Liveblogging the thesis: finally.
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hawkwing_lb4. Hellenisation, Hybridisation, and Trends in Hellenistic Religion.
Heresy is the life of a mythology, and orthodoxy is the death.
Joseph Campbell, On Mythology and the Individual, [Lecture 1A, 20:42], 1997.
4.1. Hellenisation, hybridity, and the colonisation of language.
Language is a versatile instrument, but often painfully imprecise. Words become charged with the history of their use, so that it is difficult to divorce the concept from the context. We make assumptions without being aware of them, and use blanket terms which fail to elucidate the messy complexities of living, growing organisms: people, societies, religions, culture.
This is the case with "hellenisation". To hellenise, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, means to make or become Greek, to make of Greek character, to study or to imitate Greek culture. Hellenisation, then, is the adoption of Greek manners and culture, or the act of causing a culture to become Greek.
To become Greek. Is it, then, so easy to trade one culture for another, one mode of thought and life for another, as one might shed one set of clothes and don another? We talk of the "hellenisation" of indigenous elites in the new post-Alexandrian kingdoms, and by speaking in terms with an exclusive Greek frame of reference, fail to look more closely at the chances for Greeks to cast off their himatia and run off with the barbarians: to, in short, take advantage of the opportunity to "go native".
Or to bring the native back to Greece. Up until the latter part of the last century, scholars contrasted "orientalising" and "hellenising" tendencies in the Hellenistic world without critically examining their own frames of reference. Civilised, rational, classical Greek culture, with its concern for naturalism in art, the clean symmetry of its temples, its philosophers and democracies, set against the wealth and luxury of the decadent Orient, the more stylised art, Egypt's animal-headed gods, kings and god-kings: a frame of reference itself rooted in the nineteenth-century assumptions that opposed the enlightened West with the opulent East. The so-called Orient is still today associated with exoticism and the Other,# although these underlying assumptions are increasingly challenged by the use of post-structural and post-modernist methodologies. But we still speak broadly of "hellenisation," and in so doing, render the non-Greek experience all but invisible. If considerations of Greekness dominate our semantics, how are we to express with any clarity the experience of identity which does not fit neatly into a discrete binary?
Isis embodies one such experience. "The hellenisation of Isis" is spoken of often without a second thought. But what does this mean? For Isis never became truly Greek, essentially Hellenic: part of her appeal remained always in her Egyptian and ancient origins, in her unGreekness. We see this reflected in the Egyptian apparel of Walters' "Women in the Dress of Isis", in the uraeus which accompanies her from Egypt and into her Roman iconography; in the continuing importance of water, especially Nile water, in her cult. A tension exists between her foreign origins and the normalising effects of her incorporation into public cult in Delos and in Athens. Isis is Egyptian, not Greek: and yet that distinction too is misleading at a time when the inhabitants of Egypt belonged to a society whose elites, even in the royal quarter of Alexandria, made use of a hybrid palette of iconography, style and symbol.
It is of hybridity that I wish to speak. As a framework through which to interrogate the evidence, there is much to be said for one which does not emphasise either side of an equation, and indeed, provides room for a multilateral, multifaceted mixing of cultural material. Hybridity, in post-colonial theory, refers to "the creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonization."# Because of its association with colonisation and the coloniser/colonised relationship, we must apply this word with caution: hybridity is a disputed term in the post-colonial conversation because of its frequent use to mean merely cross-cultural exchange. As Ashcroft et al. write, "This use of the term has been widely criticized, since it usually implies negating and neglecting the imbalance of the power relations it references."#
We cannot ignore the status attached to Greekness by both the Greek and the non-Greek inhabitants of the Hellenistic kingdoms during our period. Even after the sack of Corinth and the definitive establishment of Roman hegemony in Greece, Greekness remained valued, and even Greek-born Roman citizens such as Plutarch, in the second century, remained proud of their Greek heritage. As did some Roman emperors: Hadrian, after all, was enough of a Hellenophile to hold Greek priesthoods and undergo initiation to the Eleusinian mysteries.
It is not possible to pretend that the Greek adoption of the cult of Isis took place separately from the wider cultural milieu. But in this wider cultural koine, Isis was hardly the only non-Greek cult to be adopted by Greeks: at Delos, aside from the other Egyptian gods, the large sanctuary to the Syrian gods# provides ample evidence that some Greeks were engaged in new cultural and religious constructs and identities, in what Homi K. Bhabha calls the "Third Space of enunciation."# As were some Egyptians, as we can see from Apollonios (I), the - despite his Greek name, presumably Egyptian - priest of Memphis who brought the cult of Sarapis with him to Delos.#
So we must bear in mind the mutuality of cultural interaction expressed in syncretistic developments, and the fact that all parties in any exchange possess agency, a detail frequently obscured by the use of sweeping terms such as "hellenisation."
