Religion in the Mirror of the Other: The Discursive Value of Cult-Atrocity Stories in Mediterranean Antiquity

Abstract

Cultures in the Roman Mediterranean world, including Christianity, conceptualized their most valuable and potent ceremonial elements not only through the occasionally learned abstraction or larger social categories but by imagining their perversion by others: sometimes witches or savages; sometimes intimate, conspiratorial enemies; and sometimes evil heathens and debauched heretics. These concerns with dangerous alterity cluster around areas of culture and practice that can be generalized as religion and that point to a tentative, discursive concept of religion.