The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

Chapter 4 - Impetrative Divination
Motivation 23
Why do people engage in divination in the first place? The question is as simple as it is
complicated to answer. Divination is acquisition of knowledge, but not just any type of
knowledge. People rarely if ever consult diviners to know which star is really the biggest or
whether there are an even or uneven number of trees in the nearest forest. You can also
wonder why people in modern times, who believe that divination will tell you the absolute
truth of any matter, have not yet asked for the Grand Unification Theory, which would unify
all the natural sciences (there should be Nobel Prize for that eventually). The point is that the
knowledge sought after in divination will inevitably be related to the life of the questioner. 24
But why is it so? Why do the concrete subjects apt for consultation seem to vary hugely from
culture to culture? Is there at all anything general to the motivation behind divination? To
understand this we need to consider human motivation in general.
The psychology textbook by neuropsychologist Michael S. Gazzaniga and experimental
psychologist Todd F. Heatherton defines motivation as: “Factors that energize, direct or
sustain behavior” (Gazzaniga & Heatherton 2003: 275). In psychological research two main
lines of research can be distinguished. The more biological line has focused on the internal
states and consequently has given more attention to neurobiology including hormones,
neurotransmitters and brain sites (e.g. Rolls 2000). The other line has focused on the life
goals of individuals in a more social or individual psychological approach (D'Andrade &
Strauss 1992; Sloan 1996). Gazzaniga and Heatherton argue that it is necessary to bridge the
gap between these two in order to properly understand human motivation (Gazzaniga &
Heatherton 2003: 276).
It seems possible to integrate these aspects of motivation if we work from the assumption
that the central component in motivation is emotion. At a superficial level it is not difficult to
see that my feeling of pride motivates me to do my best at my exams, that my feeling of
hunger motivates me to go the cantina and that my love for my wife motivates me to kiss her
every now and then, but there still seems to be some differences between these kinds of
23 This chapter builds on (Lisdorf 2007d)
24 It is very often the type of information that Boyer calls strategic information, that is, information related to
social interaction (Boyer 2001: 173)
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