Revelation as DivinationDivine Presence and Knowledge in Oracles, Mysteries, and the Apocalypse of John

Explores not what John meant in Revelation but how Revelation produced meaning through ritual experience

• Provides a detailed description of Revelation’s Christ-following communities’ ritual practices in the context of the rituals of wider divination-practicing communities of the Roman Aegean.
• Moves rhetorical studies of Revelation as ekphrasis into the culturally specific context of ritual performance and its constructions of and interactions with divine presences.
• Argues for “divinatory performance” as a category inclusive of prophecies, revelations, oracles, and mystery initiations.
• Provides detailed discussions of and comparisons with several other divinatory performances around the Roman Aegean, including the Oracle of Apollo at Didyma, the Oracle of Apollo at Claros, the Oracle of Trophonius of Lebadea, the Mysteries of Eleusis, and the Orphic Mysteries.
• Brings together leading research from a range of disciplinary areas of focus—including performance criticism, ritual studies, material culture, affect theory, rhetorical criticism, and cultural criticism.

The Book of Revelation has been read as a literary prophecy, an allegorical divination narrative, or a piece of persuasive rhetoric. In this new approach to the apocalyptic text, Nathan Leach argues that Revelation’s oral performance to Christ-following assemblies in the ritual settings of the late 1st century CE formed an experience that resonated deeply with wider divinatory practices in Roman Asia.

Revelation as Divination uses an interdisciplinary theoretical repertoire including performance criticism, ritual studies, material culture and affect theory to show how Revelation created meaning through oral performance to its ancient participatory audience. Despite Revelation’s extreme social separatist polemic, it is through the performance’s experiential resonance with broader ancient Mediterranean divinatory practices that its production of divine presence and access to divine knowledge were socially readable, gained authenticity, and affected its participants.