6 Divinity

In Sala III of the Terme di Diocleziano (Museo Nazionale Romano), the visitor comes face-to-face with three slightly under-life-size terracotta models of young women seated on thrones with their feet resting on low stools (Figure 6.1). Arranged into an uncompromising V-shape and positioned at the end of the largest room of the museum with stairs to the second floor directly behind them, the three women dominate the space and challenge the visitor to pass without paying them due attention. Produced between the late fourth and early third century BCE, the substantially restored statues were recovered from a sanctuary that appears to have been connected with Demeter and Kore, within the località Casaletto in the territory of Ariccia (ancient Aricia, Latium). Over-life-size clay busts of the two goddesses found at the same location are displayed on either side of the seated figures, at least two of which have also been identified as representations of the supposed tutelary deities. At the front of the group, a figure made using pinky beige–coloured clay has been identified as Demeter, based on the ears of corn that decorate her throne, jewellery, and diadem, as well as that which she clasps lightly in her right hand as her elbow rests informally on the arm of her wide throne. Her chiton-covered legs are slightly apart, the right stretched forwards as she reclines in a relaxed manner, her face turned upwards, gazing away from the viewer. Over her (missing) left shoulder sits Kore, her slightly less well-preserved body dressed in the same manner but her pose upright and taut. She is made from a reddish clay and holds a model of a piglet in her left hand. To her right sits an unidentified figure made from the same reddish clay, also dressed in a chiton and cloak but with no clear attributes to indicate whether she should be recognised as a specific divine figure. She wears a diadem, button-shaped earrings, and pendant jewellery that the museum label points out is comparable with examples from Magna Graecia. Her head is slightly too small for her awkward and stiffly posed body, and her thick neck is modelled with folds, but she sits enthroned in the same fashion as the figures identified as Demeter and Kore, one foot placed slightly forwards and resting on a stool.

In some respects, it is the modern arrangement of these three similar yet clearly individualised figures in the centre of the gallery space which presents a challenge to the visitor. Although they are neither physically dominating nor made from precious or elaborate materials, their collective material thingliness affects the visitor in unexpected ways: we are compelled to walk around them, to defer to their presence and to regard them, even as at least one of them refuses to look us in the eye. As objects in space, they currently ask the beholder to consider who they might be, what relationships exist between them, what their status is, and how we should respond to it. They were more than likely positioned differently in their original setting, yet their material form and co-presence (perhaps accompanied by similar models and smaller clay figurines of the same or different design: Figure 6.2), as well as their location within a sanctuary, was undoubtedly equally physically and cognitively affective in the early third century BCE.

Figure 6.1 Three terracotta models of female figures seated on thrones, from a sanctuary connected with Demeter and Kore within the località Casaletto, Ariccia (Latium), late fourth to early third century BCE.

Photo: Emma-Jayne Graham. Su concessione del Ministero per i beni e le attivita culturali – Museo Nazionale Romano.

But what are the terracotta female figures from Ariccia? Are they elaborate votive offerings dedicated to one or both of the female divinities connected with the sanctuary? Maybe they functioned as cult statues, in which case they might be the recipients of offerings or the focal point for ritualised activities. If they are cult statues, does that mean that they are goddesses or merely representations of them? As Lambros Malafouris (2013, p. 117) has suggested for other types of figurine, whether such objects were iconic representations of a deity or the very embodiment of that deity may actually have depended upon how individual people engaged with them, since ‘both possibilities are equally afforded and can be seen as active even in the context of the same ritual process’. The information provided by the Museo Nazionale Romano is restrained in its interpretation, suggesting merely that each is a ‘statue’ (statua), resisting the temptation to assign them to a more specific category of ‘cult statue’, even if the manner of their display at the end of the gallery parallels the location of cult statues towards the centre or back of a temple cella, where they might be glimpsed from a distance before being approached. Nevertheless, it is easy to understand why the appellation ‘cult statue’ might be applicable: they are clearly larger as well as more elaborate and expensive than the typical types of terracotta figurine recovered from votive deposits of this period and region; at least two bear the attributes of known goddesses; and all three are enthroned, implying elevated status. What is more, the widespread absence of archaeologically attested ‘cult statues’ at many of the excavated sanctuaries of mid-Republican central Italy suggests that, if such things existed at all, they may well have been produced using materials such as terracotta (Rask 2011; Kiernan 2020).

Figure 6.2 Terracotta statues depicting seated women, from Lavinium (Latium), fifth century BCE

Photo: De Agostini Picture Library/G. Nimatallah/Bridgeman Images.

Perhaps they are something else entirely. Their identification with Demeter and Kore is prompted by certain distinctive attributes (corn and piglet), but it is not completely clear, for instance, whether the so-called Kore had received or intended to offer the model of the piglet in her hand, and while the statue described as Demeter is veiled, the unidentified woman is not. Indeed, it is the third figure who complicates any straightforward reading of these objects as ‘cult statues’: based on her physical appearance and absence of characteristic attributes, she cannot be aligned easily with an alternative iconographic form of either goddess. Maybe she is another currently unidentified female deity, or perhaps she is a votive model of a mortal woman who had access to the financial means necessary to commission an especially elaborate dedication. Similar questions have been asked about other representations of seated women that seem to evade straightforward categorisation as strictly divine or human, including the tufa ‘matrons’ from the sanctuary of Mater Matuta at Capua (Carroll 2019) (Figure 6.3). These most probably depicted mortal women, possibly with the many babies that they had conceived, miscarried, or successfully given birth to over the course of their generative lives. Nevertheless, their appearance and posture – seated, sometimes with their feet on a low stool – may indicate a more complex interweaving or assembling of divine and mortal characteristics.

The presence in the Ariccia trio of a less demonstrably divine female figure therefore complicates their interpretation: Are they deities or humans? What might make one terracotta model the embodiment of divinity and another not? Were these boundaries fixed? Did the materialness of these three different figures afford specific experiences of lived religion, or was it only their appearance that mattered? Maybe they were intended to represent humans dressed as deities, perhaps reflecting a woman’s role as priestess or attendant within the cult or the enactment of a particular ritualised activity. Near life-size terracotta models of mortal women are certainly known from other similar sanctuary sites, such as those from the sanctuary of Portonaccio at Veii currently housed in the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia. Ranging from 440 to 220 BCE in date, these two-thirds life-size figures are shown standing, rather than seated, in the act of making dedicatory gestures typical of offerants rather than recipients (outstretched arms with upturned palms and raised hands). What is more, as Zsuzsanna Várhelyi (2017, p. 96) has recently argued for later periods of Roman history, intentionally placing statues of non-divine figures alongside those of deities, and more importantly engaging them directly in the same types of religious activities, could blur the ontological boundaries between them. The model of a mortal might become as much a focal point for ritual as that of a deity, with consequences for both. We might consider, then, that the ambiguities introduced by the presence of the third woman in the Ariccia ensemble are a useful reminder that such figures should be considered strictly as neither, illustrative instead of a blending of the personae and essence of both divine and mortal that was a consequence of the ‘in between’ environment of the sanctuary that was introduced in Chapter 5.

Uncertainties concerning the formal status of the female statues from Ariccia therefore raise a host of questions concerning the ways in which divinity was present in Roman ritualised settings, including what it meant when individual images of a divine figure coexisted within the same setting. In the case of Ariccia this meant at least two of Demeter, which were perhaps accompanied by smaller votive figurines depicting the same figure. Plutarch’s account in the Life of Coriolanus (37.4) of how the unexpectedly successful fundraising efforts of the Roman matronae led to one of the two statues they financed in the temple of Virtus Muliebris speaking out loud to thank them, attests not only to Roman ideas about how humans might engage with divinities via material statues, but also to the apparently non-problematic possibility of their contemporary duplication. For the purposes of this study of the thingliness of lived religion, however, the Ariccia figures raise issues that are potentially much more difficult to address, including the burning question of whether the affordances of divinity were limited to those of a human-made anthropomorphic cult statue or might manifest in other ways. Relatedly, was it even possible for divinity to belong to a truly non-hierarchical assemblage of material things? In other words, this chapter asks whether cult statues were the only thing that really mattered when it came to the thingliness of the divine.

Figure 6.3 Tufa ex-voto dedicated to the goddess Mater Matuta, from Capua (Campania)

Photo: De Agostini Picture Library/Bridgeman Images.

Can gods be things?

Jan Bremmer (2018, pp. 108–9) recently observed that the emphasis on the individual within studies that privilege lived religion means that ‘it sometimes looks as if lived ancient religion consisted mainly of actions, be they by men or women, priests or lay people, free-born or slave. This focus on actions and agents means that the gods receive relatively little attention’. It is certainly true that, as far as the earlier chapters of this book have been concerned, the presence of the divine within the assemblages of things that I have examined has been largely taken for granted. It is also fair to say that the precise thingly nature of these divine entities has been for the most part sidelined, even though the actions of people who made votive offerings, performed sacrifices, or experienced religious place have been framed with reference to the perceived existence of a divine world – one which was, moreover, crucial for those people’s subsequent rationalisation of the differences to the world that those actions were perceived (or anticipated) to make as ‘religion’. My own acceptance of the divine as an unexamined element fundamental to the existence of what I have been describing as ‘Roman religion’ might, of course, reflect some of the realities of a lived ancient world in which the tradition of pax deorum genuinely did establish that the gods were simply ‘there’ or, if they were not ‘there’ permanently, might be summoned or convinced to manifest temporarily. From that standpoint, it is the continually unquestioned existence of the divine which provides the rationale for specific ritualised activities that prompted the assembling of certain things: the gods need sacrifices, their will must be determined, a promised gift will secure our agreement, and so on. Nor am I alone in beginning with this assumption: others have suggested that ‘methodologically … it is important neither to engage in a debate about their existence nor to expect to find their traces empirically… . Analyzed as “signs,” the “gods” have neither an essence nor biographies’ (Rüpke 2007b, p. 7).

