Calling Upon Gods, Offering Bodies

Antón Alvar Nuño / Clelia Martínez Maza / Jaime Alvar Ezquerra

Introduction: Calling upon Gods, Offering Bodies. Strategies of Human-Divine Communication in the Roman Empire from Individual Experience to Social Reproduction

The present volume is the product of the research project “Vías de acceso a lo divino: apelar a los dioses, ofrecer los cuerpos, entregar la vida” [Access paths to the divine: appealing the gods, offering the bodies, giving the life] (HAR2017-84789-C2-1-P), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness. This was a coordinated research project consisting of a subproject led by Clelia Martínez Maza at the University of Málaga, entitled “Cuerpo vivido, cuerpo narrado: mártires y ascetas en la Hispania tardoantigua” [Lived body, narrated body: martyrs and ascetics in late antique Hispania], and another subproject headed by Jaime Alvar Ezquerra at the University Carlos III of Madrid, entitled “Epítetos divinos: experiencia religiosa y relaciones de poder en Hispania” [Divine epithets: religious experience and power relations in Hispania] (EPIDI).

This volume contains the papers presented at the congress Calling upon Gods, Offering Bodies: Strategies Of Human-Divine Communication In The Roman Empire From Individual Experience to Social Reproduction, held in Malaga from the 23^rd to the 25^th of June, 2021, and attended not only by members of the two research teams, but also by other colleagues interested in discussing the subject. Here, we would like to express our gratitude to them for their commitment.

The aim of the project was to explore the possibilities of the lived religion model applied to an analysis of religiosity in Roman Hispania, examining different forms of access to and the lived experience of the divine. Although each of the subprojects analysed two discrete symbolic horizons (Roman polytheism and Christianity as manifested in Hispania), they converged theoretically and methodologically within the overarching coordinated project. Our intention was to delve deeper into the phenomenon of religious experience, going beyond the limits of ritual formality, the collective manifestations of the religious community or the religious policy established by those in power. Based on these premises, each of the subprojects was responsible for studying a specific form of religious manifestation.

The volume opens with a paper proposing a general taxonomy of divine epithets, produced by all the members of the EPIDI subproject (Jaime Alvar Ezquerra, Alejandro Beltrán Ortega, María Fernández Portaencasa, Valentino Gasparini, José Carlos López-Gómez, Beatriz Pañeda Murcia, Lorena Pérez Yarza). This task became necessary when analysing those that were specifically related to power but bordered on other epithets whose nature was more or less coincidental. The associated analyses made it possible to generate an original and useful classificatory grid that depicts the position and relation of each epithet with respect to any other epithet. This analysis enriched the initial perspective of the EPIDI subproject.

The members of the EPIDI subproject opted to investigate the strategies deployed to construct the puissances divines and their social repercussions through an analysis of the epithets chosen by devotees to identify and address their gods.¹ From this perspective, it was crucial to pay attention to the dimension of the individual in action in the context of epithet use, or more precisely, of the chains, sequences or onomastic formulae that identified the divinities invoked.² The choice of one particular epithet from among all other possibilities or the formulation of a particular chain was a significant act, in the same way that the use or omission of an appellative to accompany the theonym was not random. The absence of specific rules allowed a flexibility that opened the door to a subjective dimension, and consequently reflected an attitude constructed in relation to the deity. Thus, polytheism has shown itself to be extraordinarily creative in the procedures of access to the divine, which is why it has constituted a particularly attractive field of research from the perspective of lived ancient religion. One example of this is the unusual phenomenon of epithets built on personal onomastics, which will be published separately (Alvar, Bonnet and Gasparini, forthcoming). However, although it might seem that personal options are infinite, they are, in fact, limited by the cultural register in which they are inserted. Consequently, it is essential to advance in the study of acceptable limits and their flexibility in the balance between “social agentivity” and “individual agency” (Alvar, 2018: 221–247; id. 2023: 63–75).

As can be seen in Chapters 6, 7 and 8, the EPIDI subproject team paid special attention to epicleses that can be related to the exercise of power in the broader sense of the set of relations of hegemony and subordination that correspond not only to the political and administrative sphere, but also to relations of dependence and personal submission, which are pivotal in structuring other actions (Foucault, 1978).

Chapter 6 (Jaime Alvar Ezquerra and José Carlos López Gómez) deals directly with epithets of power in Hispania, elucidating the significance of these choices and their banalisation over time, while Chapter 7 (Beatriz Pañeda Murcia) analyses women’s choices, revealing that there is no evident relationship between gender and epithets. In Chapter 8, the authors (Lorena Pérez Yarza and Tünde Vágási) explore the type of linguistic strategies deployed to contact the gods according to the epigraphic record, and investigate the implications underlying the use of other terms used to appeal to the gods, as in the case of the infrequent term “socius”.

