Paganism in Roman Britain

- Ladies and gentlemen, it's getting dark, which means it must be time for me to come out, and I'm going to open this talk on paganism in Roman Britain by considering a debate between very fine scholars of the subject, which I'm going to term artificial and unnecessary, and it's on how Romanized the religion of Roman Britain was. And one side of the debate, suggested by scholars such as Miranda Aldhouse-Green and Graham Webster, was that native British religion, like those three presumed mother goddesses on the left, was carried on almost totally unchanged, just dressed up in Roman costume. And the other side of the debate, propounded by experts like Martin Henig and Guy de la Bedoyere, is that the religion of the native British got thoroughly Romanized. So why am I being so dismissive at the start of a debate between scholars whom I admire, respect, and avidly read? Well in one sense, it's insoluble, and in the other sense, both sides are clearly right. Our first problem is we don't actually know what the religion of the native British was like before the Romans arrived. It's prehistoric, and that means that there's no writing, so we have no inscriptions with names of anything, or anything to indicate what and why people were doing things, and the native British didn't believe in icons, at least as much as we can tell, and that means we don't have pictures of their deities until the Romans arrived. And the other part of the argument is that Romans always honored the local deities of lands which they conquered. They believed that if they didn't respect the goddesses and gods of the area which they'd just taken over, then their tenure of it was unlikely to be very long or very happy, and so they invested large amounts of money and effort on praising, honoring, and commemorating the deities of each area which was annexed to their empire. And they took this really seriously, so the first thing that a Roman occupying a bit of conquered land would want to know is who divinely owns it, and if they were just passing through and they didn't have time to find the name of the top local goddess or god, they'd simply leave an offering to the spirit of the place, the genius loci, and we find a lot of these inscriptions to the genius loci across the empire. And where you could find the name of the local deity, then a pious nod in their direction was a good idea. For example, on what's now called Scargill Moor, Yorkshire, a strapping, Roman, young army officer called Julius Secundus killed an enormous and fierce wild boar, it must almost have killed him because otherwise he wouldn't have been so emotionally invested, and he commemorated his escape by putting up an altar to commemorate his achievement to the Roman God of hunting Silvanus, and then our friend Julie suddenly remembered that Scargill Moor must belong to a local deity, and he found out the name, Vinotonus, and put a thank you to Vinotonus on the other side of the altar, and that's a classic way in which a traveling Roman would deal with the divine in foreign parts. And that's why, when Romans take over an area, there is no religious war involved, just a bit of pruning. Up here, they removed the Druids, the traditional experts in religion and magic for the native people. Don't know why they did it, the Romans said they did it because the Druids did horrid things like sacrificing human beings. That may be true, we can't prove it, but it's absolutely certain that the Druids led the local resistance to Roman conquest, and therefore they had, A, to go, and B, to go down in history as thoroughly bad when the Romans were writing the history. And the Romans claimed to remove human sacrifice as part of civilizing peoples, but again, it's practically impossible to tell whether this is simply fake news or whether it's an anthropological record of what locals, including the local native British, were doing. And if the locals had invoked war goddesses or gods against the Romans when the Romans came in, then the Romans would abolish the worship of the deities who'd fought against them, stubbornly, and remove their shrines, but these are only a small minority of the goddesses and gods of the place. And really, the only way, in Roman Britain, to tell who's engaged in any religious act is from the name of the person who's engaging in the act, if they leave an inscription, and over 90% of Roman Britons didn't leave inscriptions when they engaged in religious acts, and most of those who did didn't leave names for themselves, and of this tiny minority of a tiny minority, if somebody's got a Roman name, you can't tell whether they're Roman or not, because if you're a nouveau riche, up and coming, social climbing Brit, you take a Roman name, so that's why this debate runs out, and I'm going to take us straight to the evidence. So what is the evidence? Well, Roman deities are well represented in Roman Britain, and there are three in particular whom you find again and again. The first is the boss, da capo, Jupiter, king of the gods, second is Mars, third is Mercury, and between them, they control government, the weather, trading, the family, farming, death, and war, which, apart from the land itself, doesn't leave very much for anybody else. And Jupiter is the dude you see posing there on the screen. And also, the cult of guidance of the emperor, I'm going to explain what this was a bit later, which was instituted all over the empire, is well found in Britain. There are colleges of priests at London, Lincoln, and York that carried it on, there's a temple to a dead Roman emperor at Colchester, and there are small busts of good emperors who were venerated found in many parts of Eastern England. And also, the mystery