The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

causes. This is also the case concerning divination: “Their collective representations oblige
them, as it were, by some form of preconception or pre-connection to refer the death to a
mystical cause (..). The only thing that matters is the true cause and among certain peoples, at
any rate, this is always mystic in its nature” (Lévy-Bruhl 1985: 281). According to Lévy-
Bruhl the method of choice to find this true cause among the primitives was divination,
because it was likewise characterized by mystical ideas.
Central to Lévy-Bruhl‘s treatment is the distinction between natural and mystical causes.
This distinction, which I will call the dual-causation theory, is a fundamental one as we will
see later. Another important feature is that Lévy-Bruhl ties primitive mentality to collective
representations. This accounts for its persistence. The difference between primitives and
moderns is thus not one of adequate perception of the world, as in the English empiricist
perspective, but one of thinking about the world. This in turn is conditioned culturally by
collective ideas.
Durkheim & Mauss as well as Lévy-Bruhl have their focus on how primitives think and
how this is culturally constituted either in collective representations or in systems of
classification. In both cases divination plays an integral role. Whereas the English tradition
concerned itself with issues of inductive truth the French is concerned with mentality, thus
exhibiting the differences between empiricist and rationalist philosophy. In general it is
interesting to notice that there seems to be no principled distinction, at this stage, between
magic and divination. Both rely on the same thought processes.
After the decline of evolutionist theorizing after World War One research into divination
also declined somewhat with some notable exceptions. Instead of the evolutionist armchair
theorizing, the extended periods of field work of functionalist anthropologists, such as
Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Radcliffe Brown, became the ideal. Both were teachers of
a scholar, who would arguably become the most central in divination research: Edward Evans
Evans-Pritchard.
Edward Evans Evans-Pritchard
Edward Evans Evans-Pritchard’s (1902-1973) classical monograph Witchcraft, Oracles, and
Magic among the Azande from 1937 is a landmark in divination research. It was based on
fieldwork conducted between 1926 and 1930 among the Azande living in Southern Sudan
(Evans-Pritchard 1937: vii). No one had dedicated that amount of fieldwork and scholarly
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