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Curtius describes the distinction well in relation to the condition of Greece with which history first presents us: 'The mantic art is an institution totally different from the priesthood.
After looking Panurge in the face and making conclusions by metoposcopy and physiognomy, he casts his horoscope secundum artem, then, taking a branch of tamarisk, a favorite tree from which to get the divining rod, he names some twenty-nine or thirty mantic arts, from pyromancy to necromancy, by which he offers to predict his future.
It is significant that Socrates does not claim to be giving his own thoughts when speaking of love. He says he is only relating what a woman once imparted to him as a revelation. It was through mantic art that he came to his conception of love. Diotima, the priestess, awakened in Socrates the daimonic force which was to lead him to the divine. She initiated him.
The mantic art, i.e. the ability to predict the future by signs from the gods or direct divine inspiration, was throughout antiquity considered one of the surest proofs of the existence of the gods.
Among many tribes intoxication is a common preparation for the work of the shaman; and human sacrifice has been practiced in all parts of the world. There is nothing peculiar in the office of soothsayer that accompanied the Dionysiac cult; mantic persons and procedures have formed a prominent part of the constitution of the lower peoples everywhere.
The Greeks recognized omens in the acts of various animals, especially in the flight and cries of birds; so important were these last that the words for 'bird' came to be employed for 'omens from birds' and even simply for 'omens'; Aristophanes, laughing at the Athenians, declares that they called every mantic sign 'bird'. Skepticism, however, appears in Hector's passionate rejection of the signs of birds and his declaration that the best omen is to fight for one's country.
+777+. Dionysus, in a word, was originally the local god of a savage community; the data are not sufficient to fix precisely his original place and the original conception of him. His mantic function does not necessarily show that he was a ghost.
What clairvoyant could go further? Test my mantic gifts at any other point and I doubt not I can satisfy you. Do you want to know at what time there will be high water at Aberdeen on the afternoon of the 21th January? The answer is: "Thirteen minutes past one." Do you want to know when partridge shooting will begin? I do not even need to reflect before giving the answer: "The 1st of September."
No one has ever poured such satire upon the mantic arts as did Rabelais in chapter twenty-five of the third book of "Pantagruel." Panurge goes to consult Her Trippa the famous Cornelius Agrippa, whose opinion of astrology has already been quoted, but who nevertheless, as court astrologer to Louise of Savoy, had a great contemporary reputation.
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