THE RATIONALE FOR THIS BOOK
“Religion” is an amorphous concept which has been defined in numerous ways, without any scholarly consensus in sight. Its main features seem to us to be (a) having socially shared activities which bear no direct relation to subsistence, (b) demanding some specific attitude towards death and/or the dead, and (c) generally including a discourse including entities which are beyond this world.
Whatever it is, religion seems to be uniquely linked to the human race. It was in Europe and the Middle East that the culture of our immediate ancestors first combined the attributes which are the necessary precursors of religion - burials, plastic art and paintings. It was the religions of groups as diverse as the Greeks and the Scandinavians which seem to have given birth to important traits of our civilization as we define it today. Thus the history and prehistory of Europe is fundamental to the history of the human race and religion - and the history of religion is fundamental to Europe.Anatomically modern humans, that is, the type of humans to which we belong, arrived on the European continent approximately 40,000 years ago. Their arrival in Europe is associated with the end of the Middle Palaeolithic (which began perhaps 250,000 years earlier in Europe) and the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic. Significantly, in the Middle East, anatomically modern humans used the same tools of the Middle Palaeolithic assemblages as the Neanderthals, whereas in Europe the Neanderthals are also briefly associated with the Upper Palaeolithic. In the Near East and in Europe, Neanderthals and our ancestors buried their dead - the first ritual act we can identify with certainty. In any case, the Neanderthals died out some 30,000 years ago, and thus the history of the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe is that of the human race. The Upper Palaeolithic is the era of the birth of the first cave paintings and the period when small figurines appear in small numbers, yet more abundantly than in any preceding period.
For most of the Upper Palaeolithic, however, the archaeological evidence of ritual is scant, and it is a matter of debate whether or not it can be interpreted as indicating traces of religious rituals and beliefs. Yet, this debate is crucial, because what is certain is that material such as burials, cave paintings and figurines is the kind of material that in later times is closely linked to religion (as indications of belief in a beyond, as depictions of myths, and as representations of supernatural beings).
With the Neolithic, a new migration brought new human groups into Europe from the Near East where the concepts of sanctuaries and meeting places were gradually being developed. The Neolithic began some 12,000 years ago in the Near East, reaching France and Scandinavia only thousands of years later. From the start in the Near East, it was marked by special treatment for the dead and buildings which may have served communal purposes. The earliest population movements (beginning more than 11,000 years ago) involved the transfer to the islands - Cyprus, Crete, Sicily - and from each island to the adjacent mainland. It was only millennia later that the movement pushed directly overland, along the Danube and through the area to the north of the Alps. In any case, these new peoples pushed on, probably conquering territory and mingling with the existing population, creating new identities.
As the predominantly hunter-gatherer populations of the Near East began to adopt farming and settled communities began to form, marking the beginning of the transition to the Neolithic era from approximately 12,000 years ago, archaeological remains become more plentiful and from the end of the period also show an increasing regional diversity. Yet even these finds are not unambiguous as concerns what we today call religion, but clearly they represent the “forms” or the “expressions” of what in historical religions is filled with religious “content”. It is only from the European Bronze Age that we have access to the earliest written sources (mid-second millennium BCE) that - together with material remains - allow us to document religious life in Europe.
Yet although Minoan and Mycenaean documents demonstrate literacy in the Mediterranean, most of our written source material belongs to the Late Iron Age and classical antiquity - as attested by inscriptions in Greek, Etruscan, Punic, Celtic and various Italic languages. Over time, textual and material evidence for religious life in various parts of Europe becomes more plentiful and much more detailed. The diverse names of gods, the myths about them, the rituals carried out to honour or propitiate them, the buildings constructed to worship them in the various parts of the continent demonstrate the cultural wealth and local variability of ancient Europe.As a consequence of the emergence and ultimate imposition of Christianity, the first religion on the continent with a hegemonic ambition, most local religions were gradually wiped out. Although originally a local variation of Eastern faiths, in general Christianity did not spread organically from person to person, so much as having been selected and protected by rulers who then expected their people to follow. The Roman emperor Constantine initially privileged Christianity over its rivals. After Julian the Apostate (reigned 360-63 CE) tried to re-establish religious freedom in the empire, his successors aimed at revoking his efforts, and in the 380s CE Theodosius elevated Christianity to the status of being the only religion tolerated within the empire. This initiated a process that eventually ensured that competing non-Christian alternatives disappeared as living religions. These were initially banished from the Mediterranean, and subsequently from the Germanic, Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, Slavic and Baltic areas, finally reaching the utmost peripheries of Europe with the forced conversion of the Sami and other Uralic-speaking peoples in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.1
The picture of religion in ancient Europe that emerges even from such a thumbnail sketch is one of diversity and complexity.
The time depth is vast, the evidence - whether archaeological or written - is difficult to interpret, and the variety of religions documented by the sources is bewildering. For students, scholars and members of the broader public wishing to expand their horizons in this field, it is challenging in the extreme to attempt to gain an overall picture of religious history before the advent of Christianity. The difficulties are compounded by the fact that much of the scholarly literature on some local pre- Christian religions is written in languages that are largely inaccessible to an international readership, such as Icelandic, Swedish, Polish, Finnish or Latvian. Hence, scholars working in the field will typically be truly familiar with one or two particular traditions, while the non-specialist may find it an almost impossible task to gain a broad understanding of pre-Christian religious Europe.The Handbook of Religions in Ancient Europe is intended to remedy this gap. Specialists in various areas of pre-Christian religious history have contributed chapters that provide brief state-of-the-art surveys of their fields of expertise, targeted at non-specialist readers, together with a list of suggested further readings.2 Besides aiming at accessibility, all authors were presented with two sets of challenges.
First, they were asked to base their chapters on the best available sources and reflect critically on the nature of these sources and on the challenges involved in interpreting them: how does one access the rituals and religious conceptions of people known to us only from the material remains unearthed by archaeologists? What information can be gleaned from place-names, inscriptions and coins? What insights can we gain from written accounts, given that these are often the products of literate elites, or of hostile outsiders such as Christian missionaries?
Secondly, they were invited to treat religions as plural and multidimensional, manifest as discourse, action, organization and material culture; produced by specific people with at times quite diverse interests: distinct local groups, religious or social elites versus others, or men versus women.
As is clear from the chapters that follow, various regions and epochs provide very different possibilities of understanding this multidimensionality. In some areas (e.g. classical antiquity) written sources and material remains are plentiful, and internal diversity obvious. For others, such as prehistoric Finland, indirect evidence such as the distribution of loanwords for religious concepts or place- names incorporating diverse terms for the sacred gives a picture of different religious strata. For yet others, such as the Baltic region, archaeological remains are almost non-existent, written sources appear only at a late date, and the evidence from oral history provides few clues to allow for such a differentiated picture.are sometimes sparse and more ambiguous than material sources), the division into two parts does reflect the fact that with the introduction of writing, new kinds of data begin to emerge. The identity of the deities, the names of festivals and the rationale for celebrating them can be easier to discern from texts than from images and artifacts.