Nonetheless, recourse to the ancient (almost, but not total) uncritical acceptance of gods as somehow natural and self-explanatory of the role of divinity within religion remains, to be blunt, something of a cop-out. If Roman religion is to be understood as the product of ritualised assemblages of things – and I maintain that doing this offers us the best way of understanding it – then it behoves us to attempt to grasp the thingly qualities, or fundamental ‘essence’, of all the potential core components of these assemblages, including the most intangible. Consequently, it is necessary to examine more thoroughly the place of the divine as things in their own right within the ritualised assemblages that produced religion in Roman Italy, and to address some of the issues raised by both the statues from Ariccia and Jan Bremmer’s comments concerning the absence of the gods within a lived religion approach (albeit probably not in the way that he was expecting). To do this, I turn my attention in this chapter to the very thingliness of divine presence, asking whether Roman gods could be things in the same sense as the other things that I have examined in this study, venturing beyond rather simplistic statements concerning the universality of divine presence in the ancient imagination to interrogate more closely how the affordances of divinity manifested materially within relational assemblages that produced not only particular forms of lived religion and religious knowledge but also the concept of divine agency itself.

This is not an easy task, and it has to be noted at the outset that the very notion of divine agency is immediately problematic in the context of a study predicated on the idea that all agency is relational and that none of the things within an assemblage inherently possesses its own autonomous agency. That is to say, once we acknowledge the inclusion of things which are usually understood to wield ultimate power within our otherwise non-hierarchical assemblages, we risk everything falling apart. If, as I have argued throughout this book, agency is the product of an assemblage of equally relational things rather than something inherent to one or more of its components, it must follow that divine agency (sometimes styled divine ‘power’) was not the innate possession of a divine being but a product of how divinity related to the other components of a ritualised assemblage. The implication appears to be, therefore, either that deities cannot be inherently all-powerful, since power (agency) only exists as a product of relations between things, or that this power is artificially ascribed to whatever it is that is conceptualised as being ‘divine’ by the presence of human brains in an assemblage (the latter is the favoured approach of recent work on ancient lived religion: Albrecht et al. 2018, pp. 571–2; also Iara 2020). In other words, either the divine do not bring anything special at all to an assemblage (at which point we lose the significance of the gods entirely), or divine power is all in the heads of humans, where it is shaped by human expectations and interpretations, becoming purely anthropocentric and, if pushed to the extreme, entirely imaginary, or at least lacking in comparable material thingliness.

Regardless of whether this last point is true or not (and here I refer the reader back to my earlier discussion of religious knowledge as cognitive rationalisation in Chapter 2), it is certain that religious agency is produced only in circumstances in which a component of a ritualised assemblage involves something which can be considered supernatural, otherworldly, or somehow superior to humans. As Jörg Rüpke (2018a, p. 7) notes, activity only becomes religious ‘when and where, in a particular situation, at least one human individual includes such [superior] actors in his or her communication with other humans, whether by merely referring to those actors or by directly addressing them’. Although the theoretical underpinnings of this statement differ from those that I adopt in the present study, it is the inclusion of superior, non-human participants that (for Rüpke) marks out activities, and (for me) characterises ritualised assemblages, that are capable of making a difference that is fundamentally religious in consequence. The first proposal – that the specialness of divinity cannot be distinguished from other things – must therefore be rejected. The second proposal, that divine beings are effectively ‘all in the head’, is also far from satisfactory, since all it achieves is an inversion of the status quo, replacing the all-encompassing dominant affectivity of the divine that caused the imbalance in the first place with the newly privileged affectivity of human imagination. Both options are difficult to reconcile with the idea of a flat ontology, in which no component of a relational assemblage is more dominant than any other.

To what extent, then, is it ever possible for divinity, or anything considered to possess affordances that might combine with those of others in order to produce agency that is equated with the supernatural, to be part of a relational assemblage predicated on non-hierarchical relationships? Must the inclusion of the divine within such assemblages always be considered in human terms, that is, either through cognitive rationalisations which interpret the world with reference to human expectations and experiences or through representations and material forms that are initiated and shaped by humans, such as cult statues? And, moreover, what do we do about the relational imbalance that the divine brought to such an arrangement? We are left to ponder not only whether gods are things, but if so, whether there are ways to flatten their relationship with other things without resorting to anthropocentrism, or in other words without always shaping the thingliness of gods in humanity’s image. I will address this issue in this chapter by asking how far it is possible to escape from traditional forms of understanding concerning the more-than-human divine components of an assemblage that frame it in purely human terms.

A question of (im)material agency

The immediate question, then, becomes one about whether immaterial things within a relational assemblage can be material on their own terms. Conceiving of divinity as having material affordances is undoubtedly challenging to get our heads around without thinking about how these might manifest either in the imagination (e.g. ‘the divine smell nice’) or in a secondary, usually visual form (e.g. a cult statue). It is akin to trying to imagine the smell of a penguin without first conjuring at least a mental image of a penguin and its habits. It is not, however, completely impossible to identify how immaterial things might interact with physically material things, as demonstrated by one example of an intangible thing with tangible affordances that regularly makes a difference to our own world: anyone who has used an umbrella on a blustery day will have experienced the tangible affectivity of the otherwise intangible thingliness of the wind. Wind has no material form, at least not if we acknowledge that the physics of the Earth’s atmosphere and the combination of nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, argon, and other trace gases that make up the air that we experience is an aspect of materialness imperceptible to humans without the use of modern technology. Yet wind can make a difference to the material world and to human behaviour. It can blow down trees, it can whip up water, it can damage buildings, it can transport scents as well as move pollen over large distances, it can enable an aeroplane to take off, and it can cause your umbrella to turn inside out. It cannot be seen other than via its effects on other things, it cannot be held or contained, but it can touch us and it can affect, making a difference to how we (and other, more-than-human things) behave, act, and respond to the world. In this way, and only as part of an assemblage with bodies, buildings, trees, and umbrellas, wind has a demonstrable material impact on the physical world. This is because when it combines with other things, these relationships afford a particular outcome or agency. Wind can only be affective when it is part of an assemblage, and these relationships allow an otherwise intangible component to become perceptible.

What happens if we consider gods in the same terms, as intangible things with affordances that are perceptible in certain ways only when they combine with the qualities of other things? An ancient example might be found in Aurora, goddess of the dawn, whose real-world affectivity as perceived by ancient people came in the form of the sensory experience of sunrise: her divine affordances were manifested in the changing light and reappearance of the sun, the subtly rising temperature or presence of dew on the ground, the sound of birdsong. These sensory affects, produced by an assemblage of things that featured the affordances of the material world brought into relation with the theorised presence of the immaterial deity, gave the otherwise intangible (even imaginary) goddess a tangible presence in the world. Significantly, David Levene (2012, pp. 56–7) points out, with reference to Ovid (Metamorphoses 13.587–90), that Aurora was not otherwise given ‘artificial’ material form by ancient communities: her thingliness resided in the very affordance of dawn itself, made tangible through the perceptible qualities of the other things with which she combined at that moment. A divinity therefore need not necessarily be innately material in order for presumed divine affordances to become tangible, even if, ultimately, it will always be human interpretation of any resulting outcomes that allows for them to be understood as a consequence of divine characteristics. In many ways, this means that religion remains a fundamentally anthropocentric interpretation of the agentic consequences of immaterial and material affordances, since other more-than-human components in an assemblage lack the cognitive capacity to process intangible affordances in the same way, even if they may have a physical effect upon them (the warming of the air, the wetness of water) (see Kindt 2012, pp. 42–3). However, as noted in Chapter 2, what is being questioned here is not the human-centred cultural concept of religion but the processes that underpin it.

Earlier chapters have demonstrated the capacities of the material affordances of things to make a difference in the world in ways that are quite separate from any wilful intent to do so, and reconfiguring agency as relational, rather than purposeful or intentional, also offers a way of reconciling the notion of ritualised assemblages as non-hierarchical with the apparent supernatural superiority of these ‘quite “special” actors’ (Rüpke 2018a, p. 12). It is, however, much easier to conceive of non-purposeful agency in the context of things, such as incense boxes or votive models which are not expected to possess the capacity to be purposeful, than it is when it comes to the divine. Cultural conventions and persuasive myths, from at least Homer onwards, and centuries of scholarship concerning ancient religion have conditioned us to conceive of Roman gods as wilful, demanding, and potent individuals – effectively as a superior extension of very human-like ‘agency’ (Ullucci 2012, pp. 62, 72, n. 26). Jörg Rüpke’s (2018a, p. 9) recent adoption of variations on the phrase ‘actors who were not indisputably plausible’ offers a useful starting point for moving away from these expectations, and the accompanying culturally loaded terminology of ‘gods and goddesses’, by suggesting that the divine are a broader group of actors. But Rüpke’s ‘actors’ remain primarily human-like in their relationships, and he uses this (rather cumbersome) phraseology interchangeably with, amongst other qualitative terms, ‘superhuman’, ‘otherworldly’, and ‘superior’. Doing so immediately places divinity back on an unequal footing, reinforcing the extent to which it is imagined to possess a will, a purpose, desires, and intentions which because of its exceptional status it can more readily act upon, certainly in comparison with the more narrowly limited abilities of mortals.

