The Handbook of Religions in Ancient Europe

Lisbeth Bredholt Christensen, Olav Hammer, David Warburton

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317544524
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

"The Handbook of Religions in Ancient Europe" surveys the major religious currents of Europe before Christianity - the first continental religion with hegemonic ambition - wiped out most local religions. The evidence - whether archaeological or written - is notoriously difficult to interpret, and the variety of religions documented by the sources and the range of languages used are bewildering. The "Handbook" brings together leading authorities on pre-Christian religious history to provide a state-of-the-art survey. The first section of the book covers the Prehistoric period, from the Paleolithic to the Bronze Age. The second section covers the period since writing systems began. Ranging across the Mediterranean and Northern, Celtic and Slavic Europe, the essays assess the archaeological and textual evidence. Dispersed archaeological remains and biased outside sources constitute our main sources of information, so the complex task of interpreting these traces is explained for each case. The "Handbook" also aims to highlight the plurality of religion in ancient Europe: the many ways in which it is expressed, notably in discourse, action, organization, and material culture; how it is produced and maintained by different people with different interests; how communities always connect with or disassociate from adjunct communities and how their beliefs and rituals are shaped by these relationships. The "Handbook" will be invaluable to anyone interested in ancient History and also to scholars and students of Religion, Anthropology, Archaeology, and Classical Studies.

1 Introduction

Lisbeth Bredholt Christensen, Olav Hammer and David A. Warburton

DOI: 10.4324/9781315728971-1

The Rationale for this Book

“Religion” is an amorphous concept which has been defined in numerous ways, without any scholarly consensus in sight. Its main features seem to us to be (a) having socially shared activities which bear no direct relation to subsistence, (b) demanding some specific attitude towards death and/or the dead, and (c) generally including a discourse including entities which are beyond this world. Whatever it is, religion seems to be uniquely linked to the human race. It was in Europe and the Middle East that the culture of our immediate ancestors first combined the attributes which are the necessary precursors of religion – burials, plastic art and paintings. It was the religions of groups as diverse as the Greeks and the Scandinavians which seem to have given birth to important traits of our civilization as we define it today. Thus the history and prehistory of Europe is fundamental to the history of the human race and religion – and the history of religion is fundamental to Europe.

Anatomically modern humans, that is, the type of humans to which we belong, arrived on the European continent approximately 40,000 years ago. Their arrival in Europe is associated with the end of the Middle Palaeolithic (which began perhaps 250,000 years earlier in Europe) and the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic. Significantly, in the Middle East, anatomically modern humans used the same tools of the Middle Palaeolithic assem-blages as the Neanderthals, whereas in Europe the Neanderthals are also briefly associ-ated with the Upper Palaeolithic. In the Near East and in Europe, Neanderthals and our ancestors buried their dead – the first ritual act we can identify with certainty. In any case, the Neanderthals died out some 30,000 years ago, and thus the history of the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe is that of the human race. The Upper Palaeolithic is the era of the birth of the first cave paintings and the period when small figurines appear in small numbers, yet more abundantly than in any preceding period.

For most of the Upper Palaeolithic, however, the archaeological evidence of ritual is scant, and it is a matter of debate whether or not it can be interpreted as indicating traces of religious rituals and beliefs. Yet, this debate is crucial, because what is certain is that material such as burials, cave paintings and figurines is the kind of material that in later times is closely linked to religion (as indications of belief in a beyond, as depictions of myths, and as representations of supernatural beings).

With the Neolithic, a new migration brought new human groups into Europe from the Near East where the concepts of sanctuaries and meeting places were gradually being developed. The Neolithic began some 12,000 years ago in the Near East, reaching France and Scandinavia only thousands of years later. From the start in the Near East, it was marked by special treatment for the dead and buildings which may have served com-munal purposes. The earliest population movements (beginning more than 11,000 years ago) involved the transfer to the islands – Cyprus, Crete, Sicily – and from each island to the adjacent mainland. It was only millennia later that the movement pushed directly overland, along the Danube and through the area to the north of the Alps. In any case, these new peoples pushed on, probably conquering territory and mingling with the existing population, creating new identities.

