I'm not going to go into a full analysis of Harvey Whitehouse's modes framework now (I spent half an MA dissertation doing that, so it would get more longwinded than usual). Suffice to say that if you place a high importance on people memorising an intricate set of doctrines and then repeating them consistently (with deviations being flagged up and punished as heresy), then it helps if everyone involved is fully literate. Literacy (including printing) arguably makes consistency easier and deviations easier to spot. However, this clearly isn't the same thing as saying that literacy and stress on orthodoxy are invariably found together, so Classical Rome makes an interesting case study. Here's a society where upper-class men were pretty highly literate, but you don't seem to see very much emic stress on orthodoxy. That being the case, what kind of attitudes did they hold towards religious practice?
Beard et al. kick the chapter off with a welcome announcement:
"We shall stress too, in this chapter in particular, that traditional Roman paganism was not, as has been claimed, "completely tolerant, in heaven as on earth" [cf R.MacMullen's Paganism in the Roman Empire]. The fact that there was a plurality of gods did not necessarily mean that religion had no limits, or that (apart, of course, from Christianity), 'anything went'. Polytheistic systems can be just as resistant as monotheism to innovation and foreign influence. And, although Roman religion was marked throughout its history by religious innovation of all kinds, there were, at the same time, clear and repeated signs of concern about the influence of foreign cults; there were also specifically 'religious crimes', categories of religious transgression liable (as in the case of the unchastity of Vestals) to public punishment. Rome was never a religious 'free for all'." (p.212)
This is followed up by a really nice emic quote:
"If you truly desire to become immortal, do as I advise. In addition, not only must you yourself worship the divine everywhere and in every way according to ancestral custom and force everyone else to honour it; but you must also reject and punish those who make some foreign innovation in its worship, not only for the sake of the gods (since anyone despising them will not honour anyone else) but also because such people who introduce new deities persuade many people to change their ways, leading to conspiracies, revolts and factions, which are most unsuitable for a monarchy. So you must not allow anyone to be godless or a sorceror. The art of divination is necessary, and you should certainly appoint some as diviners from entrails and birds, to whom those wishing a consultation will go. But magicians should be absolutely banned, for such people, by speaking far more lies than truths, often cause many disturbances." -3rd century writer Cassius Dio (book LII.36.1-3). He presents this as advice given to Augustus by his friend Maecenas.
Later, the discussion of Christian persecutions provides a good example of a clash between two ways of conceptualising the doctrine/praxis issue. Pliny apparently wrote to Emperor Trajan for guidance on whether merely professing Christianity was in itself a crime, or whether the person in question had to have committed "associated criminal actions" before punishment was necessary (p.237, quote from Beard et al. rather than Pliny). Pliny himself offers his take on the issue:
"If they claimed [Christian faith], I repeated the question a second and third time, threatening them with capital punishment; those who persisted I ordered to be executed. For I had no hesitation... that that stubbornness and rigid obstinacy should certainly be punished."
150ish years later, Emperor Decius legally required all his subjects to offer a great sacrifice to the gods, and also to formally swear that they had sacrificed regularly throughout their lives (if they did so, they got a certificate signed by two officials. Kind of like a swimming certificate, I guess, but for sacrifices and with higher stakes than those generally entailed by failure to complete the 100m butterfly) (p.239).
"We should note, however, that Decius did not specify which gods were to be the recipients of the sacrifices- and it would seem that local gods were as acceptable as specifically Roman ones. In this case the demand was not that Christians should worship specifically Roman deities, but that they should participate in the sacrificial system as a whole with its offering of incense poured libations and and tasting of sacrificial meat. Sacrifice (not particular gods or festivals) here delimited and paraded the true subjects of Rome." (Beard et al. p.239)
Tacitus reports that the public had a mixed reaction to the executions of Christians. On the one hand, he notes that Christians were "hated for their vices". On the other hand, some pitied them- not because they thought they were innocent, but because they were killed "to gratify one man's cruelty, rather than serve the public good." (p.237)
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Another useful thing about this chapter: it presents us with an emic binary dichotomy. These are brilliant for roleplayers (and, more generally, anyone who wants to convincingly fake an understanding of a foreign culture based on a strictly minimal level of research). Just look at the isfet / ma'at dichotomy. Anyone trying to describe some sort of fictionalised quasi-Ancient Egyptian culture can cheaply milk that one for months. (Etic binary dichotomies don't generally seem to work as well, which is possibly why Levi-Strauss never produced a successful rpg).
