Revisiting the Death/s of Religions

What is it about?

Writing the history of the end of Greek and Roman cults is perennially complicated by the fact that it is done from the perspective of the ‘winners’ – early Christian historians like Eusebius, or contemporary historians of religion who repeat the emic viewpoints of early Christian writers’ triumphalist successionist histories. Along with that is the problem of defining religion: can one actually speak of Graeco-Roman religion, when before the emergence in the Mediterranean world of large-scale translocal religious formations, all cults only manifested in local cultic organisations? Even where the same deities were offered cult as in other locales, local iconographies, myths, ritual practices anchored such cults in their local community contexts. To address problems like these, one needs to change perspective and consider both the making of religion and the broader phenomenon of religious changes from the viewpoint of how religions are ‘manufactured.’ When viewed from the perspective of religion ‘building blocks,’ it is actually possible to see how religions and cults mutate, become transformed, get absorbed into larger formations, and generally, how cults and religions continue to have afterlives. In the context of the topic of Christianisation of the Roman Empire, one can actually say that Christianity is the way in which Greek and Roman religions continued to exist.

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