The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

the ultimate communicator it was argued that the prestige effect should also be detectable with
regard to counterintuitive agents. A psychological experiment indicated that the prestige of the
counterintuitive agent, seen as the ultimate agent in the divination practice, did influence
judgments of which divination practice was considered most credible. High prestige
counterintuitive agents were judged to be more credible than low prestige counterintuitive
agents, when all else was equal. This kind of prestige was termed indirect prestige.
Chapter 5 dealt with oblative divination. The main difference from impetrative divination was
the sign production. The basic problem in oblative divination is to pick out salient events in the
daily stream of events. In principle any event could become salient, but three primary ways of
identifying such events were distinguished. The first type relied on the event becoming salient in
light of the current concerns of the perceiver. The second type relied on a pre-established
catalogue of signs. It was argued that they would often be encoded in writing. The third type
relied on the event itself being so unexpected that it demanded extra explanation. These three
types were found in different cultures from around the world. Based on a psychological
experiment, it was possible to say that priming with stories that stipulate the ability of a
counterintuitive agent to send signs, greatly stimulates the identification of an event as an omen.
It was argued that this priming can be constant if a cultural model stipulating this ability of
counterintuitive agents to send communicative signs is often communicated. This constantly
sensitizes people to the possibility of communication from a counterintuitive agent and was
taken to be a contributing factor in picking out an event as an omen.
In Chapter 6, first an overview and summary of the cognitive processes involved in the two
types of divination was provided. Whereas the previous two chapters dealt with the cognitive
basis of divination, and thereby made up for the first lack found in previous research, this chapter
tried to make up for the second lack, namely a framework for dealing with the dissemination and
historical dynamics of divination. It was argued that the cultural epidemiology originally
proposed by Dan Sperber is a viable framework for understanding dissemination of cultural
phenomena such as divination. A few modifications to the approach were, however, suggested.
The benefit of the epidemiological approach is that it is multi-factorial and that it allows us to
integrate cognitive factors with social and ecological ones. In epidemiology a standard tool for
analyzing dissemination of disease is the web of causation. This technique was adapted to
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