Introduction
This essay presents some ideas raised by the third-person question structure found in the question tablet texts from Dodona. Examples of these questions include:
DVC 194: Aischytas asks about treasure whether there is any in the house and by praying to what god he would find it.
DVC 357a: God. Good Fortune. Alkinoos asks Zeus Naios and Dione if it is preferable and advantageous that Nikeas build the workshop.
DVC 1130B: He asks about health Lysinos.
DVC 1313B: Aristomachos asks whether he should sail out and work with Straton.Footnote 1
Of course, not all the questions asked at Dodona were composed using this kind of formula. There are numerous examples of oracle questions where a first-person structure is used:
DVC 377: Will I succeed with this journey/course of action?Footnote 2
DVC 3009A: Shall I consult the physicians?Footnote 3
And there are also many tablets where both third- and first-person perspectives are used, such as:
DVC 2367: God. Good luck. Epilytos asks Zeus Naios and Diona by doing what and by sacrificing to what god he would be successful; and whether I should practice the trade I was trained in or turn to another and whether I will get it if he attempts it and whether I should take Phainomena as wife or another woman and whether indeed I should take a wife (now) or wait.Footnote 4
Finally, there are also examples of questions that are formulated in such a way that they do not offer a particular perspective, for example:
DVC 626A: About a slave (freedman, is it better) to return him to slavery?Footnote 5
Scholars have suggested that the range of formulae used to compose the questions at Dodona may offer us some indication of how the questions were recorded and transmitted.Footnote 6 But there is very little that has been written in modern scholarship about the use of the third person in these tablets. The majority seems to take a similar attitude to that evinced by, for example, Robert Parker, who observes of the question posed by Epilytos, above, that ‘Such fluctuations between first and third person are common in the tablets’ and does not examine this phenomenon any further.Footnote 7
In contrast, I want to suggest, in this essay, that this third-person phrasing may offer some insights into experiences of oracular consultation both at Dodona and more broadly. An overview of the corpus, as presented in DVC, indicates that the use of the third-person formulation outweighs the use of the first-person formulation.Footnote 8 But even if this is not the case across the full corpus (many tablets are not yet edited), the range of potential formulae in itself suggests that the composition of a question was not a given: individuals could select for themselves the ways in which they wanted or needed to present themselves in their questions, whether they did this consciously or unconsciously. In what follows, I argue that this flexibility of formulation of the question was itself an important element in the effective operation of the process of consultation.
In a previous publication, I have suggested that this third-person formulation may indicate to modern observers something of what an individual consulting Dodona may have experienced.Footnote 9 In that essay, I drew on theories of embodied cognition, specifically embodied simulation, to argue that oracular consultation involved pilgrims in a process of ‘simulating futures’. As I noted there, research into mirror systems within the brain shows that when we are rehearsing different possible futures, we enter a process of mental simulation – imagining ourselves from an external, third-person point of view.Footnote 10 This is, as others have argued, one way in which we interact with external forces, practicing thinking about ourselves in relation to other objects.Footnote 11 Building on this, I suggested that when a pilgrim entered the formal process of divination, they may well have been imagining different future possibilities, an activity that would have prompted in them some form of action representation of those possibilities. Pilgrims would have not only envisioned their futures, but also physically experienced something of those possibilities through an embodied simulation, and this would have deepened their experience of the decision-making process. In that essay, building on work done on the part of the brain activated by third-person perspectives, I also briefly raised an additional possibility. According to neuroscientific research on taking third-person perspectives, the part of the brain that is activated is crucial both for the development and exercise of empathy and also for the activity of distinguishing self from other:Footnote 12 I asked, could this also have been part of the experience of oracular consultation?
It is this latter question that I would like to reflect on in this essay, that is, the treatment of the self/part of the self, as an other. I will focus here on the self as partible, not only in relation to others, but also in relation to the self. This sense of the self as fragmented, I argue, is one that emerges particularly strongly in moments of crisis and/or decision making, which is likely to have been the context of oracular consultations. As well as drawing on my previous work on the self in religion generally, and oracular consultation in particular, I will also introduce some theories used in psychology and psychotherapy concerning the experience of the fragmented self. Such approaches, I argue, may offer some insights into the ways in which the process of consultation at an oracle may have provided psychological relief to pilgrims.
