Transcript

Jessica Hughes - Thank you for joining us for this discussion hosted by the Open University Centre for the Study of Ancient Material Religion. I'm Jessica Hughes from the Department of Classical Studies, and I'm joined today by Emma-Jayne Graham, Barbara Roberts, and Patricia Kret, who is visiting us today from Leiden University. We're going to be discussing amulets in ancient Rome and Beyond. Patricia, welcome to The Open University. You've just given us a talk related to your PhD research, which focuses on the use of amulets in the late antique Christian world. Perhaps we should start with an overview of what we mean by amulet. What definition are you using in your thesis?

Patricia Kret - Yes, thank you. Amulets are objects. They are material things that people use to deal with problems in relation to health, safety, and abstract benefits, such as victory in the races or in court or general good luck. These things are put on a location where they need to work. So for example, a body amulet to protect your body, and a house amulet at the front door to protect a house. But in general, there are a lot of objects that fall under this definition. In my research, I mainly look at objects with text on them or the instructions for making amulets because I am a historian, I need some text.

Jessica Hughes - You're looking at a very wide period, so 100 BC to 600 CE, and how amulet use changed over that time. Should we start with the very earliest times? What kinds of amulets were being used in the Roman period before Christianity was widespread?

Patricia Kret - Yes, a variety of objects could be used. We have the textual amulets that were written down on metal tablets or papyrus or parchment and worn around the neck. We have gemstones with inscriptions that are considered magical and therefore amuletic. We have a lot of objects that we do not have in the archaeological record anymore. Most of the amulets will have been made of plant or animal-based materials that were worn around the neck or anywhere on the body where they needed to work. So you have parts of animals put in a pouch and tied onto the body. And what we already see before the arrival of Christianity is that we see changes in that more iconography is added to the objects, more text is added to the objects. So in the beginning, we have a lot of iconographical pendants, for example, with the face of Medusa, phallic symbols that could also have been used as amulets and probably were, but it's not written on it. Over time, you see this addition of magical characteristics, and that we can say these are amulets.

Jessica Hughes - What changed when Christianity began to be the main religious framework? Did amulets carry on being used, and was everyone happy about it if they did?

Patricia Kret - In a way, nothing changed. Amulets continue to be used, and of course, there were a lot of Christian elements added to the text and in images, but the objects remained the same, the same shapes, the same way of using them, and people believe that they worked in the same way. And this was not approved by the early Christian Church fathers. We have a lot of sermons from bishops condemning the use of amulets. They say that people shouldn't do it because it will kill their soul and they will not have an eternal life. But in between the lines, they also say that priests and monks are making these amulets. So even though the bishops didn't like it, a lot of lower Church members did like it, provided them, made them. We also have text where the use of amulets by priests is condemned, so they also used them. It just continued also on that level.

Jessica Hughes - Thanks, Patricia. That's fascinating. Now, Barbara, this material it was very familiar to you because you've recently completed your PhD on the topic of Roman amuletic objects, and you were focusing on late antique Italy and Sicily from the third to the seventh century. One of the interesting things about your thesis was how it expanded the range of the thing that we consider amuletic. You started looking at the familiar objects like inscribed gems and rings and necklaces, but you then moved on to argue that other kinds of artefacts could also be amuletic. Could you introduce listeners to some of the objects that were in your thesis?

Barbara Roberts - Yes. Although, like you said, I began looking at objects such as inscribed gems, rings, necklaces, tablets that were placed into capsules and then worn as pendants around the neck. It gradually became clear to me. It emerged that a lot of these objects, I was actually having to think of them in multiple roles and in multiple contexts, including, very And importantly, the graves that a lot of them were found in. Once I started thinking about that, it was a gateway to noticing how other grave goods or features of a burial, and indeed objects and structural features placed within or a part of non-funerary structures and enclosures, so buildings, fields, things like that, might also work as amulets and do amulety things, if you will. For example, you might also think of drawings scratched into the walls of the Roman catacombs near graves, such as there's one that depicts a horseback rider attacking somebody that maybe is a demon. It's a bit unclear. But that image is nowadays referred to as the Holy Rider and is often seen also on a number of Byzantine bronze medallions that were a little later and also contemporary. Or perhaps another example might be inscriptions on blocks of stones, probably boundary markers in a number of cases that were found in Southeastern Sicily asking Jesus and other Christian figures to protect vineyards and fields, or indeed, something like the mosaics depicting Gorgons that were found in the floors of a house in Ostia. That focus on objects doing things on functions led me to the phrase ‘amuletic objects’ to explain that I was looking at objects doing things like protecting, healing, or bringing good luck, but not necessarily to the exclusion of other functions.

