Excavating Byzantine Dreams

Over the past decade there has been an outpouring of scholarship on Byzantine Dreams (as well as dreaming in the Arab and Ottoman world). Much of this was likely prompted by the publication of three books: first, Steven Oberhelman’s translation of six oneirocritica in 2008 (although this was based on his earlier and widely used 1981 dissertation), Maria Mavroudi’s monograph on the Oneirocriticon of Achmet in 2002, and finally, W.V. Harris’s monograph on Classical dreams in 2009.

These works touched off a spate of conferences and conference proceedings on dreams that have culminated in works like Bronwen Neil’s Dreams and divination from Byzantium to Baghdad, 400-1000 CE (2021). I read and enjoyed Neil’s book this weekend and was hoping that it would help bring into focus the dream episodes in my dream archaeology article that I’m slowly revising and updating this week. Unfortunately (for me!), Neil’s work, like most recent scholarship on dreams, isn’t particularly concerned with the kind of literal dreams that appear in saints’ lives that my chapter relies upon. Instead, Neil, like many of the recent generation scholars on Byzantine dreams is more interested in elaborate or symbolic dreams than dreams or visions where a holy person gives the dreamer explicit instructions how to act.

Strangely enough, the individuals who had these dreams often did not see the instructions—no matter how literal they appear to a modern reader—as an impetus for obvious actions or as even clear and straight forward. In fact, any number of saints’ lives involve the person who appears in a dream having to constantly tell the dreamer to perform the action and there are often consequences when the dreams ignores or fails to understand the urgency of the vision’s message. 

A nice example of this comes from a dream recorded in the Life of St. Nikon which I describe in my chapter: St. Nikon stayed the night amidst the ruins of an Early Christian, but now largely ruined church, while on the island of Crete where he was active urging local Christians to repent. The archaeologically-savvy saint was able to identify the church on the basis of visible architectural fragments (particularly the geisons). While sleeping, St. Photeine appeared to the saint in a dream. She asked Nikon to rebuild the ruined church or she would not allow him to leave the island. At first, Nikon ignored the saintly vision and continued on his way, but he was soon struck blind. His sight was restored only when he committed to rebuilding the ruined church. Regaining his sight, Nikon returned to the church but lacked a spade (gr. skapani) or a shovel (gr. ptuon) necessary to complete the task.     

Neil does offer some useful insights, however, regarding dreams and gender. Neil notes that dreams allowed women access to spiritual traditions in ways unimpeded by the clergy or the male dominated institutional church. Moreover, the appearance of women in dreams paralleled the Early Christian rise of holy women who piety allowed them to carve out new gender roles that were neither explicitly male or female. Through dreams women are able to appear to men and direct them in ways that society would not have always allowed. The dreams of St. Helena, for example, not only revealed to the emperor Constantine’s mother the location of the True Cross, but also contributed to her authority to order a soldiers to excavate its location and demonstrated its authenticity when she used to raise a man from the dead. Women continue to play key roles in dreams in the Byzantine and later periods: the Empress Pulcharia’s dream revealed the tomb of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste and St. Photiene’s appearance to individuals suffering from blindness restored their sight to name just two. In the modern era, the nun Pelagia’s dreams revealed an icon of the Virgin on Tinos around which the modern pilgrimage has developed. In my blog yesterday, I noted how a woman’s dream directed the Greek archaeologist Anastasios Orlandos to excavate an Early Christian church in the 20th century and Manolis Andronikos reports receiving a letter from a Greek American woman who saw his excavation of Royal Tombs at Vergina prior to their discovery. 

Neil is clear that Freudian analysis of ancient dreams are unlikely to reveal conclusions that are relevant to the ancient world. At the same time, the persistent interest in dreams not only among Byzantinists at the turn of the 21st century, but among Greek (and non-Greek!) archaeologists a century earlier remains suggestive. Neil’s interest in excavating the social significance of dreams in her work and demonstrating their relevance for understanding gender roles and cross cultural attitudes toward the sacred suggest that much like Freudian analysis, her study sought to excavate the meaning of dreams in the Byzantine and Islamic world. Dreams continued to rely on their irrationality and divine origins to produce culturally situated meaning, but, in the hand of a savvy scholar, their divine or even irrational meaning melts aways beneath the more rigorously demonstrated historical analysis that reveals their ultimate rationality and significance to social, religious, and political situations that might have been invisible to dreamers or interpreters.  

In the 20th, dreams continued to be a window into the intersection of the irrational and rational worlds and susceptible to the verification through rigorously modern means. Dream archaeology, alongside the kinds of parapsychological, psychic, and supernatural archaeological methods explored in yesterday’s blog post, collapses the temporal and cultural distance between the modern interpreter and the dreamer. Just as Freud resorted to interpreting his own dreams as a strategy to mitigate the risk of suggestion or conscious construction of dream narratives by his patients, so the 20th-century dream archaeologist draws on both modern methods and historical precedents to deform and challenge the primacy of “scientific” or “industrial” thought. 

In this context, I wonder whether our contemporary efforts to excavate Byzantine dreams represents an abiding faith in the power of rational, modern interpretations to bring them to heel. Perhaps this speaks as much to our continued modern anxieties around the power of religious and spiritual thinking as any real concern for allowing dreams to speak in their own culturally situated language.