For these reasons, the arguments already adduced for agency as the product of engagement between things rather than inherent within individual things become especially significant. If we can shift our perspective on ancient divinity away from one in which it not only inherently possesses agency but also has more of it than every other component within the assemblage, towards one in which agency is the shared product of the affordances of the whole assemblage, including the affectivity of the immaterial and the cognitive interpretations that its human components subsequently place on the effects of that agency as religious, then it does become possible to start to flatten out those relationships. The need for ritual itself also becomes clearer since this, rather than so-called divine agency, is the driver for the production of these assemblages: ritual is the activity that enables the thingliness of divinity to forge particular relationships with other things that are subsequently understood and experienced as religion. It is therefore essential to continue to rethink the thingliness of divinity and to find ways of understanding how humans and other components in an assemblage interacted on more equal terms.

By way of example, I have chosen to explore this from two angles, examining how different ways of being affected by the qualities of divine thingliness could produce disparate forms of religious knowledge. First, I will consider what happens when intangible concepts of divinity are given material character in the form of images and statues. Then I will examine the opposite standpoint: rather than giving the divine material form, how might divine affordances already be tangible within the physical world? This means examining ways in which divine thingliness might manifest through human-made artefacts that were not designed for the purposes of representing the divine, as well as natural elements such as water.

Imaging divinity

For many people, myself included, to think about Roman gods is to first think about the so-called cult statues or cult images that continue to feature at the heart of a wealth of scholarship concerned with the nature of ancient divinity (e.g. Gordon 1979; Donohue 1997; Stewart 2003; 2007; Elsner 2007; Iles Johnston 2008; Lipka 2009; Estienne 2010; Mylonopoulos 2010a; Rüpke 2010; Weddle 2010; Bremmer 2013; Madigan 2013; Estienne 2015; Várhelyi 2017; Kiernan 2020). Much of this work has focused on Greek contexts, where the evidence provided by both sculptural forms and textual sources points towards considerable ancient interest in the ‘matter’ of the gods and the relationship between images and deities (e.g. Steiner 2001; Platt 2011). Evidence for cult images in Roman Italy, particularly for the earlier periods of its history, remains much scarcer (Rask 2011; Kiernan 2020, pp. 26–37), with scholars (and indeed some Roman writers themselves) compelled to rely for their understanding of the existence, function, and status of cult images on a handful of textual sources ranging from the late Republic to late antiquity (Mylonopoulos 2010b, p. 3; Estienne 2015, pp. 382–3). As a result, scholarly energy has gone especially towards scrutinising the terminology associated with images of the divine in these texts, seeking to articulate the complex relationship between a set of terms which, when used in particular contexts, might signal that a statue was intended to be a container for divinity, a representation of a divine figure, an embodiment of a divine figure, or might even be considered to be a divine figure. This includes the question of whether a god or goddess might temporarily inhabit an image, with the statue acting as an empty shell that was only periodically filled with divine presence (e.g. Stewart 2007; Estienne 2010; Bremmer 2013; Estienne 2015; Kiernan 2020). Approaching these issues has not been an easy task, and even though Sylvia Estienne (2010) has suggested that certain Latin terms were used more commonly for images of gods than for humans (signum and simulacrum), Ioannis Mylonopoulos (2010b, p. 5) points out that ‘neither seems to refer to a specific function, but rather to a form of representation: while signum is more generally any visual sign of the invisible, simulacrum seems to describe an anthropomorphic image’. Indeed, Estienne (2015, p. 383) notes elsewhere that

recent research on statues in Greece and Rome have rightfully questioned the notion of ‘cult statue’: philologists scarcely find any traces of it in the Greek or Latin vocabulary, archaeologists generally face serious difficulties in identifying it due to a lack of usable context, whilst art historians try, often in vain, to retrieve its reflection from votive or numismatic material.

What is certain is that Romans of both the late Republic and imperial period were themselves unsure about such matters (Ando 2008, p. 21). What has come down to us therefore represents attempts to systematise the complex, and sometimes obscure, cultural practices that Roman commentators witnessed and participated in. As has been pointed out by others, the efforts of Roman writers to intellectualise or at least schematise the divine world are characteristic of the intellectual spheres of the imperial period and may not reflect the realities of either lived experience or earlier periods of Roman and Italic history (see Ullucci 2012, pp. 57–8; Bremmer 2013, p. 15; Macrae 2016; Rüpke 2018a, pp. 289–90; Bispham and Miano 2020, pp. xii–xiv). One factor in this may have been the increased role of writing in religious activity from the late Republic onwards, which compelled participants to develop not only a more precise understanding of the nature of the divine but also standard ways of communicating and sharing those understandings. As practices changed, and especially as epigraphy became a means of signalling and commemorating religious acts, such as the making of vows or curses (Schultz 2006, pp. 100–2), it increasingly mattered that a person could refer to one god rather than another or, for that matter, all gods:

When it came to the question of how to address the gods, public literacy enabled a precision that the vagueness and variability of an oral approach could not easily achieve. Anyone wishing to write had to name the elusive deity.

(Rüpke 2018a, p. 294)

As a consequence, divinity became increasingly fixed by titles and perceived attributes as well as by the varied contexts in which people chose to invoke them. This sort of rationalisation extended also to those who oversaw cult activities and who produced inscribed calendars or ritual regulations, which in turn served to promulgate these expectations concerning divinity. According to Jörg Rüpke (2018a, p. 159), ‘Where ritual actors produced texts, they tended to do so in order to deliberately introduce and implement standards that would have the effect of stabilizing and homogenizing changes in practices’ (also Rüpke 2011a, p. 196).

The religious landscape of Rome changed during the course of the middle and late Republic, as forms of communication, including the construction of temples and statues and the issuing of coins bearing the images of divine figures, were incorporated into contemporary forms of political discourse. Consequently, the ability to name and to identify a deity, and by implication to develop a shared knowledge of the ideals and virtues associated with that figure, acquired a new importance. In this context, the divine as recognisable individuals with distinctive characteristics became increasingly important, motivated by what Richard Gordon (1979, p. 13) described as ‘ “non-religious” ends’ (see also Rüpke 2018a, p. 189). In turn, this resulted in new ways of communicating both politically and culturally with reference to gods and goddesses (see Stewart 2007, p. 167 on the multiplying of images). It is therefore the socio-political exploitation of divine imagery, rather than anything connected with changed ideas about the nature of divinity itself, which explains why ‘it was only the more popular deities who were fixed by iconographic focalization’ (Lipka 2009, p. 91). The nature of the (non-religious) discourse in which the divine were now implicated was determinative, meaning that to speak about or to visually present divinity on a communal level required a level of precision that was unnecessary at the level of personal lived religion. Hence divinity acquired a set of standardised names and common attributes or areas of expertise, all of which could be rendered in written and visual forms. It was no good depicting the bust of a deity on a coin if nobody knew which god it referred to or, more importantly, what that association was intended to communicate about the person responsible for its issue. Indeed, Richard Gordon (1979, p. 16) argued long ago that it was the use of divine images in non-religious contexts that ultimately ‘legitimated this particular concatenation of choices, and helped turn image into god’.

Interestingly, it is also against this increasingly intellectualised and politicised backdrop that many of the highly localised deities of early Roman Italy disappear from view or are transformed. A largely undifferentiated mass of subtly diverse divinities was no longer relevant to the ways in which religion was being used within the social and political world of Rome and its territories, which required an ever-more standardised and restricted pantheon. This does not mean that earlier understandings of divinity ceased to be incorporated into ritualised assemblages or that local communities simply chose to put their traditional encounters with the divine to one side, but choices with long-lasting consequences were made about which of these deities it was useful to represent in a wider range of contexts, and how (witness Lipka’s point cited earlier about only the most ‘popular’ deities being imaged). The deceptively neat categorisations implied by the uncritical use of signum and simulacrum in Roman sources, and even the ability to represent, distinguish, and name individual deities, are therefore a product of a particular cultural milieu that potentially obscures the complexities of divine image-making within religion as it was lived.

Unfortunately, archaeological identification of extant cult images for all periods of Roman history, especially Republican Italy and the periods immediately preceding it, has proven equally difficult, running into the problems outlined here for the statues from Ariccia. Locations associated with cult activities, including those with architectural elaboration such as the construction of an aedes, altar, or other cult buildings, have provided comparatively little unequivocal evidence for the presence of cult images as the visual focal point for ritual activities (Rask 2011; Iara 2020; although for examples from the Roman provinces, see Kiernan 2020). The broadly held assumption that they must have once existed has led to fragments of sometimes rather grandiose or over-life-size statues coming to be used as a basis on which to speculate about the nature of tutelary deities at some sites. This is true for the sanctuary at Vicarello near Lake Bracciano, discussed further below, where fragmentary stone sculptures have been assigned to ‘cult images’ of Apollo and Asclepius (Bassani 2014b, p. 163). This can sometimes result in rather circular arguments about the nature of cult at sanctuaries that lack supporting epigraphic evidence. It remains possible that stone, bronze, or wooden statues were removed or destroyed when sanctuaries ceased to be used, but the widespread absence of in situ anthropomorphic cult images across central Italy appears too consistent to be explained by this alone.