In sum, power relations are present not only in hierarchical decision-making that concerns society as a whole, but also in horizontal decisions that personally affect other members of the community, for example, sexual and reproductive relations. These generally result from male imperatives—past and present—often pigeonholed under the label of fertility, as if it were a de-ideologised collective good. Indeed, fertility and fecundity are two nouns usually associated with functional attributes of particular divinities. Their mere presence appears explanatory, but in reality is an a priori resulting from a cultural construction of the social role of women and their protective goddesses.

For the purposes of the project, it was particularly important to determine the meaning of epicleses in their context, analysing the selection of one or another theonym in light of the process of municipalisation and its connection with political power. Furthermore, moving beyond these traditional topics of debate, project members discussed whether to incorporate epithets into the analysis of religious bricolage in the changing scenario of the Roman Empire, individual action and social agency, the presence of women, sensoriality and local epicleses, from among a diversity of viable approaches. Certainly, the creativity of the inhabitants of Hispania does not seem to have been especially ingenious when compared to the innovations formulated in the Greek-speaking part of the empire. Rather, the attributes of power ascribed to the deities were borrowed from political nomenclature and applied to the religious sphere; thus, the divinities were acclaimed using the terminology of power. Initially, such uses reflected the preferences of the moment, but they rapidly became entrenched as formulae of respect, with no value as expressions of imperial worship, as opposed to what was usually assumed from the epithet Augustus/a.

In short, from the perspective of epithetical usage, access to the divine took place from a position of submission formulated in political terminology, closely mirroring the relationship of dependence assumed in prayer.

As soon as gods can be enunciated, they manifest themselves to the worshipper. Consequently, their presence takes on a new dimension, since it does not correspond solely to the image established by their iconography in a more or less canonical form, but is altered by the epithets by which they are called. The iconography is more static, for as Cicero points out: “It may be lawful to say that Jupiter always wears a beard, that Apollo is always beardless, that Minerva’s eyes are blue-eyed and Neptune’s are cerulean…”. Thus, the forms of representation were fixed, admitting of few variations, and the divine presences were consequently mediatised by their image; however, their identity and perception was altered by the flexibility of the onomastic formulae with which worshippers addressed them. There is no doubt that the epigraphic testimonies, and in particular the epithets, modified the divine presences and the ways of accessing them. In this respect, the statues, their bases and inscriptions of all kinds bear witness to the vitality of a deity in its cultic space. Thus, each sanctuary, each sacred space, constituted a repository of collective memory that shaped a changing religious landscape according to the needs of their communities. Potentially, such spaces were the result of the deity’s accessibility and capacity for transformation, even if we do not always have sufficient information to understand these. Furthermore, as repositories of memory, shrines served as important spaces for learning, that is, for the religious socialisation of those who visited them. It was within this space of resonance that the limits of what was acceptable to the community were set; actions that transgressed these limits might be normalised and integrated into the orthopraxis; but when the community rejected them, they were designated sacrilegious acts. ‘Social agentivity’ is the tool that helps us to understand the mechanisms of integration or rejection in forms of access to the divine.

As mentioned earlier, besides contributions from the members of the EPIDI subproject, this volume also contains contributions from colleagues who wished to offer their perspectives on the subject under analysis. Some agreed to join us in the adventure of exploring other ways of addressing the gods and examining different strategies for mobilising divine favour. Others preferred to focus on the offering of bodies, or have written about intermediate strategies.

Among the former, Kerasia A. Stratiki (Chapter 3) analyses the process of creation, choice and use of specific epithets in the manner of the EPIDI subproject, focusing on the example provided by the use of heroine names as epithets of Artemis. The nexus between Iphigenia, Callisto and Artemis is successfully revealed and serves as an example of the use of onomastic epithets, often theonyms but sometimes also anthroponyms, a category that has been the subject of specific attention within this same project, in cooperation with the MAP (Mapping the Gods) project led by C. Bonnet in Toulouse (Alvar, Bonnet and Gasparini, forthcoming).

Lucia Rainone and Marietta Horster (Chapter 4) address other strategies to access the divine by studying the gradual construction of Jupiter, throughout the Republic, as a result of the agency of individuals belonging to the urban elites, according to the testimony of literary sources.