religions of the rest of the Roman Empire all came into Britain and took root here, that of the god of enlightenment, and light, and rebirth, Mithras, who's the chap killing the bull of darkness on the screen, there's Kybele, or Cybele in English, and her lover Atys, which is a cult of triumph over death, of reincarnation and resurrection, there's the divine couple Isis and Serapis, deities of wellbeing and reassurance, and Bacchus, who's god of intoxication, but liberates people from a lot more than just sobriety, liberates them from anxiety, liberates them from depression, liberates them from a feeling of being bounded in their world. And lots of goddesses in gods come in from the northwest parts of the empire, they aren't British, but they're well received here. Those are both the nearest bits of the empire, and they have a common language, a Celtic language, with the British, deities like Rosmerta, who's the lovely lady on the right, a deity of protection and abundance for individuals, there are the Mothers, the Matres, who are three lovely ladies who hand out goodies in luck and in prosperity to those who honor them, and for those of you like horses, there's Epona, the goddess of horse lovers and horse breeding. And native deities, of course, were also honored both by the Romans in Britain and by native Britons, when you can distinguish them, and there's a chain of them down Hadrian's Wall, I'll just take you to some of the highlights. In Cumbria, the favorite male deity was Belatucadros, that's him on the screen, it means the bright, beautiful one, and you'll observe that beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. But actually, he is a short, naked guy with a stoned expression, horns, and a spear and a shield, but greatly beloved of Romans of all classes and the natives in what's now Cumbria. And at the Newcastle end of Hadrian's Wall, at Benwell, we have a more refined horned deity, that's Antenocitus. We know nothing about him except the name and this rather pretty, rather melancholy face, and those lovely twining horns going up through his curly hair. And a lady, Coventina, at Carrawburgh, which is now a desolate bit of moorland between Newcastle and Carlisle, and she is there the goddess of the sacred spring, which was right by a fort on Hadrian's Wall, and she looked after the water, she looked after the legionaries, and she was incredibly popular, with huge numbers of offerings being made to her by all the ranks there. The point here is tremendous localism. Many of the goddesses and gods we know from native Britain in the Roman period are only ever recorded once, and this is true across the empire, and so we've lost many of them forever, maybe most. There's hope that archeology will dig up some more in the future, but we can't guarantee that. On the whole, among native deities honored in Roman Britain, the gods, the males, tend to stand for human activities and functions, they stand for war, protection, trade, and travel, and you find goddesses are more inclined to look after the land, they're more inclined to care for hills, or rivers, or wells, but there's no exclusive gender barrier here, there are plenty of protective goddesses, war goddesses, goddesses interested in communication, and there are gods of natural features like Condatis, the god of the River Wear, which is the main river of County Durham, and indeed Father Thames was a Roman deity, and there was a god, a male deity, in charge of the River Tyne, that flows through Newcastle, and there are gods in charge of woods like Rigonemetis in Lincolnshire. And hey, we get twinning, okay, I'll use the fancy technical term, hybridization. Now, this is rather like the communities of Europe over the last few decades that twinned themselves with equivalent settlements in other parts of the European Union, so Oxford being twinned with Leiden in the Netherlands and Bonn in Germany, so native deities would be twined with Roman deities so that both sides could feel at home with them. The greatest example is this rather fierce-looking lady, the face of the bronze cult statue of Sulis Minerva from the great hot spring at Bath. I'm going to go back to Bath a bit later to look in more detail at what happened there. Sulis was the name of the native goddess that inhabited the hot spring, and the Romans twinned her with Minerva and created a terrific pilgrimage center to her, investing huge amounts of Roman money in it brought in from abroad, so it was one of the greatest developments in the Roman Empire for an astonishing natural phenomenon, which is that spring that pumps out thousands of gallons of really pleasantly hot water every single day. Hybrid deities get a lot of attention because they are this fascinating illustration of an imperial religious system at work. Mars is twinned with 21 native British deities, covering Mars' huge remit of his portfolia, war, healing, agriculture, and leadership. But the rather cute Maponos, who's the kind of rock musician god of the Roman Empire, is paired with Apollo, who is the rock musician god of the rest of the Roman Empire, Maponos from the Celtic-speaking bits and Apollo from the Roman and Greek bits. And I've mentioned Silvanus, the Roman god of hunting, who has three pairings, and Mercury has one, we'll come back to Mercury in a bit. My all time favorite, being fond of animals, is Apollo Cunomaglus, Cunomaglus means lover of dogs, and there was a big complex to him at one place, which is what's now Nettleton Shrub, a valley in North Wilshire, and he was twinned with Apollo, who also liked doggies. Now, there's no standardization here, there's no killjoys around, saying, you can't twin Silvanus with that native god'cause he's already been twinned with another, or