Thus, in this essay, I first explore the ways in which these tablets present narratives of the self, setting them within the framework of ‘small stories’, a theory developed by Alexandra Georgakopolou,Footnote 13 and examining their role in expressing a sense of identities (‘The Dodona Questions as Narratives’). Then, by drawing on analyses of pain and trauma narratives, I suggest that these texts expressed a sense of the pilgrims’ lived experience of themselves as they confronted the problems that had brought them to the oracle (‘A Sense of Self or Selves’). By examining research on self-talk in psychology and psychotherapy, I suggest that we can also understand the third-person formulations of the questions as supporting cognitive integration and emotional distance (‘Soothing Self-Talk’). I then develop this argument further, by drawing on cognitive linguistic theory (‘Blending Viewpoints at Dodona’), to explore how third-person phrasing of their questions may have enabled pilgrims to experience, simultaneously, different Viewpoints on their problems, including the Viewpoint of the divine.Footnote 14 This latter suggestion leads to some final thoughts (‘Conclusion: The Power of Awe’) on the importance for this process of consultation of the embodied experience of the divine in the context of the sanctuary of Dodona.
The Dodona Questions as Narratives
It might be difficult at first sight to consider the texts from the tablets at Dodona as offering ‘narratives’. Traditional approaches to narrative have privileged a linear temporal structure, with a recognizable beginning, middle and end, usually told by one active teller.Footnote 15 But, offering an alternative framework to these more established forms, there is a category of narratives that Alexandra Georgakopoulou has described as ‘small stories’.Footnote 16 This offers a dynamic and emergent approach to the creation of narrative: ‘small stories’ are brief, even fragmentary narrative activities, which may include not only ‘tellings of ongoing events, future or hypothetical events, shared (known) events, but also allusions to tellings, deferrals of tellings, and refusals to tell’.Footnote 17 They are locally occasioned and closely connected with the contexts in which they unfold: in this model, narrative is viewed as ‘a trajectory of interactions rather than as a free standing, finished and self-contained unit’.Footnote 18 It is understood as relational, in terms of both the other discourse activity with which it interacts and the larger context in which a narrative of this kind occurs. Thus, this approach to narrative requires consideration of the narrative in its environment, along with the occasion and interactions within which it emerges.Footnote 19
As an example of this approach, we can consider some analyses as small stories of the (brief) messages found in social media, a context that Georgakopoulou considers as affording its users ‘opportunities for sharing life in miniaturized form at the same time as constraining the ability of users to plunge into full autobiographical mode’.Footnote 20 She draws attention to the ways in which, if the analysis concentrates on those writing the messages – what she calls ‘the tellers’ – we can identify ‘narrative stancetaking’, that is:
A moment of position taking where a speaker more or less reflexively mobilizes more or less conventionalized communicative means to signal that the activity to follow, the activity underway or the activity that is indexed, alluded to, deferred, silenced is a story. In doing so, he or she positions him/herself as a teller: somebody who is in a position to tell and assume a point of view on the telling and/or told.Footnote 21
This is a process achieved through ‘the circulation/circulatability of the activities beyond the single speech event, not necessarily as actual, cataloguable events, but as interwoven into the here-and-now of any activity’.Footnote 22 Georgakopoulou emphasizes how the particular telling of a story draws on past experiences and future resources and how such ‘stories will refer to and anticipate previous tellings, tellers and audiences’.Footnote 23 In this way, she implicitly draws attention not only to the community within which the story was told, but also to the role of relationality and temporality in the telling of a story. This has further ramifications: building on this notion of narrative stancetaking, Bamberg and Georgakopoulou suggest that small stories are ‘sites of identity work’, where individuals are seeking to find ‘identity constructions of sameness in the face of adversative conditions and constant change’.Footnote 24
Attention to this area of social practice, and engagement with the ‘small story’ as opposed to ‘big story research’ (as Georgakopoulou puts it),Footnote 25 has been described as indicative of ‘a late modern focus on the micro, fleeting aspects of lived experience’.Footnote 26 It is an emphasis that seems to align, in the current context of the field of the study of ancient religion, with the recent exploration of ‘lived religion’, and its concern ‘with action and experience’.Footnote 27 And, I suggest, it offers a stimulating way to think about the Dodona question tablets, as small stories from the lived action and experience of consultation, each offering insight into a narrative that comprised multiple other interactions and revealing moments of narrative stancetaking.
