[2] The devotio has sometimes been interpreted in light of human sacrifice in ancient Rome,[3] and Walter Burkert saw it as a form of scapegoat or pharmakos ritual.
[4] By the 1st century BC, devotio could mean more generally "any prayer or ritual that consigned some person or thing to the gods of the underworld for destruction.
Livy explains that he will record the archaic ritual of devotio at length because "the memory of every human and religious custom has withered from a preference for everything novel and foreign.
"[10] Another votum that might be made in the field by a general was the evocatio, a ritual by means of which the tutelary deity of the enemy, particularly that of a city under siege, might be induced to come over to the Roman cause by the promise of superior cult.
Tacitus refers to the magic charms uncovered in connection with the poisoning of Germanicus as devotiones, indicating that the word had expanded its meaning to include other ritual acts in which an individual sought to harm and even kill another.