johnston s. i. (2011) whose gods are these melanges borgeaud

7/27/2019 Johnston S. I. (2011) Whose Gods Are These Melanges Borgeaud

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RELIGIONS EN PERSPECTIVE N o 24

Clifford ANDO, Daniel BARBU, Nicole BELAYCHE, Corinne BONNET,David BOUVIER, Maya BURGER, Claude CALAME, Valentina CALZOLARI,

Antoine CAVIGNEAUX, Philippe COLLOMBERT, Nicole DURISCHGAUTHIER,Doralice FABIANO, David FRANKFURTER, Fritz GRAF, Christian GROSSE,

Dominique JAILLARD, Margaret JAQUES, Sarah Iles JOHNSTON, Antje KOLDE, BruceLINCOLN, Mlanie LOZAT, Alessandra LUKINOVICH, Philippe MATTHEY, Silvia

NAEF, Agnes A. NAGY, Maurice OLENDER, Delphine PANISSODEGGEL, SvetlanaPETKOVA, Vincianne PIRENNE-DELFORGE, Olivier POT, Francesca PRESCENDI,James M. REDFIELD, Anne-Caroline RENDU LOISEL,

Andr-Louis REY, Thomas RMER, Franois RUEGG, Jrg RPKE, John SCHEID,Renate SCHLESIER, Paul SCHUBERT, Aurore SCHWAB, Guy G. STROUMSA,

Youri VOLOKHINE, Froma I. ZEITLIN

Dans le laboratoire del historien des religions

Mlanges offerts Philippe Borgeaud

Edits par Francesca PRESCENDIet Youri VOLOKHINEAvec la collaboration de Daniel BARBU et Philippe MATTHEY

LABOR ET FIDES


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Cet ouvrage est publi avec

les soutiens de la Facult desLettres de l'Universit de Genve, dela Maison de l'Histoire, Genve,

de M. et Mme Matthey, de la fondation Patek Philippeet de la Rpublique et canton de Genve

Avec le soutien de la Ville de Genve

ISBN 978-2-8309-1428-3

2011 by Editions Labor et Fides1, rue Beauregard, CH 1204 Genve

Tl. + 41 (0)22 311 32 69Fax + 41 (0)22 781 30 51

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Diffusion en Suisse : OLF, FribourgDiffusion en France et en Belgique : Editions du Cerf, Paris

Diffusion au Canada : FIDES, Montral


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Gravure de Eisen, illustrant l Emile de Jean-Jacques Rousseau,dition de La Haye, Naulme, Paris, Duchesne, 1762.

En-tte du livre second (Tome I, p. 140), avec la lgende : Chiron exerant le petit Achille la course .


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Whose Gods are These ?A Classicist Looks at Neopaganism 1

Sarah Iles J OHNSTON (The Ohio State University)

Many contributors to this volume will be discussing religions of theother in the ancient world, as seen through the eyes of the ancientsthemselves : how the Romans viewed the Jews, how the Greeks viewedthe Egyptians, and so on. I would like to do something different ; I wouldlike to look at a group of people whom scholars of ancient religions them-selves tend to view as practicing a strange religion : namely, those whorecreate ancient religions in the contemporary world, or neopagans .The topic is particularly interesting because neopagans base their practicesand systems of belief not only on the ancient sources but also, and evenmore directly, on the work of those who study the ancient sources that is,they create their religions by drawing upon on the scholarship that we produce. For most of this essay, I will look at what it is that our workcontributes to these new religions, and how, exactly, it does so. More briefly, at the end, I will suggest that by considering how these new reli-gions develop, we will better appreciate the vitality and flexibility of ancient religions.

But first I must get some basics out of the way. The word neopaganism is often used as a blanket term for religions that seek to revive the polytheis-tic beliefs and practices of the pre-Christian west. Although estimates vary,it is likely that about 700 000 people in North America (including Canada)identify themselves as practicing some form of neopaganism2 . Thisincludes, for example, Neo-Druidism, Heathenry (or Norse neopaganism),and Hellenismos that is, the revival of ancient Greek religious practices.

1. An early version of this essay was presented at the 2010 meetings of the AmericanPhilological Association as part of a joint panel on Religious Controversies that was co-sponsored by the APA and the Classical Association, organized by Tim Whitmarsh. I thank

the audience for their responses and my colleague Tom Hawkins for discussions before the paper. I also thank Sabina Magliocco for her continuing advice on the larger project towhich this essay serves as a prelude. The essay is offered in gratitude for the many years of friendship and common scholarly interests that I have shared with Philippe Borgeaud.

