Review of 'The Concept of Shamanism: uses and abuses' (part 1)

(edited by Henri-Paul Francfort and Roberte N. Hamayon in collaboration with Paul G. Bahn, 2001, Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó)

So I'm currently reading two different books on shamanism. They take different approaches- Piers Vitebsky's Shamanism is an image-heavy book which feels like it probably works better as an intro book for someone without a social science background (in that it's interesting and well-written and very very pretty, but not as thoroughly referenced as I'd like). The Concept of Shamanism, on the other hand, is an essay collection with a very analytical approach. So far I'm enjoying the latter one more.

If you take a Popperian view of science (which I do), the vast majority of ethnographies are non-scientific studies. Ethnographic data is usually presented in a way that makes it impossible for anyone else to try to test or replicate it. There are many reasons for this. Obviously there's a major issue in that ethnographers tend to work alone and focus very much on local variation (so if someone else feels your ethnography doesn't sound plausible, then even if they have considerable knowledge of the culture in question it's often possible to just say "well, my understanding is very specific to the individuals I spoke to and the time period when I was there. If the study had been done in a slightly different place, at a different time, or with a different researcher, then differences in interpretation would be inevitable."

This sort of attitude would seem to make the idea of reliable replication of results pretty problematic (although it is sometimes possible to go back and re-interview the specific people who acted as informants for an earlier anthropologist, and see if their statements still seem to support the original researcher's conclusions. Derek Freeman's research with Margaret Mead's informants would be an obvious example, although I'm not massively familiar with his work and I'm aware that some people feel he ends up resorting to ad hominems against Mead- I'll have to go read it properly sometime).

However, I think that even if we accept the methodological limitations of research on human belief systems, there are ways in which it's possible to pursue scientific research by phrasing your theories in terms of testable predictions. Not many people actually seem interested in doing this- which is fair enough, and if researchers are interested in a pursuing a humanities approach rather than a scientific one then it makes total sense. What REALLY annoys me, though, is when someone advances a theory which seems to involve testable hypotheses, but then when you actually engage with their research it often turns out that their hypotheses aren't really testable. Or worse, they're testable as initially phrased, but any apparently contradictory evidence is met by attempts by researchers to redefine terms or otherwise move the goalposts in order to save the theory from falsification. That just seems to render the entire debate completely pointless.

Caveat: I'm not totally up to date on the theory that's under question in this book. I read Clottes and Lewis-Williams' The Shamans of Prehistory (1998) about three years ago, but I certainly wouldn't claim to be an expert on that book and I haven't read more recent stuff like Lewis-Williams and David Pearce's Inside the Neolithic Mind (2005). So I'm basically going on the reviews presented by the various essay authors in The Concept of Shamanism (who were published in 2001, so theoretically Lewis-Williams & co. could have penned a devastating rebuttal by now for all I know). So that aside: here's a summary of what I understand to be the core theory that's being proposed:

• 'Shamanism' is a word which applies to customs practiced in a very broad range of cultures throughout human history. 'Shamanism' here seems to mean localised belief systems inspired by certain kinds of altered states of consciousness (ASCs) experienced on a regular basis by individual ritual practitioners.
• These ASCs are often induced by drugs, but they can also be caused by other things such as sensory deprivation.
• There are certain types of vision/hallucination which frequently arise from shamanic ASCs, regardless of the cultural context. This is because all humans share the same sort of brain structure and visual system, and these can internally generate certain kinds of images (e.g. entoptic phenomena).
• Shamanic ASCs often inspire certain types of artwork (thus leading to certain patterns of images which can be found in art from a broad range of cultures).
• Therefore, if we find art which fits these patterns, we can infer that the culture which produced it practiced shamanism.
• European Paleolithic cave art and San rock art show these patterns. Therefore the (long-dead) people who created these works were shamans.
  

The contributors to this volume are archaeologists and anthropologists who are sceptical of this theory.