As the predominantly hunter-gatherer populations of the Near East began to adopt farming and settled communities began to form, marking the beginning of the transition to the Neolithic era from approximately 12,000 years ago, archaeological remains become more plentiful and from the end of the period also show an increasing regional diversity. Yet even these finds are not unambiguous as concerns what we today call religion, but clearly they represent the “forms” or the “expressions” of what in historical religions is filled with religious “content”. It is only from the European Bronze Age that we have access to the earliest written sources (mid-second millennium bce) that – together with mate-rial remains – allow us to document religious life in Europe. Yet although Minoan and Mycenaean documents demonstrate literacy in the Mediterranean, most of our written source material belongs to the Late Iron Age and classical antiquity – as attested by inscriptions in Greek, Etruscan, Punic, Celtic and various Italic languages. Over time, textual and material evidence for religious life in various parts of Europe becomes more plentiful and much more detailed. The diverse names of gods, the myths about them, the rituals carried out to honour or propitiate them, the buildings constructed to worship them in the various parts of the continent demonstrate the cultural wealth and local variability of ancient Europe.

As a consequence of the emergence and ultimate imposition of Christianity, the first religion on the continent with a hegemonic ambition, most local religions were gradually wiped out. Although originally a local variation of Eastern faiths, in general Christianity did not spread organically from person to person, so much as having been selected and protected by rulers who then expected their people to follow. The Roman emperor Constantine initially privileged Christianity over its rivals. After Julian the Apostate (reigned 360–63 ce) tried to re-establish religious freedom in the empire, his successors aimed at revoking his efforts, and in the 380s ce Theodosius elevated Christianity to the status of being the only religion tolerated within the empire. This initiated a process that eventually ensured that competing non-Christian alternatives disappeared as living reli-gions. These were initially banished from the Mediterranean, and subsequently from the Germanic, Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, Slavic and Baltic areas, finally reaching the utmost peripheries of Europe with the forced conversion of the Sami and other Uralic-speaking peoples in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.¹

The picture of religion in ancient Europe that emerges even from such a thumbnail sketch is one of diversity and complexity. The time depth is vast, the evidence – whether archaeological or written – is difficult to interpret, and the variety of religions documented by the sources is bewildering. For students, scholars and members of the broader public wishing to expand their horizons in this field, it is challenging in the extreme to attempt to gain an overall picture of religious history before the advent of Christianity. The dif-ficulties are compounded by the fact that much of the scholarly literature on some local pre-Christian religions is written in languages that are largely inaccessible to an international readership, such as Icelandic, Swedish, Polish, Finnish or Latvian. Hence, scholars working in the field will typically be truly familiar with one or two particular traditions, while the non-specialist may find it an almost impossible task to gain a broad understanding of pre-Christian religious Europe.

The Handbook of Religions in Ancient Europe is intended to remedy this gap. Specialists in various areas of pre-Christian religious history have contributed chapters that provide brief state-of-the-art surveys of their fields of expertise, targeted at non-specialist readers, together with a list of suggested further readings.² Besides aiming at accessibility, all authors were presented with two sets of challenges.

First, they were asked to base their chapters on the best available sources and reflect critically on the nature of these sources and on the challenges involved in interpreting them: how does one access the rituals and religious conceptions of people known to us only from the material remains unearthed by archaeologists? What information can be gleaned from place-names, inscriptions and coins? What insights can we gain from written accounts, given that these are often the products of literate elites, or of hostile outsiders such as Christian missionaries?

Secondly, they were invited to treat religions as plural and multidimensional, mani-fest as discourse, action, organization and material culture; produced by specific people with at times quite diverse interests: distinct local groups, religious or social elites versus others, or men versus women. As is clear from the chapters that follow, various regions and epochs provide very different possibilities of understanding this multidimensionality. In some areas (e.g. classical antiquity) written sources and material remains are plentiful, and internal diversity obvious. For others, such as prehistoric Finland, indirect evidence such as the distribution of loanwords for religious concepts or place-names incorporating diverse terms for the sacred gives a picture of different religious strata. For yet others, such as the Baltic region, archaeological remains are almost non-existent, written sources appear only at a late date, and the evidence from oral history provides few clues to allow for such a differentiated picture.

Three terms in the title merit some comment. A handbook, and particularly one the size of the present one, can only provide a partial sample. Many other areas and religions of ancient Europe could have been included, but at the cost of producing a vast encyclo-pedia of essays. Pre-Christian Gaul, Scotland, Estonia, Hungary, Dacia, Illyria, Thracia and many other regions of great intrinsic interest were excluded for practical rather than theoretically defensible reasons.

