The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

as a displacement of intention (Humphrey & Laidlaw 1994; Richert 2006) or a "goal-
demotion" (Boyer & Lienard 2006: 605). This does not mean that ritualized action is not
thought to be able to accomplish goals, quite the contrary, as we shall see shortly. This is a
special mode of action which could be described as counterintuitive 36 : It is composed mostly
of intuitive elements, but involves a breach, in that the action does not accomplish the
purported or any other reasonable goal.
The thesis proposed here is that the deficiency in the intentional structure brought about by
the displacement of intention in the action produces a search for either another goal, as in
magical rituals (the future coming of rain, or the attraction of a beautiful woman), or another
hidden agent (such as God giving salvation through priest in baptism, or souls of dead people
moving the pointer at the Ouija board). 37 The reason for this is that the cognitive system will
try to build the best representation of the action at hand and since it initially seems
intentional 38 , a representation based on beliefs and desires will be built. This involves an
agent, an action and a goal. 39 In divination the action and the goal are fixed from the outset.
Consequently only the agent can be repaired. Crucial in obtaining this representational
outcome is the severing of the link between the manifest agent and the action leading to the
goal. The manifest agent must not be seen to be in control 40 of the outcome of the action.
36 On the analogy of what is special about religious concepts done by Pascal Boyer and others (Barrett 1998;
Barrett & Nyhof 2001; Boyer 1994; Boyer 2003; Boyer 1996; Boyer & Ramble 2001). The first, to my
knowledge, to suggest this classification of ritual as counterintuitive action was Pierre Liénard (Liénard
2006).
37 The process resembles the repair process known from conversation analysis (Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks
1977). Here a missing word in a sentence will be repaired to make it meaningful. This in turn points to a more
primitive and general feature of the human brain, namely pattern completion. Pattern completion underlies
among other things the ability to recall events from memory (Guzowski, Knierim, & Moser 2004) and helps
resolve ambiguity of perception (Maloney et al. 2005). This is essentially also what takes place here. Further
there is evidence that even small infants and infants in general look longer on novel sequences of action
(Kirkham, Slemmer, & Johnson 2002: 39). This shows that even at an early stage infants form expectations
about the sequences of actions, and that, like counterintuitive concepts, action sequences that violate
expectations are attention demanding (cf. Liénard 2006).
38 Because it is carried out by an agent and because it is done in response to a question.
39 While this superficially resembles Lawson and McCauley’s theory of ritual action, there is one important
distinction here that Lawson and McCauley do not make, that is, between the actual perceived action and the
represented action (Lawson & McCauley 1990; McCauley & Lawson 2002b). I believe that the
representational part of the thesis proposed here is in accordance with theirs. According to their theory the
action representation system will build representations of exactly the type stipulated here: agent, act, and
patient (McCauley & Lawson 2002: 14).
40 Bertrand Malle and Joshua Knobe investigated the American folk model of intentionality (Malle & Knobe
1997b). They demonstrated that participants in their experiments make distinction in assigning intention to an
action based on the agent’s skill and awareness (Malle & Knobe 1997: 112). I have collapsed these into the
concept of control. This does not mean that there is no real distinction between skill and awareness, but in the
present context this distinction is not significant. Malle and Knobe do actually themselves consider the use of
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