Tag Archives: Mythology

Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Mancy (Special Mention) (7) Botanomancy

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Lotus flower – public domain image

 

(7) BOTANOMANCY

 

“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”

Sadly, botanomancy or divination by plants seems to get short shrift compared to theriomancy or divination by animals, even though both probably originate in prehistory – with prehistoric humans depending as much on observations of plant life as they did animal life.

Even the term botanomancy itself is read more narrowly, at least in the Wikipedia entry for it, as divination by burning particular plants (similarly to burning laurel wreaths or daphomancy), but this seems more in the nature of pyromancy.

There are also references to anthomancy or divination by flowers (as well as phyllorhodomancy or divination by rose petals), dendromancy or divination by trees, and phyllomancy or divination by leaves (as well as sycomacy or divination by fig leaves).

However, none of these references elaborate anything by way of divinatory practice in history, although the specificity of some of those references – rose petals or fig leaves – suggest some specific practice. One can imagine divination by scattering rose petals in much the same way as dirt in geomancy and it would make for a more romantic date, if nothing else.

At very least, there’s that romantic divinatory game of plucking petals from a flower – s/he loves me, s/he loves me not…

One can also imagine divination by spots in leaves or fruit and so on, or perhaps patterns of where they fall. There’s also that Celtic tree alphabet (or ogham), which was the weird focus in Robert Graves’ The White Goddess – although it’s hard to tell with that book – in a manner suggestive of divination or magic. In fairness, the Wikipedia reference to dendromancy does note particular trees – “especially oaks, yews, or mistletoe” – and druids seemed to go nuts for that last one.

Ironically, the (vaguely) botanomantic reference which is elaborated in most detail is tasseomancy or divination by patterns in tea leaves or coffee grounds – which however is both a relatively recent method of divination and also more akin to hydromancy by brewing.

As a method of divination, botanomancy just seems a little low tier in comparison even only to theriomancy – perhaps plant life operates on too long (or slow) a time scale for practical divination, or perhaps we just have more of an emotional attachment to animals. Unless you’re communing with the Green in the style of Swamp Thing or Poison Ivy.

As a school of magic, however, I rank it as top tier – again essentially combining the Dungeons and Dragons classes of wizard and druid. It’s arguably up there with the elemental schools of magic – indeed the Chinese had five classical elements, one of which was wood. That’s especially so if you can control or grow plants, again in the style of Swamp Thing or Poison Ivy.

Alternatively, with a little fantasy or imagination it’s up there with theriomancy, but as a literal way of plant powers – with one of many applications replicating the effects of plant-based toxins or drugs.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Mythologies (Special Mention) (7) Witchcraft

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Poster for the 2015 film The Witch directed by Robert Eggers

 

(7) WITCHCRAFT

 

Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?

Just a girl and her goat. Or in the case of European witch folklore, of many girls and their great goat

Witchcraft – traditionally defined as the malevolent “use of magic or supernatural powers to harm others” – is something that seems well-nigh universal in mythologies or beliefs throughout the world. Perhaps not surprisingly, as cultures that saw the world in terms of magical or supernatural forces would then see harm or misfortune in terms of such forces malevolently used by some individuals against others.

Nor are beliefs in witchcraft confined to pre-modern history – or more precisely, early modern history, as trials for witchcraft declined in Europe in the late eighteenth century. They persist even today, and even in the form of active witch hunts, apparently with body counts far exceeding those of the European witch hunts, most notably in Africa and India.

Arguably however, witch folklore reached its highest or most definitive form (indeed, giving us the word for witch) in European witch folklore, particularly that of the early modern witch hunts and trials – and it certainly is the witch folklore that is the source of endless fascination for me.