even more, you can't twin your local native god with Apollo'cause he's already twinned with Silvanus. Some native gods are paired with both Mars and Silvanus, and this goes on. Now, the tantalizing thing about all this is that we don't have an answer to the really important question that we want to ask about it, which is, hey, what does it mean already? It could mean this is assimilation, it's natives and Romans having a chat over some wine or local beer in a taverna, and saying, oh, you've got a goddess that does that, have you? We've got a goddess for you, and introducing the deities to each other and fixing up this pairing relationship, like making a business deal. On the other hand, it could be the Romans coming in and repressing the Brits by ordering that their local deities are paired with Roman deities, otherwise they won't be allowed to worship them publicly or won't get funding for temples for them. Both are possible, both represent opposite points on an understanding of how Roman imperialism felt, and we've no idea of telling which is right, but that's great for historical novelists and artists because you have a completely free range for the imagination here. So how do you live with Romano-British polytheism? Because at first sight, it's difficult to know how you can live in a world with so many deities and semi and demi-deities around, and avoid your brain blowing up, because Greeks, Romans, ancient Europeans in general believe there's an indwelling spirit to every tree, to every spring, to every rocky outcrop, even a bunch of bushes is liable to have something divine living inside it, so how do you manage to cope with all this without going to paranoid schizophrenia while dealing with the divine? And the Romans actually had a word for this kind of paranoia, they called it superstitio, from which we get our word superstition, and to them, it was excessive fear of the divine, it's taking gods and goddesses too seriously. And the general Roman solution, which seems to have been the Roman British solution as well, is don't worry, the goddesses and gods are not very interested in us, they didn't create us, we're parallel species, they do not make laws, and commandments, and morals for us and they don't monitor our performance, so just lighten up. Both sides in the transaction want to ignore each other as much as possible most of the time, and that makes getting on possible. They do, like mafiosi, require respect, and this is given in a kind of ticking-over way by providing them with public shrines if they're important enough and well-followed enough, and regular rituals, and these are just kept up by public money, on the taxes or the rates, or by donations from rich, charitable individuals. And there are no professional priestesses or priests for these, instead, whosever elected to or appointed to be a local magistrate carries out the rituals as part of the job of local government, and provides the public with results for money with annual, colorful religious festivals at the shrines, which everybody can enjoy, theater, entertainment, exciting ritual. And at home, it's always well to pay a reasonable amount of protection money to the local divine gang, and they're called the lares and penates, and every household has them. Between them, they represent two different kinds of spirit: one is that of the spirits of the place, because wherever you've built your house or wherever you buy or rent a property that somebody else has built, that patch of land is owned by some spirits or a spirit, and so you've got to recognize that they are actually, ultimately, in control of the real estate, and also, your family dead, if they're fond enough of you, will follow you round, and while they may not be there all the time, they certainly shouldn't be a nuisance, but they'll pop over every so often just to have a look and make sure everything's getting on well, and so food and drink are left out at certain times to entertain these spirits when you go to bed, and there are usually images of them kept in a family shrine to which people pay respect when they feel the need. But in general, the deities have got much more interesting things to do than bother about the human race, like make war on, or entertain, or have affairs with each other, and so if you're an ordinary person and you want a deity to notice you, you have to attract their attention. And it's a bit like trying to attract the attention of an official or an aristocrat, you've got to offer a bribe, and that usually means what we ponderously call an ex-voto offering, in other words, you only contact a deity if you have an emergency. It's a bit like calling out a plumber or a central heating operative when your system suddenly fails, you have an emergency call by saying, if the goddess or god who looks after this particular function, heating, toothache, childbirth, business deals, helps me then I will erect an altar to them, or I'll commission a ring with their image on it, or I'll just offer them a barbecue of the best that I can buy. And then, if the service is performed by the divine, you pay the promised price, and that's the transaction. In every society, there's a minority of people who are instinctually deeply religious and feel a constant sense of the divine there. It's the same kind of talent as enabling somebody to handle languages or maths, or play music really easily. And these people would found their own shrines of a size proportionate to their means, or they'd join a mystery religion, where you get initiated in this closed society and you get promised a really strong and ongoing relationship with the goddess, or god, or divine couple at the center of the mystery religion, so all tastes are catered for.

