Ritual Production of Divine Dreams in Ancient Greece and Song China

Dream production is one of the main ways of seeking direct contact with the divine world in many religions. Both ancient Greece and Song China developed dream production practices to facilitate the divine dreams of gods. These dreams share similar features of miraculous healing and the gods’ use of proxies. They also diverge in ritual procedures, the purposes of dream production, and the roles of cult sites. This talk will compare several salient types of dream production from both societies and examine how gods intervened in dreams and what problems they solved. While the parallels in dream production demonstrate some universal notions of divinity, the differences reveal diverse modes of human-divine interaction that make each form of polytheism unique.

About the Speaker 

Qin Yang is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Department of Classics and Archaeology, University of Nottingham. She received her PhD from the Australian National University with a thesis on visual forms of classical interpretation in Song China (tenth to thirteenth centuries). She currently works on two strands of research: one is about the transformation of classical learning during the Song period, and the other is about Chinese religions in anecdotal sources in comparison with Greek religion, with a focus on dream production and divine epiphanies.

The ANU China Seminar Series is supported by the Australian Centre on China in the World at ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.