The anthology kicks off with 'Shamanism: symbolic system, human capability and Western ideology' by Roberte Nicole Hamayon (p.1-27). Hamayon instantly earns my love by starting off with a quote from Unended Quest (I am a Popper fangirl). The quote in question goes:

"Never let yourself be goaded into taking seriously problems about words and their meanings. What must be taken seriously are questions of facts and assertions about facts: theories and hypotheses, the problems they solve and the problems they raise." (cited p.1).

This is an especially important point in discussions on 'shamanism', where there's rarely a clear consensus over exactly what the word means, and so you tend to wind up with a series of overlapping but non-equivalent definitions plus a substantial number of researchers who don't really care whether the word has a precise definition as long as it can be used in a sort of broad, common-sense, "but at least everyone knows roughly what I mean by this" sort of way (see p.5, 8).

Hamayon is concerned that popular interest in shamanism (from Western subcultures like the New Age and Pagan movements, or people interested in experimenting with drugs) is in danger of distorting research on shamanism in other cultures (by providing an incentive for people to attach the shamanism-label to a very wide range of practices, and then only emphasise the elements of those practices which accord with the vague mental image which non-specialists have of 'shamanism').

A couple of key quotes here:

"At the risk of oversimplifying the debate, we may put it in the straightforward manner it was initially put no matter how obsolete this may appear today: Is shamanism basically and ultimately the expression of a type of religion or worldview or of a type of personality or inner innate disposition? If the former, is it characteristic of certain types of societies and cultures or an elementary constituent of religious systems in general? If the latter, is it specific to a certain type of individuals or inherent in human beings?" (p.4)

"On the basis of this [Korean shamanism] and other similar examples, it has come to be largely admitted that shamanism is inherently oral, not as a reflection of illiteracy and backwardness but as a condition for its specific practice. According to tradition, shamanic efficacy comes from being in 'direct contact' with spirits and acting under their inspiration. It is precisely for this reason that shamanic practice is claimed to be an object of personalised performance exclusively, basically incompatible with the very idea of doctrine and, more broadly, with the idea of fixed ways of expression." (although written songs have been used to train beginner Korean shamans, established Korean shamans argue these songs lack efficacy and so an experienced shaman should only sing songs they have learned directly from their spirits). (p.10)

Hamayon thinks 'shamanism' appeals to some modern Westerners for the following reasons:

• it sounds 'exotic' and 'primitive', and therefore represents a rebellion against Western culture
• people feel it's connected with 'nature' and therefore environmentalism
• it sounds relatively vague and non-culturally specific. Therefore a commitment to 'shamanism' does not not necessarily imply a commitment to any particular culture or way of life (which is good from a memetic transmission perspective, because a definition of 'shamanism' which implied that to be a 'shaman' one must be a hunter-gatherer, for example, would make it much harder for Westerners to participate).
• shamanism is conceptualised as a phenomenon which encompasses a wide range of cultural variation but has some universal features (such as a specific type of ASC which humans from any culture can learn to induce). This implies that if you want to become a shaman, it's not strictly necessary to learn about specific types of non-Western cultures, or be initiated into an existing non-Western tradition. You can theoretically tap into the universal features of the shamanic experience from the comfort of your own home and culture.
• sometimes these universal features of shamanism are speculated as being connected to universal features of the human brain. This relatively vague reference to neurology helps reassure some people that 'shamanism's efficacy has scientific backing.
• 'shamans' are conceived as individuals, working outside of any institutional structure, who are capable of 'mastering' spirits. This means that, compared to some other religious options on offer to Westerners, 'shamanism' seems to make fewer demands which might conflict with individual's existing desires or moral beliefs (p.12-13)

Hamayon then goes on to argue that members of the Western counter-culture are using the concept of 'shamanism' as a tool to reshape Western culture into a form which they find more compatible with their own interests. In some areas, they have been remarkably successful in doing so- for example, concern for the environment and for individual health and well-being are values which began mainly as features of the counter-culture, but have since become widely accepted by mainstream Western society. Hamayon states quotes Bernard Dupuy: "mysticism is the form taken by a religion when new tendencies refuse to break out of the shell of the old religious system to create a new one but instead remain confined within its limits." (cited p.13).