the great central act of Romano-British religion is sacrifice, which means you offer presents to the divine, and this is a natural response to a world in which nature is overwhelmingly powerful and human life and human civilization incredibly vulnerable, fragile, and transitory. You need to keep the deities in a good mood by paying them some attention to show that they're still valued. And absolutely anybody can start a new cult, and people do all the time, they have a dream, or a vision, or an experience, and then announce they've been contacted by a deity nobody's ever heard of before, and if they want to have a public religion of this deity, they go to the Roman Senate or they go to a local oracle, and they ask for permission to launch a public cult, and if they don't want to have a public cult, they want to worship in private with their friends, and their initiates, and their disciples, their neighbors, they just go ahead and do it. The only restrictions are that it can't break the law, it's got to be moral, as far as most people think decency is, as far as anybody knows what's going on, and it mustn't keep the neighbors awake. Something everybody has to do is to burn incense when required, or, if they really want to push the boat out, do something more to honor the guardian spirit of the reigning emperor. This is not the same thing as worshiping the emperor. Romans had the idea, which, as I've said, entered Roman Britain, that every human being is born with a divine opposite number, a genius for a man or a juno for a woman, but anybody who makes it to be emperor, and the overwhelmingly majority of Roman emperors have risen through the ranks, they're not born into an imperial family, has got to have a really powerful spirit to get them up that high, and it's called the numen, we get our word numinous, Tolkien got his mystical land Numenor from it. And so what you're expected to do is, when the current emperor's on the throne, you burn incense when required, make an effort, to encourage the emperor's numen to keep him being a good emperor, to advise him well, to keep him hardworking, to do the best possible job. And this is the test of loyalty to the empire because, clearly, to the Romans, and to most of the Romano-British, if you're not encouraging the emperor's guardian spirit to tell him to do a good job, you're trying to bring down the empire. Unfortunately, there was one religion which refused to do this, and that was the newly appeared and growing one of Christianity, because Christians truly believed, in a way that was unique in the ancient world, that there was only one true god and he was the god of everybody, or should be, and so to burn incense, that is to make an act of offering, to any other being was to break the Christian code, and that's why, for that act, that refusal, Christians were persecuted at times under the pagan Roman empire, but not very often. For only 30 years in the 300 in which Christians and pagans coexisted in the Roman empire were Christians subjected to anything like widespread persecution, but those times could be pretty awful, and at least three martyrs were made in Britain, the most famous of whom being St. Alban, after whom St. Alban's has been named ever after. Romano-British pagans, like Roman pagans in general, like ancient pagans in general, didn't have any theology, they didn't have any orthodox system of beliefs about the way in which the divine operated, and nobody ever debated them. The crucial thing for ancient Romano-British paganism, as for most recorded ancient paganism, is ritual, it's ceremony, and what ritual is is a theater to catch the attention and approval of a deity. Remember, you actually have to attract their attention, so a religious ritual is rather like a male peacock spreading its train to attract the attention of a lady peacock, but to attract the attention of a goddess or a god, and keep it, for the vital time in which they can bestow general goodness and help on the people providing it. There's plenty of speculation about the nature of the Universe and the fate of the soul, but that is left to philosophers, and philosophers have no official status, there's never any laws or rules to enforce their beliefs, it's a free market, they disagree about absolutely everything. And you can see the results in Roman Britain, as elsewhere, by going to the cemeteries. Some people prefer cremation, some people prefer inhumation, that's leaving their bodies intact in the grave, some think you should load up the dead with goods, presents, maybe to take with them, maybe because they're thought to be polluted by the person's spirit so you dare not hang onto them after they're dead, most do not, they do not bury their people with any gifts, some clearly expect the dead to stay in the tomb until sometime in the future, so it's carefully furnished, and there are actually pipes provided so that food and drink can be sent down the chute, like a dumb waiter, to the dead to keep them nourished in the tomb, whereas other dead are equipped with hobnailed boots and other accessories for a long journey to somewhere else. So clearly, there's an immense range of belief about the nature of the cosmos, the fate of the human soul, and the position of humanity in the Universe, and everybody's entitled to their opinion. It's taken 'til the late 20th century for London to become as multi-ethnic, multi-faith, multi-cultural a city as it was in Roman times. And finally, in this line, having produced this pluralistic, multi-faith, multi-ethnic society, there are certain things that people have in common, apart from the attitudes I've described. The most expensive, the most valued form of sacrifice is animal sacrifice, and this is not as inhumane and as creepy as it can sound to a modern audience, because this is