4.2. Trends in Hellenistic Religion
When we say "religion", we are using a modern term with its own processual problems: the Greeks had no word for religion, in the general sense, as we understand it today. The closest Greek term is ta hiera, things which are sacred, and so when we speak of "religion" with reference to the world of antiquity, we are transposing a modern category onto a past context of thought and action. Nevertheless, as long as we bear its potential semantic problems in mind, it is a practical - and also practically unavoidable - framework to use.
Pakkanen, in her study on early hellenistic religion, identifies four trends which together are characteristic of religious attitudes in this period: syncretism;# monotheistic tendencies;# individualism;# and cosmopolitanism.# All four can be seen, to one degree or another, in the cult of Isis.
Whether these trends arose in response to the wider horizons and greater political flux in the Mediterranean world during the period between the death of Alexander and the age of Augustus, or whether they were already latent potentialities in Greek religion is not something this thesis can adequately address. The greater tendency towards universalising statements in Hellenistic ruler cult and the growth of an attitude of personal, individual interest on the behalf of deities demonstrated in dedications - not in the cults of Isis and Sarapis alone - which mention dream visitations and commands, argue, however, for an increasing change in Greek responses towards sacred things. The personal experience of the divine - the epiphantic initiation - sought in the mystery religions and attested so eloquently in the cult of Isis by Apuleius in chapter eleven of the Metamorphoses is a natural outgrowth of this universalising and personalising desire.
It is only natural, therefore, that Isis, already positioned as a deity with multiple aspects and wide powers in Egyptian mythology, should be open to adaptation to a wide range of circumstances and worshippers in Hellenistic Greece. From Delos to Athens to Euboeia to Asia Minor, Macedonia, and Thrace; from Isis Aphrodite to Isis Tyche to Isis Dikaiosyne to Isis Euploia to Isis the Great Mother and Isis Queen of the Gods. Among her worshippers, Isis is indeed "first-born of the ages, highest of the gods, queen of the shades, first of those who dwell in heaven, representing in one shape all gods and goddesses."# Her position in Hellenistic Greece remains difficult to clearly elucidate, and it is to be hoped that further research may throw greater light upon her cult and its sanctuaries, but it is plain that the processes at work in the expansion and growing popularity of her cult are more complicated than the purely Greek appropriation of a "hellenised" Egyptian deity. Her difference is part of her appeal: an appeal which reaches its zenith in the mystery cult of the Roman-era.
Now all I have to do is put in my maps and plans, and write my bibliographical essay. Or just a bibliography. We'll see how ambitious I feel.
Heresy is the life of a mythology, and orthodoxy is the death.
Joseph Campbell, On Mythology and the Individual, [Lecture 1A, 20:42], 1997.
4.1. Hellenisation, hybridity, and the colonisation of language.
Language is a versatile instrument, but often painfully imprecise. Words become charged with the history of their use, so that it is difficult to divorce the concept from the context. We make assumptions without being aware of them, and use blanket terms which fail to elucidate the messy complexities of living, growing organisms: people, societies, religions, culture.
This is the case with "hellenisation". To hellenise, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, means to make or become Greek, to make of Greek character, to study or to imitate Greek culture. Hellenisation, then, is the adoption of Greek manners and culture, or the act of causing a culture to become Greek.
To become Greek. Is it, then, so easy to trade one culture for another, one mode of thought and life for another, as one might shed one set of clothes and don another? We talk of the "hellenisation" of indigenous elites in the new post-Alexandrian kingdoms, and by speaking in terms with an exclusive Greek frame of reference, fail to look more closely at the chances for Greeks to cast off their himatia and run off with the barbarians: to, in short, take advantage of the opportunity to "go native".
Or to bring the native back to Greece. Up until the latter part of the last century, scholars contrasted "orientalising" and "hellenising" tendencies in the Hellenistic world without critically examining their own frames of reference. Civilised, rational, classical Greek culture, with its concern for naturalism in art, the clean symmetry of its temples, its philosophers and democracies, set against the wealth and luxury of the decadent Orient, the more stylised art, Egypt's animal-headed gods, kings and god-kings: a frame of reference itself rooted in the nineteenth-century assumptions that opposed the enlightened West with the opulent East. The so-called Orient is still today associated with exoticism and the Other,# although these underlying assumptions are increasingly challenged by the use of post-structural and post-modernist methodologies. But we still speak broadly of "hellenisation," and in so doing, render the non-Greek experience all but invisible. If considerations of Greekness dominate our semantics, how are we to express with any clarity the experience of identity which does not fit neatly into a discrete binary?
