First section of the Introduction to a book titled "Ancient Divination and Experience":

"This volume is the result of a conference held in London, in July 2015, on the topic of divination in ancient cultures, with particular focus on Greece and Rome. The conference itself arose from the desire to explore approaches that diverged from the prevailing scholarly functionalist analyses of ancient divination. A recent summary of the state of anthropological research in this area will come as no surprise to classicists: ‘regardless of whether divination is conceived of as a means for providing emotional reassurance, a tool for restoring and sustaining a social structure, an instrument for making decisions, building consensus, and establishing political legitimacy, or an aid for maintaining a cognitive order’, the assumption in most studies has been that ‘divination [is] a derivation from, and representation of, some underlying processes which it serves to control’.

In scholarship on the ancient world, there is no doubt that such explanations reveal important socio-political dimensions of divinatory practice, but they also run the risk of obscuring from view the very people, ideologies, and experiences that scholars seek to understand. The problems raised by this approach have recently been summarized by the religious studies and anthropology scholar Patrick Curry: it ‘allows the observer-theorist to distance him- or herself from the subject matter and its human subjects, and then to inform them what they are “really” doing. You believe; we know.’ In contrast, the papers at this conference sought to re-examine what ancient people—primarily those in ancient Greek and Roman communities, but also Mesopotamian and Chinese cultures—thought they were doing through divination, and what this could tell us about the religions and cultures in which divination was practised. Contributors to the 2015 conference were asked to engage with one or more of a set of shared questions:

• What kinds of gods do ancient forms of divination presuppose?
• What beliefs, anxieties, and hopes did divination seek to address?
• What were the limits of human ‘control’ of divination?
• What kinds of human–divine relationships did divination create/sustain?"

Ancient Divination and Experience