Frederica Mathewes-Green on Eastern Orthodoxy

I've just added Frederica Mathewes-Green to the 'Food for Thought' list on the right sidebar. It's a list I've set up for people who I mostly don't have an awful lot in common with, but who I think are engaging and good at articulating how/why they reached their current opinions. Mathewes-Green is a writer, public speaker, pro-life activist and a convert to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. She doesn't have any ethnic heritage from the communities we tend to associate with Eastern Orthodoxy (Greece, Russia, etc)- she was originally a mostly-agnostic person who went through a period of identifying as Hindu. Then she and her husband converted to Christianity, and she accompanied him to seminary and helped him establish himself as an Episcopalian pastor. Eventually she and her husband got disillusioned with Protestantism, and so they both converted to Eastern Orthodoxy and established their own church in Baltimore (where he's pastor and she's Khouria, or Mother of the church).

Here are some quotes from her essays which I thought were interesting:

Excerpted from her book At the Corner of East and Now:

"Though westerners tend to think of Protestant and Roman Catholic as the two opposite poles of Christian faith, in eastern eyes this quarreling mother and daughter bear a strong family resemblance. The two circle around questions of common obsession, questions which often do not arise in the east: works versus faith, scripture versus tradition, papacy versus individualism. This very context of habitual argument creates a climate of nitpicking, and every theological topic that can be defined, and some which are beyond definition, gets scrutinized in turn. As a result, the east sees in the west an unhelpful tendency to plow up the roots of mystery."

"Since there is no locus of power where the [Eastern Orthodox] faith may be tailored to fit current fashion, it doesn’t change in any significant way–not over long centuries nor across great geographical distances. The faith of the first century is the faith of Orthodox today. When we meet in this little stone church outside Baltimore, we celebrate a liturgy that is for the most part over fifteen hundred years old. We join in prayers that are being said in dozens of languages by Orthodox all over the world, prayers unchanged for dozens of generations."

"Also, he [her husband] began to believe that the compromising flaw lay at the very heart of Anglicanism. The beloved doctrine of “comprehensiveness” suggested, “Let’s share the same prayers, the same words about the faith, but they can mean different things to you than to me.” Not a common faith, but common words about the faith— mere flimsy words. A church at peace can survive this way; a church attacked by wheedling heresies must tumble into accommodation reducing orthodoxy to shreds."

"The constant experience of doctrinal disagreements contributed to a Western tendency to make the Christian experience more about ideas than about heart-driven living faith, more what you think than what you do; more assensus than fiducia, more ideas about God than surrender to him. The Orthodox Church, escaping this sort of discord, could admire a butterfly without having to pin its head to a board. [...] For example, rather than over-defining Jesus’ presence in the Eucharist, or tossing out the concept entirely, Orthodox are content to say that the bread and wine become his body and blood simply because they “change.”"

From her book Facing East:

"A kaleidoscope of images flashes through my mind. The textures, the scents, the music of the liturgy, a continuous song of worship that lifts me every week. The Great Fast of Lent, a discipline far more demanding than I’d ever faced in my Christian walk. Kneeling on Holy and Great Thursday and listening to the hammer blows resound as my husband nailed the icon of Jesus’ corpus to the cross; seeing my daughter’s shoulders shake with sobbing. Easter morning giddiness and champagne at sunrise."

I thought this was quite interesting in terms of the CSR debate over what role doctrine plays in Christianity. I don't know much about Eastern Orthodoxy- maybe I should go look up some stuff.

Reading List: Richard Hamilton's 'The Social Misconstruction of Reality'

“Men will fight for superstition as quickly as for the living truth – even more so, since superstition is intangible, you can't get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.”

-Hypatia, quoted p.43 of Hypatia: mathematician, inventor and philosopher.

It's worth mentioning that Hypatia's concept of 'truth' probably diverges quite a bit from mine, what with the fact that she lived hundreds of years ago and seems to have been a pretty hardcore Platonist. Having said that, I think this quote is a decent suggestion for why hypothesis-testing doesn't seem to have caught on in the social sciences (not that I'm biased or anything...)

There's a book which I want to get my hands on at the moment called The Social Misconstruction of Reality, by Richard F. Hamilton (who I'm guessing is probably a different Richard Hamilton to this one, although I prefer to believe that he isn't, because that allows me to maintain the mental image of him coming back from the dead to lecture us all on epistemology before disappearing away on his government-funded UFO).

