The Occult Sciences - Oniromancy or the Study of Dreams

M. C. Poinsot

Description

A republication of the 1897 edition. A study and interpretation of dreams including a key to various types of dreams.

Sujets

• Dreams
• Spirituality

Informations

• Publié par: Read Books Ltd.
• Date de parution: 06 septembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781473357358
• Langue: English

Extrait

Contents
I Antiquity of Oniromancy. Famous Dreams
II A Little Study on Dreams
III The Oracle-Dream
IV Interpretation of Dreams
V New Key to Dreams
VI Notes on the Key to Dreams
O NIROMANCY
I
Antiquity of Oniromancy. Famous Dreams
A LL nations in all times were struck by the extravagance of dreams, and also by the coincidences which they noticed between the subject matter of their dreams and subsequent events. Therefore at an early date a premonitory value was attached to dreams, wise men began to comment on them, and a special science was born to interpret them.
This belief in the revelation of the future by the images of sleep came from the faith in gods who by this means sent to man warnings and counsel. It will thus be seen at once that Oniromancy (from oneiros , dream, and manteia , divination) is connected with intuitive divination, whilst the inductive divination interprets the signs of the thoughts of the gods. We have here an intimate communion with the intellect, a subjective (and not objective, by means of intermediaries) prediction, which is made by the direct coming of celestial light to the mind. This is how Aristotle understood it, whilst admitting that sometimes the language of dreams might be symbolical.
Oniromancy is a great realm which may be divided into two territories:-that of the observation of dreams, or Oniroscopy, and that of their interpretation, or Onirocritics. Plutarch and Cicero did not scorn to study it, and following them there are numerous authors from olden times to the present day 1 not to speak of many writers of Keys to Dreams , always drawn up at second hand.
One of these Keys, the most famous and extremely old, is that of Artemidorus of Ephesus which has recently been translated and commented on by Mr. Henri Vidal in a beautifully produced book with notes on the author, from which we gather the following information. 2
Artemidorus was born at Ephesus in the time of Antoninus Pius. He practised Oniromancy in his native city, then a magnificent and famous town, and also Chiromancy, under the name of Artemidorus of Daldia. He had read all the treatises which had up to then appeared dealing with these matters, and had sought his enlightenment from Epicharmus, Antiphon, Strabo, Demetrius of Phalera, Apollodorus, Aristarchus, Aristides the magnetiser, Geminus the astrologer, and many others. He added his own experiences and was careful to distinguish between dreams which might have a premonitory value and others.
Mr. Vidal also refers to the interesting book which Mr. Boucher-Leclercq has devoted to the ancient history of the divinatory arts. 1 According to this author Onirocritics is as old as the world. But Jaucourt gives its origin more exactly by tracing it back to the Egyptian priests who were past masters of the art. But it is more probable that dreams have always moved those who had them.