Hamayon believes that the type of shamanism practiced in the West is more individualistic than non-Western 'shamanisms', more internalised within individuals (due to Western conceptualisations of 'ASC' and 'trance' rather than an emphasis on ritual performance), and less focused on spirits (especially spirits with specific roles, such as embodiments of discrete aspects of the natural environment, or of individual ancestors) (p.14). I agree that the Western shamanic movement seems a lot more individualistic than non-Western shamanisms- I can't really comment on the other two points, since I don't know enough about Western shamanism to say what would count as 'typical'.

This leads to my one major area of concern with Hamayon's very intriguing essay: she doesn't make it very clear how much direct experience she's had with the Western shamanism movement. Has she done any textual research, interviews, or participant observation? If not, then does she have a good reason why we should take her arguments on trust? Her description of Western shamanism feels relatively plausible to me, but I'm definitely not an expert and so I'm not convinced that 'plausible to me' is good enough.

For example, she cites Weber's comment that ecstatic states, spirit possession, and ASCs caused by drugs or dancing play the same role for 'peasants' that 'mysticism' plays for intellectuals (see p.14). Setting aside the fact that my level of respect for many of Weber's generalisations is not terribly high, I'm not convinced that this statement really applies to much of the Western shamanism movement. It sounds like it might be a reasonable argument in relation to most of Western history (although I'm not a historian so I don't really know), but it seems to me that most of the people who are drawn to the Western shamanic movement are attracted by the idea that it involves ASCs and/or drugs and/or dancing and physical ritual- this is something which serves to distinguish it from most of the other options on offer. I also don't understand what Weber's supposed to be implying by the word 'mysticism' in this context- earlier we had a quote from Dupuy which seemed to be saying that 'mysticism' is basically just any attempt to radically reform a religious tradition from the inside, rather than starting a whole new tradition in order to achieve the sort of religious framework that you want. Where does that imply 'intellectualism' or a lack of emphasis on ASCs and dancing? Possibly Weber has a narrower definition of 'mysticism' that addresses these questions, but if so it would have been helpful for Hamayon to mention it.

All in all, though, it's an interesting essay- definitely food for thought.

Reading 'Shamanisms Today', part 2

Picking up from where we left off...

Researchers may feel that ASCs are the thing that sets shamans apart from their clients- but presence of ASCs is not necessarily an important defining feature of shamans from an emic perspective. (p.313)

Some people argue that shamanism gives people access to a type of revelatory information which mainstream Western society lacks (from the context given, I'm uncertain exactly what sort of information we're talking about, but I'm guessing it's information about how to handle individuals' transitions between different social roles, like from childhood to adulthood). R. Ridington argues that actually, it's not that the modern West lacks this information, but that the distribution of this information is centralised. This means that our society de-emphasises the importance of individual transformations (since we've got institutions that are designed to make them routine), and focuses instead societal or political transformations (since these affect institutions, and thus millions of individual people) (p.312). Or, I think that's what he's saying. I'll have to chase up the original article.

A. Siikala argues that a shaman communicating with spirit is basically a person taking on different roles, using techniques which in the West are referred to as 'hypnosis' (p.312). Noll apparently argues that the defining feature of shamans is not that they see visions, per se, but the fact that they go into a controlled visionary state and then actively engage with the visions they encounter (presumably in contrast to, say, possessed people) (p.313). Dreams may be very important in shamanic practice, but their role hasn't really been emphasised by most social scientists (at least, not since Tylor) (p.313). Atkinson argues that Western social scientists have a tendency to stress the idea of shamanism as a kind of alternative medicine because this makes it easier for us to understand (whereas if you stress the idea of shamanism as a religious practice, then more social scientists are likely to see it as weird and scary).

