Pursuing lived ancient religion

Abstract

“Lived ancient religion” is a new approach to the religious practices, ideas, and institutions of the distant past. The notion of “lived religion”, as it has been applied to recent phenomena that go beyond orthodox beliefs and religious organizations, cannot be transferred directly to a study of ancient religions because its methodology, inspired above all by anthropology and empirical sociology, requires some form of direct access to the living of the religion. This departure is implied by the oxymoronic form of “lived ancient religion”, which juxtaposes the living of religion with an only incompletely accessible past in which the subjects of study are no longer living. What might have been deplored as a loss, has turned out to be a gain, allowing for a significant expansion of the concept. While still invoking “lived religion” as it is understood in modern contexts, “lived ancient religion” is neither restricted to “everyday religion” nor focused on subjective experiences. Rather, the focus on the ancient world, the past, the already lived experiences and events, provides the opportunity to study lived religion with a renewed and revitalized focus. This approach overcomes the dichotomy of official and institutionalized religion on the one hand and “lived religion” on the other. Rather, taking the perspective on individual appropriations to its extremes, it also allows studying institutions as sedimented forms of lived religion. Thus, as “lived ancient religion” a framework to analyze religious change is given, religion in the making even on a large scale (see Albrecht et al. 2018). As is indicated by the subtitle of the foundational project, “Questioning ‘cults’ and ‘polis religion’”, “lived ancient religion” shares a critical impetus with the study of contemporary “lived religion”. Yet given the very different degrees of coherence and embeddedness of religious practices in ancient Mediterranean societies, and in the Roman Empire in particular, our project (2012–2017) aimed at a much broader re-description of ancient “religion” (Rüpke 2012). Fundamentally, it questioned the implicit assumption that all inhabitants of the Imperium Romanum were equally religious. Likewise, the tendency to focus upon civic, that is collective, institutionalized religious practices was questioned, as such a focus has led to the production of a series of sub-categories (“oriental cults”, “votive religion”, “funerary rites”) in order to save those phenomena whose relation to civic practice is indeterminate. This shift in focus was