Abstract

Abstract Among the many aspects of ancient dream divination, the most problematic is surely the paradoxical quality of the mantic use of incestuous dreams. I have identified three main problems, one of which is common to dream divination in general, while the other two are specific to the interpretation of incestuous dreams. The first and more general problem was described by Angelo Brelich in his essay “The Place of Dreams in the Religious World Concept of the Greeks,” published in Roger Caillois’s and G. E. von Grunebaum’s The Dream and Human Societies. Though Brelich described the contents of ancient and modern dream books as a “chaos of absurdities” and spoke of “unrestrained folly” as inspiring such lore, I define this problem less dramatically as the existence of different, even of contrasting interpretations for similar dreams in the same corpus.

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