Additionally, comparing shamans to doctors or psychotherapists can sometimes be a way of mocking the latter professions, by suggesting they're not as 'scientific' as they think they are (to be fair, some psychotherapists, notably Jungians, have responded by trying to apply shamanic insights to their own theories) (p.313-4). Various people have offered explanations for why shamanic healing works- the usual ones involve psychotherapy and/or the placebo effect, although Kulcsar has apparently suggested that !Kung trancers might treat people by way of sweating out opiates and then rubbing them into their patients' skin (p.313). An increasing number of researchers are reacting against the tendency to portray shamans as ethereal and otherworldly, by looking at how they have reacted to political movements like colonialism and ethnic conflict (p.315-7).

Some people define 'shamans' as people who adopt a relatively commanding attitude towards the spirits they communicate with; giving them instructions in an authoritative way rather than adopting a supplicatory attitude towards them. This is supposed to be what distinguishes them from other kinds of people who communicate with supernatural beings, like priests or possession mediums. Eliade went so far as to say that shamanism never involves possession and always includes some sort of out-of-body experience or belief in magical flight. The difficulty with this is that Lewis' research suggests that the archetypal shamans (the Tungus ritualists from whom we get the name) do actually engage in all the stuff Eliade said we needed to exclude from the definition of 'shamanism' (p.317).

Still, it's possible to argue that shamanism involves more of a commanding attitude towards spirits than possession cults* do. However, it sounds like a possible upshot of this approach is that women who communicate with spirits are less likely to be labelled 'shamans', at least when researchers are working in cultures where women are expected to adopt a relatively meek and placatory attitude in public (whether they are talking to mortal men or to spirits). It seems to me like the same might hold for cultures where men are generally expected to adopt a concilliatory sort of attitude towards others (I don't know enough about Japan to state this with confidence, but maybe this would be one example- perhaps this is why Shinto ritualists are referred to as 'priests' rather than 'shamans'?) (p.317).

Another implication of this line of thought is that it may undermine the argument that possession cults represent a unique opportunity for marginal people to seize some power for themselves (by claiming to be possessed by a very powerful and authoritative spirit). This argument seems to be largely based on the idea that a disproportionate number of possessed people are female, poor, transgendered or in some other way disqualified for most routes to power. If the only difference between possession cults and shamanism is the degree to which a researcher sees their leaders as acting in an authoritative way, then there may be a tendency to label cults made up of women and poor people as 'possession cults', while cults composed of men and local political leaders are referred to as 'shamanism'. That could imply that the whole thing is a definitional tautology, not a causation issue- that is, rather than it being the case that possession cults attract marginal people, or that marginalised cults place a greater emphasis on possession, it could just be that marginal cults get labelled as 'possession cults' rather than 'shamanism' at the point where researchers get involved.

Having said this, I need to get around to reading Lewis' Ecstatic Religion, so maybe I'm overstating the critique- for example, if it turned out that there's some sort of well-defined difference between 'possession' and 'shamanic trance', then the basic argument would still hold. The argument would also hold up if it turned out that in most cultures low-status people can get away with speaking authoritatively to spirits, whether or not they're considered to be 'possessed' at the time (cf p.317, although I'm not sure to what extent Atkinson would agree with what I'm saying here).

There's also the complicating factor that women in many cultures HAVE been labelled as 'shamans' by researchers (e.g. see Koreans, Inuit, Taiwanese shamans, p.317-8). I'd be interested in knowing whether these researchers are also using the 'person who speaks authoritatively to spirits' definition of 'shaman'. It might be that different regional specialists have gotten into the habit of using the word in different ways- or, alternatively, I could just be talking rubbish.