Determining whether any object was the singular focus of cult activity is additionally problematic when the evidence is partial or fragmentary, and when, as demonstrated by the Ariccia trio, the ground rules for what form such objects might take are far from certain. Art historians have stressed the probable use of prestigious materials for the production of cult images, but at the same time they note that ancient authors do not privilege these materials over others: the apparent antiquity of wood was as prized as gold (Mylonopoulos 2010b, p. 9). In reality, very little archaeological evidence survives, at least for Italy, so Jörg Rüpke (2018a, p. 214) can claim that ‘in Roman statuary gold was reserved for gods, and marble and bronze created an association with wealth that was not produced by either wood or terracotta’ without invoking any material evidence to support these statements. Indeed, the difficulties of determining whether an extant statue is a genuine cult image or merely a statue depicting a god is the reason why I have chosen not to include more images in this chapter, on the grounds that they may be misleading.

As the figures from Ariccia and the mothers from Capua demonstrate, discussion also continues to focus on the difficulties of distinguishing between votive offerings and cult images. Katherine Rask (2011, p. 94) has argued that ‘every cult statue can be considered a votive, but not every votive need be considered a cult statue’, whereas Ioannis Mylonopoulos (2010b, p. 7), on the other hand, considers standpoints such as this unnecessarily restrictive: ‘We should rather distinguish between permanent cult statues and those images of gods that occasionally or under specific circumstances could be momentarily transformed into a cult statue’. A more fluid approach to the role of figured images in cult contexts is therefore necessary, one that acknowledges how the material presentation of divinity might actively work to reinforce the ambiguous affordances of divinity.

Anthropomorphic viewing

Despite these problems, textual sources and some limited archaeological evidence suggests that material things considered by Romans to be cult images did exist across ancient Italy, and in some contexts they were undoubtedly integrated into ritualised assemblages. Although I would stress that we must acknowledge more openly that cult images were not an essential component within all ritualised assemblages, and that their presence should not be considered to any degree the norm at least for large parts of early and mid-Republican Italy, it would be hasty to completely exclude them from any examination of the ways in which the immaterial divine might be made material. Where they did exist, cult images essentially afforded a visualisation of the intangible, otherworldly nature of the divine as understood by the human imagination, created in dialogue with the cultural and political agendas noted earlier. Rendering the thingliness of divinity in any physical form also afforded specific types of physical interaction with the divine that might otherwise be unavailable. What has tended to be overlooked in art historical studies of cult images focused on questions of categorisation, form, and iconography is how this process of materialisation itself – what we might describe as the deliberate re-thinging of divinity – could also affect very particular relationships between humans and divinity.

An exception to this can be found in the work of Peter Stewart (2007), who has suggested that a cult image might serve to presence the distributed personhood of the divine in multiple locations. He draws on the writing of Alfred Gell (1998), who

sees in the idol (for example) not merely a visual representation of the deity, but a bodily extension of its personhood – a sort of prosthesis. In one sense it owes its existence as an idol to the agency of the god, or at least we abduct the agency of the god from such physical forms.

(Stewart 2007, p. 168)

Definitions of agency aside, Stewart’s argument can be used to suggest that, when and where they existed, the replicability of cult statues provided a means through which certain affordances of divinity itself, including its innate partibility, could be distributed across space. I will return to the matter of divine partibility shortly, but for now it is evident that this made cult statues so much more than artificial images of a god designed to be visual prompts for communication. To this must also be added an acknowledgement that rendering the distributed personhood of divinity in material form quite literally brought it down to earth, situating it firmly within the physical world as it was perceived by humans, and temporarily reducing, or at least appearing to diminish, aspects of the otherwise hierarchical relationship caused by the apparent specialness of divinity. The use of anthropomorphic images might therefore make the divine ‘more convincing as social partners, partly because it made them resemble living human beings who are accepted to perform as agents’ (Stewart 2007, p. 163). It is debatable whether this truly flattened relationships between divine and human things or merely substituted one thing for another, since in the transformative process from intangible divinity to cult image the divine effectively lost – at the discretion of humans – at least some of its unique thingly qualities (i.e. its very intangibility). The material affordances of cult statues always remained a consequence of human choices, technologies, the availability and cost of materials, and cultural expectations of what might be appropriate when giving divinity a body – almost always, although not exclusively, a human body (Gaifman 2012, p. 79).

Nevertheless, the consequences of the active decision to produce and use anthropomorphic cult images in some contexts deserves closer examination, since it was without a doubt neither inevitable nor accidental. In some contexts the human-like form of the cult image and the particular way in which it was visually encountered almost certainly facilitated the development of a particular type of relationship between the human and divine components of a ritualised assemblage, whether this was intentional or not. Jaś Elsner (2007) has described this as the religious gaze, a specific form of viewing that can also be connected with a specific form of knowing, or epiphanic vision (see also Platt 2011 on primarily Greek contexts). Elsner (2007, p. 24) describes the process of encounter as follows:

The viewer enters a sacred space, a special place set apart from ordinary life, in which the god dwells. In this liminal site, the viewer enters the god’s world and likewise the deity intrudes directly into the viewer’s world in a highly ritualised context. The reciprocal gaze of this visuality is a kind of epiphanic fulfilment both of the viewer-pilgrim, who discovered his or her deepest identity in the presence of the god, and of the god himself, who receives the offerings and worship appropriate to his divinity in the process of pilgrimage rites.

For Elsner, the cult image was a nexus for the relationship between human and divine, since it was through mutual looking as the culmination of a series of other activities that their relationship was formed and a person was able to comprehend their place in a lived world that interacted with an otherworldly one. His description is steeped in tension and drama, involving the great ‘reveal’ of the reciprocity that bound the two participants, although admittedly it is a little difficult to reconcile this with how most people would have encountered divine images, placed as they were at the back of darkened rooms or potentially even off limits entirely (Madigan 2013, p. xxvii; Weddle 2010, pp. 213–20). Images of the divine were also not always the ultimate destination of a long pilgrimage (Graham 2019), nor even encountered only in formal cult-related locations (statues of gods, demi-gods, heroes, nymphs, and so forth were common features in Roman gardens, for example). Despite this, the levelling power of the reciprocal gaze as described by Elsner offers another way in which the hierarchical relationship within an assemblage might be flattened. From this standpoint, regardless of what the cult image was thought to be (a temporary container, representation, or embodiment of divinity), it was the reciprocal gaze which locked two of the components of the assemblage into a more equal relationship: each looked at the other with parity, each was dependent upon the other to maintain that gaze, each existed in a particular way because of the presence of other in that place at that time and, moreover, the act of looking itself sustained their relationship, producing an encounter the effects of which the mortal participant understood as religious in nature. If one participant looked away the relationship broke down, and the agency produced by their engagement was lost. It was the anthropomorphic form of the image, combined with the human capacity to engage it visually, that afforded a relationship capable of producing that type of religious agency.

Reconfiguring cult focalisation

Transforming the immaterial divine into something material with particular visually perceived qualities that afforded a mutual gaze might produce situationally specific forms of proximal religious knowledge, but a cult image was also a complex three-dimensional material object that occupied space and which a ritual context might cause to become assembled with a range of other things. Accordingly, Katherine Rask (2011, pp. 96–7) proposes that we reconfigure how we imagine encounters with cult images, paying greater attention to the ways in which these were invariably just one aspect of the experience of moving around a complex sanctuary landscape, ‘passing various statues and points of focus along the way’. She notes that ‘the relative importance of different sculptures in a sanctuary probably depended more on features other than location, such as temporality, the festival calendar, or even the personal motives of visitors’. Cult images were at once a potential part of an assemblage that produced religious place, as well as belonging to the proximal experience of individual ritualised assemblages based around particular activities. It is important that cult images are reinserted into these broader, multi-layered lived experiences of religion rather than continuing to be privileged in isolation or for their visual characteristics alone.

We might, for instance, reconsider the statues from Ariccia (Figure 6.1), questioning not what or who they represent or even what sort of gaze each facilitated (the statue of Demeter seems to actively avoid the direct gaze of a viewer), but how they enabled the thingliness of divinity to be experienced in situ, how they incorporated divinity within the kinaesthetic and multisensory ritual activities of cult participants, and how this, in turn, combined with experiences of religious place to produce or sustain particular forms of religious knowledge (Figure 6.4). In this case it is not certain whether they would ever all have been encountered by a single cult participant (none has been precisely dated beyond the broad period of the late fourth–early third century BCE), so it might be expected that such relationships emerged, developed, changed, or ended as statues were introduced or removed, and as their positions relative to one another were altered. Specific ritual circumstances might cause one cult participant to address one of the figures at the same time as another focused on a different one, or one statue may gradually have emerged as more popular as the wider social or political context of the period prompted particular concerns or demands that made it especially relevant. Rather than being a fixed component of all ritualised assemblages statues like these might therefore move in and out of them in different situational contexts, resulting in disparate lived experiences and consequently varied forms of knowledge. Responding to Rask’s proposal to diversify how we think about these encounters certainly suggests that viewing statues in terms of their visual properties alone is unnecessarily limiting.

Figure 6.4 Detail of a terracotta statue identified as Demeter, from a sanctuary connected with Demeter and Kore within the località Casaletto, Ariccia (Latium), late fourth to early third century BCE

Photo: Emma-Jayne Graham. Su concessione del Ministero per i beni e le attivita culturali – Museo Nazionale Romano.

Arguments for the ‘religious gaze’ also depend upon the presence of a cult image that took human-like form, in other words a statue which could at least appear to gaze through recognisably human eyes back at the person who encountered it, exactly mirroring their own gesture of looking. Indeed, visuality persists as a key ingredient in modern scholarship on divine materialness, as evidenced by the statement that ‘Graeco-Roman religion … depended on a rich and complex system of image-making and viewing’ (Platt 2016, p. 163, emphasis added). This is true even of studies of aniconism which reject the tyranny of anthropomorphism, since they too tend to assume that there was a need for at least something that could be seen or gazed upon (e.g. Gaifman 2017, p. 338; discussed later).

