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Abstract

​This thesis produces a novel interpretive model for the functioning of divination practices by combining the lenses of modern cognitive analysis and Jane Bennett’s “Vital Materialism,” a New Materialist ontological framework. This model is especially developed to reanalyze the Greco-Egyptian Magical Formularies (GEMF)—a late-antique corpus of ritual manuals which record a diverse array of divination techniques. The thesis begins with a foundational observation: that the quasi-animism displayed in the GEMF—which assumes the existence of autonomous spiritual entities that can affect or manifest in material bodies, and which I reconstruct through close-reading of selected formularies—bears many affinities with the notion of “object agency” from New Materialist philosophy. These outlooks are by no means identical but are close enough to prompt a thorough comparative investigation. Thus, I inquire how Greco-Egyptian divination rituals can be understood as collaborative processes between human and nonhuman agents. ​To link modern theory and ancient practice, I leverage a cognitive-analytical approach to divination, drawing especially from Peter Struck’s “Surplus Knowledge” theory, which reads divination rituals as systems for expressing pre-discursive, intuitive insight cultivated through an “omen-minded” disposition. Vital Materialist theory supplements this model by reframing intuition as emergent from dynamic assemblages of human bodies, materials, and environmental forces, decentering human agency in favor of distributed cognition. ​The study concludes that Vital Materialism offers a productive supplement to cognitive approaches, illuminating the ways material assemblages in GEMF rituals actively participated in the generation of altered states and intuitive revelations. By situating late-antique divination within a broader conversation about material agency, distributed cognition, and human–nonhuman entanglement, this research bridges classical studies, philosophy, and the study of religion. It suggests that ancient divination, far from being a vestige of “irrational” belief, can be understood as an epistemic technology—an experimental method for navigating uncertainty through the co-production of knowledge by humans and the active material systems that surround them.