Our conception of Europe is similarly pragmatic. The very denomination “Europe” is, of course, an anachronism for much of the time covered in this book, and would have been completely incomprehensible for most of the peoples whose religions we study here. Furthermore, globalization is not a modern phenomenon. Ice Age figurines show large similarities over an area from France to the Urals and testify to some kind of contact; trade contacts with regions outside present-day European borders were common since the Bronze Age. Excavations of a Viking settlement on the island of Helgö near Stockholm unearthed a Buddha statuette from northern India, a scoop from Egypt, and coins from the Arabic-speaking world. The amber route connecting large parts of Europe has linked the Baltic and the Mediterranean since the early second millennium bce, and has thus contributed to the diffusion of cultural traits.

Although this volume is focused on Europe as a bounded geographical entity, we have asked contributors to mention possible interactions with other cultural regions, and individual chapters discuss such contacts whenever our very imperfect understanding of interregional religious relations in ancient times allows for this. As regards the earliest prehistory, what happened in Europe cannot be understood when isolated from develop-ments in Africa and the Levant, and therefore the chapters on the Palaeolithic and the Neolithic refer to developments in these areas.

Finally, religion is a contested term that we have also decided to understand in a broad and rather pragmatic sense. Few of the groups presented in this volume had any native term for what we would characterize as “religion”. Those who did, mainly Latin authors, used the term polemically: acceptable religio was distinguished from unacceptable super-stitio. We use the term in the sense shared by many of our colleagues in the study of reli-gion: sources that indicate a preoccupation – in narrative, action or material culture – with a postulated supra-human realm have been interpreted as elements of a cultural domain we can call “religion”. In principle, however, it must be accepted that what is studied by students of the academic disciplines of the study of religion, anthropology, archaeology, sociology, and so on defines what is understood as “religion”. Our understanding of the phenomenon itself is thus at least partially a reflection of our discipline more than being a theoretically defined reality which is “out there”.

This book comes in two parts, one dealing with prehistoric religion, and one presenting a variety of religions that have also left written traces. Although the boundary between prehistory and history is to some extent artificial (because continuities in material culture may bridge an imagined border between writing culture and non-writing culture, and because textual sources, even when there, are sometimes sparse and more ambiguous than material sources), the division into two parts does reflect the fact that with the introduction of writing, new kinds of data begin to emerge. The identity of the deities, the names of festivals and the rationale for celebrating them can be easier to discern from texts than from images and artifacts.

Prehistoric Religion

There is no consensus on the issue of whether or not one can talk about “prehistoric reli-gion”, and the work of those who have actually dealt with the matter has led in very differ-ent directions. Scholars of religion have few methodological tools to work with material culture when no texts are available to “explain” or support interpretations of the material.

In recent years, a number of scholars have begun to theorize on the origins of reli-gion via cognitive approaches. These approaches understand “origins” largely as biologi-cally hardwired mental dispositions and their expressions, and presuppose that ancient materials can be understood on the basis of observations made on modern people. One of the basic assumptions of such a method means assuming that the present character of religion as understood today corresponds to the origins. Given the ambiguous character of material culture, it is always possible to debate how it can be interpreted. However, the origins might be very different from the modern form – and thus developing interpretive frameworks based on hypotheses related to the existing forms of religion might be the wrong approach. By contrast, prehistoric religion in the sense studied by archaeologists involves interpreting the material of the past as it is preserved, and these materials have led them to formulate a diverse set of views. We have decided to provide several different such archaeological perspectives. This allows an insight into the work being done today and into the differences in approaches and interpretation.

The current debate about the origins, forms and development of religion in prehistory is also a reflection of the evolution of archaeology. Until the end of the Second World War, archaeology was largely an empirical discipline occasionally exploited for national-ist reasons. Some time after the war, this “traditional” approach gave way to a gradual transformation called the “New Archaeology” which affected archaeological thinking, mostly in the English-speaking countries, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. The major concept of this trend was to try to study the material on its own terms and not as a mere search for national identities or in order to establish chronologies. The methods were more rigorously “scientific” and aimed at answering modest questions related to economic and technological developments, occasionally touching on identity, but usually setting aside complicated issues such as religion. One particular trend of the New Archaeology has since been dubbed “processual archaeology”, particularly by the “post-processual” archaeologists who in recent decades have largely spurred on a debate about religion and cognition – issues which somehow fell by the wayside in the theoretical debates for most of the second half of the twentieth century. The terms “processual” and “post-processual” archaeology must be understood in terms of “structuralism” and “post-structuralism” and are thus more polemic categories in the sense of “schools of thought” than categories of thinking. Regardless of the different eras and approaches, the current essays represent virtually all of the different strains of archaeological thought as they are expressed today (including those that are viewed by many as outmoded, such as the origins of religion as a single strain).

