8 Conclusion

Throughout this book I have argued that temporary and situationally specific relationships between human and more-than-human things were crucial for the performance and experience of Roman religion as lived, and for the subsequent production of both distal and proximal forms of religious knowledge. Using a series of self-contained yet complementary case studies, I have sought to demonstrate that the significance of lived religion can only be fully appreciated when we adopt a much more material-centred posthumanist approach to ancient ritualised practice and reframe religion as the product of a complex relational world of things. This means asking questions not only about what people did with material things as part of their religious ritual experiences, but also about what those material things did to people and their experiences in return.

In order to do this, I drew upon new materialist theories concerning assemblages and the thingliness of things which posit that all things, including humans, exist within a flat ontological state whereby their mutual status as things means that they all have the potential to afford action, but only when combined with each other. That is to say that humans and other more-than-human things, including objects, raw materials, the natural environment, animals, and divinities, share a fundamental thingliness as potentially affective entities in their own right. In this way, each thing offers to others a distinctive range of potential qualities, any number of which may or may not become foregrounded when those things become configured, or assembled, in certain ways. The qualities made available by each of these things can affect, and in return be affected by, the mutual qualities of other things.

As a result of these vibrant properties and dynamic yet non-hierarchical relationships, it becomes possible to understand how ways of being in the world, including those that are perceived to relate to religion, are determined as much by the material affectiveness of the world as by human intentionality. This is because humans are unable to act alone: even if, in contrast to many (although not all) other things, humans possess conscious intentions they are incapable of acting upon those without engaging with the materialness of the physical world of which they are themselves a part. A person may, for instance, intend to perform an animal sacrifice, but they cannot do so without engaging with the materialness of an animal victim, as well as a set of other material things that enable the ritualised death of that creature to come about. When human and more-than-human things are bundled together into assemblages, then, some of their potential affective qualities can combine in order to make a perceivable difference to the world. These differences are more commonly described using the term ‘agency’ which, in turn, can therefore be understood to be a relational property rather than an autonomous force. Agency emerges when things form relationships; it is not an independent property that can be possessed by, ascribed to, or somehow inherent within one thing alone. Adopting this standpoint, which emphasises the relational qualities of things and the role of those qualities in producing agency, makes it easier to understand how the material world can offer to human experience opportunities and potentials that extend beyond the representational or symbolic. It consequently makes our approaches to the study of antiquity considerably less anthropocentric and allows the material world to become an equal partner in both human and more-than-human ways of being.

Assemblages responsible for the production of agency can form in any number of situational contexts and circumstances (indeed, we are all part of multiple assemblages at all times, including as I write this and you read it), but those which have been of special interest to me in this study of Roman religion are those which were stimulated by ancient ritualised actions. In these cases, the process of ritualisation may itself have been prompted by existing forms of cultural knowledge concerning ways of acting in the world that might be understood to make particular types of difference to it that were categorised in relation to ‘religion’: performing a sacrifice, dedicating a votive offering, making an anthropomorphic figurine, or as I stated earlier, shared knowledge that the gods need sacrifices, a promised gift will secure an agreement, divine will must be determined, and so on. Under these circumstances, the agency produced by an assemblage which coalesced in a ritualised context, and the vibrancy of relations between its thingly components that ritualisation specifically prompted, was perceived as making a difference to the world which was subsequently rationalised and described as religious. In turn, this difference-making action was effectively experienced as lived religion. Religion as lived consequently involved proximal sensory, embodied, and cognitive engagements with material things that ritualisation caused to be experienced in particular ways, at the same time as its effects were also rationalised in relation to more broadly shared distal forms of religious knowledge.

Reassembling Roman religion

To test these ideas in relation to religion in Roman Italy, the chapters of this book have spotlighted a series of case studies focused on some of the different types of things that may have been brought together as part of the ritualised assemblages that produced Roman lived religion. These things were examined under the broad headings of place, objects, bodies, and divinity before being reassembled as part of an investigation of the role of ritualised assemblages in the production of one specific proximal experience of religion commonly described as magic. What these case studies reveal is that the material world was deeply embedded within Roman lived religion in ways that have until now been under-appreciated.