However, when cult statues are categorised as things rather than purely as images, it becomes evident that they had a much fuller range of potential material affordances. As things, cult statues occupied space and could affect humans and other things in multisensory ways at the same time as they might themselves be affected by the qualities of other things, including processes of material deterioration or decay: the famous case of the wooden statue of Artemis of Ephesus becoming blackened by attempts to preserve it offers a good example (Pliny, Natural History 16.213–14). There is also plenty of evidence to indicate that Romans did far more than merely gaze upon, or be gazed at, by cult statues: they moved towards and away from them, moved other parts of their body in gestures of prayer in relation to them, and uttered words or other sounds (Graham forthcoming a). They also washed, anointed, dressed, undressed, and adorned them with garlands and gifts, and also sometimes repositioned or carried them in procession (Madigan 2013). What is more, even if it was Seneca’s intent to mock as superstitious those who engaged in practices of simulated care for the statues of the Capitoline Triad at Rome when he described ‘hairdressers for Juno and Minerva’ and those who gesture ‘with empty hands to imitate the act of anointing’, his account of these actions implies that for some individuals, even mimicking the movements involved in physical contact with cult statues might be as significant a form of experiential and sensory engagement with this manifestation of divine thingliness as any real tactile or other sensory experience (Seneca, On Superstition, cited in Augustine, The City of God 6.10).

Polly Weddle (2010) has catalogued the evidence for these and other interactions with cult images, including examples where visual interaction with statues might be obscured by piles of offered clothing, ribbons, hair, flowers, garlands, crowns, foodstuffs, and other votive objects (e.g. Ovid, Fasti 6.569; Pausanias, Description of Greece 2.11.6; 3.26.1; 8.31.8; 10.35.10). These dedicatory activities were afforded precisely by the material qualities of a statue – that is, not only the way in which they were individually modelled with outstretched hands or a lap which invited the placement of offerings, and a human-shaped body that could be dressed or draped with garlands, but the comparative durability and strength of stone, bronze, wood, or other materials. Their capacity to absorb oils or to change colour and lustre when anointed may also have contributed to the type of sensory engagements that cult statues afforded, while an ever-changing set of offerings must have continually disrupted and complicated these experiences on both a sensorial and temporal level. When ritual activities brought the affordances of the cult statue into a relational assemblage with these other things, including organic offerings of flowers, foodstuffs, liquids, perfumes, and incense, it produced not only a dynamic, ever-changing vision of divinity but an equally varied and vibrant smellscape within its immediate vicinity. Olfactory experience of the affordances of divinity might therefore blend the metallic scent of bronze, the earthiness of terracotta, and the tang of oils and paint (e.g. Pliny, Natural History 33.111–12) with that of fresh and decomposing organic matter at the same time as it interacted with the aroma of incense clinging to the clothes of participants, the dress of the statue, or other fabrics adorning the cult space. Proximal encounters with cult statues are therefore revealed once again to have been more multidimensional than an exclusive focus on the gaze allows, and they may in fact have been as olfactorily unpleasant as they were delightfully otherworldly.

Nor was the thingliness of cult statues any less complex than other things when it came to their own materialness. Ancient statues were often composed of separate pieces joined together; this might involve a blend of multiple types of material, including the amalgamation of terracotta, wood, and bronze, as well as the widely reported use for cult statues of chryselephantine sculptural techniques combining gold and ivory (Lapatin 2001; Stewart 2003, p. 47; Rüpke 2018a, p. 129) (Figure 6.5). That ancient people expected statues to comprise a composite of materials is hinted when second century CE writer Pausanias (Description of Greece 2.11.6), albeit something of a ‘connoisseur’ of cult images, is reluctant to draw conclusions about the material used for the whole statue of Asclepius at Titane (near Corinth) based on only the few exposed body parts visible to him:

One cannot learn of what wood or metal the image is, nor do they know the name of the maker, though one or two attribute it to Alexanor himself. Of the image can be seen only the face, hands, and feet, for it has about it a tunic of white wool and a cloak.

Perhaps in this instance it was simply not very easy for Pausanias to distinguish materials from a distance, but his words imply that he at least expected statues to be made using different materials. Certainly faces and heads, but perhaps also hands, might be fitted into the main body of a statue made from another material (see Stewart 2003, p. 47), making not only the identity of a statue interchangeable but also its gestures.

Romans were very aware of the complex composition of cult statues, and might have mocked those who considered them the pinnacle of divine perfection, as is revealed by Lucian’s comment that ‘if you stoop down and look inside’ an outwardly beautiful image of a divinity,

Figure 6.5 Statue of seated Minerva in the style of Phidias, made from multiple materials (the face and neck are modern plaster), Augustan period. Found at Piazza dell’ Emporio, Rome. Museo Nazionale Romano Palazzo Massimo.

Photo: funkyfood London – Paul Williams/Alamy.

you will see bars and props and nails driven clear through, and beams and wedges and pitch and clay and a quantity of such ugly stuff housing within, not to mention numbers of mice and rats that keep their court in them sometimes.

(Lucian, The Dream, or The Cock 24)

Consequently, cult statues were themselves composites, assemblages of multiple material components, the balance of pliable and rigid qualities of which together produced an anthropomorphic image. Statues were therefore even more susceptible to material deterioration and fragmentation than the living human body, meaning that this specific type of manifestation of divinity also actively worked to flatten the hierarchical relationships between divine and human by virtue of its imperfect mirroring of those bodies (something we might compare with the anatomical votives discussed in the previous chapter). If the divine could be made material from elements with different affordances, it could also be broken down into those constituent parts: its artifice was made sensorially evident through its very materialness, and in this form even divinity was not so superior that it did not sometimes need a helping hand. As such, a cult statue might once more serve to make divine thingliness into a more convincing component within the social relationships prompted by ritual assemblages. Returning, then, to the question of whether cult statues mattered, the answer must continue to be in the affirmative even if such a statement requires qualification: cult statues mattered at least sometimes, and not always in the same way. To determine whether they were the only things that mattered, we need to explore some alternative possibilities for the material manifestation of divinity.

Dividual divinities

Unsurprisingly, anthropomorphism stalks the pages of most studies of cult imaging practices, but was it ever possible for the thingliness of divinity to be material without taking this form? In her work on Greek aniconism, Milette Gaifman (2012, p. 13) observes that ‘at the root of the problem is the assumption that the human figure was the default mode for any visualization of the divine’, preferring instead to identify a ‘spectrum of iconicity’ in which divinity might be presenced in a variety of forms, even via the evocation of its absence (e.g. an empty chair) (Gaifman 2017, p. 342; also Iara 2020). What her work on this topic demonstrates is that the active decision by humans to materialise divinity need not always involve the choice to give them human-like bodies, even if the assumptions behind some of the alternatives might entail a residual degree of anthropomorphism (e.g. an empty chair presumes a human-like body). Examining evidence from Greek and some Roman contexts, Gaifman argues that studies of (Greek) cult images should re-orientate their attention towards ritual focalisation, since ‘Greek anthropomorphism was not universal, neither conceptually nor materially’ (Gaifman 2012, p. 12). Accordingly, she proposes that ‘aniconic’ should

describe a physical object, monument, image or visual scheme that denotes the presence of a divine power without a figural representation of the deity (or deities) involved. Similarly, ‘aniconism’ can be defined as the denotation of divine presence without a figural image both in religious practice and in imagery and visual culture more broadly.

(Gaifman 2017, p. 338)

Gaifman thus extends the range of ways in which divine thingliness might be affective within an assemblage beyond the traditional anthropomorphic cult statue, and this, coupled with the previous acknowledgement of the innate partibility of divinity, offers further ways of thinking about the affective thingliness of divinity in Roman Italy. In Chapter 5, the concept of dividuality was briefly introduced in relation to collections of anatomical votives dedicated at sites across central Italy between the fourth and late second or early first century BCE. There, I argued that the exchange of material body parts, in return for the healing essence of the divine, and the relationships of enchainment that this produced, might blur the boundaries between human and divine bodies. Briefly returning to this discussion in the context of the present exploration of the thingliness of divinity helps us to begin moving away from thinking about how humans actively materialised divinity in the form of figural representations towards alternative ways in which divine affordances became manifest in the wider material world.

Ethnographic studies assert that dividuality might involve various forms of partibility or permeability, and that it is a potential quality of both human and more-than-human things, including the supernatural and the dead (although in ethnography these things are more commonly described in terms of relational personhood and therefore as ‘persons’: Fowler 2016). Partibility is usually understood to involve the extraction of a tangible or intangible ‘part’ of a thing that is believed to be integral to their state of being, which is then transferred to another, whereas permeability comprises circumstances in which the qualities or essences of one thing permeate another in order to alter their respective compositions (see C. Fowler 2004, pp. 7–9). The two are not mutually exclusive and both relate to the idea of agency as the consequence of active relationships between the different qualities of things. Some of the archaeological implications of dividuality have been explored by John Chapman (2000; see also C. Fowler 2004, pp. 66–71, 2011, 2016), who relates them to the concept of enchainment, whereby these acts of exchange produce relationships that effectively ‘enchain’ the participants to one another for an undefined period of time. In Chapman’s case studies from prehistoric southeastern Europe, these exchanges primarily concern objects used as an extension of, or proxy for, the social persona of the participants, but in other contexts enchainment might also come about in relation to the potential permeable, and therefore immaterial, qualities of things as they are afforded by particular relationships.