2. Sabina MAGLIOCCO, Witching Culture. Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America ,Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, p. 60.


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But the term neopaganism also includes groups or individuals who

are consciously eclectic in their worship, seeking not to replicate a singlesystem, but rather to create a new system from pieces of several older systems, including that of ancient Greece. This type of neopaganism has been around for about a century, having been initially inspired, in part, bythe widely popular work of James Frazer and Jane Ellen Harrison, as wellas by the then nascent fields of folklore studies and anthropology3 . Muchof what I write about in this essay will reflect this eclectic type of neopaga-nism, especially as it is found in California and the American Midwest.Occasionally, I will refer to a specific neopagan group by the name they

have chosen, such as Coven Trismegiston, a group founded in the Berkeleyarea about twenty years ago, but usually I will make statements represen-ting broader trends.

Which brings me to a caveat : working on this topic presents a different sort of challenge from those we usually encounter as scholars of ancient religions. Usually, we deal with testimonies that are too few and too scatte-red for us to be sure that we have gotten a complete picture of whatever weare studying. When working on neopaganism, in contrast, and especiallyduring the cyber-age, we encounter such a profusion of evidence that one

of the biggest challenges is to find ways to generalize without misrepresen-ting. Complicating this is the fact that to work on neopaganism in depth,one needs to interview the people who practice it, which, at least for American scholars, means going through a lengthy process of obtainingapproval from the government s Institutional Review Board, a clearinghouse for all research involving humans. For this reason, in preparing the present essay I have avoided interviewing individuals or joining web-basedgroups that would have admitted me to conversations that neopagans carryon amongst themselves. Any statements that I quote have been taken either

from the public portions of neopagan websites4

or from a book by SabinaMagliocco, one of the leading scholars of neopaganism today5 .With these preliminaries out of the way, I can turn now to our main

question : what it is that our work as scholars contributes to neopaganism,and how does it do so ? The average American neopagan, according toMagliocco, is white, middle-class, well-educated and an avid consumer of books . He or she usually has at least one college degree and not

3. See Sabina MAGLIOCCO, op. cit. , pp. 23-56, esp. 41-43; Ronald HUTTON, The Triumph

of the Moon : A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft , Oxford, Oxford University Press,1999, pp. 36-37, 122-27.4. All of the websites cited in this essay were visited on numerous occasions during the

period between mid-November and late December, 2009. None of the information I citechanged during this period, so I do not specify days or times of day.

5. Sabina MAGLIOCCO, op. cit.

SARAH ILES JOHNSTON124


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uncommonly lives within a university environment 6 . Not surprisingly,

given these demographics, neopagans acknowledge that it is best to learnthe languages relevant to the religions from which they borrow and read thesources for themselves. But they also acknowledge that this requires aninvestment of time that few of them can afford, and so they compile andshare lists of primary texts in translation that they consider important (Homer, the HomericHymns and the OrphicHymns are among their favo-rites) and they also share lists of secondary works that they judge to behelpful. Leading the latter sort of list, almost always, is Walter Burkert sGreek Religion . Also common are Fritz Graf s Magic in the Ancient World ;Jon Mikalsons Athenian Popular Religion ; F.W. Parkes Festivals of the Athenians ; and two of my own books,Hekate Soteira and Restless Dead .Given the context of the present volume, I am delighted to report that oneoccasionally finds Philippe Borgeauds The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greecerecommended as well. Most interestingly, on a page of the Other Godswebsite entitled Pan Visits News Jersey , Edwin Chapman claims that,after reading aloud an ancient hymn to Pan that he found in Borgeauds book, the god appeared to him in a form that looked (and smelled) like ahomeless drunk, complaining that humans did not talk to him anymore7 .One sometimes finds older books by Karl Kerenyi and Walter F. Otto, aswell and also, still, Jane Harrisons three major books.