The witchcraft attributed to witches in or by the hunts and trials evolved into a mythos with remarkable complexity and depth. There were the witches themselves, predominantly but not exclusively female (with men as the primary targets of accusations of witchcraft in some areas), with all the various features attributed to them or protections against them – magic and spells of course, the evil eye, flying ointment, necromancy (as with the Biblical Witch of Endor), animal familiars, imps, witch’s marks (to be distinguished from witch marks to ward off witches), witch’s teats, witch’s ladders, and witch balls or bottles (again to ward off witches).

And then there was the witchcraft ‘religion’ itself, usually styled as an anti-religion of service to the Devil in exchange for magic or supernatural power, with its ritual of the Witches Sabbath or Sabbat and all its various elements, not least the great goat himself, the Devil in caprine form, referenced as the Sabbath Goat (as in Goya’s famous paintings) or Baphomet – or Black Phillip to his friends. And of course all the lurid sexual details that went with it – with the osculam infame being particularly hard to dislodge from one’s mind after reading about it.

The historiography of the origins of these elements of witchcraft has evolved into almost as much a mythos as that of witchcraft itself. The standard historical explanation tends towards the various elements of witchcraft being projections from the lurid fantasies of those conducting the witch hunts or trials, which they confirmed by “confessions” extracted under torture (aided by circulation of those same lurid fantasies in popular belief).

Interestingly, the medieval Catholic Church had disdainfully dismissed belief in the existence of witches or witchcraft as pagan superstition (although heresy was another matter) – and it was the advent of Protestantism, and the religious warfare that went with it, that saw the height of the witch hunts and trials.

And then there are the more exotic historical explanations that become something of a mythology of themselves – with the foremost as the witch-cult hypothesis, that saw the elements of witchcraft as the survival of a pagan cult, distorted and persecuted by Christianity. The witch-cult hypothesis reached its sensational height with Margarat Murray in the early twentieth century – possibly influencing modern neo-pagan witchcraft or Wicca, but has since largely been discredited – although some scholars such as Carlo Ginzburg contend that “surviving elements of pre-Christian religion in European folk culture influenced early modern stereotypes of witchcraft”.

And on the topic of Ginzburg, I have a soft spot for his and others’ conjecture of witchcraft including surviving shamanic elements, most notably the use of hallucinatory or psychedelic substances to essentially conjure the Witches Sabbath out of dreams or drug hallucinations – flying ointment as getting high, or tripping witch balls.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GOD TIER – OR IS THAT GOAT TIER?)

Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Books (Special Mention) (7) Robert Graves – The White Goddess & The Greek Myths

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Art by Simon Bisley for “Slaine: The Horned God” written by Pat Mills for the 2000 AD comic as one of my favorite adaptations of Graves’ Goddess in popular culture, even more so than it was of Frazer – since it essentially adapted Graves, who in turn adapted Frazer

 

(7) ROBERT GRAVES – THE WHITE GODDESS & THE GREEK MYTHS

 

Graves saw Frazer’s sacred king and raised it with a queen, his titular White Goddess. For Graves, the monomyth was his theme, or rather the great mythic and poetic Theme:

“The Theme, briefly, is the antique story, which falls into thirteen chapters and an epilogue, of the birth, life, death and resurrection of the God of the Waxing Year; the central chapters concern the God’s losing battle with the God of the Waning Year for love of the capricious and all-powerful Threefold Goddess, their mother, bride and layer-out. The poet identifies himself with the God of the Waxing Year and his Muse with the Goddess; the rival is his blood-brother, his other self, his weird.”

However, The White Goddess is not as accessible in its prose as Frazer’s The Golden Bough and is essentially a compilation of poetic musings, which has its shining moments but can often become turgid or bogged down in Graves’ esoteric discussion of the Irish tree alphabet or the poems of Taliesin. And like The Golden Bough, it’s best read as poetry than for factual or historical accuracy.

And he was an apostle of the White Goddess again in his study of Greek mythology. However, it remains my favorite single volume study of Greek mythology.

Essentially it comes in two parts.

The first part is a conventional compendium of Greek mythology – literary retellings of the various myths from their sources – and it is this part that is the basis for the book as my favorite single volume study of Greek mythology, albeit somewhat dense in its prose style.