In Chapter 5, Francisco Marco Simón tackles the problem of animal sacrifice in the Lusitanian sphere. In some bilingual inscriptions, individuals with Latin onomastics invoke their divinities using Lusitanian theonyms but Latin votive formulae and evidence scarce but striking code-switching, revealing specific mechanisms for addressing the divinities that owe their existence to the interaction between traditional practices and innovations derived from immigration and cultural contact. Of great interest is the use of the Lusitanian language for communication with supernatural entities, while Latin is maintained for communication with the audience or mortal readers.

Chapter 9, by Georgia Petridou, is illustrative in this respect. She conducts a comparative analysis of the description of the plague in the second book of Aelius Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi and the ritualisation of this same epidemic in a series of religious inscriptions from the same period. Aristides’ interpretation is complex and nuanced, in line with the rest of the Hieroi Logoi.

A specific form of verbal access to divine entities is also explored in two consecutive chapters. In the first of these, Silvia Acerbi (Chapter 10) examines the divinatory practices attested not only in polytheism, but also in Christianity, in which children became the bearers of meaning, instruments through which communication with the divine was established. Converted into mere recipients, children were objectified and transformed into messengers of the supernatural and, at the same time, into messages of the divine word. Rituals such as cleromancy and cledonomancy did not die out with Christianity, but were resemanticised, indicating the popularity of the topos of infans loquens.

In the following chapter, which also serves as a link to the subproject concerning the use of the body as a tool for communication with the supernatural, Juan Antonio Jiménez Sánchez (Chapter 11) analyses a group of Visigothic slates from the Iberian Peninsula that provide a glimpse into the survival of ritual practices with polytheistic roots in peninsular Christianity. These are magical formulations addressed to angels in order to obtain their help for the benefit of the supplicants. According to Jiménez Sánchez, these are a faithful reflection of popular religiosity in Hispania, which operated successfully in parallel with standardised ecclesiastical practices.

Whereas the subproject “Divine epithets” examined strategies for constructing divine agency and its social repercussions, through an analysis of the selection of epithets used by devotees to identify and address their gods, the subproject “Lived body, narrated body”, directed by Clelia Martínez Maza, applied the interpretative paradigm of lived ancient religion to individual and collective experiences of contact with the divine in a Christian setting. Analysing testimonies related to Christian communities, the subproject’s aim was to elucidate the way in which individuals were able to enhance their agency through the authority conferred not only by claims to have been in the presence of the divinity, but also by the rhetorical (narrative construction of the event, inclusion of doctrinal and moralising elements) and performative (physical and behavioural) capacity they deployed to differentiate their status vis-à-vis the rest of their communities.

Here, the increasing agency of charismatic characters and its strategic use as a reference point in the collective imaginary are analysed from two angles.

The first of these draws on late antique martyr literature. In this case, of course, such narratives cannot be interpreted a priori as biographical accounts, but rather as catalysts of the forms of contact with the divine that were recognised as viable. The new interpretative approaches have moved away from simply confirming or disproving such accounts’ historical veracity, to explore how the sublimation of martyrs reinforces their prestige and authority in the community both at the moment of death and in relation to their Christian community (in cases where there is no doubt about the historical veracity of the account), and to investigate the long-lasting meta-historical discourse that is articulated in myriad ways whenever a community of believers decides to extol the memory of their own martyr’s passio (Cameron, 1991; Roberts, 1993; Leemans et al., 2003; Rosoux, 2004; Bowersock, 2005; Castelli, 2007).

Drawing on this line of interpretation, Mª Amparo Mateo (Chapter12) analyses the text of the passion of Saint Vincent of Saragossa and the reworking proposed by Prudentius, Augustine and Justus of Urgell. According to Mateo, each of these authors used martyrdom as a pretext for presenting their point of view on controversial issues (the resurrection, for example) and for transmitting a powerful message about the moral values of a good Christian. Mateo also examines the zeal shown to establish a close link with the martyr, fostered by the local churches not only through the rereading of these texts but also through the exploitation of relics that served as material testimony to the antiquity of the Christian community. Nathalie Klinck (Chapter 13) demonstrates common purposes and outcomes in a similar case, that of Salsa, a young North African martyr. Possessing the virtues that adorned the ideal of the devout Christian woman, she overcame the weaknesses of her sex to become the object of veneration and protector of the community. Once again, the martyr’s remains were wielded as a powerful instrument in the service of the local church, which strove to capitalise on the martyr’s cult. To this end, it monopolised the entire process, from legitimisation of the relics and the miracles they performed, to control of the martyr narrative and veneration of her tomb.