I should stress that I haven't read The Social Misconstruction of Reality (or anything else by Richard 'not really the retired agent in Men In Black' Hamilton), so for all I know I might violently disagree with him if I actually read it, but from review articles written by other people, it sounds like he's arguing that in the social sciences and humanities there's sometimes a tendency for the following to happen:

1. someone proposes a tentative hypothesis for some social phenomenon, without flagging up the fact that it's tentative and doesn't yet have much evidence to support it.
2. the hypothesis sounds plausible and so a lot of academics endorse the idea
3. the idea becomes an 'established fact'
4. someone subsequently comes up with evidence refuting the hypothesis
5. everyone ignores this evidence because it clearly contradicts established facts.

Obviously this is something which potentially could happen in any academic field if people are willing to fudge the facts to make them fit their theories (and people are inevitably going to do this to some extent, cf Lakatos). But it sounds like Hamilton's arguing that it's more of a problem in the social sciences and humanities than in the natural sciences (presumably due to the fact that hypothesis-testing is at least a theoretical goal for most natural scientists, whereas it's not for most other academics). Hamilton focuses on three theories which he thinks have been particularly resistant to contradictory evidence. These are:

• the 'Protestant work ethic' explanation for capitalism
• the idea that Hitler's rise to power in Germany was largely due to the support of the lower middle class
• Foucault's theory (as proposed in Discipline and Punish) that the transition from corporal punishment to prison sentences in the West was not a sign that the state was becoming more humane. Rather, it was a symptom of a shift from big obvious expressions of state power (like public maimings) to more subtle and insidious methods of control based largely around intense surveillance of civilian populations.

Interestingly (because I'm pretty sure they're coming at this from pretty different angles) Hamilton seems to have reached a similar conclusion to The Kugelmass Episodes when they say:

"For dedicated opponents of psychoanalysis, and the legacy of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, it is simply impossible for a psychoanalytic argument to be valid: the writer is spinning his wheels, and that is all. No matter how elegantly scientific citations, anecdotes, literary examples, and so on are woven together, the premise is wrong. In many cases, the very elegance and density of a piece becomes a reason to suspect that the author has filtered out reality and built castles in the air.

[...] As long as false premises create opportunities for displays of intelligence, and as long as those displays are worth money, we will never be rid of the falsehoods themselves: we’re just too grateful for them. That’s why liberalism that prides itself on the simple desire for intelligence accomplishes nothing besides staged debates with conservatives. It’s also why “anti-philosophers” turn into philosophers who mix critiques of Kant with paeans to his intelligence."

So now I need to go chase up the critique of Weber, at least (since that's the most directly relevant to my field).

Video of the Day: Korean mudang (shamans) being possessed by changun (warrior-general spirits)

Interesting thing about this one: the mudang being interviewed about how they stand on the edges of chaktu (a type of knife) describe how doing this makes them feel "very good". They don't seem to be talking about what I would normally think of as a stereotypical sort of 'ecstasy' state. They just look cheerful, which is unexpected (by which I mean, unexpected for me, someone who has extremely limited experience when it comes to standing on knives. At least if we're talking about doing it intentionally.)

Also: damn, that armour's pretty.

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 'On Spiritual Edgework' by David G. Bromley

Bromley, David G., 2007, 'On Spiritual Edgework: the logic of extreme ritual performances', Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 46, 3, pp.287-303

A rough paraphrase of Bromley's concept of 'spiritual edgework' might be 'rituals in which participants deliberately do things that people in their cultures would normally consider dangerous, in order to publically demonstrate that their spirituality enables them to transcend normal human limitations' (p.289). He illustrates this with two examples: Christian snake-handling and New Age firewalking. I think this make sense, but I had a couple of issues with the way Bromley goes about explaining this concept.

First of all, there's Bromley's explicit definition of the concept: in spiritual edgework, "practitioners challenge the presumptive safe limits of human activity by regularly and deliberately engaging in ritual practices that apparently risk certain physical or psychological injury or even death" (p.289). Bromley further clarifies that his definition of 'edgework' excludes cases where the practitioner actually "goes over the edge", as with martyrdom (p.301).