The second part – his interpretative notes or commentary – is where things get more wild, albeit all in good poetic fun. This is where Graves ‘decodes’ or reconstructs Greek mythology to his monomyth of the Goddess or prehistoric matriarchal religion – “Graves interpreted Bronze Age Greece as changing from a matriarchal society…to a patriarchal one under continual pressure from victorious Greek-speaking tribes. In the second stage local kings came to each settlement as foreign princes, reigned by marrying the hereditary queen, who represented the Triple Goddess, and were ritually slain by the next king after a limited period, originally six months. Kings managed to evade the sacrifice for longer and longer periods, often by sacrificing substitutes, and eventually converted the queen, priestess of the Goddess, into a subservient and chaste wife, and in the final stage had legitimate sons to reign after them”.

So there you go. Of course, the historical accuracy of Graves’ interpretation or commentary has been almost universally contested or considered to be idiosyncratic – “the interpretive notes are of value only as a guide to the author’s personal mythology”. His characteristic rejoinder was to plead poetic privilege, essentially rebuking his critics or classical scholars “You’re not poets!”. And it’s hard to argue with poetry.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
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Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Mancy (Special Mention) (6) Arithmancy

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Yes – it’s one of my favorite memes, the math lady / confused lady featuring Brazilian actress Renata Sorrah playing Nazare Tedesco in a scene from Senhora do Destino

 

(6) ARITHMANCY

 

Lucky numbers and sacred geometry!

Also Pythagoras – whom I used to think of as a grounded philosopher and mathematician from his theorem at school, because schools don’t teach how much of a mystical kook he was as well. Mind you, the same goes for Greek philosophers in general, as E.R. Dodds propounded in The Greeks and the Irrational.

And yes – apparently numerology was known as arithmancy prior to the 20th century, and frankly still should be rather than coopting a name more appropriate to a science to itself, similarly to astrology. Also – numeromancy was sitting right there!

In fairness, similarly to astrology contributing to astronomy, numerology may have contributed to science, albeit more numerology in the broader sense of numeric patterns – as per British mathematician I. J. Good, “there have been a few examples of numerology that have led to theories that transformed society…It would be fair enough to say that numerology was the origin of the theories of electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, gravitation….”

Arithmancy or divinatory numerology essentially involves “a belief in an occult, divine or mystical relationship between a number and one or more coinciding events” – or that certain numbers have certain mystical or symbolic properties. Or in short – lucky (and unlucky) numbers. The same concept can also be applied to the mathematical properties of geometry – hence sacred geometry.

As for the numbers themselves, they may come from some process of random selection (not unlike modern lotteries) or from assigning numeric values to other things, such as an alphanumeric system for letters in words or names (overlapping with my previous special mention for nomancy or onomancy).

That last is also known as gematria, a practice dating back to ancient history and (in)famously appearing in the Bible as 666 or the Number of the Beast in the Book of Apocalypse – or as I like to quip, that sixy beast – for which the scholarly consensus is that it is an alphanumeric key to the Roman Emperor Nero. (It’s a little more messy than that – I understand it wasn’t the actual Nero, but some sort of projected supercharged revenant Nero back from the dead, and could also be rendered alternatively as 616, as it was in some versions).

The strength of arithmancy or numerology as both method of divination and school of magic lies in the elegance and explanatory power of mathematics to explain the fundamental properties of our reality – something which is ever more so in modern science, where whole swathes of reality only seem explicable entirely as increasingly arcane mathematical formulae.

To the point that our physical reality often seems a coalescence or crystallization of mathematics or numbers – it is not so much that everything has a true name but a true number.

I can’t resist closing with two of my favorite incarnations of arithmancy in science fiction.

The first is the basic arithmantic principles underlying the Laundry series by Charles Stross – where the magic is essentially arithmancy or mathematics (and where the growing computing power of humanity and its machines will reach a threshold drawing the attention of hostile Lovecraftian entities).