a society in which most people can't afford to eat meat even if they want to. Most of the time, cheese is practically the only source of protein, maybe with eggs, for most people. And so to offer an animal sacrifice at a festival is one of the few times of the year when people can get meat, most people. The rules are prescribed by Rome that the animal must be a willing sacrifice, in other words it can't show fear, it must be taken to the place reassured and happy, if it shows any sign of fear or anxiety, the sacrifice is called off and it has to die instantly at one blow without feeling anything, otherwise, again, the sacrifice is a disaster, so in many ways, the atmosphere of an early 20th century abattoir, with the animals squealing in fear because of he smell of blood is completely missing. I'm not condoning the killing and eating of animals, what I am saying is that for a society that eats meat, this is one of the better ways to go about it, and what we'd now regard as humane terms. Only the inedible bits of the animal would be offered to the deities. Afterwards, a barbie would be held for everybody else in which they would make the best possible meal of the animal offered. Deities are very specialized. If you have a kind of "Trivial Pursuit" or pub quiz style question, who's the Roman goddess of agriculture, it's Ceres, or Keres, we get the word cereal from her, but there are actually 10 goddesses called Ceres, one who deals with plowing, one who deals with harrowing, breaking up the earth, one who deals with sowing seeds, one who deals with fertilization, one who weeds, one who reaps, one who rakes, one who ties up the corn, one who stores it, and one who distributes it. Now, the big question obviously is are these just aspects of one goddess or are these different goddesses? Guess what? The Romans didn't know. Nobody was quite sure, so everybody drew their own conclusions, or said, search me. And there are other deities to deal with corn growing, there's Tellus Mater, who fertilizes the seeds, there's Promitor, who protects the granary from fire or rodents, and there's even a god of dung, Sterculinus, who looks after the manure heap. Nothing misses the attention of the divine.

there are 140 temples known so far in Roman Britain, of many, many different styles and shapes. They're not like Christian churches because they're not designed for worshipers, most of them are only big enough for a dozen people, so they're really houses for deities to rest in if they're in the neighborhood, rather like clubs for people coming up to town, and they are places for private prayer, you're supposed to feel that you can have a one-to-one, or a small group experience with the deity without anybody else interfering, it's you and the deity eye to eye. The big festivities, when hundreds of people turn up, happen in an open space in front of the temple with a big public altar, and loads of people can gather. There are temples found in the countryside and in the towns from the start, but in the last half of the Roman period, the 3rd and 4th centuries, a new kind of temple appears, the rural pilgrimage temple, found all over Southern Britain, there are scores of these. They're set in remote and beautiful countryside, often in physically dramatic places, and you need an effort to get there, you've got to make a journey, you've often got to climb a hill, cross water on a boat, go up onto a peninsula jutting out into the sea, and they're set up for visitors. Usually, there's a hotel, there's baths, 'cause you're hot and sweaty by the time you've got there, there's a souvenir shop. They're set up by the owner of the local land, a local noble, they provide income from the visitors, but also, you're pleasing deities by setting these up. And maybe, as Christianity grows stronger in the towns, they're a way of decentralizing to the countryside and setting up worship there. The great thing is there's always one goddess or god who's at the center of a pilgrimage temple, but they're hospitable, there's up to a dozen other deities have their stalls inside the temple in case people prefer to talk to them instead, so you cover a whole range of faith. Let's look at some of these temples. The greatest single urban temple complex in Roman Britain is at Bath, because of the hot spring, and it's to that lady with the bronze stare you saw earlier, Sulis Minerva. We don't really know much about her, Minerva's the Roman goddess of war and handicrafts, and maybe of enterprises like healing, Sulis is simply the goddess of the hot spring. And later on, Bath becomes, because of its medicinal waters, a great center for healing, people who have all sorts of ailments go there to take the waters and be healed. And it's kind of tempting to assume that that's why the Romans went there, and that's maybe true, but when you actually look at what's in the spring,

there are loads of coins, 12,000 of them, thrown in as gifts to attract the attention of Sulis and put her in a good mood, but her great line is cursing, there are scores of lead tablets with curses written on them to invite Sulis to nuke somebody you don't like, almost always somebody who has hurt you or stolen something from you, and the three things that tend to get stolen from people going to Bath are towels, because they're bathing, and goods of theirs they've left in the changing cubicle, jewelry, and girlfriends, and Sulis goes after the perpetrators who've taken away all of these. With that eye to the personal experience, the spring is rebuilt halfway through the Roman period. It's an open area, an open pool at the beginning, with the steam rising from it, like it is today, and people can gather round it in crowds, but halfway through, it's enclosed, and there is a roof put upon it, or over most of it, and a corridor put to