Most of these are books that I would put on reading lists for my graduatestudents but the neopagans do not consume them in the same way that scholars do. For one thing, neopaganism is selective in what it takes awayfrom its sources. Or to be more precise, neopagans engage in what Magliocco, adapting a phrase from Michel de Certeau, refers to as poa-ching in the stacks 8 . That is, they borrow elements or ideas from scho-larly works, from which they fashion new concepts or spiritual identities.Magliocco was particularly interested in the effects that such poaching hadhad on neopaganism during its infancy and especially on the effects that the emergent field of folklore studies had had on it. Magliocco showed that

6. Sabina MAGLIOCCO, op. cit. , p. 64, cf. pp. 60-61 and 75-80.7. Philippe BORGEAUD, The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece ( Recherches sur le dieu Pan ,

1979), Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1988 ; http://www.othergods.org/research/Pan%20visits%20NJ.html. See also, e.g., the College of the Crossroads website, whichrecommends BORGEAUD on a page devoted to Lupercus, the Wolf-God : http://www.

collegeofthecrossroads.org/Lupercus.htm. The importance of Pan to neopagans, beginningat the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, is discussed by Ronald HUTTON, op cit. , pp. 43-51; briefly put, to them Pan is the guardian of the wild, and naturally harmonious countryside,as seen in opposition to the artificial, industrialized city.

8. Sabina MAGLIOCCO, op. cit ., pp. 54-55 ; MichelDE CERTEAU, The Practice of Everyday Life ( L Invention du quotidien , 1980), Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984.

WHOSE GODS ARE THESE ? 125


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the early neopagans borrowed the concept of survivals from folklore stu-

dies and then, subsequently rejecting the authority of the academy whene-ver it restricted them, sought proof that pagan religions still survived in theBritish countryside, ready to be revived.

Although the concept of survivals still interests neopagans, nowadaystextual poaching has different focuses. Let us first note that the scholarly books I mentioned a moment ago are of two types : most popular are what might be described as surveys of information Burkert, Graf, Mikalson andParke fall into this category. In contrast, neopagan reading lists usuallydon t include books that focus closely on interpreting a single god or single phe-

nomenon, with a few exceptions : quite a few lists include myHekateSoteira for a reason that I will discuss shortly below, and I as mentionedabove, several lists include Borgeauds book on Pan, a deity central toneopaganism for more than a century. But I have never seen, for instance,Burkert s Homo Necans , or Mikalsons Religion in Hellenistic Athens on aneopagan reading list.

What explains this pattern? As Henry Jenkins, a scholar of contempo-rary media culture, has observed, for textual poaching to succeed, the text in question be it a movie, a TV series, a novel, or, I would argue, a

scholarly work that is being used by a non-scholarly community must have enough coherence of its own to retain clear meanings even as it is being dismembered and reused. The parts must continue to resonate withwhatever glamour or authority of the original whole attracted the poacher sattention in the first place. Jenkins examined the Star Trek uvre and itsfans with this in mind and showed that the fans are able to build detailedhistories of a character or a continuing theme the Star Trek uvre ishighly coherent, in other words9 . The fans can invoke the full richness of acharacter s personality or a themes complexity by incorporating, or even just alluding to, isolated pieces of information in their own conversationsor creative works.

We begin to see why neopagans choose to poach from certain scholarlytexts about Greek religions and not from others : by their very nature assurveys, the books I mentioned tend to impose a coherence and singula-rity of meaning upon materials that were in reality polyvalent. In contrast, books that focus on specific phenomena or gods more frequently acknow-ledge the contradictions inherent in such polyvalence, and leave the rea-ders to reach their own conclusions. In other words, if one wants to createa picture of Athena that coheres, and from which one can develop onesown practices, it is better to look at what Burkert, Mikalson or Parke says

9. Henry JENKINS, Textual Poachers : Television Fans and Participatory Culture , NewYork, Routledge, 1993.



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about Athena than at, for example, Susan Deacy and Alexandra Villings

volume Athena in the Classical World , which offers 20 different analyses by 20 different scholars10 .This brings me back to my ownHekate Soteira , which rather decisively

proves the point I am making. In addition to offering a close look at itseponymous goddess,Hekate Soteira provided, when it was published in1990, the first general description in more than 40 years of the esotericmovement known as theurgy, in which Hecate played a central role. Our ancient evidence for theurgy comprises a bewildering array of what oftenseem to be contradictory opinions, advice and reports snipped from sources