The second is my favorite version of arithmancy in a charming (and characteristically horny) short story by Fritz Leiber – in which the number seven assumes a sexy female personification. Hot damn – that would have made maths classes more interesting at school!

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
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Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Mythologies (Special Mention) (6) Magic

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1 The Magician from the Rider-Waite Tarot illustrated by Pamela Colman-Smith

 

(6) MAGIC

 

Abracadabra!

Where else to feature magic but in mythology? Although…magic is not so definitive of mythology as it is of, say, fantasy. Yes – you have what might be termed (supernatural) magic throughout mythology, but usually as characteristic of divine or semi-divine beings, as part of their inherent essence or nature. You tend not to have magic in the more narrowly defined sense of functional magic – that is, magic as the human “application of beliefs, rituals or actions employed in the belief that they can manipulate natural or supernatural beings and forces”. When mortal humans or heroes tend to use magic in mythology, it is as a gift from the gods – because it was given to them by the gods or other supernatural beings.

Functional magic tends to occupy that eclectic middle ground (or perhaps no-man’s land?) between mythology and more general folklore or ritual. And even more so between religion and science. I like to quip that religion is organized magic. I stand by that quip, but religion tends more to the role of magic in mythology – as something that is given by divine power rather than manipulated by humans, indeed tending to see the latter as…competition at best. (I understand that historian Keith Thomas proposed a similar thesis, albeit in a narrower historical setting, in his Religion and the Decline of Magic).

I tend to see religion more as Sir James George Frazer did – as closer to proto-science, or an effort to create a system of cause and effect, albeit without science’s rigor to exclude personal beliefs from the results of observation. Indeed, beliefs are kind of the point of magic. Frazer coined the term sympathetic magic, dividing it further into magical principles of similarity (like affects like) and contagion (things that have been in contact continue to affect each other)

However, the classifications or types of magic could very well be the subject of their own top ten. White, grey and black magic. High and low magic. Modern magic (often styled as magick) – ceremonial and chaos magic. And of course stage magic – or illusion. Apotropaic magic. Blood magic. Elemental and natural magic. Wild magic. Alchemy – elixirs and potions. Incantations. Thaumaturgy. Theurgy. Magical objects – amulets and talismans. Magical symbols – runes and sigils. Curses. Grimoires. Runes. True names.

And of course the schools of magic popularized by Dungeons and Dragons – abjuration, conjuration, divination, enchantment, illusion, necromancy and transmutation.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GOD-TIER)

Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Books (Special Mention) (6) Sir James George Frazer – The Golden Bough

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Art by Simon Bisley for “Slaine: The Horned God” written by Pat Mills for the 2000 AD comic as one of my favorite adaptations of Frazer’s sacrificial sacred king in popular culture. Well, that and The Wicker Man (which also features in Slaine)

 

 

(6) SIR JAMES GEORGE FRAZER – THE GOLDEN BOUGH

 

“Who are these coming to the sacrifice?” –
John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

Behold the monomyth of the sacrificial sacred king.

That is – the monomyth of a recurring or universal mythic archetype, as used by Joseph Campbell for his archetypal hero’s journey. But it doesn’t get much more monomythic that one of the original monomyths – Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough.

The Golden Bough proposed the monomyth or recurring mythic archetype of sacrificial sacred kings – or their surrogates once the kings wised up to it – as incarnations of gods or solar deities whose death and resurrection in turn represented fertility. And believe me, Frazer saw these sacred kings or fertility cults everywhere – including Jesus and Christianity, controversially at the time – such that he filled several volumes up with them, although more people (including me) tend to read his abridged single volume.