We can see this larger narrative of oracular consultation, comprising multiple interactions, illustrated by the many oracle stories related by the fifth-century BCE historian Herodotus. Each of these accounts of oracular consultation begins with a problem discussed or reflected upon by an individual or community; the question is formulated and taken to the gods; the answer is received and perhaps discussed and interpreted again; and, finally, but surely on multiple occasions, the story of the consultation is told in a particular context. In fact, we could argue that the text of Herodotus and, in turn, the many readings of this text by scholars can also be seen as an ongoing part of that process of narrative unfolding.
I suggest we can also find parallels to the ‘identity work’ that Bamberg and Georgakopolou detect. When we, as modern historians, read the texts from Dodona, we observe the expressions of a person in a moment in time, and a moment in a person’s life. We do not know – but can imagine – something of the surrounding contexts and their narrative(s): how those stories might be told; what episode in those narrative(s) these texts evoke. Nevertheless, I suggest, whether the question concerned making a choice, or requested further information, we can be certain that each of these questions reflect a moment of change, and one in which an individual depicted himself or herself in a process of changing. Thus, these questions may be understood as expressing something of the experience not just of consultation, but also of the self in consultation. Moreover, they not only express that experience, but also, we can argue, as part of the relational process of narrative, they created it; thus, in turn, these texts were part of a process of the (continuing) creation of the self.
In what follows, I want to explore the narratives presented by the Dodona questions as ‘stories of the self’, with a particular focus on those texts written wholly or partly in the third person and introducing theories from narrative analysis, alongside psychotherapy and psychology. While I suggest that there are, as Bamberg and Georgakopoulou emphasize, attempts to develop identity constructions of sameness, I also want to draw attention to a different aspect. I suggest here that the ‘small stories’ of the Dodona tablets, now themselves so brief and fragmentary, may reveal how pilgrims to Dodona experienced a sense of a self fragmented in – and by – a moment of stress or choice, before they then were able to use the process of consultation to find some relief from that experience. In what follows, I start by exploring the notion of a fragmented self, before considering the potential potency of third-person formulations, and the ways in which they may reveal the role of the question tablets as narratives-in-interaction, ‘sites of engagement where identities are continuously practised and tested out’.Footnote 28
A Sense of Self or Selves
In putting forward the idea of a fragmented self in the context of studying the ancient individual, I am again building on previous work, where I have used theories from relational sociology to argue for the self as switching between different identities in different relational networks. In ‘Networks and Narratives: a Model for Ancient Greek Religion’, I suggested a dynamic and fluid paradigm for ancient Greek religion, drawing on the work of Harrison White.Footnote 29 Challenging the more static model offered at that time by polis religion, this approach emphasized the emergent nature of religious practice, and how it informed and was informed by (in a constant process of change) individuals and their relationships. In particular, White drew attention to individuals’ struggles for control and identity that occur within relational networks, emphasizing the role of narratives in these processes, as individuals created their different selves.Footnote 30 Working with these ideas, my essay built on the polis religion model to suggest that what scholars call ‘polis religion’ emerged from a meshing of social and cultural networks; and that, alongside those of the polis, there were other networks and interactions, which, at the very least, helped to define it.Footnote 31
Since then, I have developed this relational approach to consider ways in which ancient communities of religious identities formed. Importantly, these communities included the supernatural alongside mortals: the divine shared in these networks of identity, evoked through the interrelation of human cognition and activities. Indeed, since mind and body are integrally related, this apparent duality, so debated in scholarship on ancient religion, must be reconsidered; most recently, I have argued that we might think of such interactions with supernatural entities (interactions that may range from ritual to story-telling) as each, in and of themselves, comprising an experience of (what scholars have struggled to understand as) ‘belief’.Footnote 32 Here, as part of the analysis of the third-person formulation in the question tablets at Dodona, I want to build on this idea of the individual self as comprising multiple selves.