Jessica Hughes - A key theme that was emphasised throughout your PhD research, I remember, was the idea of relations between amuletic objects and bodies and spaces. And agency and relationality were key terms that kept cropping up. Can you talk us through this approach and maybe even pick out an example where we can see how important it is to put these objects into context and think about how they interacted with bodies and places?

Barbara Roberts - Yeah, I think the focus on functions led me to this approach. If an object is doing something, then the necessary question is, who is it doing something with and how is that working? When is that happening? And so on and so on. I felt that the best model for understanding this was through identifying the functions I felt were essential to the definition of being an amulet, so healing, protecting, and bringing good luck, as arising from relationships between an object and a person or multiple. The benefit of this was that it brought the other things such an object might do into my attention. For instance, an amuletic item of jewellery, such as the pendant depicting... Such as the bronze pendant depicting a Holy Rider that I mentioned earlier, that's not just an item, but also an amuletic object, but also an item of dress and a social behaviour. You can see that both in how it might have been received positively, as the object might be expensive, shiny or an eye-catching colour if it's polished, or indeed made of glass, such as an example that was found in a tomb in Sofiana in Sicily.

Barbara Roberts - It might also be subject to criticism as a mode of dress and ritual behaviour, such as John Chrysostom, one of the early Church fathers that Patricia mentioned, does in a sermon, lambasting those who wear coins as amulets. Although he's writing a good way away from Sicily at the time. And on top of that, you have the haptic relationships formed between the wearer and the object, its weight, its temperature relative to the wearer's body temperature, any noise it might make when it makes contact with metal or other items, all of which affects a wearer’s relationship with it over time and at certain times, which then again changes if you find it deposited in a grave, such as the glass-paste one in Sofiana, with perhaps the memory of these older relationships informing how and why it was considered an important grave object and where inside the grave it ended up.

Jessica Hughes - I'm going to bring in E-J now, and I've got something specific to ask you, E-J, about votives. But first of all, is there anything that you'd like to say in response to what Barbara and I've said so far?

Emma-Jayne Graham - Mainly just how fascinating it is that this is a type of material religion that carries on for so long and changes lots, but also doesn't change. But I think for me, one of the things that I find most interesting about amulets is the way they give us an insight into the ordinary people of the ancient world, what was of concern to them and how they were trying to respond to an uncertain world that they lived in. That's what I really love about them. Their religion or magic or however you want to - maybe I said a rude word there? - but for ordinary people, I think it brings us closer to those people.

Jessica Hughes - Now, before we started recording this audio, we were looking at some terracotta models that you've got in the office cupboard, including one quite amazing model of a baby, a votive baby of the kind that was dedicated in central Italy. This has got a connection with amulets, hasn't it? Can you talk us through that object?

Emma-Jayne Graham - Absolutely. I should say they're replicas rather than originals! But yes, I don't really work on amulets, but I have worked on objects that feature amulets, and I've never really thought about the amuletic properties of those before. But these models of swaddled infants, which people who have listened to these recordings before, will have heard me mention many times, that were given to the gods in Central Italy between the fourth and first century BCE. Or models of babies wrapped in swaddling bands, and a lot of them are shown with some amulet either placed on their chest as if it was hanging around their neck or actually clearly on some string that was around their neck. You get the traditional bulla-shaped ones, the circular ones. Question is whether these are linked to citizenship or whether they are on the baby for purely amuletic purposes or whether they're about signalling the status of the baby. You also get crescent moon-shaped ones. One of the most well-known bronze or copper-alloy swaddled babies that was recovered from Sanca Casciano dei Bagni in the last couple of years has got an upside-down crescent moon amulet around its neck. But that one's also got a fibula, or what appears to be a fibula pinning together the swaddling bands I don't know whether is that just there as a practical nappy pin, or is it...