Most of this is reasonable, but I'm curious as to what he means by 'risk of psychological injury'. What's a 'psychological injury'? Is Bromley thinking in terms of specifically medical labels, like PTSD? Is it meant to be an emic judgement? Or is he just assuming it should be 'common sense' for us to define etically what this means? Guessing the answer to these questions is made harder by the fact that he may not intend this part of his definition to apply to either of his two examples. Or at least, snake-handlers and firewalkers don't seem to feel that their practices are likely to cause psychological harm, and I don't recall ever seeing any of their detractors argue that either (that is, there are obviously people who think that snake-handlers and firewalkers "must be crazy", but it seems like the usual argument is that they must already be psychological unstable in order to want to participate in rituals in the first place- not that the rituals seem likely to cause psychological harm).

Another problem with the vagueness of the 'psychological injury' issue is that if you start picking religious practices at random, you can probably always find somebody SOMEWHERE who would argue that they're potentially psychologically damaging. For example, it's not too hard to find people who argue that Catholicism instils a sense of pathological guilt (for the record, I'm not arguing that it does, but this is a claim which you do see cropping up fairly often). Does that imply that going to Mass is a type of spiritual edgework? I doubt Bromley would label it as such, but if he doesn't like a definition of 'psychological injury' that includes basic Catholic doctrine then that does raise questions about whose definition he would prefer to apply.

My other main issue with this paper is Bromley's frequent use of the word 'empowering'. Bromley doesn't define this word, so I'm kind of left to guess at what he means by it. I've always assumed that the word implies a value judgement. It's hard for me to imagine someone applying the word to a practice which they don't actively agree with (unless they were being sarcastic, or making it clear they were using it in the context of emic views- "some participants argue that this ritual is empowering", etc). Maybe it's just me, but if the word is generally assumed to carry a value judgement, then I don't think it's appropriate to use it in the context of etic statements in an academic article.

It's possible that Bromley just meant it as a value-neutral way to say "things that people believe give them power", but if so then I think it would have been helpful to state it explicitly. It's also possible that Bromley feels that the groups he's discussing have been the target of so many negative value judgements that it's necessary for him to use positive value judgements to compensate. Bromley discusses criticism of these groups on p.288. Small point- as evidence that snake-handlers have "often been treated derisively" even by academics, he quotes Williamson and Pollio: "unfortunately, most analyses of this practice tend to decontextualize it as pathological or characterize it in functional terms, that is, as mitigating the difficulties of life. For example, La Barre (1962/1992), a psychoanalytically trainedanthropologist, cast his unfortunate subject, Beauregard Barefoot, as a compulsive snake handler who attemptedthrough ritual to resolve the sexual conflicts of his childhood life." While I agree that these approaches to snake-handling don't sound massively helpful, it's worth pointing out that functionalists tend to describe EVERYTHING as functional, and followers of some psychoanalytic tend to describe EVERYTHING in terms of dysfunction resulting from childhood sexual conflict- it's not helpful, but it's not necessarily a sign than snake-handlers suffer from any special prejudice either.

The issue is further complicated by the fact that the first sentence in the entire paper states that "religion as a social form is constructed to provide adherents with a sense of empowerment and control" (p.287). I have no idea what Bromley means by this, or whether he's speaking in the context of religion in general or just religion in the modern West. I also don't know what he means by the word 'constructed'- is he thinking in terms of top-down or bottom-up models? That is, is he thinking in terms of the motives of people who start religious movements (or push for major changes within them)? Is he saying that these people are motivated by the desire to make the religion better at 'empowering' ordinary worshippers? Or is he thinking from the perspective of ordinary worshippers themselves? Is he arguing that they're always trying to find a way to make their religion more empowering for themselves personally? That would make more sense, assuming Bromley would be happy with this statement applying equally to pretty much every kind of social system (not just religion).

Although, weirdly, on p.289 he seems to be saying that some religions/spiritualities are more concerned to provide adherents with a sense of empowerment than others are ("The [New Age] movement is concerned withtranscending the apparent limits of human capacity through a diverse array of methods for personal growth and transformation. One common characteristic of many New Age quasi-religious therapies (Greil and Robbins 1994), therefore, is a ritualized means of enhancing a sense of individual empowerment and control.") Unless there's some nuance here I've missed (maybe New Age stuff stresses INDIVIDUAL empowerment whereas many other religions/spiritualities mainly discuss empowerment in a group context?), this seems to kind of contradict the idea from p.287 that providing adherents with a sense of empowerment is a function of religions in general.