it which only allows one or a few people to go down at a time, to give people, again, that tingly experience of being alone with the goddess or the god and seeing the awe-inspiring spectacle of the steam rising from the water in front. And moving to the countryside, going up to the Forest of Dean, at a spur of the forest sticking out towards the River Severn, you have the rural pilgrimage temple of Lydney, excavated by the charismatic archeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler between the wars. Wheeler said it was a healing temple of the god Mars, who had been twinned with the local god Nodens, and it has a bath, it has a hall with cubicles in which people could have sacred sleep and wait for the god to come to them in dreams, and it had a guesthouse, and there were lots of statues of dogs there, sacred hounds, which Sir Mortimer believed were kept to lick the afflicted part of people with injuries or diseases, and heal them. But archeology is such a mess, the evidence is so easily differently read, and all of Sir Mortimer's interpretations are based on temple sites in Greece, where these things happened. If you look at the evidence again, the cubicles may not have been for beds and for dreams, but for private worship, or for different deities, or for insulation, they could even have been a Christian addition in the 5th century, after the temple ceased to be pagan, and we don't have much evidence for healing, just as we don't have it at Bath, we have a single miniature arm of somebody who might have left it as a sign they had an arm they needed healing. And as for the god Nodens, we just have two inscriptions to him, but we also have a bronze relief of a sun god, we have a female figure with a horn of plenty, we have a dedication to Silvanus, so Nodens may not have been the main deity. I'm deconstructing this to show you how much we actually don't know, even about famous, charismatic sites about which we thought we knew a lot. And the dogs there may have been guides to the underworld, or they may have been aids to hunting, we cannot say why dogs were so popular at Roman Lydney. And going across the River Severn, this is my neighborhood so I'm being patriotic and local, if you go up the Cotswold Scarp, that great cliff of limestone, up onto the fields beyond, above the village of Uley, you find a rural pilgrimage temple again, dug by Anne Woodward this time in the 1970s. It's an Iron Age shrine with miniature spears in it, so probably to a war god, and you also find spears in the temple, but the main Roman god put in was not very aggressive, he's my mate Mercury, patron of academics, patron of communication in general, so helper of travel, of commerce, and indeed patron of thieves and those who suffer from theft, which is another form of humans relating to each other. And so possibly preserving a fierce aspect from a war god, like the fierceness of Sulis at Bath, what you're tapping into is actually quite a a hard, malevolent deity who's going to go after bad people on your behalf. There are miniature legs found there, maybe because Mercury's god of travelers, maybe 'cause people just got sore feet getting up that Cotswold cliff in order to get to the temple. Goats and cockerels there, consumed, to Mercury, coins and ring tokens for a god of commerce, but wait for it, you also get dedications to Mars, Silvanus, Sol, the sun god, Jupiter, Cupid, and Bacchus. So, we know it's Mercury because there's this nine foot cult statue to him, but he's very hospitable, like all these deities. So finally, what have we lost in the experience?'Cause I'm talking about all this stuff, I've intimated that a lot of it's quite puzzling, but all you actually get in these buildings is foundations, and what don't they tell us? They don't tell us how high Romano-British temples were, they don't tell us if they had windows or other forms of natural lighting, we don't know how they were lit artificially if they needed it, we don't know if the windows were of colored glass, the Romans could make glass in red, blue, and green, which would make the beautiful effects of sunlight coming through particularly attractive, but this may be my imagination, we don't know if they had draperies, incense burners, paintings on the wall, if they were decorated with flowers, or if they had reflecting surfaces, mirrors. At Uley, there was a pool in front of the statue of the god, so maybe, what people saw when they came in, or probably what they saw when they came in was a kind of double dimension of Mercury, the statue in front and his reflection on the water, spreading out towards you. We don't know what the music was like at the festivals, whether people danced there, whether intoxicants were handed out, what the temperature was like in these places, were they ice cold, did they have braziers there to keep people cozy in winter? We don't know. We don't know what the ceremonies were that were carried on there, we don't know if they had theaters with sacred plays, we don't know if they had stalls to sell votive offerings. Go to Hindu India these days and an active temple is going to have lots of stalls on the sides supplying the impedimenta of worship, probably, Roman Britain had those, but they've left no certain trace in the record. Was there a reception to greet you on arrival when you went into a temple, especially a pilgrimage one? Don't know. So all this is an awful lot of don't knows, but I'm not going to end on a negative note, I'm going to suggest how close we can get to real pagan Romans. And I've chosen two of them, one a woman and the other a man. The woman is from Uley, and she was called Saturnina. She has one name and so she's a commoner, but she's literate, and yet although she could write, she wasn't very wealthy. Why? Because one of her most precious