The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

Divination derived from the Latin term divinatio originally came from an Indo-European
word designating the making clear of something. This found two different uses in the Latin
language: one for designating roughly what we today call divination, another for designating
the making clear of the plaintiff in the criminal process. The treatise De divinatione by
Marcus Tullius Cicero fused the first meaning of divination with stoic philosophy and created
a general category. Cicero showed the universality of divination by examples from the entire
known world. This work has been the frame of reference for all subsequent scholarship
dealing with divination as a general term. Divination more or less disappeared in Europe after
the Roman Empire became Christian.
No research on divination as a general phenomenon was carried out until modern times.
The colonial encounter with people who used divination extensively everywhere around the
world made divination a problem: why did the rest of the world engage in divination, when
the Europeans did not? Initially evolutionist ideas served to account for the differences
between the savage primitive and the scientific European. The rest of the world had not yet
advanced to the European stage of culture.
In Britain the evolutionistic argument rested on empiricist concerns such as a deficiency in
inductive ability of the primitives compared to the modern Europeans. In France rationalist
concerns such as collective representations and classification took centre stage. The
primitives differed in their ideas about the world, not in inductive ability. A central
development here was Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss’ focus on sociality as the basis for
classification. This created two separate trajectories of modern divination research.
Anthropology in Germany and The United States was more focused on philological and
descriptive endeavors, why divination did not pose a problem. This also resulted in very little
research in divination as a general phenomenon.
With the breakdown of evolutionistic anthropology after the First World War other ways of
analyzing divination came to the fore. It became apparent that the source material of the arm-
chair evolutionist anthropologists was not always of very high quality. Extended periods of
field work became the ideal of anthropology with the functionalists. This showed a more
nuanced view of the “primitives” and their everyday lives. This ideal entered divination
scholarship with Edward E. Evans-Pritchard. He gave a richly nuanced analysis of how
divination functioned in the everyday lives of people. By considering this everyday life the
problem of the rationality of divination was resolved. Focus shifted to the social relations and
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