On p.289, Bromley states that "while there is a substantial literature exploring the nature of ritual as a social form and different types of ritual (Bell 1997; Grimes 1995; Turner 1969), there is little inquiry into the issue of how ritual empowerment, particularly in its more radical forms, is socially constructed" (p.289). Maybe there's actually a substantial amount of academic literature examining the issue of empowerment in a descriptive way, and I've missed it (obviously the term gets used by consciously partisan academics like feminist activists and psychiatrists trying to find a way to enhance clients' self-esteem, but those are fields that have made a deliberate decision to use normative rather than desciptive terms, so it's a different thing). If so, then I've obviously missed it (entirely possible)- but at the moment, I suspect that maybe Bromley feels that there's "little enquiry" into the issue because he's using an idiosyncratic term and hasn't come across people who are using synonyms for whatever it is he means by it.
Final quibble: I don't understand why this paper was published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion when it's not a scientific study (I'm not trying to be snarky and use 'scientific' as a generic word for 'good' or 'intellectually rigourous'- I mean it's non-scientific in the sense that it doesn't involve any hypothesis testing. There are plenty of good non-scientific journals of religious studies out there, so I would have assumed that this particular journal would stick to scientific stuff).

So that's all the stuff I didn't like- what about the rest of the article? Distaste for the word 'empowerment' aside, I'm intrigued by what Bromley seems to be saying here:

"A foundational assumption of classic sociological interpretations of religion- that the transcendent is socially constructed is critical to the issue of empowerment and control. If the transcendent is socially constructed as an autonomous source of power, independent of humans,then it can be potentially both constraining and liberating, as has been noted in formulations of the holy (Durkheim 1965; Otto 1923). It follows that groups determine, through the way the transcendent is constructed, the extent of constraint/liberation to which they are subject and the means through which the transcendent can be apprehended and influenced. In fact, this is a common theme in sociological theory and empirical work on religious groups." (p.287)

On the one hand, I'm a little leery of the fact that he's apparently coming right out and saying "let's start with the assumption that religion is 'socially constructed as an autonomous source of power'" (I'm of the opinion that social scientists of religion should be really cautious about taking sides on this issue- reflexive passages where they explain their personal views on the matter are fine, but I feel their actual analyses should do their best to describe emic belief or scepticism without passing judgement. But obviously not everyone feels this way (and obviously one could argue it's kind of convenient for someone who's personally agnostic to endorse professional agnosticism as best practice). And I guess Bromley isn't coming right out and saying "I'm an atheist", or anything he's just stating the fact that most social science analyses start with the assumption that we can describe a religious system entirely in terms of human efforts, so I guess if you don't plan on doing anything differently then arguably it's better to just say that straight off rather than dance around the issue.

If I understand Bromley correctly, he's going on to say that cultures are to some extent 'choosing' the constraints or restrictions which they're prepared to abide by (particularly in terms of supernatural prohibitions, although obviously pretty much the same argument would apply to systems of secular law). Therefore, if we come across a group which abides by something that looks like a particularly harsh imperative (e.g. a commandment to handle venomous snakes), it's relevant to ask why the group has generally accepted this (even if some individuals have rejected the idea). If anyone here has read the Sandman graphic novel (that's an expensive comic book, for those of you who aren't as pretensious as me), I can see 90's-era Neil Gaiman really going for this idea.

So in the context of edgework, then, he's saying that communities accept the idea of doing stuff they'd normally consider dangerous because they believe that a higher power will enable them to transcend their normal limitations. When people make it through the ritual unscathed, they feel like they've achieved something miraculous, and so get a sense of empowerment. Bromley reckons that from this perspective, firewalking and snake-handling are both practices which are really well-suited for edgework (he argues this is why they've been picked up by multiple cultures- see p.291). There are several features of these rituals which make them especially suitable.

