{"id":3019,"date":"2011-08-03T09:31:30","date_gmt":"2011-08-03T13:31:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/dreamgates\/?p=3019"},"modified":"2011-08-03T11:36:05","modified_gmt":"2011-08-03T15:36:05","slug":"st-jerome-bewitches-dreams-and-dreamwork","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/2011\/08\/st-jerome-bewitches-dreams-and-dreamwork.html","title":{"rendered":"St Jerome Bewitches Dreams and Dreamwork"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>For many centuries, the pretext for official Church hostility to dreams and dreamwork was the deliberate mistranslation of a Hebrew word in the first Latin version of the Bible. This was known as the Vulgate, and was the official Catholic Bible for over fifteen centuries, until the mid-1960s.<\/p>\n

The translator was St Jerome (347-419), the child of a patrician Christian Italian family who became a desert monk and \u00a0learned Hebrew after a terrifying dream in which he was lashed before the throne of a divine judge and berated for his interest in the classics.<\/p>\n

The key word in Hebrew is anan<\/em>. \u00a0It can mean either \u201cwitchcraft\u201d or \u201csoothsaying\u201d. In the Old Testament, it is always derogatory, suggesting low goetic magic and superstition, the work of fortune tellers and necromancers. The word anan<\/em> appears ten times in the Old Testament. In making his Latin translation, Jerome correctly translated it as \u201cwitchcraft\u201d seven times.<\/p>\n

But in translating Deuteronomy 18:10 and Leviticus 19:26, Jerome rewrote the law, \u201cYou shall not practice augury or witchcraft\u201d by giving a different meaning to anan. <\/em>In these passages, he assigned the meaning \u201cobserving dreams\u201d. So the law now read, \u201cYou shall not practice augury or observe dreams.\u201d<\/p>\n

Christian scholar Morton Kelsey observed that this mistranslation is curious and can hardly be disingenuous, \u00a0in light of the fact that Jerome was an excellent scholar and correctly translated the term anan <\/em>seven \u00a0times. Kelsey concludes that the mistranslation may have been deliberate, perhaps inspired by Jerome’s frightening dream.<\/p>\n

Over the next fifteen centuries, most translations of the Bible were derived from Jerome\u2019s Latin, and not the original Hebrew, so the prohibition against using dreams as a source of guidance and healing \u2013 and of direct revelation, as seen in the Bible itself \u2013 was widely accepted by churches and compliant Christians without access to the original text. The New Oxford, New Jerusalem and other modern editions of the Bible have restored the original meaning of anan<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Source<\/em>: Morton Kelsey, God, Dreams and Revelation: A Christian Interpretation\u00a0of Dreams <\/em>(Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House,1991).<\/p>\n

Image<\/em>: \u00a0Francisco de Zurbar\u00e1n, Jerome in the desert, tormented by memories of the dancing girls of Rom<\/em>e (1639)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For many centuries, the pretext for official Church hostility to dreams and dreamwork was the deliberate mistranslation of a Hebrew word in the first Latin version of the Bible. This was known as the Vulgate, and was the official Catholic Bible for over fifteen centuries, until the mid-1960s. The translator was St Jerome (347-419), the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":224,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,20],"tags":[458,460,459,456,457],"class_list":["post-3019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dream-interpretation","category-history-of-dreaming","tag-anan","tag-dreams-and-christianity","tag-dreams-in-religion","tag-st-jerome","tag-vulgate"],"yoast_head":"\nSt Jerome Bewitches Dreams and Dreamwork - Dream Gates<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/2011\/08\/st-jerome-bewitches-dreams-and-dreamwork.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"St Jerome Bewitches Dreams and Dreamwork - Dream Gates\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"For many centuries, the pretext for official Church hostility to dreams and dreamwork was the deliberate mistranslation of a Hebrew word in the first Latin version of the Bible. 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He is the creator of Active Dreaming, an original synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism. Born in Australia, he survived three near-death experiences in childhood. He leads popular seminars all over the world, including a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. A former lecturer in ancient history at the Australian National University, he is a best-selling novelist, journalist and independent scholar. His nine books on dreaming, shamanism and imagination include Conscious Dreaming, Dreamways of the Iroquois, The Dreamer's Book of the Dead, The Three \"\"Only\"\" Things, The Secret History of Dreaming, Dreamgates, Active Dreaming and Dreaming the Soul Back Home: Shamanic Dreaming for Healing and Becoming Whole. His most recent book is The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse. Over the past 20 years, he has led seminars at the Esalen Institute, Kripalu, the Omega Institute, the New York Open Center, Bastyr University, John F. Kennedy University, Meriter Hospital, and many other centers and institutions. He has taught depth workshops in Active Dreaming in the UK, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Brazil and Austria and leads a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. He hosts the \"\"Way of the Dreamer\"\" radio show at www.healthylife.net. He has appeared on many TV and radio shows, ranging from Charlie Rose and the Today show to Coast to Coast and the Diane Rehm show on NPR. His articles on dreaming have been published in media ranging from Parade to Shaman's Drum.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.mossdreams.com"],"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/author\/rmoss"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/224"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3019"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3023,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3019\/revisions\/3023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}