RELIGION 201cultural terms as an element of identity formation; the ‘imperial cult’ as just one
aspect of a non- fi nite empire- wide renegotiation of the relationship between the
ruling power and very diversifi ed subjects. The second venture is not a single work,
but the results of a ten- year international research programme, ‘Römische
Reichsreligion und Provinzialreligion’ directed by Hubert Cancik and Jörg Rüpke,
originally at Tübingen, later at Erfurt, published in numerous edited volumes (and
one or two monographs). The basic idea was to establish whether, and if so in what
sense, we can speak of a ‘religion of the empire’ ( Reichsreligion ), and how religious
developments in the provinces related to the centre (Cancik and Rüpke 1997, Rüpke
2007b, Cancik and Rüpke 2009). Here too the obvious candidate for a de facto
Reichsreligion, the ‘imperial cult’, was shown to be both highly diversifi ed and, as a
condition for its anchoring and legitimacy in the minds of provincials, largely driven
by local interests (Cancik and Hitzl 2003, Chaniotis 2003, Steuernagel 2010; cf.
Friesen 1993). A complementary aim was to assert the validity of the term ‘provincial
religion’, exemplifi ed in two magisterial volumes on Germania Inferior and Superior
(Spickermann 2003, 2008; cf. Van Andringa 2002 on Gaul, though not part of this
project). But the true originality of the project was to view religion pragmatically in
terms of the communication of ideas and practices, the diverse media of such
communication (Schörner and Šterbanc Erker 2008), and efforts to control them
(Rüpke in Cancik and Rüpke 1997, Rüpke 2011a). These themes were explored in
relation to the city conceived as a central place (Cancik et al. 2006); in law (Ando
and Rüpke 2006), in literature (Elm von der Osten et al. 2006, Rüpke in idem 2007b;
this theme has received much attention in unrelated projects, e.g. Feeney 1998,
Lightfoot 2003, Davies 2004, Barchiesi et al. 2004, Berdozzo 2011, Bendlin 2011);
and in the culture of festivals (Rüpke 2008b). An additional impulse of the project
was to question the widespread idea that only elite religious practice can be studied
or is worth studying (Rüpke 2007a), which coincided with a much wider interest in
the dynamics of small- group religion within the context of ‘civic religion’
(Kloppenborg and Wilson 1996, Bollmann 1998, Egelhaaf-Gaiser and Schäfer 2002,
Gutsfeld and Koch 2006, Kloppenborg and Ascough 2011). It is in this connection
that the centrality of collective dining to the practice of religion in the empire has
been underlined (Egelhaaf-Gaiser 2000). These publications have in turn stimulated
other attempts to estimate the impact of empire, though, without a coherent leading
idea, they typically amount to rather less than the sum of their parts (de Blois et al.
2006, Hekster et al. 2009).
The ‘small group’ leads directly on to the so- called ‘oriental cults’ of the empire. If
we recognize that this category, so fundamental to the old grand narrative, is an
historical construction based upon untenable colonialist assumptions, how do we
begin to re- think the topic? A Franco-German-Italian group, inspired and organized by
Corinne Bonnet from Toulouse, fi rst outlined the ‘Orientalist’ underpinnings of the
concept as it emerged around 1900 (Bonnet and Bendlin 2006) and then sought to
deconstruct both its coherence as a category and its reliance upon the supplementary
notion of ‘mystery cult’ (Bonnet et al. 2006, 2008, 2009). The ‘Orient’ turns out to be
a fl oating signifi er, sometimes the source of actual transpositions, more interestingly
of diverse appropriations, sometimes a metaphor for the assertion of religious
difference – the ‘Orient’ was good to think with (Versluys 2013, cf. Beard 1994). Even
the word ‘cult’, let alone Cumont’s ‘religions’, often suggests too great a coherence of
what were most often personal appropriations by individual religious entrepreneurs –
the literary exemplar is Alexander of Abonouteichis’ ‘ pseudomantis ’ – on the lookout