Lived Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World
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Lived Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World Lived Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World Approaching Religious Transformations from Archaeology, History and Classics Edited by Valentino Gasparini, Maik Patzelt, Rubina Raja, Anna-Katharina Rieger, Jörg Rüpke and Emiliano Rubens Urciuoli in cooperation with Elisabeth Begemann Published with support of the European Research Council (ERC). ISBN 978-3-11-055757-2 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-055759-6 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-055794-7 DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110557596 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Library of Congress Control Number: 2019953611 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2020 Gasparini et al., published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston. This book is published with open access at www.degruyter.com. Cover image: Sacrificial scene; Roman wall painting. Edificio B, Murecine/Pompeii, 1st century CE. (Parco Archeologico di Pompei). Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com Contents Valentino Gasparini, Maik Patzelt, Rubina Raja, Anna-Katharina Rieger, Jörg Rüpke, Emiliano Rubens Urciuoli Pursuing lived ancient religion 1 Section 1: Experiencing the religious Maik Patzelt Introduction to Section 1 11 Richard L. Gordon (Re-)modelling religious experience: some experiments with hymnic form in the imperial period 23 Angela Kim Harkins Looking at the Shepherd of Hermas through the experience of lived religion 49 Maria Dell’Isola “They are not the words of a rational man”: ecstatic prophecy in Montanism 71 Nicole Belayche Kyrios and despotes: addresses to deities and religious experiences 87 Maik Patzelt About servants and flagellants: Seneca’s Capitol description and the variety of ‘ordinary’ religious experience at Rome 117 Ian Rutherford The experience of pilgrimage in the Roman Empire: communitas, paideiā, and piety-signaling 137 VI Contents Irene Salvo Experiencing curses: neurobehavioral traits of ritual and spatiality in the Roman Empire 157 Oda Wischmeyer Ego-documents on religious experiences in Paul’s Letters: 2 Corinthians 12 and related texts 181 Section 2: A “thing” called body: expressing religion bodily Anna-Katharina Rieger Introduction to Section 2 201 Emma-Jayne Graham Hand in hand: rethinking anatomical votives as material things 209 Georgia Petridou The “lived” body in pain: illness and initiation in Lucian’s Podagra and Aelius Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi 237 Heather Hunter-Crawley Divinity refracted: extended agency and the cult of Symeon Stylites the Elder 261 Nicola Denzey Lewis Food for the body, the body as food: Roman martyrs and the paradox of consumption 287 Section 3: Lived places: from individual appropriation of space to locational group-styles Valentino Gasparini Introduction to Section 3 309 Contents VII Valentino Gasparini Renewing the past: Rufinus’ appropriation of the sacred site of Panóias (Vila Real, Portugal) 319 Anna-Katharina Rieger This god is your god, this god is my god: local identities at sacralized places in Roman Syria 351 Rubina Raja Come and dine with us: invitations to ritual dining as part of social strategies in sacred spaces in Palmyra 385 Barbara E. Borg Does religion matter? Life, death, and interaction in the Roman suburbium 405 Section 4: Switching the code: meaning-making beyond established religious frameworks Emiliano Rubens Urciuoli Introduction to Section 4 437 Christopher Degelmann Symbolic mourning: the literary appropriation of signs in Late Republican and Early Imperial Rome 447 Luca Arcari P.Oxy. 1.5 and the Codex Sangermanensis as “visionary living texts”: visionary habitus and processes of “textualization” and/or “scripturalization” in Late Antiquity 469 Katell Berthelot To convert or not to convert: the appropriation of Jewish rituals, customs and beliefs by non-Jews 493 VIII Contents Douglas Boin Emperor Julian, an appropriated word, and a different view of 4th-century “lived religion” 517 Katharina Bracht The appropriation of the book of Jonah in 4th century Christianity by Theodore of Mopsuestia and Jerome of Stridon 531 Emiliano Rubens Urciuoli Weapons of the (Christian) weak: pedagogy of trickery in Early Christian texts 553 Biographical Notes 581 Index 587 Valentino Gasparini, Maik Patzelt, Rubina Raja, Anna- Katharina Rieger, Jörg Rüpke, Emiliano Rubens Urciuoli Pursuing lived ancient religion “Lived ancient religion” is a new approach to the religious