Where once the elaborate architecture of monumental sanctuaries was viewed entirely through the lens of the material representation of power (both mortal and divine) and as a material backdrop against which pre-formed religious ideas were performed and communicated, the materially informed approach to movement around these sanctuaries that was adopted in Chapter 3 revealed that multiple but not necessarily competing experiences of religious place were possible. Rather than communicating a single message about the divine (or for that matter members of the local human community), the sanctuary as religious place offered individuals an opportunity to produce their own highly personal religious knowledge. Sanctuaries must therefore be reframed as offering particular locational qualities to complex time-space events or assemblages through which a host of proximal forms of knowledge concerning religion could be produced. Similarly, in Chapter 4 the reconfiguration of cult objects as things that participated equally in ritualised activities, rather than merely existing as sometimes clichéd symbols of ritual or priestly authority, demonstrated not only the crucial role that the qualities offered by material things might play in producing proximal forms of religious knowledge, but also how those lived experiences might be entwined with wider dialogues concerning Roman religion as a distal or shared form of knowledge. Even within ritualised activities that involved public performances there was space for a plurality of personal lived experiences. Rather than undermining or calling into question the principles of Roman religion, these individualised experiences brought about by very particular instances of material engagement were shown to underpin and sustain distal forms of religious knowledge, offering a means through which individuals could situate themselves within a wider religious world.

Chapter 5 continued to build on these arguments by using one particular category of evidence to explore more closely how the thingliness of objects and the thingliness of the human body might interact in the production of ways of being in the world that involved religion. Here I used anatomical votives to argue that the blurring of boundaries between bodies of different thingly form could enact human-divine relationships in very specific and highly personal ways. The example of votive cult also reinforces how communal forms of knowledge concerning religion in Roman Italy might be produced and sustained in dialogue with individual lived experiences. These relationships between divinity and mortal humans were explored further in the following chapter, in which I problematised the concept of divinity as an entirely intangible thing and sought to establish how the divine might engage with, and be engaged by, other components within a ritualised assemblage. By investigating the thingly qualities of both anthropomorphic statues and non-anthropocentric manifestations of divinity in the form of divine partibility and the manifestation of divine qualities within the natural world, Chapter 6 presented alternative ways in which the matter of the gods might form relationships with other things.

Finally, in Chapter 7, the value of these approaches to the relational thingliness of assemblages was assessed in relation to both the multiple components of a very specific assemblage – the finds from the fountain of Anna Perenna at Rome – and a much wider debate concerning the relationship between religion and magic. Reassembling the material things from the fountain and assessing the ways in which ritualisation combined them in order to produce agency made it possible to suggest that ancient magic should be understood as a form of proximal religious knowledge resulting from individualised ‘in the moment’ assemblages, rather than an distinct category of action that existed in opposition to religion.

As a result of these case study analyses it can be concluded that we must revise our understandings of lived Roman religion quite substantially to acknowledge that it was as embedded within the material world and the engagements that it afforded as all other ways of being were (and, for that matter, still are). Religious knowledge was, therefore, predicated on what people came to recognise as religion because of their lived experiences of the agency affected by ritualised acts that were part of a fully material and thingly world. Roman religion can therefore be explained as comprising a collection of highly personal ways of being in the world, encompassing hugely varied yet complementary lived experiences generated by engagement with other things in the course of ritualised activities. The proximal forms of knowledge that this prompted were nevertheless continually framed by a mutually reflexive relationship with the less diverse and less temporally shifting set of distal forms of religious knowledge that were collectively understood to represent ‘Roman religion’.

I noted at the outset that it was never my intention that this book provide a comprehensive survey, and it has of course not been possible for me to explore how these ideas relate to every (known) facet of Roman religious practice. The reader will also inevitably have found some substantial gaps in my coverage of both time and space, even within the relatively confined and self-imposed parameters of central Roman Italy. Yet when we remember that one of the consequences of the ‘being in the world’ that comes with our humanity means that every aspect of lived ancient religion involved engagement with the mutually affective qualities of the thingliness of places, objects, bodies, and divinities (and the many things that fall under each of those headings), the potential application of the arguments presented here to how we understand religion in posthumanist terms as an embedded phenomenon of the ancient world more generally should be evident. Indeed, it has been my aim here to demonstrate that religion is always more than a set of ideas; it is something that people and things do together, something which is performed into existence by the changes that are made when things engage with one another under particular circumstances, in this case those involved in ritual action. It is simply not possible to do religion of any sort without people being part of a non-hierarchical assemblage of mutually affecting things, and doing religion was what millions of Roman people did on a daily, weekly, monthly, and annual basis as part of their culturally informed ways of acting in the world. Only a small minority of ancient Romans wrote about religion or sought to intellectualise or rationalise it, and even they also did religion and engaged with the material world in the process. They too were embedded as embodied thingly beings in a material world, and the ‘Roman religion’ they purport to describe could only ever be based on a combination of distal forms of knowledge and their own proximal knowledge derived from lived experience. In sum, I propose that if we are to ever get to grips with the big questions about what religion is, how and why religions change, and why religion even matters to people in the first place, it is high time that investigations of ancient ritual practice and of ancient religion as lived find ways to loosen the roots of their assessments from within fragmentary textual discourse concerning distal religious knowledge and endeavour to make their assessments increasingly posthuman in nature. Taking proper account of the thingliness of things offers us a starting point.

