Reviewed by: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations of Divination and Magic: Manipulating the Divine ed. by Jesper Sørensen and Anders Klostergaard Petersen Vanessa Da Silva Baptista jesper sørensen and anders klostergaard petersen, eds. Theoretical and Empirical Investigations of Divination and Magic: Manipulating the Divine. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021. Pp. viii + 288. Terminology is a perennial issue in the social sciences. Scholars must decide whether to use vast and vague catch-all terms to capture a variety of distinct practices that share some similarities or to use only culturally and temporally specific categories. Jesper Sørensen's and Anders Klostergaard Petersen's edited volume focuses on two especially complicated terms: magic and divination. [End Page 337] Sørensen and Petersen problematize the categories of magic and divination, particularly in the context of colonialism and the emergent Western esoterism that influenced early anthropology. However, through theoretical reflections which take their cues from twenty-first century cognitive science, they ultimately provide a defence of the communicative, as opposed to analytic, value of these terms. Across ten chapters, which are unified in their attention to the methodologies and frameworks of cognitive science, the collection evaluates the effective use of magic and divination as categories in various specific contexts from ancient Greece to the contemporary world. Corby Kelly and Jörg Rüpke analyze how divination and magic, respectively, were conceived in distinct times and places. They demonstrate how the acceptability of these activities was partially determined by their associations with other factors. Kelly examines the fourth century Pseudo-Platonic Epinomis, placing it within wider contemporary trends of Greek philosophical writing. Kelly convincingly argues that the Epinomis outlines a structure of the universe which actively marginalized divination by relating it to wage earning and the unseeable, and thereby unknowable, elements of the universe. Rüpke's article complements Kelly's in examining how magic was understood by a single intelligent Roman individual, Propertius. In his close reading, Rüpke shows that Propertius's allusions to magic establish that it was one of several legitimate recourses open to ancient Roman people but that, due to its connection with potions and therefore resemblance to the illegal activity of poisoning, it was predominantly understood as a last resort. Other contributions seek to examine the relationship between magic or divinatory practices and religion. Dimitris Xygalatas's article argues largely for continuity in the importance and popularity of divinatory practices throughout Greek history, from antiquity to the present day. Xygalatas shows how the Orthodox Church has frequently chosen to be pragmatic in their response to extra-liturgical practices, choosing to turn a blind eye or, on occasion, even engaging in or condoning these practices at a local level. Gideon Bohak's contribution provides an edition and translation of a medieval Jewish recipe for opening doors and contextualizes this within medieval Jewish culture. Bohak demonstrates that while it may have had its detractors, the Torah's prohibition of magic meant that the Jewish people who used this recipe would not have considered it to be magic. However, Bohak defends the practice of calling this recipe magic as this allows for the investigation of similar recipes, in a medieval Jewish context and cross-culturally, that were variously understood as magical or licit. Jørgen Podemann Sørensen's and Jesper Sørensen's contributions are highly theoretical, aiming to build morphologies and models that allow for the [End Page 338] comparative study of divinatory practices. Podemann Sørensen makes a persuasive case for the continued use of divination as a category of academic interrogation by comparing a sample of five temporally and geographically distinct divinatory practices under a simple model wherein an act randomly selects a text which is interpreted to provide meaning. While generally convincing, it felt at times that the example of the oracle at Delphi was an outlier that did not comfortably fit into this framework. Sørensen's contribution argues that by examining the various cognitive mechanisms at play in divinatory practices scholars can unpack their logic and function, thereby allowing a diverse set of practices to be synthesized into complementary models. While the examples are interesting, the attempts to systematize various practices without recalling the...