Manichaean Cues: Religious Identity in Everyday Life

The people we have met in the past few chapters juggled several roles. Pamour III was – as far as we can tell – a dutiful son, a responsible elder brother, a sometimes absent husband and father, an eager trader, a Kellite, a migrant, and probably a number of other things that we cannot discern. Other villagers were daughters, potters, mothers, weavers, carpenters, caravan drivers, estate managers, Roman officials, ‘Egyptians’, ‘Hibites’, and so on. For some, such as Pamour III himself, we may add ‘Manichaean’ to the list. However, the nature of this ‘Manichaeanness’ is difficult to ascertain. Shared religion is, by and large, not something that the Pamour family or their associates discuss at length: indeed, the main body of evidence for Manichaean affiliation is the literary texts, not the documentary letters. How are we to judge the importance of religious identity to Pamour III and the rest of his associates? And how can we be sure that this identity was ‘Manichaean’? These questions will, in various guises, follow us throughout the rest of this book. The present chapter sets the stage by clarifying some theoretical concepts broached in the introduction, and applying them to a selection of documentary letters. While religious affiliation is never discussed explicitly, authors of House 1–3 did employ religiously charged phrases, allusions, and terms: what we may call ‘religious cues’. These cues comprise the best-preserved evidence we have for the way the actors themselves articulated their religious identity. Below, we examine what they tell us about the role of religious identity in the everyday lives of the House 3 inhabitants, and the extent to which they can be taken as belonging to a specifically Manichaean tradition. But before we turn to the House 1–3 material, we need to take a step back and consider some theoretical perspectives on everyday religion and lay identity, in order to situate the present contribution. We therefore start by looking at recent trends in scholarship on late antique religious identity.