Seeing with Different Eyes - Cosmology and Divination

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The essays in this collection originated at a conference held at the
University of Kent, Canterbury, in April 2006, entitled “Seeing with
Different Eyes: a Conference on Astrology and Divination”. This was the
second event of its kind at Kent, and this is the second publication to
emerge from the teaching and research initiative on divination located in
the School of European Culture and Languages (religious studies section). 1
The MA programme in the Cultural Study of Cosmology and
Divination, sponsored by the Sophia Trust, is currently in its second year
and is attracting international attention from students and researchers
involved in the academic study of the theories and practices of divination
and the cosmologies within which these practices arise. The focus at Kent
is on the epistemology and hermeneutics of divination and symbolic
interpretation as a field of enquiry in its own right, and it is unique in
regarding divinatory consciousness as a ubiquitous human phenomenon
worthy of investigation on its own terms. Divination studies have tended
to become subsumed into other disciplines such as anthropology, classics
or history of ideas, but in locating divination (and particularly the study of
astrology) within religious studies, we are acknowledging its roots in a
sacred cosmos whose order is perceived not solely through speculation but
also, if not primarily, through participation in ritual activity. Divination is
understood as a fundamentally “religious” experience, however broadly
the word is conceived, and however valiantly science, behavioural
psychology or the social sciences may seek to prove or disprove its “truth”
through their own frames of reference.
Our approach is truly interdisciplinary, as the papers in this volume
demonstrate, but it is not reductionist. Divination is addressed here
through the lenses of ancient philosophy, religious practice, the arts,
astrology and specific cultural forms and contexts, all of which emphasise
a dynamic interplay between the human rational faculty and the religious
imagination, the interpreter and the symbol, the abstract concept and living
experience. We do not seek to explain divination, or to relegate it to the
product of a “primitive” mentality, but to understand its many
manifestations as a rich testimony to the power and creativity of the
human soul as it seeks to make sense of the unseen forces that surround it,
and act accordingly.