Many dreams have become famous, either on account of the position of those who had them, or on account of the events which happened and which are claimed to have been foretold by them.
No child who has studied his Bible will have forgotten the dream of Jacob seeing the ladder placed on his breast and rising to the sky, prediction of the high destiny of his race; the dream of Pharaoh (the seven fat kine and the seven lean kine) which Joseph interpreted as the approach of seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine, and so many others in which Jehovah appeared to Moses and the Prophets. More especially in the Gospels he will remember the angel foretelling to the carpenter Joseph the supernatural motherhood of Mary, and the other angel who warned him to fly into Egypt so as to escape the Massacre of the Innocents, and the wife of Pilate excited by dreams which drove her to beg her husband to save Christ, etc.
Independently of the well known dreams of Athaly and Belshazzar, it was in a dream that the mother of Virgil knew by seeing laurels that she would give birth to a poet, in a dream that Brutus saw a threatening spectre foretelling his defeat on the eve of the battle of Philippi, in a dream that Calpurnia, the wife of C sar, foresaw the murder of her august husband, in a dream that Catherine de Medici saw the tournament in which her husband lost his life, in a dream that Henri II of France heard a voice predicting exactly the wound to his eye which would come soon, in a dream that the Princesse de Cond was present in anticipation at the battle of Jarnac in which her son was to perish, in a dream that Madame Roland knew the death of her mother, and that Madame de la B dolli re saw the man she was to marry and whom she did not know.
Here are some other remarkable dreams:-
The celebrated astronomer Flammarion told 1 Madame de Th bes that a traveller of the name of B rard saw in a dream, at an inn where he put up, all the details of a murder which was to be committed later when the lawyer V. Arnaud was killed in the room in which he slept, thanks to which dream it was possible to discover the body (in the barn) and to arrest the murderers.
The Italian chronicler, Paul Jove (XVIth Century) relates in his Histories that a certain Captain Sforza dreamt of a river in which he tripped and was nearly drowned, after having in vain asked the help of a person dressed like St. Christopher, who was on the shore. On the morrow, as he was crossing the Peschara at the head of his troops, he saw one of his pages who had got away from the ford by which the army was crossing, and who was being carried away by the current. He ran to his assistance, but was in his turn carried off by the rapid tide. Thus he perished after having the preceding night foreseen the danger which he told to his companions in arms without attaching any importance to it.
So also Louis de Bourbon, the Cond who was mixed up in the religious wars, being one of the chiefs of the Protestant Party, dreamt some time after the battle of Dreux that he was fighting three others and winning them, but that he met his death amongst the corpses of his enemies, the Marshal de Saint-Andr and the Duc de Guise. And the Marshal was in fact killed soon after at Dreux, the Duke at Orleans and the Prince himself at Bassac. It is true that in those troublous times it was fairly safe to foretell a death in war. Yet it remains that this particular one seems to have been foreseen in a dream.
At the time of the siege of Chio (1431) the Genoese Grimani one day told his friends that in his sleep he had seen an enormous serpent crawling towards him to swallow him. He concluded that a violent death threatened their comrade, and advised him not to take part in the fighting. A sortie taking place, Grimani confined himself to following the soldiers at a distance, then, hiding behind the ramparts, he put his eye to a loophole, when at the same moment a ball struck him and killed him.
Three days before being killed by Jacques Clement, King Henri III of France saw in a dream all the royal insignia bloodstained and trodden under foot by monks and by the mob.
John Funger of Leovarde relates a dream which in its result was a strange godsend for the dreamer. A young man of Dordrecht, an orphan and loaded with debts, no longer knew how to get out of his difficulties, when in a dream he was advised to go to Kempen, where he would find the solution of all his troubles. The latter town was a long way off. Nevertheless our Dutchman went there, and walked about all day, waiting in vain for the promised solution. Worried and staring at the ground in front of him, he met on the bridge of the town a beggar who asked him what was worrying him. The young man, who had nothing to do, told him his story, related his dream and confessed the purpose of his journey. The beggar smiled and was astonished that any one should take such a long journey for so little.
If I took any notice of such rubbish, he added, I should only have to go very quickly to Dordrecht, from where you come, and find a garden which has also been described to me in a dream, and where there is a treasure buried under a rosebush. But rather than do such a silly thing I prefer two days receipts on this bridge where passers-by give me alms.
To this the beggar added various details from which our Dutchman learnt that the garden in question was nothing more or less than the garden of his own father who had recently died and whose fortune he had just wasted. Appearing, like the beggar, to attach no importance to dreams, he chatted a few moments longer, and without further delay returned to Dordrecht. He walked all night and arrived towards morning, tired out, but buoyed with lively hope. Without taking any rest he hastened towards the garden which he knew so well, started digging at the foot of the rosebush and found there in a cashbox such a quantity of gold coins that he was able to repay the money which he had borrowed and to live, a wiser man, happily to the end of his days.
The violinist and musical theorist Giuseppe Tartini (18th century) claims that it is to a dream that he owes his famous composition of which the title The Devil s Sonata recalls the origin. He had begun it in a burst of inspiration, but could not manage to finish it. Tired of seeking, he fell asleep, obsessed by his subject. In his dream he saw himself again tied down to his ungrateful task, despairing of ever carrying it through. Suddenly the devil appeared to him and offered, in exchange for his soul, to finish the sonata. No artist consumed by the fire of genius would refuse to make such an exchange to enable him to create a masterpiece. Without haggling Tartini agreed to the bargain, whereupon he heard with the greatest delight the devil play on his violin the notes he wanted. Waking up, he ran to his desk, wrote down what he had just heard and took up his violin. The sonata unrolled itself complete and entirely in accordance with his desire. It is quite possible that in those days of faith the co