Isis embodies one such experience. "The hellenisation of Isis" is spoken of often without a second thought. But what does this mean? For Isis never became truly Greek, essentially Hellenic: part of her appeal remained always in her Egyptian and ancient origins, in her unGreekness. We see this reflected in the Egyptian apparel of Walters' "Women in the Dress of Isis", in the uraeus which accompanies her from Egypt and into her Roman iconography; in the continuing importance of water, especially Nile water, in her cult. A tension exists between her foreign origins and the normalising effects of her incorporation into public cult in Delos and in Athens. Isis is Egyptian, not Greek: and yet that distinction too is misleading at a time when the inhabitants of Egypt belonged to a society whose elites, even in the royal quarter of Alexandria, made use of a hybrid palette of iconography, style and symbol.
It is of hybridity that I wish to speak. As a framework through which to interrogate the evidence, there is much to be said for one which does not emphasise either side of an equation, and indeed, provides room for a multilateral, multifaceted mixing of cultural material. Hybridity, in post-colonial theory, refers to "the creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonization."# Because of its association with colonisation and the coloniser/colonised relationship, we must apply this word with caution: hybridity is a disputed term in the post-colonial conversation because of its frequent use to mean merely cross-cultural exchange. As Ashcroft et al. write, "This use of the term has been widely criticized, since it usually implies negating and neglecting the imbalance of the power relations it references."#
We cannot ignore the status attached to Greekness by both the Greek and the non-Greek inhabitants of the Hellenistic kingdoms during our period. Even after the sack of Corinth and the definitive establishment of Roman hegemony in Greece, Greekness remained valued, and even Greek-born Roman citizens such as Plutarch, in the second century, remained proud of their Greek heritage. As did some Roman emperors: Hadrian, after all, was enough of a Hellenophile to hold Greek priesthoods and undergo initiation to the Eleusinian mysteries.
It is not possible to pretend that the Greek adoption of the cult of Isis took place separately from the wider cultural milieu. But in this wider cultural koine, Isis was hardly the only non-Greek cult to be adopted by Greeks: at Delos, aside from the other Egyptian gods, the large sanctuary to the Syrian gods# provides ample evidence that some Greeks were engaged in new cultural and religious constructs and identities, in what Homi K. Bhabha calls the "Third Space of enunciation."# As were some Egyptians, as we can see from Apollonios (I), the - despite his Greek name, presumably Egyptian - priest of Memphis who brought the cult of Sarapis with him to Delos.#
So we must bear in mind the mutuality of cultural interaction expressed in syncretistic developments, and the fact that all parties in any exchange possess agency, a detail frequently obscured by the use of sweeping terms such as "hellenisation."
4.2. Trends in Hellenistic Religion
When we say "religion", we are using a modern term with its own processual problems: the Greeks had no word for religion, in the general sense, as we understand it today. The closest Greek term is ta hiera, things which are sacred, and so when we speak of "religion" with reference to the world of antiquity, we are transposing a modern category onto a past context of thought and action. Nevertheless, as long as we bear its potential semantic problems in mind, it is a practical - and also practically unavoidable - framework to use.
Pakkanen, in her study on early hellenistic religion, identifies four trends which together are characteristic of religious attitudes in this period: syncretism;# monotheistic tendencies;# individualism;# and cosmopolitanism.# All four can be seen, to one degree or another, in the cult of Isis.
Whether these trends arose in response to the wider horizons and greater political flux in the Mediterranean world during the period between the death of Alexander and the age of Augustus, or whether they were already latent potentialities in Greek religion is not something this thesis can adequately address. The greater tendency towards universalising statements in Hellenistic ruler cult and the growth of an attitude of personal, individual interest on the behalf of deities demonstrated in dedications - not in the cults of Isis and Sarapis alone - which mention dream visitations and commands, argue, however, for an increasing change in Greek responses towards sacred things. The personal experience of the divine - the epiphantic initiation - sought in the mystery religions and attested so eloquently in the cult of Isis by Apuleius in chapter eleven of the Metamorphoses is a natural outgrowth of this universalising and personalising desire.
It is only natural, therefore, that Isis, already positioned as a deity with multiple aspects and wide powers in Egyptian mythology, should be open to adaptation to a wide range of circumstances and worshippers in Hellenistic Greece. From Delos to Athens to Euboeia to Asia Minor, Macedonia, and Thrace; from Isis Aphrodite to Isis Tyche to Isis Dikaiosyne to Isis Euploia to Isis the Great Mother and Isis Queen of the Gods. Among her worshippers, Isis is indeed "first-born of the ages, highest of the gods, queen of the shades, first of those who dwell in heaven, representing in one shape all gods and goddesses."# Her position in Hellenistic Greece remains difficult to clearly elucidate, and it is to be hoped that further research may throw greater light upon her cult and its sanctuaries, but it is plain that the processes at work in the expansion and growing popularity of her cult are more complicated than the purely Greek appropriation of a "hellenised" Egyptian deity. Her difference is part of her appeal: an appeal which reaches its zenith in the mystery cult of the Roman-era.
Now all I have to do is put in my maps and plans, and write my bibliographical essay. Or just a bibliography. We'll see how ambitious I feel.