Firstly, they're both genuinely dangerous, in that it's possible to point to real examples of people who've been injured or died as a result of participating. This is particularly true of snake-handling, since it's apparently emically accepted that anyone who handles snakes on a regular basis is going to get bitten eventually, even if they're a faithful Christian. It's thought that snake-handling has killed around 75 people, presumably during public services with a lot of witnesses (thus potentially making the whole thing more obviously scary than if they'd died alone in their homes). With regard to fire-walking, it's not too uncommon to get blistered feet. Occasionally people get seriously burned, and there are a few documented cases of people dying because they tripped and fell onto the coals. So, most fire-walkers probably won't have personally witnessed a death or serious injury, but most fire-walking workshops will mention the possibility in their introductory talks (p.294, 299, 302).

However, Bromley reckons that neither ritual is actually as dangerous as it might appear at first. People can and do get through these rituals uninjured on a fairly regular basis (p.301). This is often true even if people behave in a way that looks pretty reckless to observers (e.g. just reaching into a box of snakes and grabbing one without checking if they seem about to bite you, or practicing firewalking until you can spend quite a long time on the coals- see p.297, 298).

"Both firewalking and serpent handling are regarded as a confirmation and not a test of
[practicioners'] beliefs" (p.299). That is, if someone engages in one of these rituals and comes away unharmed, that's seen as proof that they've been mystically sustained by God or your higher self. However, if someone DOES get burned or bitten, that's not usually emically seen as something that contradicts the validity of the ritual. Harm sustained during rituals can be blamed on several possible factors, such as:

• the injured person was foolhardy and refused to take proper instruction
• the injured person was too prideful, and was thus in need of a reminder of their human limitations
• it was necessary that participants' faith should be tested and thereby strengthened
• the ritual was disrupted by harmful forces, such as demonic interference (p.300)

In other words "in the cases of firewalking and serpent handling, the empirical probabilityof success is considerably higher than it appears to be, and the definition of successful outcomes is expanded while the definition of failure is narrowed, so that even injuries or deaths in limited numbers are confirming events" (p.302).

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?

Religions of Rome, part 2

Religions of Rome keeps on giving. A couple of nice tidbits:

p.126-8
Obnuntiatio was an established convention whereby someone could legitimately prevent the process of legislation by claiming that he had seen bad omens (or perhaps simply that he would be watching for bad omens; the surviving texts aren't clear). However, the standard procedure for this involved making an official statement to the magistrate that you would be watching the skies (de caelo spectare). This caused a certain amount of legal confusion in 59 BC, when the consul Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus apparently became unable to leave his house for fear of being beaten up by Julius Caesar's henchmen (instead staying home and repeatedly sending messages that he was still watching the sky and so passage of Caesar's land redistribution plan should be halted immediately. Leonard Nimoy would be proud).

p.130
"Throughout his account of these events [Clodius' trial] in his letters to Atticus, Cicero huffs and puffs- deriding (as he had to) almost every aspect of the procedure, from the mistaken tactics of his own allies to the failure at one stage in the voting proceedings to produce any ballot papers with the option 'yes' on them."

More generally, the book is turning out to be interesting in the context of the debate over whether 'religion' is valid as an etic term. A lot of effort has been put into this debate over the course of the 20th century, so I'm not going to do it justice properly here- but the basic point is that it appears to be very very difficult to come up with a definition of 'religion' which:

• covers all human cultures


• is not tautological


• excludes everything which most Westerners are uncomfortable labelling as 'religious' (e.g. Marxism, humanism, science)


• includes all the things which most Westerners want to label as 'religious' (e.g. Confucianism, Buddhism)

Several people have had a go at this game, but so far no one has succeeded in fixing their definition as the standard for academia (although arguably this says more about the social sciences and its aversion for fixed terms than it does about religion per se, and admittedly some people like Spiro and Geertz have at least produced definitions which are widely drawn on). Basically, the problem seems to boil down to the fact that while Western culture has a relatively clear distinction between stuff that is 'religious' and stuff that is 'secular', other cultures don't appear to. This leads to the argument that 'religion' is a word which only makes sense in relation to the West and cultures which have been significantly influenced by the West (although admittedly the number of people in the latter box is increasing these days).

One book which makes this argument pretty well is Peter Beyer's Religions in Global Society (2006, London: Routledge). His view is that the concept of 'religion' as a distinct social sphere did not exist in most cultures until extensive contact with the West happened, and that nowadays the debate over whether something is or is not a religion is less a definitional issue and more of a political and legal one (i.e. asking a social group "are you a religion?" is not really asking them "do you fulfil some well-defined abstract criteria?" -it's more a case of asking things like "do you want to qualify for certain kinds of tax break? Do you want to appeal to the kind of people who regard themselves as atheists?")

