The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

Figure 6.1. brings together the observations on the cognitive basis of divination made in
chapters 4 and 5. The top row shows the different overall phases, then comes the central
cognitive functions that are involved and their purpose. In the manner of traditional cognitive
science the different inputs, function, and output along with their conditions of activation are
specified (Cf. Marr 1982). As can be seen these differ in certain cases between impetrative
and oblative. Obviously the figure is not exhaustive, but merely meant as a form of roadmap
that ties together central observations about relations between different factors identified in
this dissertation.
Now that we have considered the central cognitive factors underlying divination, we need
to ask how this may help to solve our primary problem: why divination was so widely
disseminated and persistent in Roman culture. The original turn towards cognitive theories in
investigating religion was made by anthropologist and cognitive scientist Dan Sperber. His
point of departure was a critique of contemporary anthropology. He argued that
anthropology’s relation to psychology should be like epidemiology’s relation to biology
(Sperber 1975: 30). Later he more thoroughly worked out the framework of an epidemiology
of beliefs (Sperber 1996; Sperber 1985). The basic principle is that cultural ideas are ideas
widespread in a population. Just as diseases are transmitted on the basis of the biological
system of humans, so are ideas transmitted on the basis of the properties of the cognitive
system of humans. Another reason why epidemiology is a particularly relevant analogy is
that epidemiology has a population perspective and explicitly works with social as well as
biological factors.
The epidemiology of ideas, or “representations” as it is also sometimes called, starts from
the cognitive system. The cognitive system has certain biases. These biases will influence the
probability that a given idea will become widespread in a population. But ideas are not like
viruses. 88 They get changed slightly every time they get transmitted. Sperber developed the
idea of attractor positions. In a given series of transmissions, a given idea will converge on
one such attractor position, because of the biases in the cognitive system (Sperber 1996: 106-
112). The local cultural context however also has an effect on this attractor position. Take the
example of a folktale. Some versions of a tale are easier for storytellers to remember because
of cognitive biases and because of local cultural relevance (Sperber 1996: 108). In a later
88 Indeed Sperber spent a good deal of effort in arguing against the extreme version of this idea known as
memetics (Sperber 2000). This theory stipulates that ideas are like genes that reproduce in humans’ minds
(Blackmore 1999; Dawkins 1976; Dennett 1995).
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