such as Iamblichus, Proclus, and Damascius. I was bold enough, when IwroteHekate Soteira at the green age of thirty, to impose a unity upon all of this. For reasons I will discuss shortly below, theurgy has always held astrong interest for neopagans, and so, not surprisingly, my book, with itstidy survey, immediately attracted their attention. I expect, in fact, that it isneopagans who have caused the book to outsell all other titles in theAmerican Philological Association monograph series in which it was publi-shed, and who have caused used copies of the out-of-print hard-cover edi-tion to sell for $200 I do not imagine that classicists alone have fueled thisdemand. With the advent of neopagan websites in the late 1990s, I began tofindHekate Soteira quoted in cyber-space. A site calledTemenos Then , for example, uses passages fromHekate Soteira to support its ideas about establishing a personal connection with a god and making proper use of divination11 . Information about non-theurgic rituals that was provided bymy work has been used by neopagans as well. Coven Trismegiston, for example, has performed its own version of anoumenia sacrifice to Hecateat a place in Berkeley where three streets meet, which Magliocco tells mewas based in part on my discussion of the ancient noumenia ritual12 . Inshort,Hekate Soteira became a neopagan hit because it was coherent toocoherent now for my own, older (and I hope wiser) scholarly sensibilities, but absolutely what one needed if one wanted to practice theurgy.

But let us return to the main point : if textual poachers are attracted totexts that seem coherent, then neopagans are especially likely to be attrac-ted, because, given that most of them cannot read ancient sources for themselves, they cannot make independent judgments about which piecesof ancient information should be privileged and which should not. Nor

10. Susan DEACY and Alexandra VILLING ed., Athena in the Classical World , Leiden,Brill, 2001.

11. http://kyrene.4t.com/mysticism.html.12. Sabina MAGLIOCCO, op. cit ., pp. 23-24, supplemented by a conversation with

Magliocco on April 16, 2008.



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are they, usually, trained in the other sub-fields that scholarly readers use

to make such judgments. I cannot imagine using Jon Mikalsons Religionin Hellenistic Athens , for example, without being able to consult the

Inscriptiones Graecae . Caught between their deep respect for ancient ways and the fact that they seldom have the time or, usually, the desireto become academics, most neopagans rely on us to produce accounts of ancient religion that are both accurate and accessible.

The second type of text that the neopagans poach is valued because it isunderstood to have captured the eternalspirit of Greek religion Otto,Kerenyi and Harrison fall into this category, and so also, I am told, does Hekate Soteira , although I did not write it with that intention. The texts of this type almost always share something else with one another as well :they foreground what the neopagans understand to be the personal sides of ancient religion : the Eleusinian mysteries, Orphism, what are thought to be the spiritual aspects of the Homeric gods and of course, theurgy andHermeticism. This foregrounding of the personal goes hand-in-hand withthe fact that neopaganism has particularly thrived in America, for the quest for a personal relationship with the divine (what Harold Bloom called the Gnostic turn in American spirituality)13 is central to every other reli-gion that Americans have invented Mormonism, Christian Science andPentecostalism, for example. Indeed, neopaganism sometimes takes thistendency further, encouraging adherents to learn who their personal god isand how best to connect with him or her.

I will note one more thing about the neopagan desire to emphasize the personal side of Greek religion far beyond what any scholar of antiquitywould : namely, that it aligns with a broader, although probably uncons-cious, tendency within neopaganism to model their new religions upon precisely those that they have rejected, particularly Christianity. In thesame vein, many of the neopagan sites that I visited emphasize what theyunderstand to be theethical side of Greek religion. They find this in textsthat scholars would not think of as religious documents : various works of Plato, Solon and Theognis for example14 . They also look to less familiar sources. A year ago I did not even know that Stobaeus had passed down147 Delphic maxims that he claimed were recorded by the philosopher Sosiades I first encountered these maxims on the ethics pages of neopagan websites15 . In interpreting these maxims, one site claims that at

13. Harold BLOOM, The American Religion , New York, Simon and Schuster, 1992.14. E.g., http://duttond.topcities.com/Hellenotamiai/ethics.html.15. E.g., http://kyrene.4t.com/delphic_maxims.html. It was also on a neopagan website

(http://www.flyallnight.com/khaire/DelphicMaxims/) that I learned that 18 more maxims, possibly belonging to the Delphic corpus, had been found in an inscription from ancient



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the core of Hellenismos (that is, a non-eclectic form of neopaganism that

strives to accurately revive ancient Greek religion) lies the embrace of moderation, hospitality and reciprocity so far, this sounds more or lesslike the Greeks whom scholars know but another site concludesthat reviving the spirit of the Delphic maxims and ancient Greek religionmore generally requires having respect for men and women regardless of ethnicity, color, creed, social status, sexual orientation, or physicalability which does not sound like our Greeks, at all16 .

