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This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. It begins by discussing the practice of divination for many millennia and across the whole Old World. It then reviews bodies of scholarship on divination and make a distinction between classical Greek ideas of divination and the quite different phenomena of prophecy in the Hebrew Bible or the later development of apocalyptic literature. It then details the book's effort to work through evidence that positions divinatory knowledge within the classical thought-world in a way that is more or less analogous to the position of the modern concept of intuition. It also makes a case for understanding divination as more closely related to surplus knowing than occult religion.

This chapter attempts to lay out a general sense of how divination functions in Plato's work. It focuses not on how seriously Plato takes divination, but rather on how he takes it. Irrespective of any endorsement he may have hinted at toward the idea of knowledge arriving via traditional divinatory pathways, in what particular ways does he talk about it? The analysis proceeds from a sense that Plato uses divination as an authoritative piece of his cultural context, to specify with greater precision his own ideas about ways of knowing; and as he is doing this, he helps us understand the nature of divination, as it is understood in his time. In general in his corpus, it is argued that Plato treats divination (in a rainbow of tones from irony to seriousness) as being based on a claim about a particular form of cognition, one marked especially for being nondiscursive.

This chapter examines the thoughts of Neoplatonist Iamblichus on divination. Neoplatonists take the discussions of the master as an invitation to understand a newly reconfigured idea of divination as much more than a comparandum, but as itself a vehicle to reveal philosophical knowledge on large questions. Iamblichus speaks about a new, “true” kind of divination, through assimilation to the divine, which yields sweeping knowledge of the philosophical underpinnings of the universe as a whole, and which is possible only through the most thorough eschewing of any bodily connection. In the school's most robust discussion, Iamblichus defines this new kind, consistently, in contrast to the tentative knowledge available by traditional divinatory practice.

This chapter suggestes that Stoic conceptions of divinatory knowing promote the idea that the cosmos itself is a single unified animal. This notion is somewhat familiar, given the parallel conception in the Timaeus, a text that the Stoics use to build some of their own core views, but it will require a substantial amount of unpacking to see all the ways it is pertinent to the Stoics' thinking on divination. When approaching the topic, their main unit of analysis is no longer the discrete individual human being, with this or that hidden process humming away, but rather the cosmos as a whole, which has its own internal activities that result in surplus knowledge for the human individuals embedded in it. In the Stoic view, the human creature amounts to a tiny corpuscle moving about inside a vast intelligent creature. Human sentience is embedded in the sentience of the larger whole, and in some circumstances the lines between the two are not meaningfully distinct.

This chapter examines Aristotle's thoughts on divination. As with Plato, his most detailed thinking on divination centres on dreams. He positions noncoincidental prescient dreams as examples of surplus knowledge that are provocative, and he sets out to attempt to explain them. The cognitive event underlying them is nondiscursive, happens in a lower region of the soul, and emerges from the cusp of physiology and psychology. Unlike with Plato, we do not have a range of references to the phenomenon across the corpus, which we might aggregate and use to discern facets of his views. Instead, we have a concentrated treatment in one treatise, On Divination during Sleep. The text is the shortest among his surviving corpus, and it is entirely justified to take this as a rough index of its importance to him, relative to such larger issues as ethics, the structure of animal bodies, or causation.

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. The account in this book has been of philosophical schools trying to make sense of a puzzling phenomenon. As is always the case in looking at an intellectual history from this perspective, one may rightly raise the question of whether it has pertinence outside these rarified circles. Do the perspectives apparent in those texts allow us to gain new insights in other domains of culture? The remainder of the chapter offers a slightly closer look at a case study which provides an example for the kinds of insights that may be available. The vantage provided here gives new purchase on the divine signs in the culminating books of Homer's Odyssey, which are sending us a slightly richer message about Penelope than we have yet fully appreciated.