BiblioVault - Books about Divination

A Commentary on Cicero, De Divinatione I
Celia E. Schultz
University of Michigan Press, 2014
Library of Congress PA6296.D15 2014 | Dewey Decimal 203.2

A Commentary on Cicero, De Divinatione I, is the first English-language commentary on the Latin text of Marcus Tullius Cicero’s dialogue in almost one hundred years. The defense of divination (the science of predicting the future) offered in Book 1 is illustrated with many entertaining anecdotes that make the argument more accessible to a wider range of readers than many of Cicero’s other philosophical works. De Divinatione also preserves many fragments of otherwise lost masterpieces of Roman Republican literature. It is a text important for the study of Roman religion, as well as Roman political and intellectual history.

This commentary aims to assist the reader in seeing De Divinatione as a cohesive whole, and to make it accessible—not only to classicists, but also to scholars of religion and to philosophers who may not be familiar with the historical and Roman intellectual background that are the focus here. The cases made for and against divination in De Divinatione closely follow arguments made by Greek philosophers, but many of the examples illustrating them reflect Cicero’s preferences in literature, his own poetic efforts and political experience, and his expertise as an augur. The result is a very personal work closely tied to Cicero’s own experience.

Celia Schultz’s volume contains the full Latin text of De Divinatione, Book 1, and accompanies it with commentary on points of grammar, history, prosopography, and ancient religious practice, among other topics. She includes a helpful bibliography for those interested in further study of points raised in the text or commentary.

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A Commentary on Cicero, De Divinatione II
Andrew R. Dyck
University of Michigan Press, 2020
Library of Congress PA6296.D15 2020 | Dewey Decimal 202.3

Andrew R. Dyck ranks among the top Latinists in Ciceronian studies. In this new volume, he offers the first commentary on Cicero’s De Divinatione II in nearly a century. This commentary aims to equip students and scholars of Latin with the kinds of historical and philosophical background and linguistic and stylistic information needed to understand and appreciate Cicero’s text on Roman religion and divination. Dyck situates Cicero’s text in the context of Roman religion in antiquity, and he traces the subsequent reception of the text. The introduction reviews recent interpretations of De Divinatione. Dyck rejects the view that has recently been widespread in Anglophone studies that De Divinatione stages a debate between roughly equal opponents and without the emergence of a clear authorial point of view. Instead he argues that a careful reading shows that Cicero as author is invested in the argument, with the particular aim of countering superstition.

Celia Schultz’s earlier volume in this series presented the text and commentary for De Divinatione I. With Andrew Dyck’s companion volume on the second book of De Divinatione, students and teachers are well served with crucial texts from one of Rome’s most famous philosophers, as he considers important Roman practices and beliefs.

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Divination and Healing: Potent Vision
Edited by Michael Winkelman and Philip M. Peek
University of Arizona Press, 2004
Library of Congress GN475.7.D58 2004 | Dewey Decimal 133.3

Divination is an important feature of cultures all over the world. While some may still question the efficacy of divination systems, they continue to serve their communities by diagnosing ailments, prescribing healing treatments, and solving problems. Yet despite their universality, there are relatively few comprehensive studies of divination systems. This volume seeks to fill this gap regarding the use of divination in healing. Here some of the world’s leading authorities draw on their own fieldwork and participation in ritual to present detailed case studies, demonstrating that divination rituals can have therapeutic effects. As the contributors examine the systems of knowledge that divination articulates and survey the varieties of divinatory experience, they seek to analyze divination as an epistemological system, as a social process, and as a therapeutic endeavor. While some of their findings reinforce traditional assumptions about the importance of social control, spirit relations, and community support in the divination process, the authors place these considerations within new epistemological frameworks that emphasize the use of alternative modes of knowing. In this wide-ranging volume, readers will find coverage of classic Ifa systems; Buddhist-influenced shamanic practices in the former Soviet Union; the reconciliation of Muslim beliefs and divinatory practices in Thailand; Native American divination used in diagnosis; Maya calendrical divination in Guatemala; mediumistic and chicken oracle divination among the Sukuma of Tanzania; Ndembu divination, focusing on the process of collective healing; and divination among the Samburu (Maasai) of Kenya, featuring dialogues from actual healing sessions. Together, these contributions argue for new perspectives on the study of divination that emphasize not only the epistemological roots of these systems but also their multifaceted therapeutic functions. Divination and Healing is a rich source of both data and insight for scholars of ritual, religion, medical anthropology, and the psychology of altered states of consciousness.