Emma-Jayne Graham - Maybe that's an amulet as well as a part of the adornment of the baby. But then further south in Campania, you get the models of babies are slightly different. They have their shoulders showing, and they were these pointed caps, where they often have a diagonally slung amulet string with lots of amulets on of different shapes, including the crescents. And I suppose what the question is, is whether this is a different localised production of how you make models of babies or whether it's a different localised system of how you protect your baby with different types of amulets. I don't know the answer to that, but I think they raised questions for me as well about whether those models... So there are models that don't have these amulets. So did they actually have actual amulets, perhaps, slung around them? We know that some of them have clearly had a bit of clay added on to the mould, so someone's personalised it. It's possible they were wrapped in swaddling bands, so why not put an actual amulet on? Or perhaps they were painted on. So there may be a lot more of this going on than we actually realise.

Emma-Jayne Graham - And in that context, they're usually interpreted as protecting an infant at a really dangerous time of its life. In the pre-modern world, those first few weeks of life are very dangerous. But I'm now also starting to question whether these amulets might have also protected other people from the slightly weird, uncertain status of those babies. They sit in between the womb and the human world. They're a little bit uncertain, especially for the first few days of their life. Maybe there's more going on here than we think, just thinking that it might be protecting the babies. So I think there's lots of interesting stuff to think about, on top of which you've got a vote of offering that's designed to protect the baby. You've got an extra layer of protection and well-being, good fortune, and things going on. There seems to be lots of layers, and I don't think we've perhaps fully got to grips with all of that yet.

Jessica Hughes - Let me remind you that you're listening to an audio from the Centre for the Study of Ancient Material Religion at the Open University, and we're talking today about amulets in the ancient Roman world. Dr. Robert Wallis is Senior Lecturer in Art History here at the Open University, and his research deals with human engagements with birds of prey and the art and archaeology of human engagements with birds of prey. Recently, he's been working on some objects which are typically interpreted as having amuletic or talismanic properties from the early mediaeval cemetery at Alfriston in East Sussex. One of these is a pierced eagle talon, which was found in an inhumation burial at the site, together with a stunning brooch made of gilded copper alley. I asked Robert to describe these objects for to share some of his insights into how they might be interpreted.

Robert Wallis - Okay, so the perforated eagle talon from Grave 43 is about three and a half centimetres long. It's been slightly shortened at the end where it would join the raptor's toe, so it would have been a little bit longer than it is now. It's perforated at that end, so probably would have been suspended in some way, perhaps on a necklace or a chattelain. It's pretty long, so eagle talons can be up to the length of a human finger. Therefore, if it was being worn on the person, this one was found near the chest, so probably on a necklace around the neck. It would have been quite cumbersome, bearing in mind that eagle talons are pointed and therefore sharp. At the cemetery at Alfriston, there was this perforated talon, which is large enough to probably be from an eagle. There was a second one in another grave, which was a piece of bone shaped like a talon. We got an interesting relationship there between an actual object and an object, which from a modern point of view, would be an imitation. Now, both of these graves are probably those of women. All of the grave goods they were found with are typically associated with women. They include examples of great square-headed and smaller square-headed brooches. These are typically gilt, copper-alloy objects, which are extremely high status, and some of the most luxurious objects, if you like, from the period. And both objects with talons, with these amuletic type talons, were found with these great square-headed brooches, as well as other rich grave goods, which the excavators and scholars since have described as being the two richest graves in the cemetery and some of the richest graves from early mediaeval England. So it's really interesting that we have these objects which have been interpreted as being to do with protection and healing and possibly the early mediaeval role of ‘cunning woman’ or healer in very high status graves with these fascinating, beautiful other objects.

