Divination

Divination is defined by what it is reaching for and how, not by whether it works or which tradition it belongs to. It seeks either divine knowledge, meaning universal conscious, or divine choice, meaning universal will, and it does so through skill and a methodology rather than through intercession. That last part is what admits rationalism and some science to the category, and Marsh means the inclusion seriously rather than as provocation. A discipline that trains practitioners in a technique for obtaining knowledge beyond individual perspective is doing what a diviner does, whatever it calls the object it is reaching for. Her history places divination among the original categories of magic. What is now called religion was divided into guilt allocation, guilt deflection and punishment, now largely the jurisdiction of law and economy, then divination and influence of outcomes, first transferred to prayer and now controlled by economics, then bondage and sublation, now the business of government. Forecasting, modelling and the prediction of markets are therefore not descendants of divination by loose analogy but the same function relocated. She said animists seldom concern themselves with the conscious outside divination, and even then typically work through a spirit intermediary, which marks divination as the exception rather than the norm in animist practice.

Anthropology treats divination as a widespread technique for making decisions under uncertainty, from Evans-Pritchard on Azande oracles onward, and the functionalist reading is that it resolves deadlock and distributes responsibility rather than that it predicts. Historians of science have documented the continuity between astrology and astronomy and between alchemy and chemistry, and Keith Thomas traced the decline of magic alongside the rise of other means of managing misfortune. Marsh's claim goes further than continuity. She does not say that science descended from divination but that some of it still is divination, since the defining features are the target and the method rather than the accuracy, which is a classification most historians of science would decline to make.