One person who apparently DOES use a definition of 'shamanism' at odds with the 'authoritative spirit-communicator' model is Taussig, who apparently emphasises the idea of 'shamans' being people whose main role involves disrupting and decentering power structures (it's not clear from this whether he thinks this is shamanism's emic raison d'etre, either from the perspective of shamans or their clients; or if he thinks that this is just the EFFECT which shamanism has on a culture, regardless of whether shamans intend it). Atkinson argues that this needs to be balanced against shamans' efforts to maintain order, whether this is at an individual, household or community level (p.319).

So, to sum up, the definitions of 'shaman' identified by this article would seem to be:

-a specific kind of ritualist found in certain cultures in Siberia and perhaps also Central Asia.
-an outdated and potentially ethnocentric term for ritualists from any culture who strike Westerners as 'exotic'
-someone who has a mental illness but lives in a culture which does not recognise it as such (this definition seems to have fallen out of favour)
-any ritualist who experiences ASCs.
-a ritualist who experiences a specific kind of ASC called an SSC (which may be objectively identifiable via brain scanning)
-someone who uses hypnosis to take on different roles or alter egos as part of their religious practice
-someone who goes into a controlled trance and actively engages with the spirits they encounter
-someone who adopts a commanding attitude when communicating with spirits
-the above, plus also must have out-of-body experiences and/or the sensation of magical flight. Does not usually experience spirit possession
-a ritualist who disrupts and decentres power structures



*Just to reiterate: 'cult' here isn't meant in the pejorative sense, just in the sense of a subset of a wider religious tradition.

Religions of Rome: part 4

I'll get back to how much I disagree with Dusek soon, honest- but first, quick post to get the last bit of 'Religions of Rome' out of the way.


The rest of the book is pretty much about elective cults. This a good phrase which I don't think I've specifically seen used anywhere else- basically, an elective cult seems to mean 'a religion in which a substantial number of worshippers have consciously opted-in', rather than a religion which is just the default option for anyone who grows up in a particular culture. So early Christianity was an elective cult, but Judaism was not (not sure whether I'd count medieval European Christianity as an elective cult or not, since for most people choosing to stop participating in worship was presumably not really an option. I guess it was elective in the sense that Jews were theoretically allowed to convert, at least in some nations and periods, and maybe the Reformation made it elective in the sense that people in many nations had to choose which side they were on, denomination-wise. So it's obviously not a completely hard and fast distinction, but it at least articulates that variation exists here, so that's better than nothing).


Quick note on the word 'cult': it's not being used in the pejorative sense of "an organisation which brainwashes its followers", or anything like that. It's just the word which seems to get used by historians and social scientists to refer to groups of worshippers which are a subset of that culture's greater religious system. So I guess that in a pagan Roman context, you could say that pretty much everyone 'believes in' Jupiter to some extent, but not everyone is necessarily part of the 'Jupiter cult' in that they're going out and actively worshipping him by making offerings at his temple, or whatever. I think it's sort of weird that the word 'cult' is used this way in this context when its associations in other contexts seem uniformly negative. I assume it's a holdover from the Bad Old Days of nineteenth-century comparative theology, but I can't think of a more convenient term so I guess we'll just have to stick with the caveats.

Another necessary caveat is that what's 'elective' for some people in a society isn't necessarily 'elective' for everyone- a nice example of how this could work is found on a second century AD inscription honouring an upper-class woman named Agrippinilla (see p. 271). Under her name are the names of 420 devotees to Dionysus, arranged in a system of either 25 or 26 grades of initiation (not sure why there's uncertainty over the number; maybe the inscription is damaged or something). Many of the names sound Oriental (as in, from the bit of the Meditteranean east of Rome, not as in what we'd now call east Asian). This could be interpreted as evidence that Oriental migrants to Rome had established their own Dionysus cult within the city, perhaps in order to preserve some aspects of their home culture.