I've been exploring indigenous thinking around objects, particularly in the Americas, and I've been looking at the work of Maria Zedeño, who talks about how objects can be index objects, which, by virtue of their qualities, when they're brought into proximity with other objects, they could potentially transform them in some way and make them into something else, into a new form of relationship. I've also been looking at the work of Paul Paukertat, who talks about how when these sorts of objects are brought together and with the power that they have, they make a relational field or bundle.

I think it might be useful to think about these sorts of inhumation settings with these objects as a bundling together of important things, which by virtue of their qualities, by virtue of what they are, what is depicted upon them, they have a living power, if you like. I find this thinking interesting. Of course, Amerindian ontologies don't map straightforwardly onto the early mediaeval period, but these ways of thinking about the world, these ways of knowing, are useful for destabilising our modern, Western, humanistic-informed ontological frameworks. If we think about these objects in terms of having qualities, with the raptor talon, I think it would be safe to say that the people who were drawing upon this object esteemed birds of prey for their aerial and raptorial qualities and would have been drawing upon those through wearing them and attempting to embody or at least take on a part of, if you like, the spirit or being of the eagle concerned.

Jessica Hughes - Patricia, what are your thoughts about what Robert described in that audio?

Patricia Kret - Yes, I really like the idea that people wish something for themselves like an eagle, and this is something that you see in amulets as well, especially in the natural amulets described, for example, by Pliny the Elder in his natural history. For example, there is one recipe that comes back many times where you need to cut off the feet of a living hare, and then you need to wear those as an amulet, but it's an amulet against arthritis. So the wish is to be swift as an hare again, which someone wasn't because of the complaints. And I think being like an eagle could indeed have been a meaning that was behind this object. I couldn't find any talon amulets in my research. I did find a description of Pliny to use eagle feet in general, but it was for pain, but not anything else.

Emma-Jayne Graham - It made me think of Adam Parker's research on pierced teeth in the Roman world being worn as amulets or as some response to pain, which is interesting based on what you said, Patricia, about the eagle’s feet being connected with pain by Pliny. He found that they're mainly pig or boar or dog or possibly wolf. But they also actually take a slightly similar shape in a way to these talons. They're pointy at the bottom, they're slightly curved, which I think is really interesting and just makes me think again of these crescent-shaped amulets that we're finding certainly on the swaddled babies that I mentioned before. But what's also interesting, I think, is this, again, this overlap of animal bodies and human bodies and bringing bits of animal bodies together with human bodies, but how in each case it's relative to the values of that culture. Robert talks about in the medieval world, perhaps valuing these raptors, whereas I don't know exactly what the value, well, probably all sorts of values for boars and pigs for the Romans and dogs and so on. But they're making those choices based on whatever properties within that animal they want to combine their own bodies with.

Jessica Hughes - Barbara, I remember parts of animal bodies definitely featured in your thesis.

Barbara Roberts - Yes, they did. One exciting one that jumped out at me, which is that the eagle talon does, to me, chime with one find from a burial ground in a Roman villa that's known as Poggio Graminiano, after the hill it's located on, found in Umbria, near the border with Lazio, which is an unpierced raven's talon. It couldn't have been pierced and hung on a string, but it was also found on the chest of a body in a burial. But that time it was, in fact, the remains of an infant who was buried inside an amphora alongside the bones of a bird. The context there is quite different. The burial area in question has today only been found have contained the bodies of children and premature infants that were buried over a relatively short period in the fifth century CE. Possibly the mortality came from a malaria outbreak at the time although it's not 100% clear. The object wasn't perforated, which means that it has to have been carried to the site, perhaps in someone's hands on their person. It's possible that the decision to bury it may have come very much in a moment during the course of the burial of this one infant.

Barbara Roberts - The idea of the eagle’s flying and hunting qualities being drawn on through the talons being worn is really fascinating to me. Up to now, I've been wondering whether this raven talon from the cemetery was deposited exclusively for curative reasons, perhaps to ease the symptoms that had killed the infant. But maybe the flying and hunting abilities as well made it an appropriate object to strengthen and protect the dead child.