possessions had been a linen cloth, and somebody had nicked it, almost certainly from her washing line. She was livid, and she panted her way over to the Temple of Mercury at Uley, went into the temple, and was confronted by a young man, stark naked, nine foot tall, made of limestone, with a hat with wings on his head, wings on sandals on his feet, and holding a rod with snakes coupling round it and wings on the end. The erudite would recognize Mercury; Saturnina didn't. She bought, or was given a lead curse tablet, and she began to write, and she wrote,"I do beseech the great god Mars," and then she had another look and crossed it out, and she then wrote, no, "I do implore the great god Silvanus," and then she had another look and thought, no, and then either she tumbled it, or else somebody gave her a nudge, and told her, and she wrote,"I do beseech Mercury," yes! And then she wrote a blood-curdling curse, I'd not have cared to be that thief. And it was then handed to an official, who put it in a machine that rolled it up, and it was then nailed to the wall it seems, so Mercury could fly by and collect it from his post box, and then go after the thief, if it worked. And it remained there until the temple crumbled at the end of the Roman empire, and the curse written by Saturnina fell into the earth, was covered by falling masonry, until another woman, Anne Woodward, excavated it in the late 1970s from the red Cotswold earth, and I feel that, at that moment, the spirit of Saturnina stood beside her, woman to woman, and the centuries were as nothing. But my very last insight is from Bath. It's one of the smallest tombstones in the collection taken from the cemetery, and the inscription reads,"To the protection of the divine,"Mercatilla, freedwoman and foster-daughter of Magnius,"lived 1 year, 6 months, and 12 days." What can we tell from those few words? Well, first of all, Magnius is a commoner, probably a a native, he's got one name, which means he ain't posh, but he's got money, he's able to afford to put up an inscription on a tombstone in a sacred place, and that needs cash, and he owns slaves, but he's got a soft heart. Magnius may even be a nickname, it may not be his real name. So we have here a nouveau riche Briton or an enterprising Roman from the working class who's made his stash and fallen in love with one of his slaves, and they then have a daughter together called Mercatilla, and he gives freedom to the woman he loves, who'd been his slave, and their baby, together, and adopts the baby, once freed, as his own daughter, but then she dies, as a toddler, like so many infants in traditional societies until recent times. And he loved her so much he actually dedicated a tombstone to her, which toddlers hardly ever get. When I first saw that and realized the story behind it, I was hit hard because on that very day, my own daughter was 1 year, 6 months and 12 days old, and at that moment, Magnius stood beside me. I saw this probably quite powerful-built man, if his name is a nickname, in the white toga of somebody who's recently acquired Roman citizen status, heading for the temple, with tears in his eyes, and a little sick girl in his arms. You can learn so much from a few words on a tombstone. So after all the puzzle, after all the speculation, after all the negativity I've stressed in what we can learn, we can still stand side by side and face by face with the people of Roman Britain. Thank you for your patience this freezing evening.(audience applauds)- Thank you, Professor Hutton, for such a fascinating nature. We have plenty of time for questions actually, so I will start off with one from our online audience before I open it up to our in-person audience. The first one is from someone called Vicky, she says she's seen some of the stone shrines to Coventina earlier this year, is there any other contemporary evidence, for example written references, and has any research been carried out in respect of her?- There are no texts, no written references to Coventina, but there are other dedications to her from the continental mainland from two different places, and so we aren't sure if Coventina was a British goddess who then got taken back to the Continent by returning soldiers or if she was a continental goddess whom soldiers posted to Britain brought to Hadrian's Wall. But she is the center of a big cult which goes on there for hundreds of years, with beautiful altars and reliefs, and she has nymphs attached, she's a party girl, she likes company, and was the center of intense affection and respect.- [Moderator] Is there any evidence of what initiation involved for secret cults, such as that of Mithras?- There's a certain amount. We know more about the Mithraic cult than the others because it's more elaborate, and ironically, because it's so secretive, you don't get into a Mithraeum, a Mithras temple, unless you're an initiate, they actually put more in the way of inscriptions, and reliefs, and things on the walls. And there are a number of grades, starting with being a raven, and then going on to be a maiden or a bridegroom, and then going up to the top to be a father. Most only get halfway up, they get to about the lion grade, and then they quit. We don't know if there were initiation rites for every grade, but certainly, the initiation rite of entry to be a a raven was quite scary. The cult begins by being all male, and remains so for hundreds of years, women come in in the 4th century as it's starting to become a bit more public, and you're stripped naked, you are blindfolded, your arms are tied behind your back, you feel yourself threatened and pricked with weapons, and then at the end, the blindfold is removed, and you find yourself faced with the illuminated relief of Mithras killing the bull, the main relief in each of the Mithraea. Now, probably more happened as well, we're reconstructing this from paintings, reliefs in Mithraea, but we can say that much. And actually, the basic thing of wholly or partly undressing a candidate, blindfolding and binding them, and threatening them with a weapon is resurrected by Freemasonry, and is actually found in quite a few modern initiatory secret traditions, so there is a recurrent theme here.