JØRGEN PODEMANN SØRENSEN On Divination. An Exercise in Comparative Method

At the end of his famous essay 'Religion as a Cultural System', Clif-ford Geertz (1993: 125) had occasion to make the point that studies of the role of e.g. divination in reinforcing social control "with but the most general, common-sense view " of what divination is as a religious pattern seemed to him "not particularly promising. " What is needed, he concludes, is "a theoretical analysis of symbolic action comparable in sophistication to what we now have for social and psychological action... " Divination is only one of his examples, and his call for theories of symbolic action has certainly not been fruitless. What I have to offer is not a new theory of symbolic action, but a modest at-tempt, on a comparative basis, to arrive at a slightly more sophisti-cated idea of divination 'as a religious pattern'. This attempt will be made with a view both to illustrate and to discuss comparative method. I shall therefore try to be very explicit about every intellec-tual operation involved, I hope not to the point of boredom