A Cognitive History of Divination in Ancient Greece

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dc.contributor.authorStruck, Peter T
dc.contributor.authorStruck, Peter T
dc.date2023-05-17T19:08:59.000
dc.date.accessioned2023-05-22T13:03:15Z
dc.date.available2023-05-22T13:03:15Z
dc.date.issued2016-01-01
dc.date.submitted2017-12-07T10:20:13-08:00
dc.description.abstractFor 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 trying to gauge the prevailing winds. Scholars have yet to take account of the extraordinary diffusion of the phenomenon. It belongs to a small group of rather widely shared cultural forms from antiquity, alongside things like myth or sacrifice. While surely there is no easy, global answer as to why this is the case, better local answers will emerge from a fuller reckoning with this fact of near universal diffusion.
dc.identifier.urihttps://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/8060
dc.legacy.articleid1177
dc.legacy.fields10.1353/jhi.2016.0000
dc.legacy.fulltexturlhttps://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1177&context=classics_papers&unstamped=1
dc.rights<p>All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of scholarly citation, none of this work may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. For information address the University of Pennsylvania Press, 3905 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112.</p>
dc.source.beginpage1
dc.source.endpage25
dc.source.issue177
dc.source.issue1
dc.source.journalDepartmental Papers (Classical Studies)
dc.source.journaltitleJournal of the History of Ideas
dc.source.peerreviewedtrue
dc.source.statuspublished
dc.source.volume77
dc.subject.otherAncient History, Greek and Roman through Late Antiquity
dc.subject.otherArts and Humanities
dc.subject.otherClassics
dc.subject.otherIntellectual History
dc.subject.otherSocial and Cultural Anthropology
dc.titleA Cognitive History of Divination in Ancient Greece
dc.typeArticle
digcom.contributor.authorisAuthorOfPublication|email:STRUCK@SAS.UPENN.EDU|institution:University of Pennsylvania|Struck, Peter T
digcom.identifierclassics_papers/177
digcom.identifier.contextkey11213342
digcom.identifier.submissionpathclassics_papers/177
digcom.typearticle
dspace.entity.typePublication
relation.isAuthorOfPublication1b265f8c-721f-40de-bc52-a41d66342a9a
relation.isAuthorOfPublication.latestForDiscovery1b265f8c-721f-40de-bc52-a41d66342a9a
upenn.schoolDepartmentCenterDepartmental Papers (Classical Studies)
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