Author(s):
Lorenz, Günther
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Albani, Matthias
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Baudy, Dorothea
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Iwersen, Julia
[German Version] I. Religious Studies – II. Ancient Near East and Old Testament – III. Greco-Roman Antiquity – IV. The Milieu of Modern Alternative Religions
I. Religious Studies An omen (Lat.
omen, related semantically to
prodigium, “portent,” and
auspicium [
oblativum], “[spontaneous] divination from the flight of birds”) is a phenomenon that is interpreted as a portent (Premonition) of an important event, mostly negative but sometimes positive; unlike oracles, omens are not sought deliberately. Often they involve encounters with animals (esp. the larger species of birds, spiders, snakes, cats), hearing their cries (e.g. owls, jackals), noises (the creak of a door), or natural phenomena (lightning, thunder, precipitation, cloud formations, earthquakes, solar or lunar eclipses, planetary conjunctions, comets, glorious weather). Other significant phenomena involve ritual (Rite and ritual) and cultic objects (interrupted sacrifice, the curling of a sacrificial animal’s tail in the fire, “sweating” and “bleeding” statues, the sound of church bells), falling or breaking objects, abnormal behavior (a dog on the roof, a sow eats her farrow, animals or infants that “speak”), unusual botanical specimens (four-leaf clover, sprouting of barren branches), abnormal births (twins, deformities, parturition of a mule), or involuntary psychophysical phenomena (sneezing, blinking, tripping and falling, dreams, hallucinations). The negative or positive assessment of such phenomena is in part spontaneously emotional and easy to understand, in part culturally conditioned or adapted and in need of explanation (a wild goose in flight as a wandering soul or Brahman in Hinduism, a “dragon in the heavens” as a positive omen in…