Many types of divination in the Graeco-Roman world relied on interventions of human technical knowledge. This chapter explores astragalomancy (knuckle bone divination) and catoptromancy (mirror divination) as two ‘technical’ modes of ancient divination which, through catoptric and mathematical knowledge respectively, reflected and shaped theological assumptions about how the gods intervened in the human realm, and how this connected to human knowledge. The chapter also considers how religious architecture was technologically enhanced for particular theological purposes. The oracle to Trophonios in Lebadeia is analysed through this lens where human technē was essential to achieving a connection with the divine in this artificially manufactured divinatory setting.

This chapter examines the earliest cases of sorcery trials in Mexico in 1520s and 1530s. A discussion is presented of the ways that Spanish women learned magic from Nahua women in Mexico City. Spanish women adopted multiple Nahua cultural behaviors. These included understanding the role of the tiçitl; metaphysics of Nahua forms of healing; the god Tezcatlipoca; and invocations in Nahuatl language. Spanish women learned about the Nahua cultural significance of sweeping and brooms, associated with cosmic order and cleanliness. Spanish women also quickly learned Nahuatl, communicating with domestic servants and in the street, where the Nahuatl word for market, tianguis, became the first Nahuatl loanword in Mexican Spanish, as early as 1524. Other cases against Spanish women show that these women quickly adopted Mesoamerican plant material for spells and that these women understood the rite of corn hurling (tlapohualiztli).

This chapter analyses the historical evolution of the creation and aesthetics of Nigerian artists during the colonial period through local musicians and actors. Moreover, the importance of oral traditions before the interaction with Europeans – such as proverbs, panegyrics, and rituals – incorporated Christianity through schools by the Nigerian elite and Western music and instruments. In the case of music, the chapter mentions how precolonial cultural traditions shaped it, the influence of ex-enslaved people from the Caribbean (such as Brazilians) who returned to the city of Lagos, and European contributions. Methodologically, the chapter follows musicians such as Fela Sowande, Victor Olaiya, and Bobby Benson. They, in different ways, integrated precolonial elements to create a national tradition that would create unity in the colonial period. In the case of theater, the chapter also mentions its historical evolution: from traveling theater to the work of Hubert Ogunde, Kola Ogunmola, and Duro Ladipo, as icons representing creativity and aesthetics, introducing Nigerian cultural elements to theater, such as Yoruba, Hausa, and Igbo language, myths, and stories, linking with Western traditions such as Christianity. The chapter concludes that the artists of the colonial period sought, through their musical and theatrical works, to preserve precolonial traditions.

Discussion of the transfer of cult knowledge from Anatolia to European Hellas in both the Bronze Age and Iron Age, with a close examination of Ephesian Artemis and other Asian Mother-goddess figures with consideration of Ur-Aeolian (= Ahhiyawan) and Aeolian involvement in the process.

In most ancient cultures, what we now call religion was interwoven throughout all aspects of life and did not always form a discrete cultural domain. Nevertheless, its principal symbols and traditions can be sufficiently distinguished to allow for a fruitful examination of the relationship of law and religion in antiquity. This chapter pursues that endeavour, with particular attention to instances when the sources at our disposal indicate, explicitly or implicitly, that law was relying on religious ideas to achieve legal ends. The chapter considers the role of religion in legitimizing law, in public law and governance, in legal transactions and proceedings, and in the determination and punishment of wrongdoing. It ultimately seeks to add clarity and specificity to the scholarly description of how law and religion interacted in the ancient world.

This chapter examines the religious role of Alexander as king and military commander in the Greek world and the territory of the Achaemenid empire. It explores how he used sanctuaries of the gods to develop his relationship with the Greek cities, as locations for the meetings of associations of Greek cities, and as sites for making dedications. It considers the honours offered to Alexander by the Greek cities, arguing that these were offered spontaneously, and were not a response to any request from Alexander. It discusses his use of diviners and other religious experts while on campaign. It considers the extent to which Alexander engaged with the religious practices and expectations of the territories he conquered, including in particular Egypt and Babylon. It discusses the evidence that Alexander consciously attempted to emulate Heracles and Dionysus, and suggests that this is unlikely to reflect any historical reality. It then explores the story of Alexander’s visit to the oracle of Ammon/Amun at the Siwah oasis, suggesting that while Alexander was aware of the significance of his pharaonic titulary, including the phrase ‘son of Amun’, this did not lead to claims of divine filiation beyond Egypt.

This chapter investigates the contours of prognosis itself. It begins by describing prognosis in the Neoplatonist Iamblichus’ De Mysteriis. It then “catches” Iamblichus in the act of inventing a new definition of prognosis in his response to Porphyry, shifting it away from discrete knowledge of particular events towards panoptic knowledge that emerges as an expression of divine substance. This chapter then shows how both the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies and the Manichaeans were also theorizing prognosis along similar lines.

