Post by Heron on Apr 27, 2012 20:00:08 GMT -1
In her book Religion in Late Roman Britain (Routledge, 1998), Dorothy Watts says that the cults of Iron Age Britain were "animistic and based on trees, streams, marshes, birds". She suggests that only after the Roman invasion were any of their gods humanised to fit apparent equivalents in the Roman pantheon. She suggests that there was a renewal of paganism for a short time after the Romans left and xtianty was abandoned by many outside of the Romanised towns. She also suggests that this renewal of paganism was only partly a return to the earlier Roman paganism and cites evidence that the emphasis was to gods of places not represented in human form.
She provides a lot of detailed evidence (e.g on burial practices) and her approach is thoroughly academic, though I'm not sure that the broader generalisations she makes are particularly supported by the evidence she gives. Nevertheless, I think it worth considering this balance between humanised deities and deities which have no particular human form (or perhaps even any identity apart from a generic one).
There has been much debate in the past on this forum about the distinction between gods and spirits of place. I'm not sure that the early Romans, before they absorbed the Greek pantheon, made the distinction in a particularly hard and fast way. But what about all the named gods? Watts suggests, for example, that the shrine of Coventina at Carrawburgh might originally simply have been a sacred spring.
Thoughts….?
She provides a lot of detailed evidence (e.g on burial practices) and her approach is thoroughly academic, though I'm not sure that the broader generalisations she makes are particularly supported by the evidence she gives. Nevertheless, I think it worth considering this balance between humanised deities and deities which have no particular human form (or perhaps even any identity apart from a generic one).
There has been much debate in the past on this forum about the distinction between gods and spirits of place. I'm not sure that the early Romans, before they absorbed the Greek pantheon, made the distinction in a particularly hard and fast way. But what about all the named gods? Watts suggests, for example, that the shrine of Coventina at Carrawburgh might originally simply have been a sacred spring.
Thoughts….?