Resources > Divinity
On Wednesday 24th March 2021, Professor Robin Osborne (University of Cambridge) and Professor Graham Harvey (Open University) joined Dr Emma-Jayne Graham (Open University) to discuss the nature of ancient divinity.
Follow this link or click on the image above to watch a recording of the three presentations.
About the Reassembling Ancient Religion seminar series…
The seminar series has been designed to explore the key themes and approaches to ancient religion that are adopted in a new book by Dr Emma-Jayne Graham, entitled Reassembling Religion in Roman Italy. The series comprises five online seminars, each of which is connected with one of the book’s broadly themed chapters - (1) Place, (2) Objects, (3) Bodies, (4) Divinity, and (5) Magic. During the seminars we will explore how the new materialist and relational approach to ancient lived religion that is advocated by the study might relate to lived religion as it was experienced in other chronological, geographical and cultural contexts across the ancient world.
Abstract of ‘Divinity’ chapter from ‘Reassembling Religion in Roman Italy’
“This chapter asks difficult questions about the extent to which gods might possess thingly qualities and whether the affordances of divinity were necessarily limited to those of human-made anthropomorphic cult statues. It ponders not only whether gods are things, but if so, whether there are ways to flatten their relationship with other things without resorting to anthropocentrism, or in other words the shaping the thingliness of gods in humanity’s image. The chapter addresses these issues by asking how far it is possible to escape from traditional forms of understanding concerning the more-than-human divine components of an assemblage that frame it in purely human terms. By way of example it explores this from two angles, examining how different ways of being affected by the qualities of divine thingliness could produce disparate forms of religious knowledge. First, it considers what happens when intangible concepts of divinity are given material character in the form of images and statues. Then it examines the opposite standpoint: rather than giving the divine material form, how might divine affordances already be tangible within the physical world? This means examining ways in which divine thingliness might manifest through human-made artefacts that were not designed for the purposes of representing the divine, as well as natural elements such as water.”
