This erudite book is not Lisa Raphals's first comparative study. It carries substantially further the quest that she began in Knowing Words: Wisdom and Cunning in the Classical Traditions of China and Greece (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992). It provides detailed and nuanced comparisons based on key issues and problems in each tradition. It favors investigating “concrete particulars embedded in their social contexts or institutions” (p. 387), alert to change and debate within each culture.
Raphals has used all the pertinent Chinese and Greek sources before the transformative advent of Buddhism in the first case and Christianity in the second. She has also canvassed the scholarly literature of divination that uses the tools of history, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology.
The point of comparing two highly evolved traditions is insights that make specialists uncomfortable, that raise questions invisible from within one field. This study explores, on the one hand, a group of city-states, none as large as present-day Athens, scattered across the Balkan peninsula and parts of the Mediterranean shore. Its people thought of divination as communications from their gods, a family of fickle individuals who lived forever and knew everything. Writing was novel, and unimportant in divination.
On the other hand, it examines the culture of an enormous land mass that by the third century BCE had become a centralized empire, but which for more than a millennium before that had relied on state divination, recorded in writing. Many Chinese gods were royal ancestors or bureaucrats, “but they do not control the cosmos directly and cosmic behavior is not arbitrary” (pp. 146–47). Divination was not addressed to them; it interpreted signs that revealed the spontaneous workings of the universe. It is not surprising that in the two civilizations beliefs about prognostication “arose from different assumptions, led in different directions, and changed over time” (p. 381). For instance, unlike the Chinese case, “Greek divination records did not take a systematic form that encouraged the development of symbolic systems for interpretation” (p. 370).
Chinese and Greek mantic practice contributed to systematic thought in different ways. Chinese notions of symmetry, numbers, and abstract patterns of change were central to the development of systematic medicine, astronomy, and cosmology. Greek debates about divination were essential to the development of skepticism, logic, and theories of causation. “In both China and Greece we see changing and contested relations between mantic practitioners and the practitioners of science and philosophy” (p. 386).
Raphals pays ample attention to archeological discoveries and their dissonance with the revealed textual tradition in both cultures. Divination and Prediction in Early China and Ancient Greece outlines the issues in modern debates, and occasionally tries to settle them.
This is a work of high scholarship. It does everything it can to facilitate new insights in classical studies and Sinology. The volume is attractively designed, on good paper, and well bound.