This is not an experience limited to the ancient world: a sense of self as partible may be one that in the normal run of life is less evident, as we move between different situations; but, in moments of crisis and/or decision making, this fragmentation can become more apparent. In part this may occur because we are, in such moments, experiencing ourselves as outside our usual experience and ‘ordinary self’, in terms of our relations with the world.Footnote 33 Brian Good suggests that this occurs when we experience ourselves in chronic pain.Footnote 34 He describes the life-narrative of a twenty-eight-year-old man who has lived his life with pain since he was two.Footnote 35 Good explains how, in the young man’s experience, the pain is ‘a demon, a monster, lurking within, banging the insides of his body’;Footnote 36 and in turn the body ‘becomes personified as an aversive agent. It is invested with menacing autonomy’.Footnote 37 The young man himself describes how he feels as if he’s,
outside myself, this whole thing I’ve got to deal with is ah, a decayed mass of tissue that’s just not any good, and I, I’m almost looking at it that way again; as if my mind were separated … from my self, I guess. I don’t feel integrated. I don’t feel like a whole person …Footnote 38
To this, we can add some considerations of the ways in which these experiences may, in turn, create a particular relationship with the sense of time. Good explores how, for people experiencing chronic pain, like Brian, ‘time itself seems to break down, to lose its ordering power’;Footnote 39 time may be slowed down or lost; its passing may be more distressing.Footnote 40 This sense of difference may then result in a loss of connection with the social world and its concerns: ‘Pain threatens to unmake the world, and in turn to subvert the self.’Footnote 41
If we return to the pilgrims at Dodona, and the formulation of their questions, these reflections on those experiencing pain may be helpful for understanding those who came to the oracle in distress. Most obviously, it offers a parallel with those seeking physical healing: looking back to the questions at the beginning of this essay, it may be that Lysinos, for example, addressed the gods in the third person because he felt distanced from, or outside of, his physical body, distanced from the social world. Building on this, we may also consider those who were experiencing mental pain, including anxiety or distress about a particular problem or choice that they faced. Perhaps the third-person phrasing of their questions to Zeus indicates that they, too, were experiencing a sense of a fragmented self, separated from community.
This sense of self-fragmentation and dissociation is studied in psychotherapeutic approaches that aim to support those who experience trauma: the Structural Dissociation model offers a way for those who have experienced some kind of profound trauma, and those who work with them therapeutically, to better understand the nature of their inner worlds. This may include a sense that their identities are multiple, that they have ‘split’ or fragmented; a sense of dissociation, that is, a sense of disconnection from those around them, from the world and its concerns; even a sense of depersonalization, a sense of being disconnected from themselves.Footnote 42 But, while it vividly illustrates the experience of fragmentation that I want to indicate here, I suggest that a traumatic experience is unnecessary for a sense of partibility to emerge. General reflections on such an experience suggest that the sense that we comprise different parts or selves is, at a much less extreme extent, something of an everyday experience.Footnote 43 Indeed, we can observe how it transpires in a number of contexts through a common experience, that of self-talk: ‘what people say to themselves either silently or aloud, inherently or strategically, to stimulate, direct, react and evaluate events and actions’.Footnote 44 And this suggests that such self-talk may indicate not only a sense of different parts of the self arising in moments of stress, but also that it has an important role to play in coping with that sense of fragmentation and the stress that underlies it.
Soothing Self-Talk
Experience, as well as research, suggests that individuals talk to themselves all the time, having developed this strategy, as children, for coping with challenging situations.Footnote 45 They may do this aloud, or in their heads; research has indicated that overt self-talk in adults emerges, naturally, in response to particular cognitive challenges or stresses.Footnote 46 Individuals tend to address themselves (as if they were separate individuals or comprised separate parts) in situations in which they need to provide ‘conscious self-guidance’;Footnote 47 and further research indicates that it is particularly prevalent when self-control is required, and in situations where behaviour change is needed.Footnote 48
As my initial account of the neuroscientific research on taking third-person perspectives indicates, it seems that self-talk activates brain regions associated with the manipulation of others: in particular, while there is some complexity in the findings,Footnote 49 this research supports the idea that those regions that are engaged in expressing compassion and empathy to others are also then engaged when expressing self-reassurance and self-compassion towards oneself.Footnote 50 Thus, such self-talk not only provides guidance, but may also influence emotions.Footnote 51 Indeed, overt self-talk has long been recognized as having potency in psychotherapeutic settings and is a particular focus of research for improving performance in sport.Footnote 52
In much of this research, self-talk is about addressing oneself using ‘you’ or ‘I’. Recent research in psychology and psychotherapy, however, emphasizes the ways in which it is effective to think about and address parts of the self in the third person. Research shows that addressing oneself through self-talk by name and/or thinking of oneself in the third person can provide the distance required to facilitate ‘self-control’;Footnote 53 helping individuals to self-distance, regulating their thoughts, behaviours and feelings;Footnote 54 and supporting them in finding future situations more challenging than threatening.Footnote 55 As noted by the researchers, this aligns with research that argues that language shapes emotional experiences.Footnote 56 Significantly, this research also indicates that the brain regions usually engaged in the cognitive control of emotions do not seem to be activated by third-person self-talk. As one of the researchers, Ethan Kross, summarized in an article on this work, ‘third-person self-talk may constitute a relatively effortless form of emotion regulation’.Footnote 57
While this analysis has so far been drawing on modern research, we can add that experiences of self-talk may be traceable in ancient evidence. It is well known that, at times of stress, the characters in Homeric epic often address themselves – or a part of themselves. Odysseus, for example, at Iliad 9.401–412, finding himself alone on the battlefield, speaks to his heart about beating a retreat; similarly, at Iliad 17.90–108, we see Menelaus speak to his own great-hearted spirit about abandoning Patroclus. These are just a couple of numerous such examples in these poems. The idea of the divided self is also familiar from other work, notably, the internal dialogues of characters in tragedy, and the philosophy of Plato, specifically in the Republic. As Christopher Gill has so eloquently argued, literary and philosophical evidence seems to suggest that, in ancient Greek culture, thought was understood as a kind of dialogue, conducted internally.Footnote 58 In this essay, I want to suggest that such a paradigm may also be traced in the Dodona oracle questions.