Yet while prehistoric archaeologists are increasingly turning to the subject of religion, religion remains a minor issue within prehistoric archaeology as an academic field (one of the reasons being that before coming to interpretative questions at all, archaeologists need first to resolve more basic issues regarding the stratigraphy, typology and chronology of a material), and most archaeologists are reluctant to discuss the matter. Fortunately, some recognized researchers were willing to do so, and we thank these authors. Two archaeologists (d’Errico and Hodder) who were interested but had no time to contribute are represented by sketches of their thoughts prepared by us.

In selecting contributors to this section the aim was that the authors would – as far as possible – represent the very different approaches within the field. Overall, the essays are from and about archaeologists who represent important trends which will be found in the literature, and will ultimately determine what archaeologists and students of religion will use as the building blocks for the understanding of “prehistoric religion”. The essays thus reflect some of what is being done in a major “work in progress”.

The first section in this book begins with a brief chapter by Lisbeth Bredholt Christensen and David A. Warburton which provides some basic guidelines to the study of prehistoric religions. Then follows an account by Jarl Nordbladh who looks back on a long archaeo-logical career, explaining what he was looking for, and how he looked for it. The account points out to the general student of religion what has happened in archaeology in the last few decades and how archaeologists work. In general, Nordbladh is sceptical as to the possibilities of speaking at great length about religion in the Bronze Age, as this was most probably not yet a distinct domain but simply diverse practices integrated into everyday life at all levels.

From here, a series of chapters cover the Palaeolithic, the Neolithic, and the Bronze Age. David A. Warburton summarizes Francesco d’Errico’s research on Palaeolithic arti-facts which suggests that the origin of “symbolling” lies before the advent of anatomically modern humans and that the production of material culture in itself was decisive for the development of thought.

Emmanuel Anati argues that already in the Palaeolithic there was religion with rituals, myths, ancestor cults, morals and belief in a life after death. Some of these elements can be traced even further back in evolutionary history, but with the Upper Palaeolithic these isolated elements were united into the form of religion. Anati concludes that religion in the Palaeolithic was largely the same globally, whereas the Neolithic saw the development of regional variants and the introduction of priests and gods.

Lisbeth Bredholt Christensen and David A. Warburton look at the work of Ian Hodder who in his work with Neolithic material has come close to developing a methodology which resembles that of the study of religion. Whereas for many years Hodder refused to speak about religion, his recent works are dedicated to this subject.

Jörg Petrasch raises the question of whether Neolithic figurines of central and south-eastern Europe should be interpreted in a religious (cultic, ancestor-related) context or not, and concludes that they should. Nonetheless, he draws a picture of the Neolithic as a period when religion did not (yet) play any large role and religious specialists, cultic areas and communal rituals were not (yet) common, but in the course of which (and even more with the Bronze Age) the role of these elements increased.

Charlotte Damm compares Neolithic religious practices in farmer-pastoralist southern Scandinavia with hunter-fisher Fennoscandia. In southern Scandinavia grave structures and burial practices are seen as relating to ancestors, while depositions point towards other kinds of powers. In Fennoscandia, material such as rock art and burial practices is seen as linking individuals, animals and deceased group members in a more diffuse and malleable world-view similar to what can be observed also among modern hunters.

Flemming Kaul argues that it is possible for archaeologists to study religion in the Bronze Age and that the evidence shows an elaborate mythology concerned with the journey of the sun, which can be read from images on razors. In his view, Bronze Age peoples saw the sun as a god, although not, or only sometimes, as an anthropomorphic or zoomorphic one. Whereas razors were the medium for illustrating cosmology and myth, rock art was the medium for illustrating rituals.

Kristian Kristian...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• A note on Greek and Latin sources
• Abbreviations and short titles
• 1. Introduction
• PART I: PREHISTORIC RELIGIONS
• PART II: ANCIENT EUROPE IN THE HISTORICAL PERIOD
• Timeline of key dates
• Contributors
• References
• Index