a situation. In a primitive tribe it is much more likely to be right, because primitive societies live in a complete or all-inclusive participation mystique. They are like one body. If one man is starving they are all anxious. Very primitive societies and other human beings who are in great danger always share their food. Everything is shared, not because they are nobler than we are, but because they say: Today I shot the caribou but in a fortnight it might be someone else so it is better to share the food we have.

When I bought my land in Bollingen the neighbours came to me and said: We are a good neighbourhood because you see in such a little community we all have to help each other at some time, so we cannot afford to quarrel. That is true, you need only go there in the winter and get stuck in the snow when the neighbours have to pull your car out. You cannot afford to quarrel and you always [help] when one of the neighbours is in trouble. The whole group consists of about five houses. The people all hate each other, quite normally and humanly, within the normal framework. They have their shadow problems and their heritage quarrels, but they never let them come up. One cannot afford it, because we are what we call eine Schicksalsgemeinde, a fate community in nature.

In mountaineering the five people who are attached to the same rope cannot afford to quarrel. They may hate or love each other as much as they like, but beyond sympathy or antipathy it is a vital Shicksalsgemeinde, a fate community, and so are the primitive communities of man. They always have common troubles and problems, there are very few individual problems; therefore for the diviner of the tribe who throws the chicken bones to find out if there will be rain or good hunting, it is of as much importance to him as to all the people who stand around and watch. So there is a tremendous collective concern and with that a tremendous load of psychic energy; there is a tremendous tension, which makes it very likely, naturally, that the diviner will be inspired to get that information from the unconscious which refers to the situation, and not an answer to his personal problem.

If divining fails, one can generally see that the diviner has a personal neurotic problem which he projects into the material. Suppose my palmist had just been in great trouble with his girl friend, he might then have divined that I had love trouble and had not been faithful at that time. When there is a failure, therefore, it is generally seen to be a projection of the diviner's personal problem which blots out the other person's problem. In primitive communities there are not many personal problems; a personal problem is really everybody's problem in a fate community, so the diviner will probably not often project personal nonsense but will function correctly. From the group unconscious he extracts the answer to the group's question, and these chaotic means are the technique.

Number or Patterned Oracles

There is a higher form of oracle where numbers, or a random pattern with a certain order, are used. For instance, the oldest oracle form in China was to put fire under the shell of a tortoise and then see how it cracks; naturally it cracks along certain lines, and from that they read the fate. The pattern on the back of a tortoise is hardly a random pattern, it is relatively ordered in squares, to a certain extent like a matrix, but not quite accurately, not in exact lines it is between order and disorder. The same applies to the crystal: the crystal has a very definite order but the light effects are chaotic and change constantly you need only turn the crystal to get completely different light effects. If you look at a diamond you will see the same thing, for the light is in different irridescent colours, so it is an admixture of random pattern plus order.

Man first used such means in divination techniques; as far as I can see, the most primitive oracles are random patterns, Rorschach things so to speak. Later they begin to have a random pattern coordinated with a certain order, or they make a certain order for instance, the chicken-bone oracle in certain African tribes by which one gets an inspiration, or finds an answer to whatever question one has in mind, from the way the bones thrown on the ground have fallen. Or there is a more involved technique in which one puts down a red, a black, and a white stick and then one throws the chicken bones and with that comes a theory. Before there was no theory, but with order there comes one, that if there are more bones on the red-black band it means bad luck, and so on, so they put some kind of matrix, or one could say Cartesian coordinates, into the random patterns, either two bands or Cartesian coordinates, or they use a natural material which is a mixture of random pattern and order and then they develop a theory. Only when the order pattern is combined with a random pattern do they apply a theory, saying if this is so, then it means that, and if it is this, it means this. Before one simply looked into the water, or at the cracks in the row, and got a hunch; there was no theory that a certain crack meant something, one just got a hunch from a chaotic picture.

There are other techniques which are much, much older than any rational scientific techniques. They came to our part of the world from the 6th century before Christ and in central Asia long before then, but still, looking at the history of mankind as a whole, that would also be recent. The chaotic pattern plus order oracle I would call the real beginning of science, historically, for with it the random pattern was put into some mathematical order, either by lines, a matrix, or a system of coordinates or numbers.

Number was always used in a binary form, for the primitive mind and we ourselves when we are in a practical situation cannot deal with subtleties. Under the hard conditions of primitive life, questions become simple: Shall I go on that journey or not? Shall I find a bear or not? Survive or die? Does my wife deceive me or not? Will my sick child die or survive? Those are all vital questions, which in the primitive mind take on the form of a Yes or a No, and that is still how our most developed logic functions, with a Yes or a No, a plus or a minus. We have a two-positional logic and we have two positions in our mind. For instance, primitive people very often do not go into the subtlety of dream interpretation. They decide only whether it is a good or a bad dream, and that is a tendency towards the Yes or No. If they have a good dream they carry on with life, if it is a bad dream they stay in bed or in their tents and do not move about for a while. That is the simplest Yes or No problem. They always decided that way and had no developed dream theories. If a Roman senator had what he decided in the morning was a bad dream, and he did not understand it as we would, then he just stayed in bed the whole day and did not go to the Senate. There are many such stories.