However, Beard et al. think it's more likely that something else was going on. Agrippinilla's family traced their ancestry to Lesbos, where Dionysus-worship was important. The 420 people on the list were probably neither born in the Orient nor voluntary converts to the cult: it's more likely that they were the family's slaves and ex-slaves, who were subject to compulsory initiation.


Obviously, either explanation would seem to imply that Dionysus-worship wasn't exactly elective in this case (since neither a family cult nor a cult that was the default for a particular ethnic minority sounds very 'elective' to me). But it highlights the fact that you could hypothetically have an upper-class Roman who made a conscious choice to worship some god and then insisted that their family and slaves did so too. I don't know if that actually happened much, but the fact that it's theoretically possible suggests a need to be careful about how we use the terminology.

On the other hand, some cults were apparently more elective than we'd normally assume (and also more elective than the Roman establishment would have liked). Tacitus condemns the wickedness of Jewish prosletytes- people who weren't ethnically Jewish, but who committed themselves to Judaism as much as they were able, going further than those referred to as merely "god-fearing gentiles"). Tacitus felt these people were abandoning their ancestral religion. Later, Cassius Dio records that Domitian executed his cousin and exiled his wife on charges of 'atheism', because both had allegedly "drifted into Judaism". Beard et al. argue that the Roman authorities were more or less ok with the Jews having their own religious practices, but felt very threatened by the possibility of Jews recruiting Roman citizens to their religion (p.276).

Under those circumstances, it's not surprising that the authorities took an even dimmer view of Christianity's active attempts to convert people. It sounds as though the type of evangelism seen as most dangerous was not the soapbox-preaching which I've usually imagined Paul engaging in, but the attempts by less prominent Christians to share testimonies with others in private. Non-Christians writer seem to have gotten a mental image of Christians as people who were so low-status as to be almost invisible, allowing them to insinuate themselves into people's households and secretly corrupt the women and children (p.276).

Another interesting thing (p.284) is that the 'alternative' cults seem to have been more reliant on written texts than the standard civic religion of Rome (presumably because adult converts had to be brought up to speed on some relatively specific doctrine or worship practice, whereas one could just pick up the necessary basics of the civic religion from childhood socialisation. Some Roman intellectuals DID spend quite a lot of time trying to write out and study explicit systems of exegesis for the Roman civic religion, but this seems to have been an emically optional aspect of worship which most Romans presumably ignored, if they were even aware of its existence).It also sounds as if most of these sacred texts were for the benefit of priests who were teaching/ initiating the convert, not for the converts themselves (which I guess makes sense in a context where literacy was presumably pretty low).

The obvious examples of sacred texts in this period are the Christian ones (which hadn't yet been collated into the Bible) and Jewish scriptures (especially the Pentateuch, which synagogues read out to worshippers over the course of a year). But there were also other texts which might have played quite different roles in their respective cults- for instance, the Isis cult apparently put great stress on the importance of their sacred texts, which allegedly originated in Egypt. But from the description given it sounds a bit like the basic fact that priests could say "we have sacred writings from Egypt, you know! Written in Egyptian and everything!" might have been more important to the average worshipper than any actual translation or exegesis of the texts (could be wrong about that, though).

Interestingly, Christianity also seems to be the only religion in this area which had a proliferation of different texts, with people actively trying to weed out the 'true' from the 'heretical' accounts (see p.284). They also seem to have been the only people who spent a substantial amount of time trying to systematically argue against the validity of other people's worship (p.310). Mithras-worshippers don't seem likely to have had particularly high opinions of Isis worship, but they don't seem to have felt it was something worth writing polemics about either. Additionally, Christians seem to have been the only elective cult to put substantial effort into building their owncentralised hierarchies of religious authority. Groups like Mithras-worshippers had internal hierarchies in the sense that there were different grades of initiation, but it sounds as though they weren't especially interested in establishing a system where there was one central body which all Mithras cults everywhere accepted as leader (p.304).