Another particular way in which neopagans poach from scholarly worksinvolves the creation of a liturgical year. Several sites include calendars of

festivals that are based mainly on the publications of Parke and Mikalson but that have been supplemented so as to ensure, as the websiteHellenionsays, that each Olympian [god] is honored at least once a year 17 . Thewebsites calendar for 2009 instructs worshippers to make a libation toAres on November 14th , for example, which it identifies with the 27th of Maimakterion an ancient Attic month that is conveniently empty of major festivals and therefore ripe for supplementation18 . Many neopagancalendars emphasize the monthly worship of Hecate at thenoumenia although not all of them require performance of rituals where three roads

meet, as did the Berkeley group I mentioned above19

. One contributor to a

Bactria the website provided a link to an article by A. N. OIKONOMIDES, Records of TheCommandments of the Seven Wise Men in the 3rd c. B.C., CB 63, 1987, pp. 67-76.Clearly, as this indicates, not all neopagans stop at reading survey-type scholarship ; somego to considerable lengths to inform themselves now aided, I presume, by the blessings of Google and JSTOR.

16. For moderation, etc., http://www.witchvox.com/va/dt_va.html?a=usfl&c=ba-sics&id=4575. For inclusiveness : http://www.hellenion.org/Mission.html

17. http://www.hellenion.org/calendar.html and http://www.hellenion.org/2009_Calen-dar_Hellenion.pdf.18. Ares, more than any other god, seems to challenge neopagans to be interpretatively

creative. From reading Homer, they conclude that he was a major god (and thus, that hecannot be ignored in their worship), and yet the political and ethical outlooks that most neopagans share make it hard for them to embrace a god of war. Some of them put considerable thought into how to deal with this conflict of loyalties. A discussion on the Neos Olympos website, for instance, includes a link to a paper given by Matthew Gonzalesat the 2005 meetings of the American Philological Association, entitled The Binding of Ares in Myth and Cult (a point that once again emphasizes the degree to which neopagansrely on our scholarship as they create their religions). The webpage quotes Gonzales at

length, emphasizing his suggestion that Ares could be understood as the servant of Dike andtherefore concluding that he deserves the worship of even peace-loving people.19. For websites advocating the worship of Hecate at thenoumenia , see e.g., http://

www.hellenion.org/calendar.html, http://sites.google.com/site/hellenionstemenos/festivals/ hekatesdeipnon, and http://community.livejournal.com/pagan/1727409.html. For the Berke-ley group, Sabina MAGLIOCCO, op. cit. , pp. 23-24.



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neopagan website, who identifies herself as Zo, suggests instead that the

noumenia is a good time to clean out the refrigerator or tend to the wormcomposter 20 . Neither of these activities, of course, are actually taken fromancient sources, but, they are admirable attempts to replicate, in spirit, theancient practice of ritually disposing of household dirt during thenoume-nia so as to purify oneself and ones household.

All of this neopagan poaching puts scholars in a very interesting posi-tion. Ancient texts that for centuries have been the almost exclusive pur-view of the educated elite now are being appropriated for use by a sub-culture (that is, the neopagans) that simultaneously relies on the educatedelite to convey the texts or at least the information contained in the texts,and subverts them by creating liturgies and belief systems that contradict what the elite claim are the texts correct uses and interpretations. Asscholars, we could choose to view our situation as similar to that of contemporary Native Americans, who protest the neopagan appropriationof their spiritual traditions and the resulting creation of what the NativeAmericans scornfully call plastic shamans. We could choose to protest the cleaning out of refrigerators at the time of the new moon, for example or to take another, and even more egregious, example of how the neopagans update ancient rituals, we could choose to protest the use of fruit-tea at contemporary celebrations of the Anthesteria, which theHellenionwebsite suggests is a perfectly good substitute for wine ; we could scorn-fully label the tea-drinkers plastic Dionysiacs21 .

