Textual Divination

"There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will"--Shakespeare, Hamlet V.ii

On the day I learned that my odious divorce had been finalized, I called my friend, who is also divorced, to tell him the news. After he offered me some consolatory words, welcoming me to "the club," our conversation soon turned to things occult and conspiratorial. I told him that I had developed a recreational interest in stichomancy and bibliomancy, two forms of textual divinition, the latter typically limited to Holy Writ (early Wesleyan Methodists practiced bibliomancy: cf. the character Dinah Morris in George Eliot's Adam Bede), as a result of my recently hearing an NPR story on Jung's theory of "synchronicity," a phenomenon in which events in one's life take on a meaningful relatedness or consistency, thus defying pure chance or coincidence.

My friend, who earned a Master's in Classics, told me of a form of bibliomancy practiced by ancient Romans known as sortes Virgilianae, in which passages from Virgil's poetry were selected at random and scrutinized for prophetic import. Intrigued by this, I asked my friend if he had handy a copy of Virgil's works. He said he did, so I asked him to open his copy of Virgil's works to a random page. The passage that his eyes first lighted upon was Aeneas's account, in Book Three of The Aeneid, of he and his crew's encounter with the Harpies. Since his copy of Virgil was in Latin, he offered me his translation. I cannot remember his translation verbatim, but I found the same passage in Robert Fitzgerald's English translation, which reads as follows:

Into their [the Harpies] midst my men
Attacked and tried a strange new form of battle,
To cut the indecent seabirds down in blood.
But they received no impact on their feathers,
Took on their backs no wounding cut: too quick,
They soared away into the upper air,
Leaving the prey half eaten and befouled.

If you don't know what the Harpies are, let me give you Fitzgerald's definition, found in the glossary to his translation of The Aeneid: "monstrous creatures: birds with the faces of women; associated with the Furies."

Now, if you're familiar with the circumstances of my divorce (if you're not, see my "The Sorrows of a Thwarted Young Werther" post), then perhaps you feel the same shudder I felt as my friend translated this passage, because, I tell you, my divorce certainly me made me feel as if my ex-wife had left me "half eaten and befouled."

Coincidence? Synchronicity?

I leave it to you to decide.