Now I think that Frazer was always entertaining and occasionally illuminating in The Golden Bough – his discussion of the principles of sympathetic magic, a term coined by himself, seems particularly definitive – but in terms of factual or historical accuracy…not so much as he’s much more mixed at best in this respect. As the old adage goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail – and when all you have is a theory of sacred kings, then by god or goddess, everything begins to look like a sacred king, even if you have to hammer everything into shape for it. After all, we all have to make sacrifices…

While Frazer is or was mostly dismissed as a footnote in academic study, The Golden Bough has been highly influential in literary culture, because whether or not it is true, his mythic archetype of the doomed hero or sacrificial sacred king has the elements of a ripping yarn.

Just for starters, there’s his influence on T. S. Eliot, who openly acknowledged the influence of Frazer on The Waste Land, although with the characteristic pessimism of that poem, proposed the cycle might be broken, leaving only violence and death without rebirth – and in which the dying god is just another buried corpse, perhaps even prompting to mind a Nietzschean murder victim or contemporary zombie apocalypse, rising writhing from their own resurrection – “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, has it begun to sprout?”

Or there’s his influence on Campbell’s own monomyth. Or on Sigmund Freud, lending itself to the segue of his influence on Camille Paglia, who described her primary influence as a fusion of Frazer and Freud (although doubling the inaccuracy of the former with that of the latter).

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
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Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Mancy (Special Mention) (5) Nomancy

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Tetragrammaton in Palaeo-Hebrew, ancient Aramaic and modern Hebrew scripts created by Zappaz and Bryan Derksen for Wikipedia and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

 

(5) NOMANCY / ONOMANCY

 

“The name is the thing, and the true name is the true thing.”

Yes – we’re talking the divination or magic of names. Although typically it involves not just any names, particularly the names we so casually toss about for ourselves in our daily lives, but true names or names of power, even if they have to be discovered through nomancy or onomancy itself, sometimes to those who have forgotten or don’t know their own true name or nature.

“A person’s true name might be self-determined, or bestowed on them by someone else — possibly in a religious or magical ritual, or it could be stolen, or given away”. It also tends to be something a person or being jealously guards or keeps secret – although that often applies to names in general, as with Odysseus with his name to Polyphemus.

A true name perfectly describes something’s essential nature – one might well say its soul or spirit – and knowing a true name gives one power over the owner of the name.

It is a concept with a long pedigree in mythology and folklore which I suspect originates in prehistory with human language itself and our ability to vocalise or for verbal thought, which often seem magical of themselves.

Some of the most striking illustrations of it are in the Bible, particularly in the creation myths of Genesis – from God essentially naming or speaking creation into existence to Adam naming the animals. True names might be said to reflect the divine language of heaven or the primal language of creation.

Interestingly, that goes for the name of God as well and there’s a whole running theme in or from the Bible about the power of God’s true name or names – from the Tetragrammaton (or four letters YHWH representing God) to the multiple or secret names of God giving power over creation, hence the various taboos revolving around the name (or names) of God (including one of the Ten Commandments).

I would argue that it also underlies the concept of Plato’s Forms – indeed, it might be argued that one’s true name essentially corresponds to one’s Form. It also perhaps underlies magic words or incantations in general.

There is even a myth, whether it has any historical truth or otherwise, that the city of Rome had a true name, safeguarded and kept secret lest her enemies learn of it to curse her or gain power over her.

All that is very well but it doesn’t seem to make for much by way of a method of divination – except of course to divine a true name as part of magic. Well, perhaps for things like those childhood or adolescent games in which one “calculates” the compatibility of a crush or love interest, although they tend to involve alphanumeric keys based on letters.

As a system or school of magic, it comes close even to oneiromancy as arguably the original source of all divination, as well as magic and religion in general – the ability to shape reality to our conceptual and verbal thought, perhaps even to define things into existence.

Not coincidentally, it is a concept that often underlies or is at least invoked by game mechanics for magic in Dungeons and Dragons – although not as a core mechanic given its potential power. Hence the class of truenamer, which on paper was a decent concept, but its actual mechanics in game play were so bad that it was widely acknowledged to be so hopelessly broken as the worst class of the game.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Mythologies (Special Mention) (5) Discordianism

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The Sacred Chao of Discordianism

 

(5) DISCORDIANISM

 

Life is the laughter of the gods!