When we turn back to those questions, especially those that are phrased in the third person, these observations suggest that perhaps they offer us some insight into not only the operation of oracular consultation, but also something of its emotional effects. It seems possible that the use of self-talk, and frequently third-person self-talk, as part of the creation of the oracular question, soothed the anxieties of individual pilgrims, enabling them to bring fragmented parts of the self into dialogue with each other, and to find sufficient emotional and cognitive distance to reflect on their dilemmas. In what follows, I want to explore that process in some more detail, by bringing to bear some research on the cognitive blending of Viewpoints.
Blending Viewpoints at Dodona
The theory of ‘cognitive blending’, developed by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier, argues that, when we develop new concepts, we are bringing together separate constructions that are held, as it were, in distinct mental ‘input spaces’.Footnote 59 These may be drawn from ‘mental spaces’, which are local and individual conceptualizations built up from many different sources, including conceptual ‘domains’.Footnote 60 If mental spaces become established, then they become ‘frames’ that can be activated at once.Footnote 61 Fauconnier gives the example of the frame ‘Jesus on the Cross’, which can also evoke, in turn, other mental spaces (e.g., ‘the frame of “Roman crucifixion”, of “Jesus the baby”, of “Jesus the son of God”, of “Mary and the Holy women at the foot of the Cross”, of “styles of painting the crucifixion”, of “moments of the liturgy that refer to it”’, etc.).
In a process of blending, different elements from different domains are brought together – they ‘blend’ – to create a new emergent mental space.Footnote 62 We perform this kind of cognitive process all the time, because we bring concepts from different mental spaces (and from different domains) together all the time in thought and language. We do this, perhaps most obviously, with figurative language, for instance when we use metaphor. As an example Fauconnier and Turner offer us, ‘They dug their own financial grave’: this appears to be a metaphor that draws from the concrete domain of burial (graves and corpses) to the abstract domain of ‘getting into trouble, unwittingly doing the wrong things, and ultimate failure.’Footnote 63 But Fauconnier and Turner note how analysing it in terms of a blend, rather than a straightforward metaphor, allows us to see ‘extraordinary mismatches’ between the source and target of the metaphor.Footnote 64 For example, among them is the inversion of the causal structure: while foolish actions cause failure, grave-digging does not cause death. Similarly, the internal event structure does not match either: in the target domain you may risk failure if you are in more trouble, but that does not arise from the source domain, since you are not more likely to die if your grave is deeper.Footnote 65 What happens is not a straightforward metaphor but, rather, a blend, in which both domains are providing input into the final meaning of this phrase. The source domain of burial provides the concrete structure; the target domain of being foolish is also an input space, providing the causal and event structures. The result is a blend of mental spaces that has proved so successful it has become conventional.Footnote 66
But our use of blending is also more mundane and frequent than this more elaborate illustration suggests. For example, we also perform this blending activity when we use language (as a Hearer or a Speaker) to gather information about viewpoints – and develop representations of what other people are experiencing. In the realm of linguistics this can be analysed using mental spaces theory, which uses a number of technical terms: a Base is ‘the subjectively construed Ground of interpretation’;Footnote 67 the Ground is the physical and temporal discourse setting of the Speaker and the Hearer.Footnote 68 Where attention is concentrated is called the Focus space; the Event space is where an event takes place; and, finally, we access conceptual content via the Viewpoint space.Footnote 69 Spaces may play more than one of these roles at the same time;Footnote 70 they may also be ordered hierarchically according to temporal or epistemic relationships.Footnote 71
As a brief illustration of how these terms may be used, and the hierarchical quality of temporality, let us briefly take an example given by Eve Sweetser: Chris drove to San Francisco.Footnote 72 The Ground or Base space is the interaction between Speaker and Hearer, which contains an implicit reference to the present (the use of the past tense, ‘drove’) which they share; the Viewpoint space through which we access the Focus space is in the present space, in which the drive is now over.Footnote 73 The attention, or Focus space, is on Chris, and the use of the past tense indicates this is a past Event space, which we access through the present.Footnote 74 If we develop this sentence, then we start to view conceptual content through multiple Viewpoints: for example, Ann knows that Chris drove to San Francisco.Footnote 75 This, to begin with, opens up a separate mental space, a Focus space that evokes Ann’s knowing. It also adds a further Viewpoint space from the shared Ground of interaction, since we are now accessing Ann’s Viewpoint space as well. If the speaker of the sentence had used another verb, one that implies doubt such as Ann believes, for example, then this would also open up a further Epistemic space, indicating the Speaker’s mental Viewpoint on Ann’s Viewpoint.Footnote 76
