Here is part VII of Mellets essay, in which he applies the method to the dream of seven fat cow and seven thin cows.
VII. It was a large portion of ancient wisdom.
But if the Sages of Egypt used sacred tableaux to predict the future, even when they had no other indications to make them presume future events, with what hopes did they not flatter themselves to know them when their investigations were preceded by dreams that could help develop the sentence produced by the Tableaux of Fate!
The priests of this ancient people formed early on a learned society, in charge of preserving and extending human knowledge. The priesthood had its leaders, and the names of Jannes & Mambres, which Saint Paul has preserved for us in his Second Epistle to Timothy, are titles that characterize the august functions of the pontiffs[1]. Jannes means the Exponent, & Mambres the Permutator, the one who does wonders.
The Jannes & the Mambres wrote their interpretations, their discoveries, their miracles. The uninterrupted continuation of these memoirs[2] formed a body of Science & Doctrine, wherein the priests collected their physical & moral knowledge: they observed, under the inspection of their leaders, the course of the heavenly bodies, the floods of the Nile, Phenomena, etc,. Kings sometimes assembled them to help each other with their advice. We see that in the time of the Patriarch Joseph they were called by Pharaoh to interpret a dream; and if Joseph alone had the glory to discover its meaning, it nonetheless proves that one of the functions of the Magi was to explicate dreams.
The Egyptians[3] had not yet given up the errors of idolatry; but God in those distant times often manifesting his will to men, if anyone would have considered it rash to question him on his eternal decrees, it should at least have seemed forgivable to seek to penetrate them, when the divinity seemed not only to approve but even to provoke, by dreams, this curiosity: therefore their interpretation was a sublime Art, a sacred science of which a special study was made, reserved for the Ministers of the Altars: & when the officers of Pharaoh, prisoners with Joseph, grieved that they had no one to explain their dreams, it is not that they did not have companions in their misfortune; but because they were locked in the prison of the Chief of the Militia, there was no one among the soldiers who could perform the religious ceremonies, who had the sacred images, far from having the understanding of them. The very answer of the Patriarch seems to explain their thought: does not interpretation, he says to them, depend on the Lord? Relate to me what you have seen.
But to return to the duties of priests, they began by writing in common letters the dream with which they were concerned, as in all divination there was a positive question, the answer to which had to be sought in the Book of Fates, & after shuffling the sacred letters and drawing them, paying scrupulous attention to placing them under the words whose explanation was sought; the sentence formed by these images was deciphered by the Jannes.
Suppose, for example, that a Magus had wished to interpret the dream of Pharaoh, of which we spoke earlier, as they had tried to imitate the miracles of Moses, and that he had drawn the fortunate Baton, the symbol par excellence of agriculture, followed by the Knight & the King [4]; and from the Book of Destiny the cards of the Sun, Fortune & the Fool are drawn at the same time, we will have the first part of the sentence we seek. If he then took out the Two and Five of Batons, whose symbol is marked with blood, and from the sacred images were drawn Typhon and Death, he would have obtained some sort of interpretation of the King’s dream, which may have been written thus in ordinary letters:
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The Sign of Agriculture gives seven.
It will be read, therefore, that seven years of prosperous agriculture will give an abundance a hundred times greater than has ever been experienced.
The second part of this sentence, closed by the two and the five of batons, also gives the number seven which, combined with Typhon & Death, announces seven years of famine & the evils it entails.
This explanation will appear even more natural if attention is paid to the meaning and value of the letters that the pictures represent.
The Sun corresponding to Gimel means, in this sense, remuneration, happiness.
Fortune or Lamed means Rule, Law, Science.
The Fool expresses nothing by itself, it corresponds to Tau, which is simply a sign, a mark.
Typhon or Zain heralds fickleness, error, broken faith, crime.
Death or Thet indicates the action of reaping: indeed, Death is a terrible reaper. Teleuté, which in Greek means the end, could be, in this sense, a derivative of Thet.