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Divination, Politics, and Ancient Near Eastern Empires
Alan Lenzi
SBL Press, 2014
Library of Congress BL613.D59 2014 | Dewey Decimal 133.309394

Advance your understanding of divination’s role in supporting or undermining imperial aspirations in the ancient Near East

This collection examines the ways that divinatory texts in the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East undermined and upheld the empires in which the texts were composed, edited, and read. Nine essays and an introduction engage biblical scholarship on the Prophets, Assyriology, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the critical study of Ancient Empires.

Features:

Interdisciplinary approaches include propaganda studies
Essays examine how biblical and other ancient Near Eastern texts were shaped by political and theological empires
Index of ancient sources

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Gendered Fortunes: Divination, Precarity, and Affect in Postsecular Turkey
Zeynep K. Korkman
Duke University Press, 2023
Library of Congress HQ1726.7.K67 2023

In Gendered Fortunes, Zeynep K. Korkman examines Turkey’s commercial fortunetelling cafés where secular Muslim women and LGBTIQ individuals navigate the precarities of twenty-first-century life. Criminalized by long-standing secularist laws and disdained by contemporary Islamist government, fortunetelling cafés proliferate in part because they offer shelter from the conservative secularist, Islamist, neoliberal, and gender pressures of the public sphere. Korkman shows how fortunetelling is a form of affective labor through which its participants build intimate feminized publics in which they share and address their hopes and fears. Korkman uses feeling—which is how her interlocutors describe the divination process—as an analytic to view the shifting landscape of gendered vulnerability in Turkey. In so doing, Korkman foregrounds “feeling” as a feminist lens to explore how those who are pushed to the margins feel their way through oppressive landscapes to create new futures.

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Healing Dramas: Divination and Magic in Modern Puerto Rico
By Raquel Romberg
University of Texas Press, 2009
Library of Congress BF1584.P9R65 2009 | Dewey Decimal 133.43097295

In this intimate ethnography, Raquel Romberg seeks to illuminate the performative significance of healing rituals and magic works, their embodied nature, and their effectiveness in transforming the states of participants by focusing on the visible, albeit mostly obscure, ways in which healing and magic rituals proceed. The questions posed by Romberg emerge directly from the particular pragmatics of Puerto Rican brujería (witch-healing), shaped by the eclecticism of its rituals, the heterogeneous character of its participants, and the heterodoxy of its moral economy.

What, if any, is the role of belief in magic and healing rituals? How do past discourses on possession enter into the performative experience of ritual in the here and now? Where does belief stop, and where do memories of the flesh begin? While these are questions that philosophers and anthropologists of religion ponder, they acquire a different meaning when asked from an ethnographic perspective.

Written in an evocative, empathetic style, with theoretical ruminations about performance, the senses, and imagination woven into stories that highlight the drama and humanity of consultations, this book is an important contribution to the cross-cultural understanding of our capacity to experience the transcendental in corporeal ways.

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The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani
C. Nadia Seremetakis
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Library of Congress GT3251.A3M367 1991 | Dewey Decimal 393.9

Based on years of fieldwork in both rural and urban Greece, The Last Word explores women's cultural resistance as they weave together diverse social practices: improvised antiphonic laments, divinatory dreaming, the care and tending of olive trees and the dead, and the inscription of emotions and the senses on a landscape of persons, things, and places. These practices compose the empowering poetics of the cultural periphery. C. Nadia Seremetakis liberates the analysis of gender from reductive binary models and pioneers the alternative perspective of self-reflexive "native anthropology" in European ethnography.

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Making the Gods Speak: The Ritual Production of Revelation in Chinese Religious History
Vincent Goossaert
Harvard University Press, 2022
Library of Congress BL475.5.G66 2022 | Dewey Decimal 202.1170951

Making the Gods Speak presents a comprehensive accounting for the processes of divine revelations. Focusing the bulk of his analysis on spirit-writing, Vincent Goossaert offers a ritual-centered framework to study revelation in Chinese cultural history and comparatively with the revelatory practices of other religious traditions.