But there would be some irony in such protests, given that classicists of a century ago, including most prominently James Frazer 22 , played leadingroles in establishing the idea of survivals and their reinterpretations from which neopaganism first grew : in combing scholarly publications for liturgical cues and then seeking modern equivalents, neopagans carry on,mutatis mutandis , the activities of those who first lay the groundwork for the study of ancient religions. And of course, there would be yet further irony in our protests given that, even if it isour texts that are being poachedfrom, the material that the neopagans seek to appropriate by doing so wasnever really ours to begin with : in contrast with the Native Americans,most of us do not claim to practice ancient Greek religion in any form. Togive this situation yet one more twist, I suspect that one reason that Greek

20. http://sites.google.com/site/hellenionstemenos/festivals/hekatesdeipnon.21. http://www.hellenion.org/timotheos/anthesteria1.html. Cf. the recommended offe-ring to Artemis Mounichia of open-faced sandwiches made on tortilla shells a contempo-rary substitute for ancient cakes calledamphiphontes : http://www.hellenion.org/timotheos/ mounikhia.html.

22. Ronald HUTTON, op. cit ., pp. 113-117.



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forms of neopaganism are especially popular among the educated middle

class is that the Greek gods were melded with the predominantly Christianculture of the western world long ago, by writers, artists and musicianssuch as Dante, Bernini and Handel, and then subsequently Walt Disney,John Updike and the History Channel. Although different enough fromChrist to have an exotic, subversive appeal, the ancient gods and heroeshave reassuringly familiar faces. We might indeed ask ourselves, whosegods are these ? They seem to belong to everyone and therefore to no onein particular.

Up until now, I have implicitly concentrated on what might be called the

authorial reception of our work as scholars and the interesting situationsin which it places us. That is, I have explored the ways in which, whenneopagans poach from our texts, they in turn create, as new authors,constructions that are clearly indebted to what they have read in our works,even if the new creations carry additional meanings. This is not too dif-ferent, in spirit, from what happened when Catullus received Sappho or Theocritus received Hipponax.

But I also want to consider a second, Jaussian model of reception, suchas has been used within the field of classics by scholars such as Charles

Martindale and William Batstone23

. According to this model, the meaningof a text is created only by the act of its reception, through its interfacewith those who receive it. By the terms of this model, as scholars of ancient religion, we find ourselves in the interesting position of not only beingunable to dismiss what we might consider inaccurate neopagan recons-tructions of ancient Greek religions but also being compelled to grant themvalidity. By this model, we can no more reject the neopagans interpreta-tions of our work and their subsequent reconstructions of Greek religionthan Homer could reject James Joyce.

Martindale himself might blench at my comparison of the neopagans toJoyce he has recently urged us, in a volume on reception that he co-editedwith Richard Thomas, to privilege Dantes Divine Comedy over the film Gladiator in our work, and he has cautioned us that as classicists, we form ourselves by the company that we keep 24 . And yet I could respond,using Martindales own words, that one value of reception is to bring toconsciousness the factors that may have contributed to our responses to the

23. E.g., Charles MARTINDALE, Redeeming the Text : Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics

of Reception , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press (Roman Literature and its Contexts),1993, and William BATSTONE, Provocation. The Point of Reception Theory , in :Classicsand the Uses of Reception (Charles MARTINDALE and Richard THOMAS ed.), Oxford,Blackwell, 2006, pp. 14-20.

24. Charles MARTINDALE, Thinking through Reception , in :Classics and the Uses of Reception , pp. 1-13 ; the quotation is from p. 11.



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texts of the past, factors of which we may well be ignorant but are not

thereforeinnocent

25

.Certainly, attention to neopaganism can do this for ancient religion.Magliocco describes a ritual created by a neopagan group in the Bay Areato help cure a member of cancer by emphasizing the connectivity of indivi-duals and communities, of humans and nature. The participants in the ritualinvoked Arachne as a goddess of weaving, trusting that she could facilitatesuch connectivity and thus the cure26 . Many classicists, I suspect, wouldrecoil from elevating a hubristic girl to a goddess. And yet, if we set asideour aversion which essentially means setting aside Ovids Metamor- phoses as an authoritative text that can be received in only one way thenwe might recognize the vigor born of bricolage that not only infusescontemporary neopaganism but that also infused ancient Greek religion.Arachnes elevation might lead us to better appreciate for example, a first or second century CE temple dedication from Chios27 commissioned by acertain Apollonides for his grandfather Megon, in which Apollonidesdeclares Megon to be aHeros Ploutodots . Declaring a dead person to be ahero is not remarkable, but adding the wordploutodots certainly is. It evokes Hesiods daimones esthloi, phylakes andrn [ ] ploutodotai andthe Eleusinian god Ploutos ;ploutodots was also a title that the Greeksgave to Isis and other eastern gods from the Hellenistic age on28 . The boundaries between the heroized dead, the traditional heroes, and the godsthemselves seem to have simply vanished at Apollonides behest, in other words. On Thera during the third century BCE, having been commanded todo so in a dream, Artemidorus of Perge built atemenos in which he brought together the localpolis gods Zeus, Apollo and Poseidon ; the local gods of the countryside, Hecate and the heroines ; the goddess of his own home-city, Artemis Pergaia Soteira ; the gods who were his personal saviors, theSamothracian Dioscuri ; and, finally, the personifications Tyche andHomonoia29 . In other words, like many neopagans, Artemidorus construc-ted a pantheon to suit himself and his own needs. Nor do examples of religiousbricolage such as these arise only late in the course of Greek

