Religious Romanization: continuity and change
The process of cultural contact which is termed ‘'Romanization” facilitated the full expression of indigenous religious manifestations from a stage which could be defined as “essentially non-iconic” and the rise of religious “Romano-Celtic” systems which were different from those that had existed before the arrival of the Romans.
At this late stage, a double mechanism of “translation” (interpretatio) - indigenous and “Roman” - was already taking place, whereby names and categories were recorded in written form, rendering the alien religious system comprehensible to the native one, and vice versa. The characteristics of such a process of interpretatio are its ambiguity and relative spontaneity, as opposed to the interpretations characterized by a more or less veiled religious Roman imperialism (Marco Simon 2012).Subsequently, a problem arises when considering the continuity (and its degree) and the ruptures of the syncretic systems belonging to the Roman era along with those existing centuries earlier. We cannot rightfully talk of “preRoman” religions: most of the names of the indigenous gods are known through epigraphic texts which belong to the imperial era, although it is evident that some of the information they contain precedes the Roman presence. And the supposed “pan-Celtic deities” (names such as Teutatis, Esus, Taranis [the triad mentioned by Lucan (Pharsalia 1. 444-7)], Cernunnos, Lugus and others) are hardly attested in Roman times (Haeussler 2008: 21-42).
Romanization introduced the ritual, until then unknown among the natives of Indo-European Hispania, of devoting altars to the gods, specifying the name of the divinity (the theonym) and that of the person who dedicated it, as well as the circumstances which led to such an action (in most cases, the happy fulfilment of a promise: v(otum) s(olvit) l(ibens) m(erito) = “willingly and deservedly fulfilled the vow”).
As against the paucity of documentation on indigenous theonyms in the Iberian sphere of influence in the south and east of the peninsula, Latin epigraphy from the first centuries CE has offered more than five hundred names of deities from Indo-European Hispania (which does not mean that so many gods were worshipped: several names can refer to the same god invoked under different epithets). There is a clear contrast between the western and north-western regions of the peninsula and the eastern Celtiberian plateau. Most of the names preserved originate in the former, where Lusitanian, an Indo-European language whose possible Celtic nature is debated, was spoken. Fewer indigenous names of deities have been preserved in the central areas of the two plateaus of the peninsula or in Celtiberia. This is the result of broader religious acculturation from the Graeco-Roman world, which influenced the Iberian peoples of the coast.