Familiarity and Phenomenology in Greece: Accumulated Votives as Group-made Monuments
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K.A. Rask
Abstract
Greek devotional activity from the eighth through third centuries included the accumulation of common votive types, many of which exhibited similar motifs and repetitive designs. This paper explores constructed assemblages by focusing on the dedication of objects featuring visual and iconographic “sameness.” Building on the work of D. Morgan and J. González, this paper theorizes Greek votive accumulations as larger conglomerations that impact religious experience through the artifacts’ very number and ubiquity. Evidence from Athens and Corinth suggests that an individual’s personal biography and past movements through the local landscape gave pervasive religious imagery a sense of familiarity and meaningfulness. While the appearance of ubiquitous votives may have been dictated by tradition and manufacturing realities, their use to create monumental votive deposits had phenomenological impact. Drawing on evidence from treasury records and excavated material at a number of Greek sanctuaries, this paper argues that, when they formed assemblages of repetitive religious images, worshippers created larger, dynamic monuments out of individual items. The clustered offerings participated in an “aesthetics of accumulation,” visually and physically linking individuals to a network of other worshippers.
I would like to thank Sandra Blakely and Nancy Evans, the organizers of the SBL panel Ritual Matters: Materiality in Ancient Religion, as well as the other panel participants and audience members for their comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank the Corinth Excavation staff and summertime researchers for their guidance and help accessing material, especially Ioulia Tzonou. Finally, I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers who read portions of this paper.
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Titelseiten
- Titelseiten
- Articles
- Introduction
- Magic and Ritual
- Magic and Ritual
- Überlegungen zu einigen griechischen Wetterritualen
- And You Will Be Amazed: The Rhetoric of Authority in the Greek Magical Papyri
- Lawsuits with Headless Foes: A Greek Incantation Motif
- A Syntactic Approach to the Orphic Gold Leaves
- Materiality and Ancient Religion
- Materiality and Ancient Religion
- Accumulation, authority, and the cultural lives of objects: materiality and ancient religion
- Familiarity and Phenomenology in Greece: Accumulated Votives as Group-made Monuments
- The Cultural Biography of a Pilgrimage Token: From Hagiographical to Archaeological Evidence
- More than text: Approaching ritual papyri from Oxyrhynchus as inscribed objects
- Rethinking Orphic ‘Bookishness’: Text and Performance in Classical Mystery Religion
- Divine Names
- Divine Names
- “Noms de dieux!” Gods at the borders
- Nommer les dieux hittites : au sujet de quelques épithètes divines
- Le culte de Zeus Brontôn : l’espace et la morphologie du dieu de l’orage dans la Phrygie d’époque romaine
- Séquences onomastiques divines à Ostie-Portus
- Myths of Origin
- Myths of Origin
- Ex arches: Looking Back at Greek Myths of Origin
- Typhoeus or Cosmic Regression (Theogony 821 – 880)
- Herakles and the Order of Zeus in Hesiod’s Theogony
- The Politics of Beginnings: Hesiod and the Assyrian Ideological Appropriation of Enuma Eliš
- Our Co(s)mic Origins: Theogonies in Greek Comedy
- At the Origins of Dionysus and Wine: Myths, Miracles, and Festivals
- Creation in the Poimandres and in Other Creation Stories
- The God Aion in a Mosaic from Nea Paphos (Cyprus) and Graeco-Phoenician Cosmogonies in the Roman East
- Ἀρχή and δῖνος: Vortices as Cosmogonic Powers and Cosmic Regulators. Study Case: The Whirling Lightning Bolt of Zeus
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Titelseiten
- Titelseiten
- Articles
- Introduction
- Magic and Ritual
- Magic and Ritual
- Überlegungen zu einigen griechischen Wetterritualen
- And You Will Be Amazed: The Rhetoric of Authority in the Greek Magical Papyri
- Lawsuits with Headless Foes: A Greek Incantation Motif
- A Syntactic Approach to the Orphic Gold Leaves
- Materiality and Ancient Religion
- Materiality and Ancient Religion
- Accumulation, authority, and the cultural lives of objects: materiality and ancient religion
- Familiarity and Phenomenology in Greece: Accumulated Votives as Group-made Monuments
- The Cultural Biography of a Pilgrimage Token: From Hagiographical to Archaeological Evidence
- More than text: Approaching ritual papyri from Oxyrhynchus as inscribed objects
- Rethinking Orphic ‘Bookishness’: Text and Performance in Classical Mystery Religion
- Divine Names
- Divine Names
- “Noms de dieux!” Gods at the borders
- Nommer les dieux hittites : au sujet de quelques épithètes divines
- Le culte de Zeus Brontôn : l’espace et la morphologie du dieu de l’orage dans la Phrygie d’époque romaine
- Séquences onomastiques divines à Ostie-Portus
- Myths of Origin
- Myths of Origin
- Ex arches: Looking Back at Greek Myths of Origin
- Typhoeus or Cosmic Regression (Theogony 821 – 880)
- Herakles and the Order of Zeus in Hesiod’s Theogony
- The Politics of Beginnings: Hesiod and the Assyrian Ideological Appropriation of Enuma Eliš
- Our Co(s)mic Origins: Theogonies in Greek Comedy
- At the Origins of Dionysus and Wine: Myths, Miracles, and Festivals
- Creation in the Poimandres and in Other Creation Stories
- The God Aion in a Mosaic from Nea Paphos (Cyprus) and Graeco-Phoenician Cosmogonies in the Roman East
- Ἀρχή and δῖνος: Vortices as Cosmogonic Powers and Cosmic Regulators. Study Case: The Whirling Lightning Bolt of Zeus