Rites and practices

Along with new rites for binding, cursing, healing, and divining, foreign ritual experts brought new forms of religious experience and community that centered not so much on traditional civic performance as on a psychological-emotional transformation (Beard, North, and Price 1998: 278-91; Smith 2003: 30-6). As described in both fiction and epigraphy, the experiences gained (and repeated) through participating in these ‘‘mysteries’’ - a kind of intensive dramatization of some myth (Isis/Osiris, Attis/Magna Mater, Mithras/Sol) - led to a sense of power, control, and unity with an incomprehensible cosmos (Nock 1934; Beck 2000). Participation in the societies that celebrated the mysteries and maintained their hybrid traditions also offered security in a hitherto ambiguous afterlife and, in this world, a new experience of religious community - one no longer based on family, residence, and civic status. These new social-ritual worlds were popular and successful, and it is in the context of their appeal that scholars have long explained the rapid expansion of the Christian movement and even the abundance of proselytes to Judaism. Both religious subcultures not only promoted rituals for safety in the cosmos but also defined social boundaries as crucial to participation and benefits.

But the legitimation of foreign religiosity in these social and personal domains was the corollary of - and might quickly revert to - an intense anxiety about foreign

Religious subversion in political and civic domains. A religious movement like Christianity, whose adherents (offrcialiy) refused allegiance to Roman religious traditions of sacrifice and devotion, was easily cast as subversive group of atheists whose very presence in the cities and countryside caused cosmic havoc (by the fifth century ‘‘pagans’’ and ‘‘heretics’’ were construed in the same manner: Rives 1995). ‘‘Magic,’’ an idea that by imperial times intrinsically denoted foreignness, was officially proscribed - and was even the subject of inquisitions - while virtually everyone sought its benefits and powers from the perennial ranks of ritual experts (Beard, North, and Price 1998: 218-25; Dickie 2001: 142-321). Divination, which offered the power to discern prospects for the most mundane crises and the most sensitive political situations, could appear uniquely dangerous to the stability of the empire, and frightened emperors and officials tried at various times to eliminate even old, indigenous oracles. Expulsion of the foreign - whether wizards, modes of divination, cults, or religious societies - reflected a general anxiety about boundaries, but this anxiety only increased over the third and subsequent centuries as the empire’s political structures and centers splintered. In their dramatic, often violent character, purges of foreign influence offered participants the possibility of renewed tradition and renewed commitment to the old centers (Brown 1970; Beard, North, and Price 1998: 228-44).