Jessica Hughes - I did a longer interview with Robert, and I'll put some extracts from the rest of the interview on the web page, together with pictures of the objects that he's talking about so that listeners can get a good idea. I think we've seen there's some really interesting overlaps with the Roman material that we've been talking about up until now. The next thing I'd like to ask you all is to pick out, I say favourite amulet, but the amulet that to you is particularly significant or that connects particularly closely with the themes that are coming out of your research. Patricia, shall we start with you?

Patricia Kret - Yes, there is one amulet that I keep coming back to, also for today, and this is a migraine amulet that has been found in a grave together with other amulets, but this migraine amulet is the only one with, for us, recognisable text on it that we can read, and so we know it's for migraines. It is older than the grave it has been found in. The grave is from the third century, and the object from the first to the second century. And also because it's a migraine amulet, it might have been a hand-me-down from a family member. It was in the end buried with a deceased one, and it really shows all the personal stories behind these objects. Objects that they were used by real people, use them for their real problems, problems that we still have nowadays. A lot of people still suffer from migraines, and it shows how people use these objects to help them deal with this.

Jessica Hughes - Barbara, what's your favourite amuletic object?

Barbara Roberts - Today, it changes sometimes, is this terracotta tablet that was found in Southeastern Sicily. It's inscribed on both of the biggest flat sides, and the Greek inscription on one side reads in English, In the name of Lord Jesus Christ, holy angels who write your names on the workshop of this wine grower, help me in the harvest for the vineyard of God. And it continues by drawing symbols that look like stars and crosses with little rings on the points which appear on many amuletic inscriptions, including gems. It finishes right in the corner with the word God again. On the reverse, extraordinarily, you find the words God and Lord again, but also the names of two angels, Gauriel and Michael. This is this idea of hidden names, if the tablet was set into the wall with the longer inscription visible. But the inscription that's visible asserts that these secret names were written by the angels themselves. It constructs what to me is this compellingly supernatural story that surrounds the very place that the object was in, or for the very explicit aim of improving the harvest, but which has very different dimensions, whether or not you know that the secret names are there.

Barbara Roberts - This entanglement of the everyday and the divine, and the secret and the known really fascinates me.

Jessica Hughes - E-J, how about you?

Emma-Jayne Graham - I don't know if I've got a favourite individual amulet or amuletic object. I think my favourite is probably one of two types. There's the crabs that Pliny the Elder tells people to hang up in their gardens to keep caterpillars away. I think there's another source that mentions that as well, where they say they should actually literally crucify them, nail them to crosses. I think partly because it seems so strange, but because I can also really imagine how strange it would be to be in a garden and come across a crucified crab and how that actually is exactly what apotropaism is about. It's about being shocked out of … seeing something weird, seeing something strange, and that protecting you. That, for me, is just one of the one of the weirdest things, I think. Plus, I've talked a lot about crescent-shaped amulets already, and that makes me then start to think of their claws and so on, but let's not go there. So it is that, or it's the Thunderstones. So these Palaeolithic, Neolithic hand axes and stone tools that ancient people used to protect against lightning. So they probably dug them up when they were in their fields, they were digging their ditches or building their houses, brought them home, put them around their house to protect against lightning. And I just love the idea as an archaeologist, I love the idea of people in the past finding things, wondering what they are, talking about them together, deciding how they're going to interpret them, and then doing something with them. They might come up with different things that I might as an archaeologist, but I just I just love that synergy between the past and the present, that interest in the natural world and trying to make sense of it in a way that makes sense for you.

Jessica Hughes - Anybody want to say anything else before we finish?

Emma-Jayne Graham - Just that the crabs are really weird. But that's Pliny for you, isn't it?

Jessica Hughes - Okay. That brings our discussion to a close. I'd like to thank Patricia Kret for joining us at the Open University to tell us about her work on amulets in the ancient Roman World and beyond. And thank you too to Barbara Roberts and Emma Jane Graham, and to Robert Wallis for sharing some of his forthcoming work on the pierced eagle talon from Alfriston. You can find images of that talon on our website resource page, together with photographs of some of the other ‘amuletic objects’ that we've been discussing today, and links to further reading on the topic. Thank you for listening.