The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

The 15 th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica published between 1943 and 1973 has a
new article on divination. This time it is written by the anthropologist George K. Park, who
was one of the most influential scholars of divination in the last half of the 20 th century. He
defines divination: “The alleged art or science of foretelling the future by various natural,
psychological and other techniques, is a phenomenon found in all civilizations in all times
and areas.(..) Divination is the effort to gain information of a mundane sort by means
conceived to transcend the mundane” (Park 1974). We see that the emphasis on the future
aspect of divination is gone (although he later mentions that the information wanted always
bears upon the future (Park 1974: 917)); it is simply information, which is the purpose. The
transcendent aspect is still there, though not explicitly as communication with gods. He parts
with the intellectualist assessment of divination as being illogical or pre-logical. Instead he
focuses on the client’s wish to obtain credible information on which he can act.
Park divides divination into “inductive”, “interpretive” and “intuitive”. The inductive
comes from natural phenomena, while the interpretive arises out of a “manipulated accident”
which might involve either nature or mechanical artifacts. The intuitive is prototypically a
shaman. The typology is like Rose’s based on the degree to which the technique is related to
humans. The first two correspond quite precisely to Cicero’s natura whereas the last
corresponds to ars. Park refers to Cicero’s work and complains that the Ciceronian typology
is too rigid (Park 1974: 917), but misreads Cicero when he claims that the class interpretive
doesn’t fit well in the inductive category. It fits very well indeed: the Roman auspicium, one
of the key examples of inductive techniques, is exactly a “manipulated accident”. 4
The last of the articles I have chosen is Evan M. Zuesse’s in Mircea Eliade’s
Encyclopaedia of Religion. He defines divination as “(..) the art of discovering the personal
human significance or more commonly, present or past events” (Zuesse 1987: 375). The
focus is on different peoples’ indigenous theory of divination. These, according to Zuesse,
involve spiritual beings, producing the following typology. 1) Intuitive divination, where the
diviner spontaneously sees the future; 2) Possession divination, where spiritual beings
communicate through intermediary agents. These can be a) nonhuman, or b) human; and
lastly 3) Wisdom divination, where the diviner decodes impersonal patterns of reality. These
are, as in the other cases, exemplified with instances from the whole world.
4 There are some further peculiarities in Park’s systematization. He puts scapulimancy in the inductive
category, but it is clearly a manipulated accident like pyromancy, which he puts in the interpretive category.
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