Sign Languages: Divination and Providentialism in the "Primary Chronicle" of Kievan Rus'

Abstract

This essay argues that remnants of a socio-religious dynamic are embedded in the Primary Chronicle. A Weberian perspective is developed in order to unearth and explicate this dynamic. Max Weber's key insight - that Christian providentialism represents a rationalized form of magical divination, which it therefore denounces - opens up a way of explaining two related points: first, why a 'rational', systematic kind of language appears precisely in conjunction with topics of divinatory import, but not elsewhere, in the chronicle text - a hitherto unappreciated point; and second, why exactly the chroniclers castigate the 'magical' discourses of the volkhvy, the indigenous diviners of Kievan Rus'.