A nice example of this is Shinto- Beyer argues that since the West led Japan to adopt the idea of 'religion' as a concept distinct from other aspects of society, there's been an ongoing debate between Shinto-supporters who want it defined as a religion and those who don't. To some extent, this is a question that can be rephrased as: "to what extent do we want Shinto to resemble Christianity in the modern West?" E.g. "is state support for Shinto compatible with postwar Japanese laws of separation of religion and the state? Does labelling it as 'religion' imply that it's possible for someone to renounce it, and if so, is this the message we want to be sending people? On the other hand, does calling it 'religion' stress the idea that it's worthy of a kind of default respect which a 'secular' philosophy might not be?" (see also John K. Nelson's excellent ethnography Enduring Identities: the guise of Shinto in contemporary Japan. Beyond this and Beyer, I don't actually know very much about Shinto, so I may be misrepresenting the emic debate. I'm currently borrowing a copy of Hardacre's Shinto and the State, which apparently goes into the issue in more detail, but I haven't had a chance to read it yet).

So I've frequently seen the argument that 'religion' is a distinctively Western concept, but so far I haven't read anything that attempts to trace the concept's genesis in any great detail (this is probably because I haven't specifically gone looking yet; it seems like an obvious thing for someone to go write about). As such, looking at what we now term 'religion' in pre-Christian Rome seems like a good idea. So, does Beard et al.'s book give the impression that 'religion' existed in Rome as an emic concept?

So far the answer seems to be 'no'. Granted, Beard et al. haven't yet tackled the question head on (although I'm only up to the section on the early imperial period). I'm also sure that there's a source somewhere which attempts to answer this question from the perspective of someone who's actually studied Classics (unlike me). But the impression I'm getting at the moment is that the sort of rituals which my society would normally label 'religious' in Rome were pretty tightly bound up with stuff that I'd normally be inclined to label as 'secular politics'. One example of this is the stuff I mentioned in my previous post over the extent to which the modern concept of 'priest' is applicable in Ancient Rome. Since then, Beard et al. have mentioned other things which feed into this debate. Some examples which I need to think about:

"It would have made no sense in Roman terms to have claimed rights to political power without also claiming rights to religious authority and expertise." (p.135, stated in relation to the plebeians' struggle to gain places in the pontifical and augural colleges- in other words, to gain access to what we might today see as high-status 'priesthoods').

"Crucially, there is no sign in any Roman political debate that any public figure ever openly rejected the traditional framework for understanding the gods' relations with humankind. Political arguments consisted in large part of accusations that 'the other side' had neglected their proper duty to the gods, or had flouted divine law. It was a competition (in our terms) about how, and by whom, access to the god was to be controlled- not about rival claims on the importance or existence of the divine. So far as we can tell, no radical political stance brought with it a fundamental challenge to the traditional assumptions of how the gods operated in the world. There were, to be sure, as there always had been, individual cults and individual deities that were invested (for various reasons) with a particular popular resonance. The temple of Ceres, for example, as we have seen, had special 'plebeian' associations from the early Republic; likewise the cult of the Lares Compitales (at local shrines throughout the regions (vici) of the city) was a centre of religious and social life for, particularly, slaves and poor (and was later to be developed by Augustus precisely for its popular associations) [...] There was always likely to be choices and preferences of this kind in any polytheism. But if these cults did act as a focus for an entirely different view of man's relations with gods, no evidence has survived to suggest it." (p.139)

"The honours granted to Julius Caesar immediately before his assassination suggest that he had been accorded the status of a god- or something very like it: he had, for example, the right to have a priest (flamen) of his cult, to adorn his house with a pediment (as if it were a temple) and to place his own image in formal processions of the images of the gods. Shortly after his death, he was given other marks of divine status: altars, sacrifices, a temple and in 42 BC a formal decree of divination, making him divus Julius. Ever since the moment they were granted, these honours- particularly those granted before his death- have been the focus of debate. If you ask the question 'had Caesar officially become a Roman god, or not, before his death? Was he, or was he not a deity?" you will not find a clear answer. Predictably both Roman writers and modern scholars offer different and often contradictory views." (p.140-1)

Sidenote: I've always been given to understand that Caesar was killed because people were scared he was trying to turn himself into a king. Possibly this is a popular misconception- if not, it makes the whole thing even harder to get my head around, since it seems to suggest that people at the time were more uncomfortable with the idea of King Julius than with Julius the Living God. Anyone have any insight on this?

