Playing with the Gods: Materialit I will then use this ancient observation as a hermeneutic lens onto divinatory practices and the materiality involved here. I will conclude on an enquiry into the question of how central this very materiality is for the construction of the divine and the establishment of a bidirectional relationship with it. In many instances, the uncontrollable generation of dataβby chance developments in nature or soundscape, from the form of livers to the flight and sounds of birds, or by the active creation of artificial chance mechanisms, the drawing of lots, for instanceβallowed to see divine action and divine messages behind such data.
Evidently, the veiling of the very construction of the divine does not foreground such intersections, yet evidence can be found looking at what seems to be side tracks at first glance. The literary form enabling to walk that delicate line was the dialogue, three eminent voices in De natura deorum , just two, the Stoic supporter and the skeptical critic of divination, in De divinatione. For that, they need to communicate their will to the humans, and hence the humans must be able to receive and understand messages.
Subsequently, I will use this established and already ancient observation as a hermeneutic lens onto divinatory practices and the materiality involved here. On that basis I will argue that this very materiality at the core of religious communication and its performative construction of the divine is comparable and even overlapping with ancient ludic practices. Both are practices of meaningful and consequential attributions of agency beyond the pragmatics of the situation.
Gods come into being in the performance, one could summarize that claim. The argument is a negative one, demonstrating that no field of knowledge is in need or could benefit from divination.
Is there, then, in such objects some quality that we can better perceive with the aid of prophecy and inspiration than we can with the aid of the senses alone?