Anatomical votive cult exemplifies this process surprisingly well, since the ritualised assemblages associated with it were underpinned by relationships of exchange that capitalised on the different dividual capacities of humans and more-than-human divinity: an ex-voto was given as a pars pro toto proxy for the human body in return for immaterial divine intercession, perhaps in the form of healing ‘essence’ (Graham 2017b; Graham 2020a). That is to say that when humans and the divine came together as part of this type of ritualised assemblage, their relationships drew on the partible affordances of the human body (its capacity to be fragmented) and the permeable affordances of divinity (its capacity to intercede in the human body). Even more significantly, anatomical votives subsequently materialised both of those types of dividual affordances within the setting of the sanctuary: the ex-voto effectively commemorated, in material form, an occasion on which the immateriality of divinity had interceded within the human body of which that model was an extension, serving to give tangible form to an otherwise intangible divine essence. In other words, it created divinity as a very particular expression of relational personhood (Fowler 2016, p. 404). As sanctuaries became filled with anatomical (and perhaps other) models, so divinity developed an ever-greater material presence in the physical world, with lived experiences increasingly sustained in relation to this composite community of human/divine body parts and the divine ‘person’ they enabled. As a consequence, anatomical votives can be aligned with Gaifman’s (2017, p. 338) definition of aniconic divinity as ‘a physical object, monument, image or visual scheme that denotes the presence of a divine power’. It is highly unlikely that this was connected with any conscious intent to manifest divine thingliness, but Catherine Bell (1992, p. 68) reminds us that ‘practice sees the problem it is intent upon; it does not see what it itself produces in the very operation of practice’. Accordingly, the ritualised practices described here for anatomical votive cult might be characterised as a ‘mute’ form of practice that is ‘designed to do what it does without bringing what it is doing across the threshold of discourse or systematic thinking’ (Bell 1992, p. 72).

Of course, anatomical votives flourished in central Italy for only a specific period of time, meaning that their capacity to materialise these particular affordances of divinity did not provide a long-term means of ‘thinging’ divinity. Nevertheless, that does not undermine the argument that in certain contexts ritualised assemblages might cause the respective dividual affordances of mortals and gods to present in distinctive material forms with consequences for the production of particular forms of religious knowledge. The value of this example therefore lies in what it suggests about needing to adopt a much wider awareness of the many ways in which divine affordances might manifest variably within the material world. Crucially, it also extends this possibility to things that, unlike cult images, humans did not intend to be materialisations of divinity. In other words, it shows that cult images were not the only media through which the affective qualities of divinity might manifest – or come to be understood to manifest – within a relational assemblage, and our understandings of the potential materialness of the immaterial divine need not always assume the presence of a human impulse to visualise the gods. Nonetheless, anatomical votives still involved a material manifestation of divinity that relied to some degree upon their mutual anthropomorphism. For our final example, we must seek out ways in which divine affordances might have manifested materially without direct human intervention.

Divine natures

The assertion by Nicole Boivin (2009, p. 274) that religion (and therefore divinity) does not pre-exist or await material expression encourages us to think about how the thingliness of divinity might be present in the physical world as a set of potentially perceptible affordances prior to, or separate from, any human representation or production of signs such as cult images. Adopting this position means that we can no longer assume that divinity simply ‘had’ attributes, a recognisable character, or ways of behaving that could be captured in or expressed by artificial and primarily anthropomorphic material forms. Instead, it posits the reverse: that religion (and therefore divinity) arose as a consequence of the relationships with the material world that people experienced within the context of ritualised assemblages. In particular, this standpoint prompts us to consider the ways in which divinity might emerge as a tangible thing through engagement with material things that have not been manipulated by humans, such as those within the natural environment.

Nature has long featured in discourse concerning ancient divine presence (e.g. Holland 1961; Edlund 1987; Green 2007; Hunt 2016), but this rarely extends beyond rather generalised observations concerning the human tendency to recognise in trees, unusual rock outcrops, or other natural features the sort of pre-existing idea of divinity that Boivin rejects. This is exemplified by statements about water seeming ‘to make more obvious claim upon man’s worship than anything in nature, except the light of the sun itself’ (Holland 1961, p. 9; see also Giontella 2012, pp. 13–14), and about the landscape of thermal waters being ‘marvelous and extremely suggestive’ and therefore ‘capable of also arousing a religious feeling’ (‘paesaggi meravigliosi ed estremamente suggestivi, in grado senz’altro di suscitare anche un sentimento religioso’: Zanetti 2014, p. 63). Such statements continue to prioritise the human aspect of all relational assemblages featuring natural materials, as does Ailsa Hunt’s (2016, p. 14) otherwise excellent work on sacred trees as materially vulnerable living things that ‘urged people to ask and explore questions about where they stood in relation to the divine’. More specifically, Hunt emphasises the role of human imagination in the production of what she terms ‘theological thinking’ concerning sacrality and divinity. She describes, for instance, how for the Fratres Arvales, who tended the sacred grove of Dea Dia throughout the Republic and Principate, ‘the religious significance of each tree was not deeply bound up with its matter: rather it was what the living tree stood for’ that was most significant (Hunt 2016, p. 162, original emphasis). Despite the minimal role of lived experiences of arboreal activities in her study, Hunt (2016, p. 82) does draw valuable attention to the ways in which ‘the nature and degree of “material overlap” between the tree and the god is left as an open question’, encouraging an approach to ritualisation that focuses not on trees as the object of worship but as material prompts for reflection about human/divine relationships. In this way, Hunt confirms that divine thingliness could affect religious knowledge alongside, but entirely separate from, a cult statue or image. Her work therefore paves the way for a more materially driven exploration of how things within the natural environment might not merely attract attention but could exist as active components within a ritualised assemblage.

At first glance, this suggestion might seem reminiscent of animism, especially the ‘new animism’ described by Graham Harvey (2005), who encourages us to explore the full range of possible engagements between human and more-than-human persons (see Jones and Boivin 2010; Whitehead 2018). From an animist perspective, when more-than-human things are considered by humans to be divine, they are often understood to take the form of rocks, trees, animals, and other aspects of the environment with which those humans form relationships. However, while it is not unrelated, there are important differences between new animism and the arguments that I have been developing here, not least the fact that even in this revised form animism still implies that the more-than-human component in those engagements possesses some sort of innate divine identity or agency. Indeed, Harvey’s (2006) definition of animists rests on the ways in which they ‘encounter other persons, only some of whom are humans, as cultural beings’, and not on their fundamental materialness as autonomous things with multiple potential affordances. Animism, much like fetishism, therefore continues to present divinity as something which exists, however nebulously conceived, as discrete and potentially purposeful. In this way, divinity exists within a tree, not as a potential affordance of the materialness of all trees. What I want to suggest, in contrast, is that paying attention to the potential material affordances of the more-than-human world reveals the possibility for a much wider range of experiences and concepts of divinity than these previous approaches have allowed. In part this is because the nature of relational assemblages means that these potential affordances may only manifest in the form of divinity under certain ritualised conditions. That is to say that the materialness of trees may sometimes affect in a divine way, but when part of another assemblage of things it might not.

Fluid divinity

Several ancient contexts offer themselves as profitable testing grounds for these ideas, including natural portents, oracles, and even prophetic or healing dreams. I have chosen to focus on water, since water was a material substance with a well-established association with ritual activities across central Italy from the prehistoric period to late antiquity (and beyond). As argued in Chapter 2, where it was used briefly to demonstrate the principles of assemblage theory, water also has the capacity to contribute towards multiple forms of agency when combined with a variety of other things as part of diversely constructed assemblages, making it a useful thing to think with in this context. Water could, for example, actively effect the human body and mind via multisensory perception as well as, in cases of thermo-mineral waters, through very perceptible changes to how they function.

Water and sacred sites in Roman Italy

Water was a feature of many of the locations at which ritual activities were performed throughout pre-Roman and Roman Italy, ranging from springs, rivers, and streams, to waterfalls, pools, fountains, steam, ice, and rain (for surveys, see Holland 1961; Gasperini 1988; Pacciarelli 1997; Chellini 2002; Edlund-Berry 2006b; Giontella 2006, 2012; Annibaletto et al. 2014; Betts 2016). As Maddalena Bassani (2014a, 2014b, 2019) has shown, many of these apparently sacred sites were located at the source of thermo-mineral waters which have since been demonstrated to offer therapeutic affordances. These include anti-inflammatory and antiseptic properties, and when drunk or absorbed via mucus membranes (including those of the lungs), thermo-mineral water might actively relieve symptoms and conditions ranging from those affecting the respiratory, gastrointestinal, and cardiovascular systems to osteoporosis and hypertension, as well as stimulating the immune system and relieving the symptoms of skin conditions (Annibaletto and Basso 2014). Rather than simply ‘symbolising’ the sort of health giving properties that might be associated with divinity, water with particular properties could therefore actively work with the human body to bring about tangible changes to a person’s being that might be rationalised as the result of engagement with the divine.