Ritualised assemblages and religious change

Overarching mechanisms of religious change have not been of direct concern to me in this book, but the arguments I have presented for understanding religion as the constantly becoming product of assemblages of things suggests that there may be grounds for exploring these issues further. Paying attention to the thingliness of things, and especially to the ways in which things become configured and reconfigured within assemblages, creates an opportunity to test out some especially original ways of approaching much older questions concerning religious change. The material thingliness of divinity explored in Chapter 6, for example, drew on evidence that effectively moved backwards in chronological time over the course of the chapter. Beginning with cult statues familiar from the imperial period, it ended with an examination of the role of water as a long-term component in the ritualised assemblages of pre- and early Roman Italy. In part this was a consequence of the availability of appropriate evidence, but it remains possible that this evidence was available (or unavailable) precisely because the materialness of divinity and the human-divine relationships that it afforded did change over time.

This hints at something that there has not been space to explore more fully in the present work: the ways in which assemblages might form in different ways at different times, even in relation to the same broadly ritualised context, and not just because of the temporally specific presence of the unique qualities of an individual human thing. Chapter 6 evidences very well how relationships with divinity could, and certainly did, change across the centuries, even when those changing relationships were evidently not prompted by any significant alteration in distal knowledge concerning religion. In other words, a major change in distally perceived and communally shared ideas about ‘the gods’ need not always happen in order for lived experiences of engagement with them to differ: Apollo might manifest in one location as a cult statue and in another as the healing properties of water without first requiring any long-term conceptual or narrative changes. Changing relationships may also have been brought about by alterations in material forms caused by factors entirely unconnected with ritual, such as the availability of new raw materials, technological developments, and even changes in the degree to which particular forms of object or their material composition were fashionable or desirable. With some further investigation this could, for example, offer a more theoretically sustained way of considering the currently unexplained emergence and subsequent decline in popularity of terracotta anatomical votives between the late fourth and first century BCE (see Chapter 5).

Looked at another way, it might be possible to use the arguments presented in this book to better understand how distal forms of knowledge were subject to change as a result of the gradual but continuous generation of multiple new forms of proximal knowledge. That is to say that lived religion was constantly becoming, it was dynamic and ever-changing, and even if wider, more distal understandings of how Roman religion worked appeared to be more fixed, the emergence of elective cults, the incorporation of new deities and localised cults into the empire, and the eventual adoption of Christianity demonstrate that it was also susceptible to change. Distal religious knowledge certainly appeared more fixed than proximal religious knowledge, but it was never entirely static. Much larger and more substantial change processes might therefore be detectable at a proximal scale before they become perceivable on a much grander, distal one. After all, as the constituent assemblages that produce proximal religious knowledge undergo constant change, so must the distal assemblage to which they contribute inevitably also be reshaped by these experiences. Thinking about Roman religion as a set of interlinked, thin-walled, dynamic assemblages also suggests that when it comes to change, individual experience grounded in lived reality might be more powerful than doctrine or the adoption of new cultural scripts.

Assemblage theory may therefore offer a way of understanding religious change in important new ways, emphasising the role of the ordinary person in sustaining and changing their religious worlds but without needing to identify those changes as the consequence of human intentionality or active individuation. Rather than expecting to be able to identify major moments of change, or individuals responsible for intentionally introducing new practices or ideas (or, for that matter, suppressing them), assemblage theory offers a perspective on ancient religion that reveals its organic, dynamic nature. It highlights the extent to which religion was never entirely fixed but constantly vibrating at a low level, always in the process of becoming, while simultaneously allowing the potential impact of personal lived religion to be better observed and assessed as something that was meaningful on a much more substantial scale.

Ritualised assemblages and identity

Another question yet to be fully addressed is how assemblage theory might contribute towards our understandings of the role of lived religion in the enactment of different forms of identity. Examination of the personal experiences of camilli and the flamen Dialis in Chapter 4 drew attention to some of the ways in which the engagement with certain things as part of ritualised action might create or affirm a particular sense of identity, both in relation to the immediate religious context and, as demonstrated especially by the camillus holding an acerra, with reference to their position within the wider social world. One aspect of the theoretical standpoint advanced in this book that has the potential to be especially valuable, then, is the way in which it prompts us to focus on individuals – perhaps not named and identifiable individuals, but undoubtedly certain types of individualised experience (this is something which of course lies at the heart of other work on lived ancient religion, e.g. Albrecht et al. 2018). In turn, this opens up new avenues of enquiry concerning the consequences of ancient lived religion, making it possible to ask questions about how and when this may have contributed to the emergence, maintenance, adoption, reworking, or loss of particular forms of identity. By way of example, I would like to briefly highlight gender identities and make some suggestions about how ancient ritualised assemblages might produce forms of knowledge that related not only to religious ways of acting and being but also those connected with other personal ways of being in the world.