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Mystic Bones
Mark C. Taylor
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Library of Congress BF1891.B64T39 2007 | Dewey Decimal 203.7

The desert has long been a theme in Mark C. Taylor’s work, from his inquiries into the religious significance of Las Vegas to his writings on earthworks artist Michael Heizer. At once haunted by absence and loss, the desert, for Taylor, is a place of exile and wandering, of temptation and tribulation. Bones, in turn, speak to his abiding interest in remnants, ruins, ritual, and immanence. Taylor combines his fascination in the detritus of the desert and its philosophical significance with his work in photography in Mystic Bones.

A collection of remarkably elegant close-up images of weathered bones—remains of cattle, elk, and deer skeletons gathered from the desert of the American West—Mystic Bones pairs each photograph with a philosophical aphorism. These images are buttressed by a major essay, “Rubbings of Reality,” in which Taylor explores the use of bones in the religious rituals of native inhabitants of the Western desert and, more broadly, the appearance of bones in myth and religious reality.

Meditating on the way in which bones paradoxically embody both the personal and the impersonal—at one time they are our very substance, but eventually they become our last remnants, anonymous, memorializing oblivion—Taylor here suggests ways in which natural processes can be thought of as art, and bones as art objects. Bones, Taylor writes, “draw us elsewhere.” To follow their traces beyond the edge of the human is to wander into ageless times and open spaces where everything familiar becomes strange.

By revealing beauty hidden in the most unexpected places, these haunting images refigure death in a way that allows life to be seen anew. A bold new work from a respected philosopher of religion, Mystic Bones is Taylor’s his most personal statement of after-God theology.

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On Old Age. On Friendship. On Divination
Cicero
Harvard University Press, 1992
Library of Congress PA6295.A3 1992

Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 10643 BCE), Roman lawyer, orator, politician and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era which saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In his political speeches especially and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106 speeches, delivered before the Roman people or the Senate if they were political, before jurors if judicial, 58 survive (a few of them incompletely). In the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters of which more than 800 were written by Cicero and nearly 100 by others to him. These afford a revelation of the man all the more striking because most were not written for publication. Six rhetorical works survive and another in fragments. Philosophical works include seven extant major compositions and a number of others; and some lost. There is also poetry, some original, some as translations from the Greek.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.

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Rituals in Slavic Pre-Christian Religion: Festivals, Banqueting, and Divination
Juan Antonio Álvarez-Pedrosa
Arc Humanities Press, 2023

Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination
Martin Holbraad
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Library of Congress BL2532.I33H65 2012 | Dewey Decimal 299.683330209729

Embarking on an ethnographic journey to the inner barrios of Havana among practitioners of Ifá, a prestigious Afro-Cuban tradition of divination, Truth in Motion reevaluates Western ideas about truth in light of the practices and ideas of a wildly different, and highly respected, model. Acutely focusing on Ifá, Martin Holbraad takes the reader inside consultations, initiations, and lively public debates to show how Ifá practitioners see truth as something to be not so much represented, as transformed. Bringing his findings to bear on the discipline of anthropology itself, he recasts the very idea of truth as a matter not only of epistemological divergence but also of ontological difference—the question of truth, he argues, is not simply about how things may appear differently to people, but also about the different ways of imagining what those things are. By delving so deeply into Ifá practices, Truth in Motion offers cogent new ways of thinking about otherness and how anthropology can navigate it.

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Water Witching U.S.A.
Evon Z. Vogt and Ray Hyman
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Library of Congress BF1628.V6 2000 | Dewey Decimal 133.3232

Despite advanced technology, the practice of water witching—using a forked stick to indicate an underground source of water—persists in both rural and urban areas. Water Witching U.S.A. is a lively look at "dowsing," full of personal accounts, historical background, and data from controlled experiments and a nationwide survey. This study includes a collection of photographs, drawings, and historical woodcuts showing the tools, techniques, and early instances of dowsing, as well as cross-sectional views contrasting the dowser's explanation of groundwater with the geologist's.

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