However, it was not only the ecclesiastical authorities who promoted worship of the relics of the first Christian martyrs. In Chapter 14, Clelia Martínez Maza examines the literary construction of the cult of the Northumbrian King Oswald. Bede’s work provides an insight into a narrative that faithfully reproduced the stages of the canon, adducing miracles that operated first in the purely popular sphere and later in the more properly ecclesiastical domain. In this instance, it was not primarily the church that was interested in promoting the cult, but rather the royal house itself, as part of a series of initiatives that it carried out for political purposes.

The second angle of analysis concerns asceticism and descriptions of the suffering body. The methodological approach employed here draws on the theories of “embodiment” that have been applied in the history of religions in recent decades. Historical-religious and anthropological analyses have revealed that in ascetic practice, the body is not so much presented as an object of cultural and social processes, but rather as a “mindful body”, as a field of action and an existential device through which ascetics position themselves as subjects in the world (Merlau-Ponty, 1945; Çsordas, 1994). Ascetic practices, which sometimes also manifest themselves in radically performative terms, remain elusive in the comfort zone of our own heuristic categories because they often reveal and invalidate the interpretative axes along which traditional historiography tends to place them, as they intertwine the political dimension with the aesthetic, or the spiritual and religious with the therapeutic.

Based on these methodological premises, Chiara Cremonesi (Chapter 15) analyses this complex web of relationships in the biography of Daniel the Stylite. Her study goes beyond the traditional interaction between ascetic and community, a relationship of power that was by no means univocal but was instead defined by porous and diffuse boundaries, for it did not flow solely from the Stylite to the crowds; rather, the crowds also operated in an autonomous, independent and uncontrollable manner, reaffirmed by their relationship with the holy ascetic.

In Chapter 16, Héctor González Palacios conducts an anthropological analysis of the hagiographic accounts of cross-dressed saints. These narratives are replete with clichés, being literary products rather than actual biographies, but they capture real practices of gender change. Analysed from the perspective of the anthropology of kinship, the accounts suggest that such gender change was the result of a negotiation between the individual and social agents.

We did not wish to limit the content of the present volume exclusively to the research results of the two coordinated teams; rather, as has already been mentioned, from the outset we wanted to complement these with contributions from other researchers who had taken similar approaches at the aforementioned congress in Málaga. Thus, we aimed to explore in greater depth the way in which the self-experience of religious communication becomes a reflective phenomenon reproduced in time and space to constitute a collectively shared narrative. Human agency has been a paramount concept in recent scholarship on religions in the classical world, but the conference organisers invited participants to direct their attention instead towards the processes of social reproduction that validate individual experience. Although human agency (understood as accountable action) is a useful heuristic category for functionalist thought, it tends to evade the temporal dimension, as it mostly highlights a specific action located in a particular moment and place. Meanwhile, a diachronic analysis of religious phenomena creates the illusion of a linear, sequential process of successive “movements”. In line with Anthony Giddens’ remarks on the importance of embedding social systems in time and space, the success of social action is evidenced by its subsequent replication over time, modelling routinised actions. The questions that participants were asked to address during the conference included the means by which individual, creative religious micro-strategies of communication with the gods became established patterns of behaviour, the extent to which individual behaviour was mediated by cultural constraints and the reasons why individual biographies of divine experience became exempla and identity markers.

In addition, the analysis of communicative strategies can go beyond a specific study of a concept afterlife. In fact, the performative potential of written expression as it appears in epigraphic formulae formed another of the avenues of analysis of the researchers invited to contribute to the volume. Such is the case of Chapter 5 by Francisco Marco Simón, presented previously, or Chapter 17 by Lidia González Estrada, who shows how the votum performed in a military context served as a communicative tool in vertical and horizontal communicative relations alike. Consequently, the votum provides a paradigmatic example of individual initiative, social reproduction (restricted, however, to a specific collective) and communicative strategy through the mediation of a religious element.

Finally, three contributors elected to highlight means other than linguistic communication or bodily experience to approach the divine. Hence, their interesting contributions focus on the materiality of the communicative act, be it provided by a temple (Chapter 4), an obelisk (Chapter 18) or the mass production of statuettes of divinities (Chapter 19).