Eve Sweetser argues that such a process is intrinsic to our everyday communication and unavoidable: ‘we are not just capable of multiple viewpoints; we are in fact incapable of keeping to one single viewpoint of space, or of cognitive structure, when other humans are present.’Footnote 77 This may be, in part, because of our mirror neurons, which cause us to experience the world not only as we see it, but also with cognition of how others, whom we experience, are, simultaneously, experiencing the world and us in it.Footnote 78 One everyday example of such a blended viewpoint is the response to a party invitation ‘Can you come to my party?’, which uses the verb ‘come’ as in ‘Sure, I’d love to come’: this participates in the deictic structure of the invitation; it takes the viewpoint of the inviter not the accepter of the invitation.Footnote 79
The idea that humans have this capacity to blend or separate representations, to generate new imagined representations from existing representations, is an important part of what mental spaces theory offers. We are constantly building mental space structures by drawing on our representations of the world, and our use of language is part of that process of representation.Footnote 80 I want to suggest in what follows that we can usefully unpack the Viewpoint blends of the Dodona tablets so as to better understand what effects their phrasing may have achieved.
Viewpoints in the Question Tablets
First of all, we can consider the blended Viewpoints that occur through the use of a third-person formulation in a question, using the terminology from this cognitive linguistic approach. To begin with the ‘Ground’ or Base space establishes the Speaker’s/Hearer’s communicative setting, in the setting that is oracular consultation at Dodona, where the Speaker is the question-writer and the Hearer the god (a point to which we will return). We see this in the tablets in explicit references to ‘god and ‘good fortune; in the naming of Zeus and/or Zeus and Dione, and/or sometimes Tyche, as well.Footnote 81 The Focus space – the content on which the discourse concentrates attention – is, first, the Event space of asking the god and, then, the Event space of the question’s content. Conceptual content is made accessible in the Dodona questions via the Viewpoint of the question-writer, and I will focus on this first before turning to some questions raised by the content of the (second) Event space. Finally, I want to examine the role of the addressee of these questions – that is, the divine – in this Viewpoint blend.
As we have established, the Viewpoint of these questions allows us to access their conceptual content. When they are written in the first person, then we seem to have direct access to that Viewpoint. When these are written in the third person, however, the individuals writing these tablets shift the Viewpoint of their questions. They create a ‘Represented Speaker’, an individual separate from himself or herself, who holds a Viewpoint distinct from ‘I’. This ‘disentangling’ means that there develop two Viewpoints:Footnote 82 the Represented Speaker voices the question to the gods, and, in those questions where a third-person formulation is used throughout, the subjective speaker remains wholly implicit or embedded in that Viewpoint. I would argue that the effect is a ‘distanced’ attitude towards the utterance of the Represented Speaker.Footnote 83 This can be seen more clearly in those questions where both first-person and third-person formulations are used, and these multiple Viewpoints are made explicit.Footnote 84
Turning next to the Event space of the Dodona oracle question tablets: this is, for the most part, across the questions, set in the future, and it evokes an imagined time and place. In temporal terms, the Event space is dependent on the Speaker’s communicative setting: that is, since it will take place in the future, it depends on the here and now of the Base space. Sometimes, the question provides some further detail about the relationship between the Base space and the Event space, as expressed, in the question, through the Viewpoint of the Speaker or the Represented Speaker. But, importantly, the details of the Event space are imagined – and, I want to argue in what follows that it is not only the Viewpoint of the Speaker/Represented Speaker that is included in its generation. It is, I suggest, represented as the outcome of another blend, between the Viewpoint of the Speaker and that of the Represented Speaker – and the imagined Viewpoint of the divine.
