Between the home and the temple arose a new phenomenon in the Graeco-Roman Period, the religious confraternity - snt or synodos. In their Egyptian forms, confraternities developed around the support of local cults like Sobek of Tebtunis, Amun of Opet, and Isis of Khemmis to supply offerings, maintain buildings, and participate in processions, and they seem to have consisted mostly of local priests, but they also involved a collective dedication to the local deity, gathering to drink wine, make libations, and affirm social bonds specified in rules. Such rules have been discovered among Egyptian papyri, written in both Greek and Demotic (De Cenival 1972; Muszynski 1977). One cult association in Koptos was responsible for erecting, in the third century ad, a stela of the protective god Tutu, with obvious benefits for all visitors to the temple (Sauneron 1960).
However, over the course of the Graeco-Roman Period, we find more Hellenized forms of the religious confraternity: a synodos dedicated to Zeus Hypsistos, for example, from somewhere in the Fayum, that reflects many of the same social features as the Egyptian confraternities, yet to a god who might be imported or might be a Greek form of an Egyptian god like Amun (Roberts/Skeat/Nock 1972). Some of these more Hellenistic confraternities certainly functioned to support particular temple cults, even if reflecting culturally an interest in more cosmic, salvific dimensions of the temple’s god (see Bowersock 1990: 22-8). A number of proskynemata at the temple of Imouthes at Deir el-Bahri mention just such a confraternity regularly dining ‘‘in the second precinct’’ - that is, showing a commitment to the place itself (hajtar 2006: 67-9). Others, reflecting Greek and Roman models of cult association - the thiasos or kline, which focused more exclusively on such ritualized meals - developed separately from temples, yet still in celebration of a god and a sense of religious community.
It is from this range of religious confraternities, both temple-based and delocalized, that we find many of the popular religious innovations of the late Hellenistic and early Roman Period in Egyptian religion. The development of a Hermetic corpus, writings of philosophy and cosmology attributed to the god Thoth in his Greek form, occurred among priests and interested, mystically inclined intellectuals devoted to Thoth, yet ultimately independent of Thoth temples (see Fowden 1986; Jasnow and Zauzich 2005). The promulgation throughout Mediterranean world of cults to Isis certainly came about through the patronage of such confraternities, which might eventually have had only token Egyptian memberships in some places (see, e. g., Apuleius’s Metamorphoses). Indeed, confraternities offered lay-folk in and beyond Egypt opportunities to gain and express status as patrons and participants in religious spectacle itself as we might gather, for example, from an elaborate gold crown with religious motifs found at the Serapis temple at Kysis (Kharga oasis). Inappropriate head-gear for an Egyptian priest, it must have been designed for some prominent citizen allowed to parade both his patronage and his devotion in religious procession (Redde 1992).
These kinds of religious societies represented a distinctly new formation of piety itself in the ancient world. In the words of the historian of religions Jonathan Z. Smith they represented a ‘‘religion of Anywhere’’ (J. Smith 2003). Increasingly loosed from their moorings in temple activities, these confraternities and cult associations developed ritual forms that substituted for priestly rites and revolved around symbolic meals, prayers, and even group hierarchy, and they cultivated images of the gods that were not localized or bound to traditional images but cosmic: Isis as ruler of the heavens, Horus as the Sun, gods capable of saving devotees from the hostile forces of fate. The community of devotees itself became the site of religious communication, and in its declarations of kinship and gatherings for sacred meals the community drew much valuable religious symbolism from the world of domestic religion.
These ‘‘religions of Anywhere’’ were a pan-Mediterranean phenomenon, not restricted to Egypt, and they multiplied through the Roman Period in such forms as Mithraism, Dionysos-devotion, and even rabbinic Judaism and Christianity.
In Egypt, however, we see their profusion against the backdrop of thriving temples. Christianity, for example, developed here first among small study-groups that traced their identity to Jewish scriptures and values but had now embarked on the interpretation of diverse gospels and apocalypses - pursued collectively or through the inspired insights of some prophet. As in the Hermetic conventicles, Christian groups’ focus on texts allowed them both a mobility and a receptivity to new forms of itinerant leadership. As the Egyptian confraternities had developed modes of conduct for insiders, so Christians were defining rigid new systems for group morality and ritual. Some, as the Christian writer Eusebius describes in third-century ad Arsinoe, exerted themselves in interpretation and purification with an eye towards some imminent millennium, which itself would have recalled Egyptian prophecies like the Potter’s Oracle {Church History 7.24), while other groups like the so-called ‘‘Gnostics’’ cultivated a heavenly identity around their texts and insights {Frankfurter 1996: 142-70; Pearson 2007). Influencing these kinds of study groups in the third century came Manichaeans, with more texts, rites, and terminology for members. The excavations of Manichaean communities in places like Medinet Madi {Fayum) and the Dakhla Oasis show a highly literary religion based in domestic spaces, yet communicating internationally - developing a sense of revelation and status that would transcend place and cultivate holiness through the individual body {Lieu 1994: 61-105). In these ways we can see the continuing importance and appeal of a religious form that evolved beyond temple and home, from earliest Hellenistic times through late antiquity, yet which combined in its structure the fictive family relations of the home with the sense of divine immanence and cosmos-sustaining ritual of the temple.
Yet the cultivation of such placeless groups of the wise and elect remained always the privilege of some in society - a rarefied piety disengaged from the landscape. As Egyptian Christianity itself became rapidly a religion of landscape, holy men, and saints’ shrines over the fourth century, so the last phases of Egyptian religion too continued to revolve around shrines and holy places. In the early fourth century ad we find a confraternity from Hermonthis, all iron-workers, who have come to the now-decrepit temple of Imouthes-Asklepios at Deir el-Bahri to dine together, to slaughter a donkey {an archaic apotropaic rite), and to make ritual devotions to ‘‘the great god’’ {hajtar 2006: 94-104). They did these things and left proskynemata with all their names. In Egyptian religion, place still mattered.
FURTHER READING
Readers interested in the historical development and character of Egyptian religion over this period should consult Dunand and Zivie-Coche 2004, with Frankfurter 1998 especially on the Roman Period. On the evolution of the priesthood and its roles, especially in the development of magical texts, see Fowden 1986, Ritner 1995, Frankfurter 2000, and Dieleman 2005. On Egyptian temples as sites of pilgrimage, healing, and incubation see the essays by Dunand 1991, 1997, 2006; Rutherford 1998, 2005; Frankfurter 2005. The topic of domestic religion, especially through the lens of terracotta figurines, is covered extensively in Dunand 1979 and Frankfurter 1998; and its extension to mummification and mortuary customs is discussed in detail in Borg 1997, Montserrat 1997, and Dunand and Zivie-Coche 2004. On the broad religious shifts in the ancient Mediterranean world that frame Egyptian religion and the rise of Christianity one should read Brown 1982, Bowersock 1990, and the essays by J. Z. Smith 1978, 1995, 2003.
DEDICATION
To the memory of Dominic Montserrat: inspiring scholar, generous friend, abysmal driver.
World History