25. Charles MARTINDALE, op. cit. , p. 5.26. Sabina MAGLIOCCO, op. cit. , pp. 136-38.27. I. Ch. 68. For discussion, Fritz GRAF, Nordionische Kulte , Rome, Instituto Svizzero

di Roma, 1985, pp. 127-31.

28. HES, Op. 123-26 ; for its use with names of eastern gods, see Fritz GRAF, op. cit. ,1985, p. 129, n. 65.29. The main sources :IG XII 3, 421 f. and XII 3, Suppl. 1333-1348. Cf. Fritz GRAF,

Bermerkung zur brgerlichen Religiositt im Zeitalter des Hellenismus , in :Stadtbild und Brgerbild im Hellenismus (Michael WRRLE and Paul ZANKER d.), Munich, Beck,1995, pp. 103-114.



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religion : the Athenian of Platos Laws proposed outlawing the erection of

private shrines based on the commands of dreams, which suggests that such practices were common in the real Athenian world30 .So : whose gods are these Zeus, Apollo, Hecate and all the rest with

whom we grapple in our scholarly pursuits ? I think we must concede that they have always belonged to whoever invested time and energy in imagi-ning them their appearances, their powers, their loves and their hatreds.Certainly, that includes people such as Artemidorus of Perge andApollonides of Chios but it also includes Euripides and Sappho, for example, whose images of the gods are just as idiosyncratic, and at times

just as much the products of bricolage , as are those of Artemidorus andApollonides, even if they are more familiar to us. And although we some-times forget it, it includes us, too, as scholars, for we inevitably re-imaginethe gods as we do our work, however much we may think we only report and analyze what the ancients have already said. But it also includes, andlegitimately so, as I hope I have shown, the neopagans, who have put agreat deal of time and energy into imagining them and have done so in amanner from which, at times, we can learn.

30. PL., Leg. 11909d.



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Table des matires

Avant-propos 9Bibliographie de Philippe Borgeaud 13

Etablie par Mlanie LOZAT, Delphine PANISSODet Aurore SCHWAB

Avertissement 27

Le Miroir de l Autre

De Jsus Voltaire. Variations sur les origines du christianisme 31Daniel BARBU(Universit de Genve)

Une page d histoire religieuse armnienne. L affrontement entre le roimazden Tiridate et Grgoire l Illuminateur prs du temple de ladesse Anahit en Akilisne 45

Valentina CALZOLARI(Centre de recherches armnologiques Universit de Genve)

L autre que nous pourrions tre ou l autre que nous sommes aussi :l histoire des religions l cole 62

Nicole DURISCHGAUTHIER (HEP Vaud)

Religion in the Mirror of the Other : A Preliminary Investigation 74David FRANKFURTER (Boston University)

Mysteries, Baptism, and the History of Religious Studies.Some Tentative Remarks 91

Fritz GRAF (The Ohio State University)

La religion populaire . L invention d un nouvel horizonde l altrit religieuse l poque moderne ( XVI e XVIII e sicle) 104

Christian GROSSE(Universit de Lausanne)


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Whose Gods are These ? A Classicist Looks at Neopaganism 123Sarah Iles JOHNSTON(The Ohio State University)

L ordalie de la philologie classique ou La tentation de l Autre 134Agnes A. NAGY (Universit de Genve)

De l histoire des religions l invention de la sociologie :autour du no-ftichisme d Auguste Comte 158

Olivier POT (Universit de Genve)

Tsiganes musulmans de la Dobroudja. Entre ethnicit et religion : lemythe des origines corn 175

Franois R UEGG(Universit de Fribourg)

