There was a time when men’s mastery over the world was nothing but a fever dream. Fickle gods played with their subjects, striking them down with boar tusk and plague, sending man, woman, and child across the veil on nothing but a whim. There were no antibiotics. No gunpowder. No electricity. Nature was beaten back with axes and spears, and any victory won over her wild frenzy earned but a brief respite.
Man does not do well where he feels he has no control. And so, desperate for a sense of control over an uncertain world, he turned to Omens.
An omen is a phenomenon in which an event is taken to carry meaning beyond itself. A temporal anomaly in which the future reveals itself hidden within the present. It is the meaning that is important. Set aside the superstitions attached to omens and you are left with a potent occurrence of significance, identified in the present and projected outward into the future.
The time of omens was a time of unseen forces. For this reason the disconnected nature of the omen and the indicated following event was of no concern. Yet, as our technological and mechanical prowess grew a mastery was gained over the physical world, and the interpretative space where omens existed could be no more.
Yet, if an omen is looked at through the phenomenological lens, something else is revealed. The phenomenon of an omen is a phenomenon of meaning. Lacking the causal mastery provided by physical laws and chemical formulas, these peoples of the past were forced to rely on their ability to discern meaning from everything they saw. And while today, this might seem like a naïve exercise of whimsical futility, there is a wisdom in this practice that the modern world is in desperate need of. Physical mastery has left us abound in answers, but causality can only answer ‘How?’ and never ‘why?’ Why is a question of meaning, and thus a question for omens.
Can you look at the flights of birds, tea leaves, coffee grounds, or clouds and make them mean something? In all likelihood most modern people never even try. There is no need. Yet, under our current domain of mastery, neither can many individuals look at their lovers, their friends, themselves, or their own lives and parse out meaning for them.
This is not a plea to return to the world of omens. Legends of old in which oracles observe omens and deliver fates that force heroes into rash, desperate actions, creating paranoid madmen where loving husbands and wives once stood, show us the risks of such beliefs. After all, if every time two eagles are seen feasting on a hare, a father sacrifices his daughter as Agamemnon did, then we will have learned nothing from the past. Yet, neither is this an ode to the superiority with which the omen has been cast off.
If the omen is an instance of acausal connection gleaned from the experience of a particular phenomenon, then the modern age might just be the perfect place for a new iteration of these meaning-making occurrences.
In the world of old, omens were signs resulting from the works of the gods. Zeus spoke through the birds, and the gods of Babylon threatened wrath with solar eclipses. Man was not the agent of his own fate, and so it helped to know what the gods might be planning so that you could ration your food and steel yourself against the coming misfortune. The modern age has cast off the old gods, searching for the places where they were said to reside and finding that the thrones of Olympus were actually cogs of the mechanistic cosmos. No blessings, envy, and ire. Just the cool, unfeeling certainty of the ticking clock.
Yet, as the new paradigm cast off the old, many a baby was thrown out with the bathwater.
While humanity might be able to survive without the old gods, it most certainly cannot survive without meaning. The last few decades of increased depression, anxiety, and suicide rates demonstrate exactly that.
If the phenomenon of an omen is the experience of a specific event delivering meaning for a future one, then the world of quantum physics provides the perfect platform. Defined by the unseen correlative nature of the world, the quantum world definitively demonstrates that when an electron is influenced in this corner of the Universe, an electron in that corner of the Universe is simultaneously influenced despite no discernible connection between the two. The mechanism of an omen is not far off. If quantum entanglement demonstrates how unseen correlation can link two particles, then perhaps somewhere within the mystery of quantum physics the temporal entanglement of an omen is yet to be uncovered.
What is left then is the meaning.
Without Zeus and Ra to send meaning down from the mountaintop, mankind is free to make its own meaning. A lost art certainly, but one that history and literature prove is well within our natural abilities.
This newfound agency over the world of meaning changes the nature of the phenomenon of the omen. If you experience an omen—perhaps you see an owl flying low over the city streets clutching a snake in its talons and the moment strikes you as far too wondrous and impressive to simply write off as coincidence—then suddenly you are forced to engage with the possibility of meaning. A few things will then happen.
First, you will be forced to engage with your desires. Some parcel of meaning will flash through your mind and you will suddenly have a moment of recognition as to what you want this phenomenon to mean. Then those desires will turn to fears. Perhaps you have heard that in some pagan cultures the owl is an omen of death, and so you are suddenly struck by the fear that this omen is indicative of your death or that of a loved one. Finally, overcome by the fear that you have just glimpsed evidence of some future calamity, you will steel yourself and remind yourself that omens aren’t real so that you might be able to return to your morning omelette without having an existential crisis.
Even if you write off the omen completely, the process of your brain attempting to parse out meaning is invaluable. It is rare in our busy lives to truly take a moment and recognize what it is that we want or fear from the future. The next step is to take those possible meanings out of the phenomenon and act upon them. After all, the future is not willed by the gods. It is created by you and I. If you know what you want then you can choose to take action that day to pursue that dream. Perhaps you internalize the owl and the snake and whenever you see the two together, whether on a wine bottle, bumper sticker, or tattoo, it serves as a meaningful phenomenon to suggest to you that you are on the right path. Perhaps the fear forces you to engage with the blessings of your life and your loved ones. Maybe after being struck by the fear of losing someone you love, you give them a phone call. You ask how their day’s going, you share a moment of life with them, and you tell them that you love them before you hang up the phone. Perhaps, you become a little more present to what being alive means. You feel the wind on your cheeks. You look at the way the light spills through the leaves of an oak. You pay that much more attention to the eating of your omelette.
Would these things not be a gift? Would the omen—that strange instance that in no discernible way could be related to the call you gave your mother or the money that you set aside for later dreams—not have meant something?
An omen is a phenomenon of meaning, and perhaps, in a meaning-starved world, it is time to peer into tea cups and stare up at the clouds and once again, try to uncover just what it is that they mean.