Thus, Lucia Rainone and Marietta Horster (Chapter 4) use the foundation of temples dedicated to Jupiter during republican and early imperial times as an example to illustrate the way in which Roman elites appropriated religious tradition and adapted it to other specific circumstances, a strategy that is clearly similar to that unveiled by Lidia González Estrada. In Chapter 18, Dario Cellamare offers an example of a “micro-history” study of the religious events that unfolded in connection with an abandoned obelisk in Alexandria during the reign of Emperor Julian (361–363). At the opposite extreme to Cellamare’s specificity, in the closing chapter of the volume, Greg Woolf (Chapter 19) highlights the importance of the iconography of divinities represented in small, easily transportable and standardised statuettes in relation to the visual configuration of a religious system that transcended ritual prescription or votive formulae, as a mechanism both of communication with the supernatural and of homogenisation of the visibility of the divine entities.

Within their thematic diversity, all the chapters are coherent from the perspective of the micro or macro strategies employed for communication with the supernatural. From lexical to physical utterances, from socialising materiality to personal appropriation, this handful of examples demonstrates the variety and performative creativity of Roman religion (polytheism and Christianity), bearing witness to the importance of the project that gave rise to the present volume.

1 One of the products of this research project has been the creation of an open access database (DEpHis=Divine Epithets in Hispania), which gathers together all the inscriptions with epithetical formulations in Hispania: https://humanidadesdigitales.uc3m.es/s/DEPHis/page/inicio. It joins other open access religious databases on the same platform (https://www.uc3m.es/biblioteca/humanidades-digitales), concerning the gens isiaca in Hispania, Mithras in Hispania, Mater Magna and Atis in Hispania, and the religious epigraphy of North Africa (SIRIS).

2 The concept of an onomastic chain is the result of research carried out by the Mapping Ancient Polytheism project, led by Corinne Bonnet, cf.: Bonnet et al., 2018.

Jaime Alvar Ezquerra / Alejandro Beltrán Ortega / María Fernández Portaencasa / Valentino Gasparini / José Carlos López-Gómez / Beatriz Pañeda Murcia / Lorena Pérez Yarza

Divine Onomastic Attributes in the Graeco-Roman World. Proposal for a New Taxonomy

Abstract: This paper takes as its start point previous work on the classification of cult epithets and onomastic sequences, using this foundation to develop a new taxonomy that is “thematic” rather than “functional”. In doing so, it focuses on the diverse meanings that divine epithets could encompass in the Graeco-Roman world. The taxonomy advanced here seeks to capture the multifaceted aspects of divine onomastic attributes, adapted to the sense they have in the specific social and religious contexts in which they occur. This approach not only assists in the interpretation of inscriptions, but also sheds light on both the evolving ways in which individuals communicated with the divine and the motivations behind their selection of specific onomastic attributes. The proposed taxonomy is an interrelated hierarchical schema that includes three main levels (environmental, divine, and human) with several subcategories. We argue that this taxonomy offers valuable insights into the intentional use of epithets, enriching our understanding of the mechanisms by which divine onomastic chains were constructed, and thereby enhancing our understanding of ancient religious beliefs and practices.

This article intends to present a synthesis of the methodological results of the research project Epítetos divinos. Experiencia religiosa y relaciones de poder en Hispania (EPIDI), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, and developed at the Institute of Historiography “Julio Caro Baroja” of the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (2018–2021).¹

The overall aim of EPIDI has been the analysis of the gods’ onomastic attributes as a means of constructing the divine in relation to contingent forms of political organisation in Hispania, with particular emphasis on the interplay between individual creativity and social normativity. Within this general framework, the project has pursued three specific goals: (1) to establish the degree of interaction between individual and social agency by analysing, on the one hand, social patterns that have been influenced by individual innovations and, on the other, religious modifications clearly influenced by the social context; (2) to explore how women’s agency is reflected in their use of divine epithets; (3) to compare the results of the analysis of the Hispanic documentation with that of other Latin-speaking areas of the Western Mediterranean, in particular North Africa.

In order to achieve these goals, the entire epigraphic record of the divine epithets attested in the three Roman provinces of Hispania (a total of ca. 1.300 inscriptions) has been collected into a database called Divine Epithets in Hispania (DEpHis) and housed in the open-access web-publishing platform Omeka S provided by the Library of Humanities, Communication and Documentation at UC3M.²

The same platform has served to build a second database, the Sylloge Inscriptionum Religionis Africae Romanae (SIRAR),³ which contains the ca. 5.800 Greek, Latin and Neo-Punic religious inscriptions of Roman Africa collected within the framework of the research project Lived Ancient Religion in North Africa (LARNA).⁴ Only occasionally have the onomastic items from the Iberian Peninsula been studied in comparison with others belonging to different territories, either in the Western or Eastern Mediterranean, in Latin as well as in Greek. Thanks to the synergy between EPIDI and LARNA, and the collation of their respective databases, it has finally been possible to collect a significant sample of divine epithets.