As the votive offerings examined in Chapter 5 suggest, the things that were involved in the dedicatory process contributed to producing knowledge concerning people’s understanding of themselves and their place in the world. For some votive things this experience might be extended to questions concerning the relationship between religion and gender. Examining the role of objects (if not things) in the enactment of gender identities is of course not a new idea. Marie Louise Stig Sørensen (2000, pp. 81–2), for example, has described how objects ‘did not simply reflect gender differences but were also discursively involved in the creation and (re)interpretation of difference’. She notes, much as I have in earlier chapters, that material things are affective, going on to stress that ‘they are partners to the construction of gender, as they provide forceful, partially sublimated, messages about importance, contribution, roles, and effect. They influence the ways we see ourselves and the roles and rights we presume access to’ (Sørensen 2000, p. 79). This is something that might be detected in the interactions between votive dedicators and discrete types of offering, including those which acted as material proxies for male and female genitalia and generative organs such as the uterus, but also for the often connected category of swaddled infants (Figure 8.1).

These sometimes life-size models of young infants offered similarly complex affordances to those of other anatomical forms in the way in which their material qualities could be sensed as a dissonant blurring of the boundaries between their existence as real infants and models of infants. They resembled babies and made the dedicator’s body move as if they were holding an infant, but they did not sound, move, feel, or smell like babies (for a full discussion, see Graham 2017a). In addition to contributing to the production of religious knowledge concerning rites of passage surrounding infancy, experiences of engagement with these infant votives as things may also have produced particular forms of gendered identity, by which I mean gendered identity that extended beyond merely male and/or female to the layers within that: in this case as mother, first-time mother, mother who had experienced multiple miscarriages, but also as father, first-time father, wet nurse, caregiver, and so on. We might consider, for instance, a woman carrying into a sanctuary a “baby” that both was and was not her baby at the same time, laying it down or passing it over, and then leaving it behind. These thingly experiences may have produced and affirmed her religious knowledge concerning dedications made on behalf of young infants, but they may also have worked to construct her gendered identity as a mother. These embodied gestures, and her engagement with the thingliness of the sanctuary location and votive model, marked the culmination of her actions over previous months during which she guided the body of the infant into the wider world through repeated daily acts of swaddling and re-swaddling, activities which were performed only by women who were mothers (or caregivers). Through all of these embodied movements and the final ritualised act of dedication, she therefore performed her own gender identity as a mother into being (see also Carroll 2019).

Relatedly, we might think more carefully about the experiences of adult men in these same ritualised assemblages, and how engagement with the material form and sensory affordances of these dedications could also enact their identity as fathers. That is, as Roman fathers who were perhaps less familiar with the hands-on work of infant care, of holding very small babies, and who may not have detected the ambiguities of the terracotta thing as starkly as those who had been more intimately involved in the living infant’s care. Paying closer attention to the thingliness of the bodies incorporated into ritualised assemblages, not only in terms of their sensory and kinaesthetic capacities but as fully embodied people who brought embodied memories and expectations into that assemblage with them, might therefore make it possible to identify gender as both an important contributor to, and a product of, this sort of ritualised material engagement. This points, therefore, to the much wider possibilities that the re-materialisation of ritualised assemblages can open up in terms of how we make sense of ancient lived experiences.

To sum up, then, this book has sought to demonstrate not only what can be gained by re-materialising Roman lived religion and putting material things back into our analyses as things that are as significant as humans, but also how this might practically be achieved through the application of posthumanist theoretical concepts already widely accepted within archaeological studies of other periods. It is hoped that, in turn, the application of these concepts to a rich set of evidence provided by case studies from Roman contexts will contribute to the continued development and refining of the discourse surrounding posthumanist and specifically new materialist approaches to the thingliness of things. Indeed, these concepts can and should be pushed much further, both within and outside the confines of Roman archaeology. It is anticipated that future studies will critique and build constructively on the examples that have been examined here, which by necessity place their focus on individual places, objects, bodies, and divinities in order to investigate more complex assemblages in which the qualities of networks of places, multiple objects, whole communities of bodies, and a host of divinities may have been available for the production of religious agency. This multiplicity of things has been touched upon in the chapters presented here when considering the different senses of place available at sanctuary locations, the range of things with which individuals might interact during public sacrifices, the many hundreds of votive offerings deposited at a single location, the diversity that abounded amongst the divine, and the number of subtly varied things that were incorporated in the production of proximally experienced magical agency in relation to a single fountain. The next step, having broken this process down to reveal the fundamental thingly relationships that underpinned Roman lived religion, is to challenge ourselves to re-complicate these assemblages once again and to start inspecting with renewed vigour the truly vibrant relationships that existed between multiple places, objects, bodies, and divinities when ritualisation bundled them together.