The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

I have selected 4 articles, 2 from around 1900 and 2 from the last half of the 20 th century.
Surveying encyclopedia entries naturally raises the problem of selection. These articles are
selected based on how well known, comprehensive and general they are. Thus little known,
small (e.g. Brandon 1970) and specialized encyclopedias (e.g. Gärtner, Wünsch, & Pauly
1980) were excluded.
The first example comes from the 9 th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica. It was published
between 1875 and 1889 and crowned by many as a landmark achievement of scholarly work.
It has an article on divination written by Edward Burnett Tylor and starts with a definition of
divination: “This term is used to mean the obtaining of knowledge of secret or future things
by revelation from oracles or omens” (Tylor 1994: IV, 293). This is done on the basis of
analogy and symbolism. Tylor explicitly uses Cicero’s typology and supplies it with modern
examples from folklore and contemporary ethnographies of primitive people. The theory
differs from Cicero’s in one important aspect since it is evolutionistic: divination belongs to
the primitive with its belief in gods, but the modern world has moved beyond this.
The article on “Divination” in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics from 1911 is written
by the classicist Herbert Jennings Rose (Rose 1974). Rose also operated within an
evolutionistic framework along the same lines as Tylor. Rose defines divination thus: “by
divination is meant the endeavor to obtain information about things future or otherwise
removed from ordinary perception by consulting informants other than human” (Rose 1974:
775). This is followed by a detailed typology illustrated with examples from the whole world
under each heading. The different types are: 1) Dreams; 2) Presentiment; 3) Divination from
bodily movement; 4) Divination by possession; 5) Necromancy; 6) Divination from animals;
7) Divination by mechanical means; 8) Divination from nature; 9) Miscellaneous.
The ordering principle seems to be the proximity of the divination practice to the human
mind. 1) And 2) come from inside – the human mind, 3) and 4) from the human body, where
5) is still human but dead. Type 6) involving animals is closer to humans than 7) because
alive, but 7) closer to humans than 8) because they are produced by humans. We thus have a
taxonomy that builds on the opposition between humans and nature. Interestingly 1) to 4)
(and possibly 5) equals Cicero’s natura, and the rest the ars. The work of Cicero thus seems
to lurk in the background of the typology although it is significantly refined. Likewise the
definition also largely falls within that delimited by Cicero.
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