"Traditionally religion was deeply embedded in the political institutions of Rome: the political elite were at the same time those who controlled human relations with the gods; the senate, more than any other single institution, was the central locus of 'religious' and 'political' power. In many respects this remained as true at the end of the Republic as it had been two or three centuries earlier. But at the same time, we can trace- at least over the last century BC- the beginning of a progression towards the isolation of 'religion' as an autonomous area of human activity, with its own rules, its own technical and professional discourse. In this section we shall look at two particular aspects of this process: first, the development of more sharply defined boundaries between different types of religious experience: between the licit and the illicit, between religion and magic." (p.150)

"In the late Republic, in other words, we begin for the first time to hear of practices designated as 'magical'. Many of these practices had, in fact, been part of religious activity at Rome as far back as you could trace; what was new was precisely their designation as 'magical' and the definition of magic as a separate category. [...] magic is not a single [cross-cultural] category at all, but a term applied to a set of operations whose rules conflict with the prevailing rules of religion, science or logic of the society concerned. And so, for the historian, the interest of what we may choose to call 'magic' lies in how that conflict is defined, what particular practices are perceived as breaking the rules, and how that perception changes over time." (p.154, emp. mine)

"We have almost no evidence at all for the circumstances that led to the destruction of the shrines of Isis in (probably) 59, 58, 53, 50 and again in 48 BC; nor, for that matter, for those that led to the expulsion of the astrologers (Chaldaei) from Rome in 139 BC. But we can make a plausible guess at one or two factors that may have lain behind such an action. The cult of Isis, with its independent priesthood and its devotion to a personal and caring deity could represent (like the Bacchic cult) a potentially dangerous alternative society, out of the control of the traditional political elite. Likewise astrology, with its specialised form of religious knowledge in the hands of a set of religious experts outside the political groups of the city, necessarily constituted a separate (and perhaps rival) focus of religious power. Although it did not offer a social alternative in the sense of group membership, it represented (as we have seen in other areas before) a form of religious differentiation which threatened the undifferentiated politico-religious amalgam of Roman practice." (p.161)

Finally, there's an interesting source from a contemporary Greek writer named Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who apparently argued that the Romans were more Greek than the Greeks (on the grounds that they had taken "the best customs in use among the Greeks" while rejecting "all the traditional [Greek] myths concerning the gods, which contain blasphemies and calumnies against them." He elaborated that by 'blasphemies and calumnies', he meant:

• theogonies (stories in which the gods fight for supremacy- e.g. the story of how Zeus overthrew Kronos)


• stories in which gods warred with mortals or were subjugated by them (e.g. the bit in the Iliad about how Apollo briefly served as a herdsman to the mortal King Laomedon)


• rituals which made reference to gods dying, or which required worshippers to behave disreputably (e.g. the mysteries of Dionysius or Persephone)

Wikipedia says he died some time relatively soon after 7 BC- that's a shame; I would have liked to see what he made of Christianity.

I've still got just under half the book to finish. If I decide to keep trawling ancient Roman stuff, I might have a look for readable translations of Cicero, since Beard et al. make him sound like an interesting guy (although I'd probably have no idea who he was if I hadn't read Allan Massie's fictional autobiography of Augustus, ages and ages ago- quite a good book for getting your head around the period, although like almost all autobiographies it suffers from a lack of neat character arcs). While I remember: I should also attempt to track down a library copy of CS Lewis' The Problem of Pain, because I skimmed the first part in Waterstone's the other day and it looks like he's come up with a theodicy which I hadn't heard of before.

Reading: Religions of Rome, by Mary Beard, John North and Simon Price (1998, Cambridge: CUP)

This is a nice intro for people (like me) who have a certain amount of vague general knowledge about Ancient Rome, but know very little about the specifics and so need to be walked through each historical period with a Classicist holding their hands and making sure they don't get lost.