The elective cults seem to have often emphasised the issue of the afterlife more than the civic religion did (p.289-90). In The Golden Ass (the best-known example of fiction written from an Isis-worshipper's perspective), Isis tells Apuleius that if he devotes himself to her, she'll extend his life beyond that granted to him by fate, and after death he'll find her shining in the darkness of the underworld. The Mithras cult linked the different stages of initiation to different planets. It seems like they believed that the initiate's soul rose up and away, eventually achieving 'apogenesis' somewhere far from the material world. And obviously Christianity stressed spiritual immortality in a somewhat different sense. But not all the elective cults did this: worshippers of Attis and Jupiter Dolichenus (an aspect of Jupiter with Syrian influences) don't seem to have thought about the afterlife any more than worshippers of the civic religion did.

There's some indication that elective cults gave rise to emically identifiable subcultures. Being part of a distinct religious minority group didn't normally cut you off from the structures of normal Roman society (except in the case of Christianity). However, it DOES seem to have shaped identities in a way that the civic religion didn't (except for natives in the provinces, where the question of one's attitude towards gods with Roman names was a bit more of a self-conscious and politically tense decision- see p.339). If 99% of the people you know sacrifice to a particular collection of gods, then it's hard to define your identity in terms of being yet another person who does that too. People seem to define themselves in opposition to other things- you can't really get excited about defining yourself as a 'Roman pagan' until there are significant numbers of Christians or non-Roman pagans in your immediate social world. Likewise, it sounds as though it was hard to strongly self-identify as 'a worshipper of Jupiter' in pagan Rome, because it doesn't sound like there was a community of Jupiter-worshippers to join (just a disparate group of people who happened to sacrifice to Jupiter without seeing that as a salient part of their identity). But you COULD potentially self-identify as a worshipper of Jupiter Dolichenus and so gain access to a community of other devotees with their own idiosyncratic worship practices.

Having said this, it's unclear to what extent people outside your subculture would notice or care about this aspect of your identity (except again in the case of Christianity, where knowing someone was a Christian presumably had a significant impact on how pagans saw them, at least if the accusations that Christians were unpatriotic and dodgy are any indication). For instance, Isis-worshippers apparently had some sort of special purity rules (p.289), but Beard et al. don't go into details and so it's hard to gauge how much impact this typically had on interactions with non-Isis devotees (did they eat separately from non-devotees? Take days off work for festivals? Wear little bracelets saying 'What Would Sarapis Do?'). They did apparently sometimes have different dress codes than normal Romans, which is probably one reason why you don't see men from the senatorial class joining these cults until after Christianity takes over (after which, things seem to become more a case of "Christianity vs all the different urban paganisms teamed up together", as people stop caring about the fact that they think Magna Mater is inferior to Mithras, and reflect that at least her priests aren't trying to ban animal sacrifices. See p.291, 383).

It's probably also significant that most elective cults don't seem to have had a distinct emic name for their own followers. For example, Mithras-worship has the names for different initiation grades, but no generic word for 'Mithras-worshipper'. 'Mithraist' is a word created by later scholars with no precise Latin equivalent- except possibly 'sacratus' (devotee) or 'syndexios' ('he who has performed the sacred handshake'). 'Judaeus' (Jew) is a common Latin word, but it was an ethnic descriptor as well as a religious one. The Isis cult sometimes used the word 'Isiacus' to mean 'Isis-devotee', but it doesn't seem to have been a very common word (p.307).

Christianity was clearly unusually exclusive, in that so many prominent Christians argued that one could not be a Christian AND a worshipper of other cults (we have no evidence of the other cults doing anything similar). However, we should clarify that there were probably at least some Christians who were less hardline on this issue than the famous Christians were (e.g. Christians who aren't famous martyrs because they decided to go along with imperial sacrifices and hope God didn't mind). There are also the Naassenes, who explicitly argued that the Magna Mater cult was actually worshipping the Christian God, and so it was ok for Christians to go to their rituals (although the Naassenes didn't castrate themselves as Magna Mater's priests did). They seem to have been declared heretical pretty quickly (p.311).