In addition to thermal and/or mineral water, recent scholarship concerning prehistoric and Roman Italy has drawn a further distinction between ‘normal’ water, represented by ‘any life-sustaining body or source of surface water where the water is ostensibly colourless and tasteless’, such as freshwater lakes, streams, pools, and springs, and ‘abnormal’ water which ‘has colour, taste or smell (e.g. gaseous springs), is volatile (e.g. rapids, waterfall, thermal springs), is stagnant, or causes illness’ (Betts 2016, pp. 67, 70, table 1 for a comprehensive categorisation and explanation for the presence of these types; Whitehouse 1992, 2016). To this last category we might also add a range of temperatures, with thermal waters in southern Etruria, for example, averaging between 30°C and 60°C (Annibaletto and Basso 2014, p. 79; for water to be considered thermal it must be above 4°C warmer than the air and 2°C warmer than the soil: A. Bassani 2014, p. 32). Even though the scientific properties of abnormal water were unknown to ancient individuals and communities, and even though water might adopt different forms in different places or at discrete moments that might each prompt a variety of responses, its impact on the health of the body and its ability to affect changes both to it and to a person’s experience of the world remained comparatively constant as a result of this broad set of possible affordances. As Veronica Strang (2014a, p. 140) notes:

The perceived qualities of things and their meanings and uses may change rapidly according to temporal and cultural context, and new relational forms will emerge, but their material properties provide consistent cognitive stimuli and phenomenological experiences and encourage recurrent ideas, values and practices.

Thermo-mineral water and its associated vapours seem to have attracted the attention of Italic people from at least the Bronze Age onwards (and probably prior to that, as attested by finds in caves from the Neolithic and Copper Age), but water which lacked mineral and/or thermal qualities also featured within ritualised assemblages (Whitehouse 1992, 2016; Giontella 2012, pp. 24–32; Betts 2016; see also Table 6.1). At Vicarello near Lake Bracciano, which was a location that would later become one of the most well-known thermal complexes of Roman Italy, both thermo-mineral water (temperatures up to 48°C) and non-mineral cold water attracted ritual activities from an early period (Giontella 2012, pp. 95–9; M. Bassani 2014a, p. 152, 2014b, pp. 162–3). Here, votive offerings including aes rude, aes grave, and large numbers of coins were recovered from a spring within a nymphaeum. The nymphaeum evidently provided a focal point for ritualised activities, although water was also collected in a smaller basin that may have been used for bathing or drinking, both of which were activities that could entail a degree of ritualisation (Giontella 2012, p. 96; Bassani 2014b, pp. 162–3). Unusually, for a site in constant use during the middle Republic, and especially one connected directly with hydrotherapy in later centuries, no anatomical votives have been found at Vicarello. As Claudia Giontella (2012, p. 96) points out, this may have been because offerings of this type would have risked blocking the spring, or because they were dedicated elsewhere in a yet to be discovered deposit. Nevertheless, large quantities of ceramics and vessels made from precious metals (fifth to fourth century BCE) have been recovered (Giontella 2012, p. 97), throwing doubt on the assumption that larger objects were avoided for fear of obstructing the flow of water. During the imperial period the site was substantially modified and transformed into a thermal bathing complex, and it is with this multi-purpose complex that the well-known silver cups (first century CE) must be associated.

Vicarello exemplifies a wider pattern of temporal changes in the use of thermo-mineral waters. From the late Republic, and particularly during the imperial period, very few newly established sanctuaries arose in locations associated with curative springs, and at those that already existed the emphasis placed on religious activities appears to have decreased. Such activity ceased completely at many sites, whereas others moved increasingly towards the adoption of functions connected more generally with health and hygiene, as witnessed by the creation of larger thermal complexes. This has been described in terms of the ‘industrial exploitation of thermo-mineral resources’ (M. Bassani 2014a, p. 151), and it coincides with a change in the types of offering being dedicated at those sites which did retain a religious character alongside their spa-like function: most traditional forms disappear, including anatomical votives, although coins continue to be deposited. This change of function also coincides with an increased focus on thermo-mineral waters in written sources, an interest which reaches its peak between the second half of the first century BCE and the first century CE, with a second period of renewed interest in the fourth to sixth centuries CE (Zanetti 2014, p. 55). Despite these chronological changes, water remained potentially available as a component within ritualised assemblages at a number of locations which appear to have been experienced as the settings for lived religion.

Table 6.1 The number of ‘sacred’ sites within Roman Italy that were located in conjunction with different types of thermo-mineral waters

	Hot	Cold	Tepid	Hot and cold	Other	Unknown	Total
Sites categorised as ‘area sacra’	11	18	0	1	0	3	33
Total sites	79	42	1	5	3	8	138

Source: Data extracted from Annibaletto et al. 2014, pp. 283–93, Appendix.

Evidence for some form of exploitation or engagement with thermal and/or mineral waters was reported for a total of 138 locations in a survey of specifically thermo-mineral sites of all types across Roman Italy (Annibaletto et al. 2014). A clear majority of these were public or private thermal complexes or general settlement sites, but at least 33 (24%) are categorised as ‘area sacra’, at some of which there were multiple water sources as well as multiple focal points for activity (see Table 6.1; M. Bassani 2014a, p. 143 writes of ‘about 70 contexts’ associated with ‘area sacra’, but these are not illuminated in detail or catalogued individually). The unexpectedly greater number of religious sites associated with cold mineral waters in this survey is most likely a consequence of the fact that many hot springs and pools were later developed into thermal complexes, either obliterating evidence for ritualised activities or making it more difficult for researchers to recognise whether these continued alongside bathing and other therapeutic or hygiene-based behaviours. Sites such as Vicarello, which combined both hot and cold waters as well as ritual and leisure activities, certainly suggest that others also probably continued to combine a range of different functions and experiences.

All of the sites connected with religious activity in Table 6.1 indicate the presence of ‘abnormal’ water, with the exception of three where the mineral composition has not been scientifically analysed. At these sites the mineral properties of the water also varied. As a result, each had the potential to offer a discrete, situationally specific sensory experience, especially for locations where water was sulphurous, emitted other forms of gas and vapour, was perhaps accompanied by a distinctive flavour, or was volatile, still, clear, reflective, or an atypical colour, such as the very blue pool at Lago della Regina (part of the collection of springs at Aquae Albulae near Tivoli). Experiences also varied when water was experienced in the open air or confined within a cave or other natural cavity that introduced its own particular sensory affordances (Betts 2016, pp. 69–72; Whitehouse 2016, p. 57). As Ingrid Edlund-Berry (2006b, p. 172) observes, ‘While not all hot water is sulphurous, all sulphurous water is smelly’, and this was something certainly noted by ancient people themselves (e.g. Vitruvius, De Architectura 8.3.1–2). Writers of the Roman imperial period also drew attention to other qualities of water: Pliny the Elder (Natural History 31) and Seneca the Younger (Natural Questions 3) both reported on the ways in which water behaved, smelled, and tasted, as well as distinguishing between water that was classified as ‘good’ and ‘poor’ (see also Vitruvius, De Architectura 8.4; Edlund-Berry 2006b; M. Bassani 2014a, pp. 30–1; Zanetti 2014).

As a consequence, and following the arguments presented in Chapter 3, abnormal water could be an integral component in the production of religious place, although this on its own does not imply that water was also the material manifestation of divinity. To explore whether it might share thingly qualities with divinity we must look more closely at how people engaged with the materialness of water, particularly the ways in which aspects of its potential sensory and therapeutic affordances might be brought to the fore by its inclusion within certain types of ritualised assemblage.

Water in ritualised assemblages

The earliest ritual activities connected with water are most commonly signalled by the deposition of ceramic and copper-alloy (bronze) offerings, including figurines of men and women, and during the early and middle Republic by increasing numbers of terracotta objects. Coins, however, characterise the majority of offerings made at thermo-mineral pools and springs during the early and middle Republic: at Vicarello almost 4,000 were found, dating from the fourth to second century BCE alone, along with many others from later periods (Bassani 2014a, p. 153; Giontella 2012, p. 96). Replacing the use of aes rude, coins continued to be deposited at watery sites into the imperial period, and it may be that this form of offering was considered especially relevant when the relationship between mortal and divine incorporated water (Crawford 2003; Livi 2006, pp. 100–3; Horsnaes 2017, pp. 55–6; see also Chapter 7). Indeed, unlike the making of offerings at sites where dedicated objects were placed on or around an altar, a statue, an aedes, or other cult structure, making deposits directly into water involved a gesture which – thanks to the material qualities of both metal and water – involved the quite literal absorption of the offering. A coin or other heavy item became fully encompassed within a pool or flow of water, crossing from one (human) world to another more-than-human one (see Betts 2016, p. 64). Like anatomical offerings, coins which remained visible at the bottom of a pool or stream might remind others of the potential relationships that engagement with the water could produce, whereas others sank out of sight into dark, cloudy, or fast-flowing water (something that will be explored further in Chapter 7).

