The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

heard from my professor that…” would it then make a difference to her credibility? We need
to distinguish between the direct prestige from the proximate communicator (Louise) and the
indirect prestige of the ultimate communicator (her professor). I have not been able to find
research addressing this question. I therefore designed a study to determine whether such an
indirect prestige effect would matter in divination, where the ultimate communicator is a
counterintuitive agent. If the counterintuitive agent, associated with a divination practice, is
of high prestige, it should be rated as more credible than if a low prestige one was associated.
In order to test this, a story of the same form as in experiment 2 above was given.
Experiment 3
Participants 40 participants, 17 male 23 female aged 16-20 (M=18,33, SD=1,3), 77,5 %
from the Western Copenhagen Region (Himmelev Gymnasium) and 22,5% from Esbjerg at
the west coast of Denmark (Esbjerg Gymnasium). They were primarily Christian protestant
(49%) and Non-believers (44%). Other religious affiliations were 7%.
Materials Above we saw that freely conferred gifts were one of the empirical indicators of
prestige. This was used in this hypothetical story as an independent variable. One way of
doing this was to manipulate the size of sacrifices, which can be considered gifts to the gods
(Høgh-Olsen 2006): Low prestige god = sporadic offerings of dry bread, Medium prestige
god = daily offerings of a meal, and High prestige god = sometimes elaborate festive
banquettes of the finest food. As in experiment 2a fictive story was composed. 79 This story
was situated among the fictive tribe Kalungi in West Africa. The main character had to find
out the reason for his wife’s barrenness. 80 A prescript read: “The Kalungi in West Africa have
different specialists, whom they often employ to reveal hidden causes of people’s misfortune.
They are all considered reliable and have a good reputation.” The specialists were described
as communicating with a god. The technique was not further specified. The only thing that
differed between the different specialists was the amount of sacrifice offered to the god with
whom they communicated. The sequence in which the different diviners were presented was
randomized into three different sets. Then participants were asked to circle the diviner they
79 See appendix 3 for an English translation of the story.
80 This is a typical reason for consultation based on the ethnographic record (Evans-Pritchard 1937: 261-262;
Jackson 1978; e.g. Mendonsa 1982: 114).
102