Divination is a system of knowledge and belief that serves the purpose of the maintenance of the symbolic universe1 in a society sharing the conviction that things happening on earth are not coincidental but managed by superhuman agents, reflecting decisions made in the world of gods or spirits.
The phenomenon of divination is known from all over the world, including the ancient eastern Mediterranean cultures where it had a fundamental socioreligious significance. “For most Greeks there was no such thing as ‘coincidence,’”2 and the same can be said of ancient Mesopotamians and the Levantine peoples, whose divinatory practices are well documented.3 *
The need for divination is triggered by uncertainty, and its purpose is to become conversant with superhuman knowledge in order to “elicit answers (that is, oracles) to questions beyond the range of ordinary human understanding.”4 Divination tends to be future-oriented, not necessarily in the sense of foretelling future events, but as a method of tackling the anxiety about the insecurity of life and coping with the risk brought about by human ignorance.5 The rationale behind divination is the belief that a necessary amount of superhuman knowledge is available to humans, especially to those acknowledged by the society as diviners by virtue of their background, education, or behavior.
The role of the diviner is essentially that of an intermediary between the human and superhuman worlds.When mapping different methods of divination, it is customary to break them down into two categories: (1) inductive methods that involve systematization of signs and omens by observing physical objects (extispicy, astrology, bird divination, etc.); and (2) non-inductive or intuitive ones, such as dreams, visions, and prophecy. In the first category, the emphasis is on the cognitive process, while inspiration or possession are seen as typical of the second category.
The distinction between technical and non-technical divination is often traced back to Plato’s Phaedrus (244a-245a), where Socrates makes the difference between the divinely inspired knowledge based on mania “madness” and the divinatory tekhne based on observation and calculation, strongly in favor of the former as a source of divine knowledge: according to
his reasoning, mania is divinely inspired and therefore superior to a sane mind (sophrosyne), which is only of human origin.
As we learn from John Jacobs’s article in this book, Plato’s discussion on divination is known by Cicero (De divinatione 1.1.1-3) who addresses its significance for philosophical inquiry into the relationship of divine and human worlds, and thus can be considered another harbinger of the modern concept of divination.Moreover, and perhaps even more fundamentally, the dichotomy of prophecy and divination goes back to the Hebrew Bible, where prophecy is the privileged way of God’s communication with humans, while other forms of divination are generally condemned (e.g., Leviticus 20:6; Deuteronomy 18:9-14; Isaiah 8:19). To be sure, divination is not censured altogether: dreams, for instance, do not seem to be denounced, and the divinatory apparatus called urim and thummim is part of the high priest’s sacred breastplate (Exodus 28:30; Leviticus 8:8). The elevated status of prophecy is not challenged anywhere in the biblical and early Jewish tradition, however, despite the fact that, for example, the use of Mesopotamian astrology is abundantly evidenced by the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Talmud.6
Plato’s alleged value judgments and, especially, the outspoken antagonism toward divination in the Jewish and Christian Bible are probably the main reason why the rather depreciating word “superstition” is often used of omen divination, seldom of prophecy. Today, however, many biblical, ancient Near Eastern, and Classical scholars (and I find myself certainly among them) would agree that prophecy should not be contrapositioned with divination but should be seen as one form of it.7 In my language, the word “prophecy” basically stands for the transmission of allegedly divine knowledge by non-technical means.8 This definition, based on the technical/non-technical divide, works quite well with regard to biblical and ancient Near Eastern texts, but fluctuates somewhat when applied to Greek sources, as it seems that the Greek seers or prophets could sometimes divine in both ways.9
As a scholarly concept, “prophecy” does not cover exactly the semantic field of any divinatory vocabulary in ancient sources, where an exact counterpart to it cannot be found.
In Greek, for example, the titles prophetes, mantis, and promantis are used of practitioners of divination of both types,10 which suggests that the Greeks, Socrates notwithstanding, did not necessarily classify divination according to the technical/non-technical divide. Ancient texts were not written with our definitions in mind, and applying our terminology to ancient cultures and source materials often requires certain terminological flexibility. Anthropological evidence of divination points to the same direction: inductive, intuitive, and interpretative techniques easily overlap.11 Nevertheless, the difference between divinatory techniques remains, leaving the boundaries between prophecy (as defined above) and omen divination as represented by ancient eastern Mediterranean sources worth exploring.I would like to approach the issue of prophecy and divination with the help of two claims of which the papers included in this volume have made me increasingly convinced of: (1) that prophecy and omen divination are not the same thing, and (2) that they nevertheless belong firmly to the same symbolic universe, that is, to a shared conceptual, intellectual, and ideological world.