In the "processual microcosm" of performance (Turner 1985:183), elements of one's chaotic, ineffable, and/or inchoate experience are found to be significant.1 Bringing about such a recognition is "the work of ritual." Through divination and related rituals people remember, revise, rearrange, and reconstitute elements of history to understand and cope with present difficulties, so that a better future can be expected. History is not absolute. Knowledge is not immutable. Rather, understanding is an ongoing process. People have no history with a capital "H"; instead, they engage in "historization" (see Davis-Roberts 1981 ). Personal past and collective "tradition" are invented as the need arises, despite what inside informants and outside observers may say to the contrary.2 As Luc de Heusch has written, "history molds itself in the categories of symbolic thought" (1982:229). The nature of these categories-that is, of logic itself-is such that ideas and inventions appropriate to present needs often seem to have existed "always." Instead, as Richard Schechner has suggested, they are "restored behavior," or "rebehavior" (I985:36). Logic is retroactive, and in social dramas actors can compose a "me" that is both consistent with the past and appropriate to the present. This important work is effected through performance, what Schechner calls "twice-behaved behavior" (1985:36). "Squeezing the 'meaning' out of an event," as Victor Turner wrote (1982:13), occurs in performances that structure standpoint and context (see Kapferer I986:I94). A study of Tabwa divination seances and the sequences of action they imply reveal the dynamics of society: how each new situation is understood and decisions are made. The "work of ritual" is serious business, as individual actors attempt to understand, cope with, and take action to redress crises of health and social welfare. People reflect upon the way life is and how it works in moments of performance. They do so in the heightened contexts of crises when failure to take action, or rather failure to take the proper action, may lead to intense suffering, death, or destruction.