Whether the gods are explicitly named or not in these questions, the interrogative form itself evokes their presence, making implicit a presumption of divine knowledge and judgement, moving the deictic centre of the statement from Speaker to Hearer. Thus, if we approach this aspect through mental spaces theory, we can argue that this, in turn, introduces into the linguistic blend of the tablets not only the multiple (past, present and future) Viewpoints of the pilgrim’s selves but also a further Viewpoint. In some of the questions, this imagined, divine Viewpoint is made explicit and more detailed by the use of specific evaluative phrases. One example is the phrase ‘preferable and advantageous’, which question-writers often included in their question so as to describe the outcomes that they wanted; there is an example in DVC 357 A at the beginning of this essay. This not only expresses those writers’ evaluations of their desired future experience (in either first-person formulation or third-person formulation); it also requests that the (imagined) Hearer – that is, the god – bring to bear their (imagined) knowledge and evaluations. The imagined future of the question-writer was, thus, understood to comprise the outcome not only of the desire expressed by the Speaker/Represented Speaker, but also of the evaluation and judgement of an (imagined) god.
And perhaps this observation introduces an intriguing further dimension to the notion of the partible self. In considering the nature of that divine Viewpoint, individuals will have brought to bear their existing cognizance of the gods, their embodied cognition evoking narrative frames and scripts that informed their understanding of divine-mortal relations; mental spaces that drew on more local and personal interactions, experiences and long-term memories. The creation of the divine presence and its nature was complex, but it was, in the end, a cognitive representation. If we accept this analysis, it seems that the divine Viewpoint represented in the Dodona questions, like their third-person formulations, may have provided pilgrims with a further way of distancing, and dialoguing with, a part of themselves, as well as a way, in turn, of re-integrating with themselves and their communities.
Conclusion: The Power of Awe
By considering the Dodona question tablets as ‘small stories’, I have argued in this essay for a reconsideration of the information they may provide, in particular what the formulation of the question may reveal. If we view these texts as fragments of narratives about the self, supported by analyses of pain narratives, we can suggest that, in formulating their questions for Zeus, pilgrims at Dodona were expressing a sense of their lived experience, including, perhaps, a sense of themselves as fragmented in – and by – a moment of stress or choice. Drawing on psychological and psychotherapeutic theories, we can argue, in turn, that the process of composing their questions for Zeus offered a way for pilgrims to engage in self-talk, considering their dilemmas and soothing their concerns. By engaging in this form of self-address and self-talk, they could return to a state of self- and community integration.
Building on cognitive linguistic theory, I have developed this argument to suggest that the third-person phrasing of the tablets enabled pilgrims to experience, simultaneously, multiple viewpoints on their lives, from multiple temporalities. Not only did these include the (past, present and future) viewpoints of their selves as mortals, but also, I have suggested, another viewpoint of their own, cast as that of the ‘divine’. Through their participation in a ritual in which they considered themselves from a distance, pilgrims were able to engage with these multiple viewpoints and, potentially, forge new narratives: we can speculate that this process perhaps offered them a self-narrative that both integrated the different parts of the self within themselves and themselves within their communities.
In an essay that has focused primarily on human psychological processes, I want to end by focusing on the ancient experience of the divine in this context. In the sanctuary of Dodona, in which these question tablets were found and these experiences took place, individuals understood themselves to be in the presence of the king of the gods. It was a location in which, it seems likely, pilgrims would have experienced awe – and such an experience, I suggest, may have been essential for this process of oracular consultation. Recent research suggests that awe – defined as ‘the emotion that arises when one encounters something so strikingly vast that it provokes a need to update one’s mental schemas’Footnote 85 – expands perceptions of time; moreover, it prompts individuals to seek new knowledge and develop knowledge structures. Experiences of awe, researchers suggest, may be the ideal context for decision making.
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