Panel organizer: Dr. Julia Kindt (The University of Sydney)
During the last decade and a half there has been a growing interest in ‘personal religion’ as another dimension in which the ancient Greek religious experience articulated itself, besides the principles and practices of polis religion. While the early pioneering works in this area by Festguière (1954) and Nilsson (1972) did not lead to a broader interest in and recognition of ancient Greek personal religion, a number of studies have recently drawn our attention to aspects of ancient Greek religion that, in reflecting a more personal engagement with the supernatural, fall fully or partially outside the polis paradigm.
Research on divination, epiphanic experiences and the production and circulation of religious artifacts (such as dedications, funerary stelai, and amulets) for example, has illustrated how personal concerns that did not involve communal issues shaped the engagement with the supernatural. At the same time the reevaluation of so-called ‘magical practices’ and ‘mystery cults’, in particular the renewed interest in Orphism emerging in the wake of the publication of the Derveni papyrus, has shown that these religious phenomena were important manifestations of the religious in the ancient world, which also reflect an individual engagement with the supernatural.
Given this growing interest in ‘personal religion’ it is now time to take stock. In particular, we need to ask what we mean by ‘personal religion’ and how it relates to the religious structures, institutions and systems of authority of official Greek religion. Should we assume that fully separate evocations of the religious are at work here? Are we dealing with complementary, or mutually exclusive religious spheres? And, most importantly, are we meant to assume that the religions of the ancient world showed a dual structure of public and private religions, of official and personal religions?
This panel calls for papers on a broad array of topics which consider these and related questions by focusing on a particular body of evidence for the study of ancient Greek personal religion, including individual manifestations of personal religion in ‘lived’ ancient Greek religion, philosophical religion, mystery cults, and ‘magic’. Diverse in content the papers selected for this panel will all speak to the common question of identifying the place of personal religion in ancient Greek religion and society.
Individual papers of this panel will be 20 minutes in length. Please send your anonymous one-page abstract (excluding bibliography) to the SCS office (scsmeetings@sas.upenn.edu) as an e-mail attachment by March 2, 2015. Please indicate the title of this panel, your contact information, and any audio-visual equipment requirements you may have in your covering e-mail. Submissions for papers to be presented at this panel will be reviewed anonymously.