(Incidentally, wiki notes something else interesting about them:

"The Naassenes (from the Hebrew word na'asch meaning snake) were a gnostic Ophite sect from around 100 A.D. The Naassenes, the Sethians, the Mandaeans, the Perates, and the Borborites are the known Ophite sects. Naassenes worshipped the serpent of Genesis as the bestower of knowledge. The Ophites' point of view on the biblic perception is this: The serpent is the hero, the one that calls himself God is called Yaldabaoth, Samael, or Saklas. Yaldabaoth was seen as the creator of the material world, but not as God, but as the will of God.[citation needed] Samael can be compared to the angel of death or the Devil. Saklas means 'fool' in the ancient language of Aramaic."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naassenes )

Final interesting thing: we've apparently found copies of a message that the Roman governor of Egypt circulated, informing the province that the Emperor Claudius did NOT want the Alexandrians to worship him as a god. This message was complicated by the fact that it was attached to a covering edict referring to him as "our god Caesar". Not sure what the precise word was, though (presumably this was all written in Latin?) See p.313. Similarly, one high-ranking Roman apparently wrote approvingly that at least one German tribe worshipped Augustus (before his death), and that their leader had crossed the Elbe in a canoe so that he could touch Augustus' heir Tiberius, who they also saw as divine (p.352).

Sadly, Beard et al. don't really get into the topic of pagan monotheism in the classical period. They briefly mention that some Isis-devotees explicitly argued that Isis was the same being as the goddesses worshipped under names such as 'Venus', 'Minerva' and 'Magna Mater' (p.281). I guess I'll have to go chase this up properly at some point.



So, follow-up questions:

-How systematic/organised was Christian evangelism in the early churches? How does that compare to the post-Constantine period? Do we know how much of it was based around public preaching, vs how much of it involved approaching people one-on-one in private?

-If we look at religions besides Christianity which were explicitly founded by one person (e.g. Islam, Buddhism), do their early followers also show a concern with producing a very large number of texts about their founder and then making sure they denounce any 'heretical' versions?

-Early Christianity was distinctive in several ways. It was exclusive (it banned its members from joining other cults). It was extremely evangelistic, in that it sought to systematically convert the world. It was very concerned with writing texts for worshippers to learn from, and then vetting these texts for possible error. It was also very concerned with writing texts to persuade others to convert (apologetics and polemics against other faiths). And it was unusually centralised. To what extent are all these traits linked? For example, was it centralised BECAUSE Christians felt they needed a central authority to make decisions on which texts were heretical?

-If we look at people following religions which DON'T stress the idea of a happy afterlife for devotees, how do they tend to respond when they encounter members of religions which do? Assuming they don't convert, do they tend to dismiss the idea as wishful thinking, or just not as anything worth thinking about too much, or what? In the long term, does regular contact (or competition) with religions that promise a happy afterlife tend to make other religions develop a Heaven-concept of their own?

Religions of Rome, part 3: restrictions on religious activity

Chapter 5 is particularly nice, because it outlines the limits of what Romans were prepared to tolerate in their religion. Emic attempts to do this are generally quite illuminating, particularly if the boundary ends up somewhere very different to where the reader would personally draw it. In this case, it's also interesting because it feeds into the debate on orthodoxy vs orthopraxy- that is, the debate over the extent to which different religions stress the importance of 'right belief' and 'right practice'. This is an important one, because if it turns out that a religion emically stresses correct observance of rituals much more than it stresses adherence to a specific creed or belief system, then expecting adherents to consistently agree on every aspect of their theology is only going to lead to tears (or, more specifically, to people getting accused of hypocrisy or stupidity for failing to pay attention to an aspect of their culture which they may not see as all that relevant to their everyday lives).

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)

*

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?