Or the goddess in this case.

Discordianism is the combination of two strands within contemporary mythology (or religion) that appeal to me.

Firstly, the strand of neo-paganism – not so much a mythology of itself, but an eclectic combination, reconstruction or syncretism of earlier mythologies, particularly those of historical pagan or pre-Christian Europe. The most distinctive – and perhaps the most numerous – neo-pagan religion is Wicca, which reconstructs historical witchcraft as a pagan survival or resurgence, typically combining historical mythic female figures within one overarching or universal Goddess, often identified as the Triple Goddess or Great Goddess, either as a monotheistic figure on her own, or with a similar male figure, often identified as the Horned God, as her consort in a duotheistic couple. Or not, since neo-paganism in general and Wicca in particular are extremely eclectic and difficult to pin down.

Of course, Discordianism isn’t the most serious example of neo-paganism – to the extent that it is even accepted as such, something which is often disputed. Which brings me to the second strand – the strand of parody religion, or more broadly, religious comedy, humor and satire. Parody religion or religious comedy is perhaps distinctively modern with many different strands, some notably sourced from popular culture, but also arguably has long roots extending back at least to classical philosophy or literature, even within traditional religions. Some even ascend to distinctly postmodern religions – which appear to have a number of relatively serious followers who embrace the perceived absurdity of these religions as spiritually significant and it is hard to tell whether even these “serious” followers are not just taking part in an even bigger joke.

Sometimes I feel that the world would be a better place if all religions originated in comedy or was told in the form of jokes.

And so Discordianism appeals to me because of its complete playfulness and lack of seriousness in matters of belief, all with a neo-pagan tint. After all, if you’re going to have a universal goddess, metaphorical or otherwise, then who better than the playful goddess of chaos, invoking Eris from Greek mythology or her counterpart Discordia from Roman mythology? Essentially, Discordianism originated as a parody religion, and as far as I’m aware, one of the first parody religions – although is it a joke disguised as a religion, or a religion disguised as a joke? Only Eris knows!

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GOD TIER – OR IS THAT GODDESS-TIER?)

Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Books (Special Mention) (5) Euripides – The Bacchae

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Pentheus being torn apart – Attic red-figure vase painting

 

(5) EURIPIDES – BACCHAE

 

Literal Dionysian deus ex machina in the original folk horror story and clash of church against state – or cult against throne.

The greatest Greek tragedy – indeed one that has been argued to be one of the greatest ever written – in the usual style of Greek tragedies, which is the gods will screw you over and there’s nothing much you can do about it, even with that weird chorus telling you what’s happening, and even if they liked to call it nemesis for your hubris.

Yes, I know Dionysus personally appears, albeit in mortal disguise, to give Pentheus a repenting chance, but he doesn’t exactly go all out in the attempt because it’s much more demonstrative – and fun – setting up Pentheus for the Wicker Man to his Lord Summerisle. Except that the Bacchae makes the Wicker Man look like a picnic.

Anyway, the play by Euripides is based on the myth of Pentheus, king of Thebes, who is opposed to the new god Dionysus and his cult, despite being, you know, actually related to him. No, seriously, Pentheus is the cousin of Dionysus, because that’s how it was in those days, particularly with Zeus. Worse, Pentheus – and much of Thebes denies the divinity of Dionysus. And you can’t be disrespecting Dionysus.

So Dionysus does what any Greek god would do:
Step 1 – disguise yourself as a mortal priest of yourself and be captured only to respond cryptically to questions
Step 2 – drive your female worshippers or Maenads mad and trick Pentheus into spying on them in disguise as one of them
Step 3 – !!!
Step 4 – profit!