Hundreds of miniature ceramic vessels have also been recovered from sites at which ritualised assemblages featured water. These strongly suggest that water was collected and perhaps poured out, moved around, used to anoint, or most probably drunk as part of ritual activities (Bertani 1997, p. 81; Betts 2016, p. 75; also for earlier periods: Whitehouse 2016, p. 55). In several instances, rather than being discarded at random these small ceramic vessels were strategically placed in order that they might continue to collect water. This was the case for the cave at Pantanacci near Lanuvium (Latium) discussed in Chapter 5, where miniature ceramic vessels were placed in niches and against the walls, from which (cold, non-mineral) water emerged; the accretions still adhering to them indicate that they were not moved (Attenni 2013, p. 6). At the same site, some anatomical votives were arranged in order that they too would come into contact with the cave’s spontaneous supply of trickling water. For the latter it is tempting to observe the parallels that these actions suggest with the permeation of divine essence discussed earlier. If the water could bring about healing or improve well-being, it effectively shared those affordances with the divine, and it was perhaps intended that the models would ensure continued and direct contact with these divine qualities in perpetuity. Moreover, as Eleanor Betts (2016, p. 73) has observed, ‘Whether or not human manipulation has affected its physical form (for example, by restricting the point of emergence), the natural, physical (and measurable) characteristics of a spring, as it appears to consciousness, create an association with abundance’. She argues that such abundance might be culturally connected with ‘wealth, health, plenty, life, fertility’, whilst the ‘presence of pottery seems to reflect a concern with the abundance of foodstuffs, which also has implications for the health and survival of the community’. The ceramic vessels at Pantanacci might be interpreted in this light since, not insignificantly, the cave at Pantanacci appears to have played a role in communal ritual activities intended to ensure the future prosperity of the community as part of what is usually categorised as a ‘fertility’ rite (Propertius 4.8.3–14; Aelian On animals 11.16; Graham 2019, pp. 28–9). The repeated filling or covering of these vessels, joined with the water flowing over the fragmented terracotta bodies of the community itself, might have afforded abundance, since their strategic placement ensured that they were never fully emptied of their divine contents. What is more, in some instances that abundance took a more lasting and solid form as accretions spontaneously built up on the vessels. Rather than merely representing abundance, it can therefore be posited that the endless supply of water appearing effortlessly from within the rock walls of the cave had the capacity to be divine abundance in its own right.

Whether water was drunk from these vessels and others like them from different sites, either as part of the activities surrounding their initial deposition or at a later date, remains unknown, although it seems probable given the widespread use of vessels designed for imbibing small amounts of liquid. At Pantanacci, water was also collected in a shallow pool created by the arrangement of stone blocks that prevented some of the water from flowing away (Attenni 2013, p. 6). No votive offerings were found in the area of this pool (its presence is attested by a layer of silt), which suggests that it was engaged with in ways that were different from the moving water that emerged from the walls. Perhaps a small quantity of water from this pool was drunk by people who used the ceramic vessels for this purpose before depositing them in locations that would lead to them becoming spontaneously refilled. A similar situation appears to have existed at the site of Grotta del Re Tiberio at Riolo Terme (near modern Bologna) where, from the Bronze Age, cold but mineral rich water percolating through the walls of a cave was collected in both natural and artificial cavities and where, during the fifth and fourth centuries BCE copper-alloy votive offerings were deposited (two figurines, one female and one male: Bertani 1997; Giontella 2012, p. 84). Over 300 miniature cups were also found at this site, collected in areas close to the entrance of the cave where it has been assumed that the majority of ritual activities took place, beginning in the fifth century BCE but continuing into the Roman period (Bertani 1997, p. 81 Giontella 2012, p. 84; Betts 2016, p. 75).

Furthermore, the recovery of clay and metal ladles (simpula) at some sites, including examples from the sixth century BCE at Celle, in the vicinity of Civita Castellana (Etruria), and ‘over one hundred “ladles” from Lagole di Calalzo’ (Veneto) have been interpreted as indicating the practice of cult activities that involved libation (Bassani 2019, p. 16). Such instruments, whilst also connected with sacrifice and priestly roles (Chapter 4), might be used to scoop water out of a communal collecting structure or pool for distribution. So too might the inscribed bronze trulla, dedicated to the divinity of the (cold, mineral) waters at Lagole di Calalzo in the Veneto region by T. Volusius Firmus (Buonopane and Petraccia 2014, p. 222, fig. 134). The fact that the most famous finds from Vicarello are also drinking vessels – four inscribed silver cups providing the itinerary for a pilgrimage from Cadiz to Rome – may also be significant, possibly even commemorating long-standing libation traditions at the complex. It is also known from much later sources, such as the De Balneis Puteolanis, a manuscript compiled around the end of the twelfth century by Peter of Eboli which survives in the form of several copies made between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, that visitors to the large thermal complexes of Baiae and Puteoli (Campania) also drank thermo-mineral waters as part of their hydrotherapy experience (Yegül 1996, pp. 138–9; see also Suetonius, Augustus 82).

These experiences of engaging with different types of water were situational and temporally specific, and they were also influenced by the precise materialness of the water being consumed and its specific affectivity within the individual body. Not unlike the divine healing essence that was attested by anatomical votives, abnormal water could have very real effects on bodily well-being which, in the context of a ritualised activity, might be affordances of divinity. As Milette Gaifman (2012, p. 248) points out, ‘When signalled by the aniconic, the presence of the divine may be completely inconspicuous to some, while apparent to others. The ordinary and the extraordinary are not always distinguishable’. This might be especially true in instances of religious activities that involved engaging with water, with the potential divine qualities of the water revealed only in combination with particular human bodies, minds, and other things. For instance, some people may have experienced a change in their bodily composition by imbibing divinity in the form of water, whereas others may have distinguished these qualities in other ways, perhaps through perceivable changes to the material of ceramic vessels as their qualities came into contact with those of water, changing colour, becoming shiny, developing a residue, or over a more protracted period, becoming encrusted, the two things effectively assembling to become something new.

When it combines with other things within an assemblage, water has the potential to produce a range of lived experiences and different forms of agency. From this standpoint, whilst it remains a material thing in its own right, with its own range of potential affordances, it becomes possible to understand how one of these qualities might be otherworldly in nature. Water might therefore be described as possessing potential affordances that make it comparable with the sort of autonomy and unexplained power to effect the very bodies of humans that religious knowledge subsequently associated with supernatural or divine forces. That is of course not quite the same as saying that a spring was equated with a god or goddess, or that it was thought to represent them in physical form. What I am not arguing is that the divinity of water was the result of some sort of primitive animist explanation of the world that sought to find the divine in nature (e.g. Buonopane and Petraccia 2014, pp. 217–8). Instead, rather than concept, what is of concern to me is experience, or in other words, the way in which water offered an in-the-moment lived experience of divinity that might produce personal, proximal knowledge of divine power or presence, not a broad narrative or overarching explanation or rationale for divine power as a whole.

What is different here, then, is the suggestion that in certain circumstances water may itself be divinity as a result of its own range of potential material affordances. After all, some water does have the capacity to bring about (apparently) unexplained changes to the body, as well as to change its form from liquid to solid and gas, to sometimes but not always smell, to spontaneously boil, to produce steam, and to gush forth in seemingly endless quantities, but also to inexplicably disappear or dry up, to lie still, to reflect, and to conceal. The material qualities of water, when drawn into particular relationships, are capable of blurring otherwise expected boundaries and, like other ways of conceiving of the nature of divinity, water is both infinite and potentially finite, controllable and yet uncontrollable. For example, as Annibaletto and Basso (2014, p. 82) point out, steam, vapour, and gases resulting from thermo-mineral water can only be experienced and exploited for therapeutic purposes in situ. Additionally, not all the gases produced by thermo-mineral springs and pools are necessarily curative and may in fact be actively harmful. This has prompted some writers to connect the discovery of curse tablets at the site of Soffioni in Arezzo with the harnessing of its poisonous fumes (Annibaletto and Basso 2014, p. 82; Bassani 2019, p. 18). There might be a very fine line involved in interacting with the divine matter of water, a balance to be struck quite literally between kill or cure – a concept not dissimilar to the fickleness of the divine as expressed as a form of distal religious knowledge in other contexts. Encountering divinity was never straightforward, nor were the outcomes a foregone conclusion. As Rüpke (2007a, p. 163) points out, the gods were never compelled to uphold their side of the bargain in any mortal-divine relationship: ‘there were no strings attached: the outcome was open’. All of these properties are more-than-human and should cause us to reflect critically on water not as a representation of divinity but, in the context of ancient Italy at least, as a divine thing in and of itself.

Conclusions

Verity Platt (2016, p. 163) recently asked ‘Why is ancient perception of the gods so seemingly ocularcentric?’ Although she later acknowledges that not all divine encounters were visual, highlighting the potential for divine presence to be experienced as a voice or scent, her question goes largely unanswered. It may, however, have a deceptively simple answer: ancient perception of the gods was not necessarily ocularcentric at all, but studies of the ancient gods have made it appear so by continuing to focus on the visual affordances of anthropomorphic cult images as the only means by which divinity might manifest, lending them unwarranted priority and status in our discussions of human-divine relationships. Given what has been noted here about the potentials and problems that anthropomorphic visualisation prompts in terms of the balance of relationships between different components in an assemblage, we would do well to consider the full thingliness of any material manifestation of divinity.

This chapter has consequently argued that we must quite radically alter the way in which we think about ancient ‘gods and goddesses’ and the ways in which we seek to identify the role of divinity in the production of lived religion and religious knowledge. Rather than always seeking visual representations or striving to identify named deities at particular sites – often, as argued by Maureen Carroll (2019), a fruitless and pointless task – we should think instead about the qualities of divinity and why and how they mattered. The specific identity of a god may have been very significant on a personal, individual level, but in terms of understanding how Roman religion worked, that is, how it was produced, we need to shift our perspectives away from those dominated by sight, by anthropomorphism, and by the identification or at the very least categorisation of gods by type (‘fertility’, ‘healing’, ‘female/male’, ‘martial’, etc.). Instead we can adopt one that is in many instances quite literally more fluid but which also considers the nature of divinity on its own, less anthropocentric terms. In the next chapter we will turn our attention to thinking about how these perspectives on the varied thingly qualities of divinity can be reassembled with the mutual thingliness of the other key components of ritualised assemblages that this study has identified (i.e. place, objects, and bodies), and to an assessment of the resulting consequences for wider debates about the nature of Roman religion.