In a recent article in the journal Kernos (2018, 31: 39–58), Julia Kindt compared ancient Greek epiphanic and oracular narratives and rightly argued that although both epiphany and divination explore analogous issues of limited human cognition at the face of the divine, recent studies of divine epiphany (Verity Platt, Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature and Religion, Cambridge University Press 2011, and Georgia Petridou, Divine Epiphany in Greek Literature and Culture, Oxford University Press 2015) tend to keep discussions of these religious phenomena separate. This chapter is an attempt to readdress this seeming imbalance by focusing more explicitly on complex self-conscious narratives pertaining to incubation (enkoimesis, kataklisis) in Imperial Pergamum, a religious practice that could be thought as offering an interesting intersection of divine epiphany and what Kindt calls ‘inspired divination’. More specifically, this paper focuses on the dynamics and problematics of diagnostic and therapeutic divination, as delineated in Aelius Aristides’ Sacred Discourses (Hieroi Logoi, Or. 47–52 Keil), Galen’s De curandi ratione per venae sectionem (4.23 = 11.314–315 K.), and contemporary epigraphic evidence from the temples of Asclepius in Pergamum and Epidaurus.

This chapter examines the idea of the prophetically able holy man, or theios anêr, and argues that the attribution of sagehood to prophets in the Hellenistic Jewish tradition paved the way to the creation of the idealised prophet-sage of the Greek theios anêr tradition. This process radically altered the way in which Greeks – including pagans, Jews, and Christians – conceptualised the role of the prophet. The merging of the rational-dialectical epistemic claims of the sage with the revelatory epistemology of the prophet in authors like Philo established a potentially universal scope to the prophet-sage’s knowledge; while both the prophet and sage had defined epistemologies and limits in traditional Greek and Jewish thought, the new-prophet sage understood nothing less than the ‘structure of the cosmos and the activity of the elements’.

This chapter draws attention to a little-known text attributed to John Chrysostom, which has so far not aroused the interest of specialists in ancient divination and prophecy: the prologue to the commentary on the Book of Jeremiah, which nevertheless enjoyed a certain popularity in the Byzantine world. The prologue exposes a classification of forms of prophecy that has no notable parallel in patristic literature. A significant parallel can be established instead with the Neoplatonic theory of divination, as set forth for example in Iamblichus’ Response to Porphyry (De mysteriis). This parallel concerns in particular the hierarchy of the forms of predictive knowledge, as well as the relationship between demonic and natural prophecy/divination. An English translation and a commentary of the fragment concerning the prophecy is given.

Divination was an important focus of philosophical dialogue and ‘pagan’-Christian religious debates in late antiquity.One of the most extensive late antique exchanges on the nature of divination and other religious practices is that evident in Porphyry’s Letter to Anebo and Iamblichus’ Reply of the Master Abamon to the Letter of Porphyry to Anebo and the Solutions to the Questions It Contains. This chapter re-assesses the key features of this exchange, arguing for its status as an important philosophical dialogue which bears some resemblance to oracular modes of discourse. In order to support this argument, the broader status of questioning, interrogation, and inquiry in traditional Greek oracular practices and within Platonism is examined. The chapter analyses the ways in which Porphyry’s and Iamblichus’ exchange is framed within these philosophical and oracular contexts, demonstrating that this dialogue draws implicitly on Socrates’ interrogation of the Delphic oracle as presented in Plato’s Apology and on Plutarch’s Delphic Dialogues. The citation and discussion of Porphyry’s Letter to Anebo by the Christian Church Fathers Eusebius and Augustine will also be considered in relation to exploring pagan-Christian religious approaches and debates.

This article analyzes women’s access to divine dreams in the Jewish texts of the Greco-Roman era: the Jubilees, the Liber antiquitatum biblicarum, the Jewish War, Jewish Antiquities, and Against Apion. By evaluating women’s dreams in light of anthropological understanding of divine dreams, that is, dreams that somehow claim to have a divine origin, this chapter aims to offer a new model for understanding women’s dreams in ancient Jewish texts. It is argued that while the preserved literature includes only a few dreams experienced by women, these examples nonetheless provide essential evidence of women being recipients of divine information in ancient Jewish texts.

According to Augustine, the limits of human autopsy restricted certain modes of knowing which relied on detailed observations. This claim unites Augustine’s criticism of the power of daemons and of astrology to predict the future. The minute calculations that astrology requires are beyond human sense perception (Conf. 7.6.9–10; Doctr. chr. 2.23.34; Civ. 5.1–6), so are the tricks used by daemons which Augustine equates to abilities specific to animals, such as the olfactory skill of dogs (Div. 3.7; cf. Civ. 9.15). This chapter examines the influence of a variety of texts on Augustine’s thought, including Ambrose’s Hexaemeron, Cicero’s De divinatione, and Apuleius’ De deo Socratis. I argue that Augustine consistently focuses his rhetoric against pagan divination on the limits of human sense perception through a unique combination of criticisms, inspired by both the Christian and the classical canons.