On the Roots of Christian Intolerance 193Guy G. STROUMSA(Oxford University)

En Mditerrane, de Grce Rome

Scripture, authority and exegesis, Augustine and Chalcedon 213Clifford A NDO(University of Chicago)

Le possible corps des dieux : retour sur Sarapis 227 Nicole BELAYCHE(EPHE / UMR 8210 AnHiMA )

Socrate, Pan et quelques nymphes : propos de la prire finaledu Phdre (279b4-c8) 251

David BOUVIER (Universit de Lausanne)

Hrodote, prcurseur du comparatisme en histoire des religions ?Retour sur la dnomination et l identification des dieux

en rgime polythiste 263Claude CALAME(Ecole des Hautes Etudes en sciences sociales, Paris)

I demoni dei bagni tra acqua e fuoco 275Doralice FABIANO(Universit de Genve)

Paysages de l altrit. Les espaces grecs de l inspiration 289Dominique JAILLARD(Universit de Lausanne)

L autre Aits 301

Antje K OLDE(Universit de Genve)Athna en compagnon d Ulysse 313

Alessandra LUKINOVICH(Universit de Genve)

DANS LE LABORATOIRE DE L HISTORIEN DES RELIGIONS662


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Tactique de l absence 324Maurice OLENDER (EHESS, Paris)

La voix d Aphrodite, le rle d Hermaphrodite et la timd Halicarnasse. Quelques remarques sur l inscription de Salmakis 328

Vinciane PIRENNE-DELFORGE(F.R.S.-FNRS Universit de Lige)

Le sacrifice humain : une affaire des autres ! A propos du martyrede saint Dasius 345

Francesca PRESCENDI(Universit de Genve)

Socrates

Thracian Incantation 358James M. R EDFIELD(University of Chicago)

D Ankara Mystra, le Dialogue avec un Perse de l empereurbyzantin Manuel II Palologue 375

Andr-Louis R EY (Universit de Genve)

Rationalit grecque et socit romaine : contextes politiqueset intellectuels de la religion de la Rpublique tardive 385

Jrg R PKE(Centre Max Weber, Universit d Erfurt)

Les motions dans la religion romaine 406John SCHEID(Collge de France)

Aphrodite reflte. A propos du fragment 1 (LP/V) de Sappho 416Renate SCHLESIER (Freie Universitt Berlin)

A la recherche des potes disparus 430Paul SCHUBERT(Universit de Genve)

Sacrifices holy and unholy in Euripides Iphigenia in Tauris 449Froma I. ZEITLIN(Princeton)

En terres d Orient, d Egypte l Inde

De Carthage Salvador de Bahia. Approche comparative des ritesdu tophet et du candombl, lieux de mmoire rituels 469

Corinne BONNET(Universit de Toulouse [UTM],Equipe PLH-ERASME, EA 4153-IUF)

Grer la religion des autres en traduisant : S r D s et la bhakti 486Maya BURGER (Universit de Lausanne)

TABLE DES MATIRES 663


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Prier et sduire 496Antoine CAVIGNEAUX(Universit de Genve)

Le hiroglyphe et la gestuelle crmonielle d Amenhotep IV 504Philippe COLLOMBERT(Universit de Genve)

Dieux en colre, dieux anonymes, dieux en couple. Sur la naturedes dieux personnels dans le Moyen-Orient ancien 516

Margaret JAQUES(Universit de Zurich)

On the Sisterhood of Europe and Asia 526Bruce LINCOLN(University of Chicago)

Chut ! Le signe d Harpocrate et l invitation au silence 541Philippe MATTHEY(Universit de Genve)

Images autorises, images interdites. L Islam et le choc descivilisations 573

Silvia NAEF (Universit de Genve)

Les Trsors cachs : entre l intemporalit et l histoire 585Svetlana PETKOVA

Mmoire et ruines de Msopotamie 599Anne-Caroline R ENDULOISEL(Universit de Genve)

Quand les dieux rendent visite aux hommes (Gn 18 19). Abraham,Lot et la mythologie grecque et proche-orientale 615

Thomas R MER (Collge de France Universit de Lausanne)

Pan en Egypte et le bouc de Mends 627Youri VOLOKHINE(Universit de Genve)

Liste des auteurs 651

DANS LE LABORATOIRE DE L HISTORIEN DES RELIGIONS664

johnston s. i. (2011) whose gods are these melanges borgeaud

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