And by step 3, I mean sit back as your Maenads, including Pentheus’ own mother Agave, literally tear Pentheus apart with their bare hands in a crazed frenzy, believing Pentheus to be a wild beast.

That leads to a moment of classic horror as Agave proudly bears the head, still under divine delusion that it is the head of a mountain lion, to her own father Cadmus, only to see it for what it really is when Cadmus recoils and calls upon her to look more closely.

From a modern perspective, it’s hard not to identify or sympathize with King Pentheus cracking down on a strange new cult spreading through his city – particularly one with literal crazed worshippers like the Maenads, up there with the followers of Jim Jones or Charles Manson.

The Bacchae resonates on so many levels. I’ve already compared it to The Wicker Man, which replays many of its story beats for horror – and it’s easy to adapt the Bacchae for horror, from folk horror to cosmic horror – Dionysus as Yog Sothoth, perhaps?

More substantially, others have argued the parallels between it and the Gospels, with Jerusalem for Thebes and Jesus for Dionysus (and the Jewish leaders and Pontius Pilate for Pentheus), except of course Jesus is far more morally palatable in his divine coup de grace than Dionysus.

And there’s the Nietzschean interpretations, most famously with his dichotomy of the Apollonian and Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy – and it is tempting to see Pentheus as a good Apollonian, attempting to hold the line of order against Dionysian chaos. Or the Freudian interpretations with Pentheus as ego trying to hold back the wild ecstasy of the id…

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Mancy (Special Mention) (4) Cyclomancy

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X Wheel of Fortune – Rider Waite Tarot (artist Pamela Colman Smith)

 

(4) CYCLOMANCY (GYROMANCY)

 

Wheel of Fortune!

No, seriously – as illustrated by the medieval concept of fate or fortune subsequently used in Tarot cards, although perhaps better known for the modern game show concept.

Cyclomancy – or divination by wheels – is the third of my casino trinity of mancy for special mention, obviously invoking roulette.

Of course, it didn’t so much involve the wheel itself, but things inscribed on the wheel, and spinning the wheel as a means of randomizing selection of outcome – not unlike the game show concept.

“Bust a deal, face the wheel” – Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome might be my least favorite of the franchise but it did have some interesting (and memorable) concepts, one of which was its cyclomantic system of justice or law enforcement. Yet again, however, it illustrates that such things usually boil down to how the diviner assigns the possible outcomes – with Aunty Entity stacking the wheel heavily in her favor with a large part of it designated as Aunty’s Choice.

I don’t know how prevalent cyclomancy was as a means of divination in classical Greece – I suspect not very as against more dramatic or emotive methods of divination – but I’d like to imagine the Delphic Oracle as a game-show style of Wheel of Fortune, spun by a delectable Pythoness. Although probably the better game show model would be something like Family Feud, down to the actual feuding families – “we surveyed a hundred divine beings and if your answer is not up on the board…”

Cyclomancy is part of that stereotypical childhood or adolescent game of spin the bottle – as for that matter is gyromancy or divination by dizziness, except for games where you’re the thing being spun. Sometimes you spin the bottle and sometimes the bottle spins you.

As a method of divination, it shares the powerful simplicity of its random mechanic with cleromancy, albeit one readily cheated by not only stacking the wheel in your favor, but also with various carnival means of interfering with the spinning of it.

As a school of magic, it does not seem so readily applicable – although I like the image of wizards using spell wheels in the manner of prayer wheels or similar objects (or, for the Dungeons and Dragons class of cleric, using prayer wheels).

However, it has a thematic applicability similar to the random nature (or entropomancy) of cleromancy, except also the reverse – in that it is not so much random but cyclical, ultimately moved by a larger pattern or even cosmic balance. What goes up must come down – and part of the art of cyclomancy is riding the wave of the cycle in your favor.

Cyclomancy can even overlap with sacrificial hieromancy – in that you can spin the wheel of fortune in your favor but you have to pay a price, at least when the wheel spins back, or perhaps even to take a spin in the first place.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)