So far I've only covered the introduction and the pre-imperial chapter, but I was surprised by how teacherite1 many of the priestly collegia seemed. There seems to be a general willingness to accept a lot of vagueness in terms of stuff like which gods were which and how they related to each other- but the attitude towards religious practice is interestingly legalistic. Some examples:

• If things were going badly, the Senate could hold an inquest to find out if it was because someone had messed up a religious ritual (emic term: to see if anyone had committed a vitium, or religious mistake). This involved getting in the augures, who normally didn't actually perform rituals themselves (that was the job of various politicians), but acted kind of like an auditing agency who kept the regulations on how things were meant to be done and so could come in and start checking if everything was being done to proper standards. Then they submitted a report to the Senate, acting sort of like an expert witness (i.e., they stated their expert opinion on the issue, then the Senate officially ruled on whether a vitium had been committed, and if so, whose fault it was) (p.29).

• The pontifices were, from our society's perspective, a sort of amalgam of priest and lawyer- they were experts on the rituals involved in private issues like adoptions and inheritances, which meant that they could adjudicate in disputes between private citizens. They were responsible for maintaining the calendar (which meant informing the Senate of which days were not appropriate for Senate meetings/ court cases/ committee meetings). They were also required to keep track of all the important news of the day and write it on a big public whiteboard (these eventually went into a permanent record that other people could check) (p.25).

“Thus, for instance, the pontifices in 222 BC prevented Marcus Claudius Marcellus from adding the cult of Virtus to an existing temple of Honos, on the ground that it was essential for each of the deities to have their own chapel (cella)- so that, it was argued, in the event of a lightning stroke it would be clear who was the offended deity to whom the appropriate sacrifices should be made.” (p.105)

• If you wanted the gods to do something, then you could publically ask for their help and promise to sacrifice to them if they did so. The gods might or might not accept your offer (so, legally speaking it's not a divine contract so much as an invitation to treat)- but the conditions for acceptance and the nature of the sacrifice are very very clearly specified.

For example, during the Hannibalic War, Rome promised the gods an unusually large sacrifice in exchange for military aid. The record of the vow specifies that if the gods kept Rome safe against both the Carthaginians and the Gauls of North Italy for a period of five years, then they would receive a sacrifice of every domestic animal born during the spring of that year (with the period that constitutes 'spring' being clearly defined). It further specifies that the sacrifice would still count if someone made a mistake during the ritual and that if any of the animals were stolen, then blame would fall on the thief and not the animal's owner or Rome. (p.82)

• The Hannibalic War also seems to have been a period in which Romans devoted an unusual level of attention to Juno-worship. This may have been because she was seen as the equivalent of Astarte, the protective goddess of Carthage, and thus someone who could have a major influence over the war. According to Servius, writing some time after the fact, attempts to 'summon out' Juno from Carthage (evocata) failed during the war and were only eventually successful in 146 BC. However, he states that they did at least succeed in 'placating' her (exorata). (p.82)

Sadly, the book is also giving me the impression that the study of Classics has attracted a certain number of people fixated on the idea that there was some period or culture which counts as 'authentic' ancient Rome, meaning that if you come across any historical detail which seems to offend your aesthetic sensibilities then it must be some kind of foreign import or sign that the Ancient Ways had become corrupt and degenerate. The upshot is that Religions of Rome occasionally has to pause to acknowledge arguments which, on the the face of things, seem utterly ridiculous.

For example, it sounds as though our concept of 'priest' lacked an exact analogue in ancient Rome- i.e. there were various people whose fulltime job involved maintaining a temple or a set of 'religious' rituals, but there was no sharp line between these and secular admin jobs. Also it sounds like there was little or no emic sense that pontifices and augures and Salii and Vestals and haruspicers and so on constituted a single category of occupation who were more like each other than they were like any other professional group. There are apparently theorists who argue that, on the contrary, this superficial diversity masks a sort of deep-down schema of 'priests' as a separate class of people who absolutely had to be kept separate from 'secular society' (p.28-9). However, the impression I'm getting from Beard et al. is that this opinion rests pretty much on the argument from absence- if anyone else knows anything about it, I'd appreciate being chucked a reference.

1 See: here">http://www.profounddecisions.co.uk/campaign/teacher.asp?NavID=40>here. The setting is fictional and is thus going to err on the side of Eurocentrism for the sake of accessibility, but anyone who's heard my rants against the State of the World Today is aware that I find these labels useful, though not entirely serious.