Divination and Human Nature [Review]

Mythlore, 2018

Plato on Divination and Nondiscursive Knowing In his most vivid narrative of his hero's life story, Plato has Socrates center his autobiography on an act of divination. Th e Apology shows a man driven by a provocative pronouncement from the Delphic oracle to devote his life to solving its riddle. Pleading his own defense before an Athenian jury, Socrates presents a carefully constructed speech, rich in mythological allusions. He compares himself to Achilles (28c) and likens his life's work to a Herculean labor (22a). 1 A more subtle and also more powerful point of reference is another fi gure, the Th eban hero Oedipus, whose life was as profoundly shaped by the oracle as he argues his own was. But while Oedipus spends his days trying to disprove the oracle, in an archetypal act of intellectual hubris, Plato reverses the main point of the traditional tale, making his story one of intellectual humility. He dramatizes his hero's epistemological caution through counterpoint. Plato consistently reaches back to myth, usually with an underlying purpose of supplanting a mythic archetype with one of his own more philosophical models-as when Er's trip to the other world is said to supersede Odysseus' narrative ("no tall tale to Alcinous" Rep. 614b). 2 It is somewhat surprising, given its prominent place in the corpus, that this particular retelling has not received more attention. 3 1 For this reading of πόνος here, see Silvia Montiglio, Wandering in Ancient Greek Culture

2016

For many millenia and across the whole Old World, from Eastern to Western Eurasia, and fro the tip of Southern Africa to the highlands of Britannia, people were in the habit of practicing divination, or the art of translating information from their gods into the realm of human knowledge. On a scale whose breadth we have yet to fully appreciate, they assumed clandestine signs were continuously being revealed through the natural world and its creatures (including their own bodies, asleep or awake). They received messages from temple-based oracles, as well as in their dreams, from the entrails of the animals they killed, from lightning, fire, lots, pebbles, livers, fired tortoise shells, the stars, birds, the wind, and nearly anything else that moved.1 These practices were not, for the most part, considered esoteric or marginal. The inclinations of the divine, like the weather, were simply a part of the ancient atmosphere, and just about wherever we look in the sources, we find people ...

Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2006

PYTHIA -N.PATERGIANNAKIS, 2016

In the ancient times, the divination served only the bright forces of good and functioned as a prophecy to warn humans of events that resulted from their actions and their free will. So, it becomes clear how spiritualism and divination differ from occult and magic. Spirituality and divination serve the greatest good, as they are the result of the positive power of the subconscious and the positive energy resulting from feelings of love for the humanity (Platonic vision). Instead, occultism and magic serve the inferior instincts of human, as they are the result of the negative power of the subconscious and the negative dark forces resulting from the passions of humans and especially from the attraction that people feel about the sovereignty in the matter and other humans. So, the Ancient Greek Divination and Philosophy exist on the Opposite Side of the Magic and Occult

Argumentation, 2023

This argument explores transcultural commonalities among civic arguments from divination in global antiquity. In the ancient world, proponents engaged in kisceral arguments deriving from divinatory signs: arguments ex divinatione regarding prospective civic action. Under ideal circumstances, their aim was to help insure that the collective action of human political organizations was aligned with the natural synchrony of the cosmos. Thus, civic arguments from divination were employed to anticipate the future’s course based on the signs the system produced holistically. In ancient Mesopotamia, China, and Rome, divination was employed as a tool for aligning the order of human society to that of a conception of metaphysical or cosmic order. By comparing these argumentative examples and rationales, we see a broader context for the way in which humans made arguments toward political futurity outside more conventional syllogistic formulations concerning causation. Rather, the argumentative strategies of many ancient cultures embraced an understanding of the future as the logical outcome of a holistic dynamism in kairotic time.

Divination was a widespread, varied and long-running practice of the ancient world. Current approaches to explaining its longevity have ranged across anthropological theories, which emphasise the role of oracles in establishing social consensus, to cognitive approaches that raise the question of hyper-active agency detection, biases towards false-positive pattern detection and confirmation bias. While raising important insights, the emphasis of both approaches has tended to be on semantic and mentalistic dimensions. In contrast, this paper seeks to draw attention back to the role of the body in processes of divination. Focusing on oracular consultation and drawing on research on embodied cognition, specifically theories of embodied simulation, this paper focuses on the key role of the imagination in the generation of alternative possibilities for future action—and the role of the body in those mental activities. It suggests that the process of oracular consultation may have provided a physical experience of oracular The published version of this paper is in: Klostergaard Petersen, A. Gilhus, I. S. Martin, L. H., Sinding Jensen, J. Sørensen, J. eds. 2018. Evolution, Cognition, and the History of Religion: New Synthesis. Festschrift in Honour of Armin W. Geertz. Leiden, 447-460.

Plato Journal, 2014

In Plato’s Ion, inspiration functions in contradistinction to technē. Yet, paradoxically, in both cases, there is an appeal to divination. I interrogate this in order to show how these two disparate accounts can be accommodated. Specifically, I argue that Socrates’ appeal to Theoclymenus at Ion 539a-b demonstrates that Plato recognizes the existence of intuitive seers who defy his own distinction between possession and technical divination. Such seers provide an epistemic model for Ion; that he does not notice this confirms he is not an exemplary rhapsode.

Divination is one of the most peculiar aspects of ancient Greece and Rome, but only in the last 60 years has it been considered as a legitimate field of study. Starting from the collective volume by Jean Pierre Vernant, Divination and Rationalité, published in 1974, scholars have begun to examine the link between divination and the epistemic value in the Greco-Roman world and in contemporary non-Western cultures. Within the ancient world, it has been noted that divination was strictly related "to systems, discourses and representations of knowledge, to intellectual and social activities, and to the practicalities of daily life". 1 This emerges from oracular evidence, because consulting an oracle was a process that involved communication and interaction between god, seer and consultant, in order to produce knowledge. We can recall, for example, the aphorism γνῶθι σαυτὸν ("know yourself"), inscribed in the temple of Apollo at Delphi and often interpreted as evidence of oracular wisdom, as Pausanias explains in the Ἑλλάδος περιήγησις. 2 The maxim possibly highlights a special connection between divination and knowledge exthat is the focus of the collective volume Divination and Knowledge in Greco-Roman Antiquity, edited by Crystal Addey. The volume opens with a general introduction on divination and its relationship with knowledge, recognizing also its centrality in religious and ritual traditions in the Greco-Roman antiquity. Retracing the previous studies