- [Questioner] Thank you very much, great lecture. You say in your very last slide there that we've, in a sense, lost any ability to recreate the kind of sensory experience of life in this past society, religious or otherwise, and yet then at the end, you go off in a slight flight of fancy about Magnius and his toddler, and so forth, and I was just wondering, do you think that there is any kind of really robust way in which we can recreate those sensory experiences, or are we always doomed to just slightly fictionalize things?- I think we're doomed always to slightly fictionalize things, but with the sensual experience, sensory experience, the visual experience of Romano-British temples, we have wholesale to fictionalize things because all we have are the foundations, but we actually can know a lot more about people because they tell us more about themselves, like Julius Secundus and his boar, Saturnina and her linen cloth, and of course Magnius and Mercatilla, and that's quite a lot, that really is a shock of the dissolution of the chasm that separates us from the past at times. And just for the record, there are moments when you have astonishing bits of jigsaw knotting together. At Lydney, somebody placed a curse tablet because they had lost a ring, and they described the ring exactly, and then they cursed the person who had taken it. And that very ring was found in a field next to a Roman city 100 miles to the east, at Silchester. It's so well described, it's unmistakable. And the gentleman who produced the report on it was an Oxford philologist called J.R.R. Tolkien, who was reinforced in his sense of the importance of accursed rings.(audience laughs)- [Questioner] Hi, thank you so much for speaking today. I was just wondering, are there any traditions, or gods, or themes, or events that have lasted through the centuries, that we're very clear that this is a thing because it still carries on today?- I think one of the great continuities with the past are, I think there are two, A is that certain things just work. When you have a religious festival, to have flowers, music, great visual effects, a liturgy, is how religious ritual works. And in the same way, if you're going to put somebody through an initiatory experience, to deprive them in some way of motion, agency, vision, some of their senses, and scare them, and then release them into bliss is a great way of bringing people into a group and into a mystery-religious experience. But the other thing is the cycle of the year that at midwinter, we need rituals that involve warmth, and light, and greenery, and feasting, and in midsummer, we need rituals that involve sunlight, and fire, and greenery, flowers, or mass, there are certain themes in the cycle of the way that the year turns, which means that, at basis, religious rituals of any religion are going to have things in common.- I've just got one here from somebody watching online:"Were these pagan gods superseded"after the Romans left and others invaded?"- It's doesn't appear as though the worship of Romano-British deities survived the departure of Rome for very long, because in the darkness that falls, I'm not speaking in moral terms, but in terms of knowledge, after the Romans pull out, we have almost no writing, we don't really know what's going on, Christianity takes over, and we're not really sure when or how, but that's when Romano-British paganism disappears.- [Questioner] Thank you. Have you seen the television series called "Britannia"? If so, did you like it, and what do you think of the rituals that are in there, particularly the Druid ones?- Okay...(audience laughs) I'm not going to give you the answer I think many you are expecting. I was the historical consultant for Jez Butterworth's series "Britannia," and of course I was asked to be a historical consultant about prehistory, native British religion at the time, so it was kind of a non-starter, all I could do was to prevent things being wildly inaccurate and to try and keep them coherent But I am rather proud of one thing, and that is that, at one point, I was asked what Druids in Iron Age Britain, before the Romans arrive, would have done for a naming ceremony for a young girl, which was kind of pivotal to the plot, and of course we haven't got the foggiest idea, and so I simply made one up, saying that this is as likely as any to have been the kind of thing they did, and delivered it to them, and then waited for it to disappear, as it were, and the idea to be taken and then given immortality by somebody else. But they actually used my ideas and put them in, and so I was knocked off my feet, and watching it, suddenly to find this thing coming in and realize that I'd actually made a difference, if only in a tiny way, after all. Other things I couldn't salvage, having Viking runes tattooed on the face of the chief Druid instead of La Tene patterns, was a shock, but that was because they'd already shot those scenes before they asked me, and decided that it would stretch the resources of the very charismatic actor playing the chief Druid to ask him to re-shoot. So I won some and I lost some, that's show business.(audience laughs)- And on that note, that's all we have for time for. We hope you can all join us for Professor Hutton's next lecture, on Anglo-Saxon pagan gods, on Wednesday, the 1st of February, I believe? Yes. Please join me, thank you.(audience applauds)