The materials, practices, and sites of religion we have seen thus far inevitably refer back to the health and good fortune of the domestic world whence come the devotees and pilgrims, and so it would be misleading to conjure a domestic religion entirely separate from religion around temples. Religion consists of the interaction among a domestic or private sphere of ritual activity; a local culture of traditions that transcends the home; and what the anthropologist Robert Redfield called the ‘‘great tradition’’: that is, the literate (yet historically mutable) formulation of system and authority, in both ritual and mythology, that centralizing institutions pursued. Yet we can still talk about the domestic sphere of religion as involving some basic conceptual and ritual parameters. Even allowing for a range of domestic structures and living arrangements, we can (for example) perceive an inevitable refraction between the sense of family as a procreative unit that passes on traditions and the physical structure - the house - that contains that family: antechambers and bedrooms, altars and thresholds. The religion of the home will thus first involve the recognition of these boundaries as forms of protection, which are extended and articulated through threshold rituals and the invocation of protective deities (Frankfurter 1998: 111-42; J. Smith 2003).
If we have little evidence from the Graeco-Roman Period for threshold rituals, the abundant terracotta images of Bes, such as the one with which this essay opened, show a common and concerted effort on ordinary Egyptians’ parts to protect the home from the many hostile spirits that lurked in the landscape. (In fact, we know something about the range of hostile spirits from a remarkable series of amuletic ‘‘decrees’’ by temple gods that some priesthoods devised in the New Kingdom to provide protection as well as to consolidate the deities’ power. Each decree lists a great range of ghosts, gods, and demonic and foreign spirits from which the bearer should consider himself protected, and thus they offer a convenient picture of the supernatural dangers Egyptians imagined: Edwards 1960). Images of the armored Horus, such as the famous window lattice in the Louvre (Frankfurter 1998: 3-4), or of the conglomerate sphinx-god Tutu also served this apotropaic function in domestic environments, much as warrior saints would in the Christian period.
The religion of the home also affirms generational continuity, both through procreation and through ancestors, whose presence and contact are cultivated in diverse ways. The importance of procreation in Graeco-Roman Egypt is abundantly illustrated in the many images of Isis that emphasize her sexuality - drawing her dress up to expose her vulva, for example - and of so-called Baubo figurines, females seated with legs apart, one hand pointing to the vulva. Harpokrates and Bes, too, were modelled to radiate fertility in its phallic mode, as was the ithyphallic god Min, who even appears in Hellenistic garb and pose (but still holding his enlarged phallus) in a panel painting from early Roman Tebtunis (Rondot 1998). Finally, nude images of priestesses and cult servants must have signified the procreative power in festival processions themselves (Dunand 1979: 60-81).
These images, as we have seen, represented both an appropriation of great gods for the domestic realm and interpretations - through the graphic media of Hellenism - of those gods in ways quite distinct from their temple iconographies. Yet, placed as they were in niches or on altars or by windows, perhaps rearranged according to the local festival calendar, - we have no ancient witnesses to the uses of these images - they contained the temple cult, its gods and processions, in miniature. Here Isis would dwell as surely as in her main shrine, but here specifically as bringer of fertility. Indeed, during festival times the home served as an extension of the local temple. Many of the terracotta lamps found in Graeco-Roman Egypt seem to have been bought and lit in connection with festivals. Even in the late fourth or fifth century ad the formidable Christian abbot Shenoute of Atripe complained about people lighting lamps in celebration of the Shai - the god of civic fortune - of the village and the home (see Frankfurter 1998: 63-4). The consuming of festival foods, described in some detail by the Greek writer Plutarch, reflected not only popular participation at temples and along processions; their very preparation integrated that principal activity of the domestic sphere, food production, with the sacred calendar and the processing gods (De Iside et Osiride 30, 50, 68). Terracotta images of the baby Harpokrates enjoying some sweet food from a bowl would thus refer back to and sanctify the sweets the family might consume at the Harpokrateia festival (see Torok 1995: 119; cf. Dunand 1979: 74-6). In the case of Bes, who had little official presence in temples, the home may have represented the principal cult-site, even during festivals like the Besia. Not only did many Bes images actually function as lamps, but a remarkable object of the Graeco-Roman Period, the Bes jug, seems to have served as a container for some festival drink in the home. A terracotta image in the Budapest museum portrays Bes flanked by a jug and two bread-loaves, signifying domestic offerings (Castiglione 1957; Torok 1995, no. 11; Frankfurter 1998: 126-8, pl. 13). Whether with cakes stamped with a god’s image, sweet drinks, or fruits, the culinary world of the home became a microcosm of festival activity (Frankfurter 1998: 53-4).
Ancestors and the dead are equally the purview of domestic religion: both their memory and their supernatural abilities to intervene for good or ill in the lives of family-members. One obvious way of assuring harmony across the generations was proper mortuary preparation, mummification and entombment by experts. In this way the deceased would become functionally assimilated to Osiris or Hathor, deities of considerable procreative powers. In the early Roman Period, however, a new preference developed in this regard in some parts of Egypt: to have the deceased represented as in life, hence the many mummy ‘‘portraits’’ visible today in museum collections. Whatever the larger significance of this new style, which did not affect every part of Egypt nor among all classes, we can understand it as one of the many options that developed for maintaining fruitful contact with the dead. Indeed, several Greek writers of the Roman Period claimed that Egyptians placed their dead in chambers adjoining their houses, allowing family members to gaze on them regularly (Diodoros 1.19.6; Athanasios, v. Ant. 90; see Borg 1997, Montserrat 1997). Although there is little archaeological evidence to confirm these claims, a wooden cabinet from the Roman Period, now in the Berlin Egyptian Museum, was designed for the purpose of storing a single mummy in a domestic context (inv. 17039, 32).
How important such contact should be for family life emerges in a late (first-century AD) example of the letters Egyptians had long used to communicate with their dead, asking them to intervene in this-worldly crises. In this late version, communicated to the local Osiris, a young woman asks for ancestral aid in getting her husband to impregnate her, ‘‘I having no power, I having no protector-son’’ (Satzinger 1975). Thus we see, behind the diverse forms of mortuary preparation and representation that developed in the Graeco-Roman Period and drew both Greeks and Egyptians, families’ basic efforts to maintain productive contact with the dead, partly through ensuring their safe, happy, and productive afterlife and partly through these forms of ritual communication (Dunand and Zivie-Coche 2004: 319-31). Where the former efforts lay essentially in the hands of local professionals and burial guilds, ritual communication remained a principal function of the domestic world.
Overall, the home and its altar or its set-apart spaces served as the location to which family members would bring back images, sanctified water or sand, promising oracle tickets, or other materials from regional shrines and festivals, and the location from which family members would take messages and hopes that could be inscribed as proskynemata or signified through votive images bought at the shrine.
World History