Very often my analysands come in, sit down, and say, I had a good dream, or I had a bad dream last night. It is often not at all true, for when one analyses the dream, what they have called a bad dream is quite hopeful, and what they called a good dream is not all sugar, but they are still as primitive as that. If the general picture, and what they get from it first hand, seems good then they come in beaming: I had a good dream! So we are still like that and the basic problems, the vital problems of man, are still with us. We must not deceive ourselves they are the Yes or No questions and either a matrix has been used to put order into disorder, or to give some orientation in the disorder, or numbers are used. Naturally they were first used in the Yes or No way, as we still do. We throw a coin and either get heads or tails, or we take a lot of pebbles and count them, and then get either an odd number, leaving one over, or leaving an even remainder, and then the even or odd remainder is the Yes or the No, which is the basis of the I Ching, a binary number system which answers Yes or No. Those were the first beginnings of putting a theory and a system into the random awareness that unconscious man used before.

If you think about it, that step of going from the random pattern, the Rorschach pattern, as a source of information, to the pattern which contains a geometrical or numerical order, is coincident with the possibility of forming a general theory. For instance, if there are more bones on this side then it is an unfavourable oracle, and when there are more on the other side the oracle is favourable. In detail one can read more out of that, but that is the separation of the Yes and the No. Or, if you use pebbles and the binary system, there will not only be a prediction of what is happening or information on what is going on in the unconscious, but an order has been imposed, one favourable or unfavourable for action. In certain primitive societies that is always spontaneously associated with good and bad, just as we speak naively of good dreams and bad dreams.

The Chinese had another way of looking at it, not so much separating good and bad, in the moral sense, or the lucky and unlucky, but seeing how it fitted into their great world order of Yang and Yin, the masculine and feminine principles, the active and passive, the light and the dark, and so on having the wiser attitude that nothing is absolutely good or absolutely bad. So it would be more important in imposing a binary order to these chaotic orders not to make it good or bad, Yes or No, but to see it as such and such a type of situation, to which such and such a type of attitude fits. Yin and Yang are neither good nor bad. In China, either can be good or bad. That is another category: when the Yin situation prevails one must behave in a Yin manner, and when the Yang situation prevails one must behave in a manner fitting that situation.

So the binary order imposed on things can either be moral, or it can be favourable or unfavourable, or it can as in China belong to this category of existence, to this rhythm of existence, which to my way of thinking is a superior attitude because it is not a personal judgement. To see everything egocentrically is very primitive. Is it good for me? Is it bad for me? That is primitive and egocentric.

The Chinese were detached and philosophical enough to say that even if it is bad for me it might be good as a whole. From the beginning they had a wiser or more objective view of what we call good and bad, and saw it more as something in the ensemble of existence. That is the beginning of science it has the essentials of what we now call the experimental method for there is a question in the mind of the one who asks, and a mathematical method for approaching the chaos of existence and then drawing a conclusion. That is exactly what we do in the most modern physical experiment: the experimenter has a question in his mind, he has a mathematical method of approach, and then he looks at the result of the experiment and judges from the mathematical model. One might say that such types of oracle were not only the birth of theoretical science but also of experimental science; theory and experiment were not yet pulled apart but were one thing.

The simplest step was taken when the human mind began to ask the chaos of existence a question with mathematical order in it, and then awaited the result, thus giving the actual chance element a possibility. Now you see how far things have developed. What was once one thing has been pulled into two extremes. Imagine a modern physical experiment either by sight or with a bone, or whatever you like to think of, and throwing an I Ching. All have the same root; they were once the same thing, but one part has been very specifically developed and the other has remained in its archaic form. The great problem is now the interesting or exciting factor of chance.

In physical experiments chance events are a nuisance. If something goes wrong in an experiment, if by chance something unexpected happens, e.g., if there is a mathematical prediction that the result should be so and so and the result is completely different, then the scientist is in despair. Then there are two possibilities: either his calculation was wrong, in which case he changes his mathematics, or fudges his equation, as they like to do nowadays, or else he tries to find out what chance has intervened, perhaps the heat was too great or there was a flaw in the instrument. There can be fatigue and other such unfortunate things, and then they fight desperately trying to eliminate the chance event, to define and then eliminate it, to set it aside. Naturally no physical or scientific experiment nowadays is recognized as valid when done only once. One experiment means nothing to a scientist. Once an electrochemist told me that the truth of an experiment is when he makes the same experiment fifty times and always with the same result; he publishes it in a paper and a Japanese in Tokyo repeats the experiment and gets the same result, and only then is it completely valid.

So chance is the enemy, chance is what you have to eliminate by as much repetition as possible, and if the fault is in the setup or the temperature, or fatigue of the material, or so on, then you do everything possible to eliminate that in the next experiment, under conditions as similar as possible, so as always to get a similar result. Naturally chance is an objective factor and exists, but in science one speaks of a chance [as an] accident, something to be regretted.

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