practices, ideas, and institutions of the distant past. The notion of “lived religion”, as it has been ap- plied to recent phenomena that go beyond orthodox beliefs and religious organ- izations, cannot be transferred directly to a study of ancient religions because its methodology, inspired above all by anthropology and empirical sociology, re- quires some form of direct access to the living of the religion. This departure is implied by the oxymoronic form of “lived ancient religion”, which juxtaposes the living of religion with an only incompletely accessible past in which the subjects of study are no longer living. What might have been deplored as a loss, has turned out to be a gain, allowing for a significant expansion of the concept. While still invoking “lived religion” as it is understood in modern contexts,1 “lived ancient religion” is neither restricted to “everyday religion” nor focused on subjective experiences. Rather, the focus on the ancient world, the past, the already lived experiences and events, provides the opportunity to study lived re- ligion with a renewed and revitalized focus. This approach overcomes the dichot- omy of official and institutionalized religion on the one hand and “lived religion” on the other. Rather, taking the perspective on individual appropriations to its extremes, it also allows studying institutions as sedimented forms of lived reli- gion. Thus, as “lived ancient religion” a framework to analyze religious change is given, religion in the making even on a large scale (see Albrecht et al. 2018). As is indicated by the subtitle of the foundational project, “Questioning ‘cults’ and ‘polis religion’”, “lived ancient religion” shares a critical impetus with the study of contemporary “lived religion”. Yet given the very different degrees of coherence and embeddedness of religious practices in ancient Mediterranean societies, and in the Roman Empire in particular, our project (2012–2017) aimed at a much broader re-description of ancient “religion” (Rüpke 2012). Fundamentally, it questioned the implicit assumption that all inhabitants of the Imperium Romanum were equally religious. Likewise, the tendency to focus upon civic, that is collective, institutionalized religious practices was ques- tioned, as such a focus has led to the production of a series of sub-categories (“oriental cults”, “votive religion”, “funerary rites”) in order to save those phe- nomena whose relation to civic practice is indeterminate. This shift in focus was 1 E.g. Ammerman 1997; Hall 1997; Orsi 1997; Bergmann 2008; McGuire 2008. Open Access. © 2020 Valentino Gasparini et al., published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110557596-001 2 Valentino Gasparini et al. necessary because, in terms of quantity, these phenomena are the subject of themajorityofourancientevidenceandnotjustsomesmall,hardtorecon- cile, subset. Finally, the project criticized the descriptive reproduction of dis- ciplinary boundaries and the practice of treating “pagan” religion, Judaism, and Christianity as though they each had existed historically in separate worlds. From a methodological perspective, the project focused on four different social and communicative spaces, from the domestic over associations, public sanctuaries and literary communication. Building on recent research of the re- lationship between religious institutions and individualization (briefly Fuchs and Rüpke 2015; Fuchs et al. 2018) made it possible to focus on the connec- tions between social structures and individual agents, with the help of four key notions: appropriation, agency, situational meaning, and mediality (Raja and Rüpke 2015a). Appropriation denotes the situational adaptation and deployment of existing practices and techniques, institutions, norms, and media in order to suit the con- tingent needs and aims of the individual or group (Raja and Rüpke 2015a; Arnhold and Rüpke 2016; Rüpke 2016c). The idea of religious agency, which grew out of an interest in the ascription of agency and a focus on competences, was used to un- derline the priority of personal engagement, knowledge, and skill in providing services of all kinds, including public and private performances, authorship, teach- ing, and networking, whether on an occasional or a professional basis (Gordon 2005; Hüsken 2009; Petridou 2013; Raja 2016). Instead of concentrating on profes- sional religious roles (priests), this broader notion of “religious agency” functions as a perspective that replaces the narrow focus on the political elite of civic reli- gion, widening and underlining the impact that studies of ancient material can have on discussions of religion in the context