Divination

Divination covers a diversity of rites, from the most public and institutionally prescribed to the most private and informal, that provide the supernatural world a means of communication and intervention in human affairs. Cross-culturally, divination constitutes one of the primary vehicles for applying the authority of religious tradition to the vicissitudes and potentialities of social life. It was central to Roman administration (with several collegia of priests devoted specifically to divination), to the functioning of Egyptian temples (where it took place during festival processions as well through rituals of private consultation), and to the development of new Mediterranean cults like that of Alexander of Abonuteichos and Christianity (Beard, North, and Price 1998: 19-23; Scheid 2003: 111-26; Frankfurter 1998a: 145-97; Johnston and Struck 2005).

Divination rites generally involve the layout of some materials or the definition of some circumstance as a ‘‘pallette’’ on which a range of patterns can result. The range of patterns can be small, as in certain types of ‘‘lot’’ oracles; it can be broad yet delimited, as in the shape of an animal’s liver or an arrangement of birds in flight; or it can be enormous, as in the ecstatic medium’s utterances or some astronomical event. Experts - priests, freelance specialists, or simply the owner of a divination manual - interpret the resulting patterns as the encoded communications of gods, spirits, or some greater supernatural order. Hence, the materials or circumstances - lots, livers, flying birds, or running children - amount to a code through which the supernatural beings transmit their message. The pattern emergent in the code, the omen proper, precedes the interpretation - the pattern rendered meaningful - which is the oracle proper. The chance patterns or responses emerge, through interpretation, as the nuanced expression of a divinity’s will. From the recognition of a sheep liver’s peculiar lobes to the inference of a divine military strategy, or from a series of dice rolls to the ‘‘instruction’’ to go to Alexandria, there is a sequence of stages: preparation of the random ‘‘pallette,’’ observation of the omen, and translation as an oracle.

Divination is ultimately a social drama, both in its ritual elements and its capacity to criticize or legitimate acts of social significance. Divination rituals are often quite dynamic, maintaining cultural stability in placid times, while in more complex times reaching out to new materials and idioms to aid people’s transitions to new social realities. Thus in the Roman period we find both quite archaic, temple-based forms of haruspices and augury and entirely new types of oracle, like astrology, lots, dream interpretation, and divination by sacred text. Yet ancient divination always involved the creative use of tradition, a sense of authority that could be brought to bear on a situation at hand. This tradition might comprise the performative style of a medium, the identity of the speaking god, the divination materials themselves, the expertise of the diviner, or simply the shrine at which divination could occur. Tradition provided the framework, the fixed and sacred theater, for the coded pattern or occurrence that signaled the god’s own communication. The preeminence of tradition is particularly evident in Rome, where volumes of ancient Sibylline oracles and augury interpretation guided priests’ divination, and in Egypt, where the archaic rite of the processional oracle still in the Roman period brought the power and presence of the god out of the temple and into a context of public communication, where it could be seen to move around on its bearers’ shoulders. Tradition likewise undergirded astrology as it took root in temples and developed among freelance experts of the Mediterranean world. Whether freelance or priestly, astrologers worked hard to assimilate the omens of planets and stars to indigenous gods and epistemologies. Divination inevitably involved a close combination of the traditional and authoritative, on the one hand, and the innovative, on the other.

Many cultures had long accorded a role to writing in their central divination procedures in one form or another: Israel’s adultery ordeal, in which the accused had to drink the letters of a curse to prove her guilt or innocence (Nm 5:11-31); Egypt’s ‘‘ticket’’ oracles, in which supplicants would deliver questions to the god in positive and negative alternatives, expecting the correct answer to be returned as the divine will; and of course the written records of ancient oracles that many temples preserved for later interpretation (Champeaux 1997). But the Greco-Roman era saw a profusion of new divinatory texts. For example, there circulated a variety of manuals for preparing the divinatory ‘‘pakette’’ using dreams, mirrors, or bowls of water (sometimes using a pure youth as the discerner), or for inviting a god’s direct apparition. In this way one could gain authoritative oracles apart from traditional temple space (J. Z. Smith 1978a; Eitrem 1991; Frankfurter 2000a: 180-2; S. I. Johnston 2001). Furthermore, we find a profusion of ‘‘new’’ oracles attributed to ancient sibyls, kings (like the Persian Hystaspes), gods (Egyptian Hermes Trismegis-tos), or sages (Jewish Seth or Enoch), collected and even cited as authoritative, even though historians can date these oracles clearly to the Greco-Roman or late antique periods (Himmelfarb 1993: 95-104; Potter 1994: 58-97). There also developed a form of text-based oracle, the Sortes Astrampsychi, whereby a client might find an answer to a particular question by thinking of a number, which would lead (through a technique known only to the Sortes’ owner) to the authoritative answer in the pages of the book. In this way, the book itself became the multipurpose repository of mantic guidance (Frankfurter 1998a: 170-84; van der Horst 1998).

The capacity of foreign divination traditions to invade politics, much as official Roman divination was intended to do, led to its occasional proscription and even full-scale purges of astrologers and oracles, as the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus says took place in 359 ce in upper Egypt (Amm. Marc. 19.12.3; see Frankfurter 2000b and in general Liebeschuetz 1979: 119-26).