It would not be difficult to find in the Egyptian customs the origin of most of our superstitions: for example, it seems that
turning the sieve to know a thief, owes its birth to their custom of marking thieves with a hot iron, composed of the two characters Tau and Samech [5], one on the other, to make the figure
Signum adherens, which served to warn people to be suspicious of the bearer. It produces a figure which somewhat resembles a pair of scissors pricked in a circle, in a sieve, which must separate when the name of the thief is pronounced and made known.
Divination by the Bible, the Gospel, and our Canonical Books, which were called the auguries of the Saints, of which it is spoken in the one hundred and nineteenth Letter of St. Augustine and in several Councils, among others that of Orleans; the auguries of Saint Martin of Tours, which were so famous, seem to have been considered as an antidote to Egyptian divination by the Book of Destiny. It is the same with the omens drawn from the Gospel,
ad apperturam libri, when after the election of a Bishop they wished to know what his conduct would be in the Episcopate.
But such is the fate of human things: of such a sublime science, which has occupied the greatest men, the most learned philosophers, the most respectable saints, there remains only the usage of children drawn to the beautiful letters.
1. As Pharaoh means the Sovereign without being the particular name of any Prince who has ruled Egypt.
2. Pope Gelasius I put in 491 some Books of Jannes & Mambres among the apocrypha.
3. Long after this time the Magi recognized the finger of God in the Miracles of Moses.
4. The valet is worth 1, The Knight 2, The Queen 3, The King 4.
5. Tau, sign: Samech, adhesion.
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Notes:
The Second Letter of St. Paul to Timothy, 3:8
8 Now as Jannes and Jambres* withstood Moses, so do these also resist the truth: men of corrupt minds, reprobate concerning the faith.
*Jambres, more accurate transliteration is Mambres.
" Jannes and Jambres are the subjects of many legendary tales, one of which is presented in a Greek work entitled "Pœnitentia Jannis et Mambre," counted among the Apocrypha in Pope Gelasius' "Decretum," and referred to by Origen (to Matt. xxvii. 9)."
http://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/ ... nd-jambres
THE MANNER OF CAUSING THE SIEVE TO TURN, THAT THOU MAYEST KNOW WHO HAS COMMITTED THE THEFT.
Take a Sieve and stick into the outside of the rim the open points of a pair of scissors, and having rested the rings of the said opened scissors on the thumb-nails of two persons, let one of them say the following Prayer:--
DIES MIES YES-CHET BENE DONE FET DONNIMA METEMAUZ; O Lord, Who liberated the holy Susanna from a false accusation of crime; O Lord, Who liberated the holy Thekla; O Lord, Who rescued the holy Daniel from the den of lions, and the Three Children from the burning fiery furnace, free the innocent and reveal the guilty.
After this let him or her pronounce aloud the names and surnames of all the persons living in the house where the theft hast been committed, who may be suspected of having stolen the things in question, saying:--
'By Saint Peter and Saint Paul, such a person hath not done this thing.'
And let the other reply:--
'By Saint Peter and Saint Paul, he (or she) hath not done it.'
Let this be repeated thrice for each person named and suspected, and it is certain that on naming the person who hath committed the theft or done the crime, the sieve will turn of itself without its being able to stop it, and by this thou shalt know the evil doer.
The Veritable Clavicles of Solomon,, chapter 26. Translated from Hebrew into the Latin Language by Rabbi Abognazar. (English translation by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers).
The auguries of the Saints (les sorts des Saints) : Bibliomancy, to divine by the first lines of a sacred scripture opened at random.
The auguries of Saint Martin of Tours (les sorts des Saint-Martin de Tours) : When the Deputies of Clovis entered the church of St. Martin of Tours, where his relics were kept, the words being sung by the choir were "Lord Lord I have put on my strength for the war, and you have slaughtered under my feet those who have risen against me." And indeed, Clovis was victorious. Thus arose the superstition that the words being sung by the choir when one entered the church were to be taken as a divine omen.
ad apperturam libri: [to open book] - an act of translation, a sermon, or other activity based on a text: extemporaneously, without preparation or recourse to reference materials. Oxford Dictionary.