The framework presented here is that of religio vs superstitio. This apparently is not the same as religion vs superstition, or at least not in the modern sense of true worship vs delusionary beliefs (or not in pagan writings, anyway- apparently some Latin-speaking Christians used them in that sense. See p.216). From the sound of it, an approximate definition of a religiosae person might be "someone who is pious in the sense that they observe respectable rituals scrupulously but don't get carried away". Superstitio, meanwhile, sounds something like "the tendency to take part in rituals which involve getting overexcited and doing disreputable things, perhaps whilst in the company of foreigners". Women were thought to be more prone to superstitio than men.
It sounds as thought the question of whether a ritual counted as superstitio was to have been independent of the question of whether it actually worked (or whether the gods would hypothetically be pleased by it). Thus "excessive commitment" to worship could itself be a kind of superstitio (p.217). For emically-defined examples of superstitio, Seneca mentions the following:
- stories which describe the gods committing incest
- ritual self-mutilation
- "displays of grief at the death of Osiris"
- "various Jewish practices"
- excesses in the worship of the Roman gods- "go to the Capitoline [temple] and you will be ashamed of the madness on display... one servant informs Jupiter of the name of those who visit him, another tells him the time, one is his bather, another his anointer- at least he makes an empty gesture with his hands to indicate anointing." (1)
- vegetarianism
(1) Seneca's words, quoted p.218. Everything else quoted or paraphrased from Beard et al. p.218 and 229
The Elder Pliny also used the word in relation to magic, arguing that magic's falsehood had been extensively demonstrated by the amount of money which Nero had lavished on it with no obvious payoff (p.219). And in case you wondered, Christianity was respectively described by Tacitus and Pliny the Younger as "a deadly superstitio" and "a degenerate superstitio carried to extravagant lengths" (p.225).
Christianity wasn't the only superstitio to be illegal in some cases. For example, Tacitus records that Pomponia Graecina, wife of a prominent senator, was tried for superstitio (p.228). Meanwhile, Isis-worship was banned within the pomerium (sacred border of the city of Rome), and later within any place within a Roman mile of the city. This didn't prevent an AD 19 scandal, in which a high-status Roman lady and Isis-worshipper was tricked into having sex with a jilted suitor (he was disguised as Anubis at the time). Tiberius responded by destroying the temple in which the deception took place, crucifying the man's priest accomplices, and throwing a statue of Isis into the Tiber. Beard et al. also state that the Roman tendency to denigrate foreign religions (e.g. by referring to them as superstitio) picks up after the second century AD, maybe because Romans perceived a growing need to differentiate themselves from the provinces (p.221).
Certain types of astrology were also illegal in some periods (e.g. consultations that took place without witnesses, or attempts to predict someone's death- in particular, attempts by slaves to predict their masters' deaths). These potentially carried heavy punishments, although this was quite hard to enforce. Tacitus was of the opinion that astrologers in Rome "would always be banned and always retained" (p.230-2).
The Greeks apparently had a similar sense of respectable vs dodgy religious practice- for example, Plutarch advises that the good wife will avoid excessive ritual and foreign 'superstition', and only worship those gods whom her husband accepts (p.222). However, they don't seem to have a word which was a catch-all term for 'undesirable worship' in the same way that superstitio seems to have been- the word Plutarch uses is Deisidaimonia, literally "fear of the gods", and referring to "excessive or demeaning behaviour". Other words used by Greek writers to translate 'superstitio' included mataiotes (vanity) and atheotes (atheism). (p.225)
A final random thing- apparently "the number of surviving Latin curses (often scratched on lead tablets, and so preserved) increase greatly in number under the empire, and the Greek magical papyri from Egypt are most common in the third and fourth centuries AD." I wonder if anyone's tried any kind of quantitative studies on this sort of thing?
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