Thank you so much to the professor for his kind introduction and for all the organizers

of the congress and especially to professor Luque for his invitation to share today with

all of us my work on Alterity, Outerness and Divination in the Roman Empire.

When we talk about divination practices during the Roman Empire we must bear in mind the

fact that the definition of the boundaries of the acceptable religion was deeply marked

by the need of the elite to define its role and position in the Roman State.

All the religious practices which don't match this category as magic, foreign cults or all

the divinatory rituals not regulated and controlled by the State and so considered as dangerous

for the maintenance of the Roman order such as astrology, oracles, necromancy or prophecy

are identified by these very elites as alien elements to the Roman religiousness.

This status of non-official activity established out of the control of the State and often

used against its interests is expressed through the use of the word superstitio, understood

during the imperial period as an antonym of the word religion.

While religio included all the religious cults that shaped the traditional Roman identity

from a senatorial point of view, superstitio referred to all the cults and religious activities

considered out of this conventionally established frame.

Along with this process of creation of a Roman religio, a religion coherent with the values

and interests of the highest classes, tradition and in charge of the main priest-cults and

wielders of the monopoly of the performance of the official public religious rites, the

reiterative links established between otherness and unorthodox cults will have a special relevancy.

A class is created between Roman religion, cult and divination controlled by the state

officialdom and a series of religions, cults and divinatory practices related to groups

excluded from the official rites, either defined by their relative poverty, sex or ethnic origin.

It will also bear in mind the link between heterodox divinatory practices and the consultations

about the future of the emperor being a serious menace to the continuity of the power of the

ruler, the continuous persecution of the producers and consumers of the alternative ways of divination

is not so strange.

At the moment of analyzing the alternative prophecy in the empire, we face its continuous

denigration on the part of the classic sources.

Since these were generally written by the senatorial elite, which saw its privileged

position threatened by the arrival of new means of divination and outlined its own singularity

through the confrontation with the divination and beliefs of the others, our vision of the

divinatory heterodox rituals is deeply marked by the traditional Roman point of view.

The continuous link between alternative divination and religious practices traditionally considered

as barbaric, as was the case of magic or human sacrifices, was a constant in the Roman sources.

Our lack of text, literally created by the practitioners of heterodox divination, being

the so-called Greek magical papyri and obsession, worsened our interpreting problems, allowing

the perpetuation of the prejudices and stereotypes of the hegemonic discourse transmitted by

classical sources.

The heterodox divination in the empire will be characterized, therefore, by its link with

alien cults to the Roman traditional religion and with rights considered as opposite to

the most major one, by its continuous persecution on the part of the authorities due to the

treat that it supposes for the established order and to the identification of its officiants

with social groups excluded from the divinatory officialdom, as foreigners, women, or poor.

We find ourselves facing the analysis of a discourse of otherness and marginalization

whose principal function was to define the social acceptable religiousness by means of

the exclusion and demonization of the diversity and to consolidate the social identity of

the senatorial class and its power inside the state.

I have divided my study between the intuitive divination or natural divination and inductive

divination or artificial divination as the Roman sources normally did.