The ways in which we engage with rituals are tied inextricably to cognitive experiences: sound, sight, scent, taste, touch, and space. It is through these mechanisms that an understanding and a memory of a ritual experience are created and codified. But can we trust our senses or the cognitive process that encodes experiences as memories? Plautus’s evaluation assumes that an eyewitness account of an event is more valuable than hearsay; while this may be true, it does not mean that one person’s version of events is a reliable or definitive account. When assessing the ancient world, eyewitness accounts seldom survive (one would be lucky to have ten hearsays) and surviving sources must be approached with caution. Rituals are not only scripted events but performed experiences, designed to ensnare the senses of performers and participants alike. How these senses are engaged impacts the perception and memory of an event. To understand how ritual memories were made, therefore, one must assess the sensory engagement and cognitive processes through which ritual memories were created and codified; namely the experience of rituals.

Through engagement with different senses and cognitive processes, rituals are transformed from a series of scripted actions in a specific place to an interactive experience, whose outcome depends on several different factors: the performance, the audience, the context, and the atmosphere of the ritual event. While these factors often serve to strengthen the emotive context and meaning of a ritual, they can also act as variables, resulting in a plurality of different outcomes for a ritual event: some positive/inclusive, others negative and/or exclusive. An ‘eyewitness account’ reflects an embodied experience, a multifaceted memory that is the culmination of sensory interpretations: not only seeing an event but also reading faces, speech, tone, gestures, and atmosphere. For Plautus, this ‘first hand’ experience appears to lend value and credulity to an eyewitness account as well as an opportunity to assess the source. Experience, however, is a double-edged sword: what unites can create discord, what provides a sense of belonging can alienate, what is meant to portray continuity can represent change, and what is meant to honour can bring shame. While an eyewitness account is undoubtedly valuable, one must also acknowledge its limitations: a single version of an experience cannot capture the plurality of possible experiences, interpretations, or outcomes of a ritual performance.Footnote ¹ The experience of a ritual event is a crucial factor in the perception and remembrance of ritual; but how can one embed the variability of experience(s) into approaches and analyses of rituals?

Focusing too much on individual experiences (if there is enough evidence in order to do so), can result in becoming myopic to larger socio-cultural factors which inform religious experiences and drive religious change. On the other hand, analysing only religious rituals and experiences in terms of cult-wide and/or collective phenomena, risks overlooking localized religious practices and of ignoring neurodiverse experiences. Unlike other scholars who research rituals and ritual experiences (in psychology or anthropology, for example), scholars of ancient religions cannot rely on designing group experiments or conducting participant interviews to gather data. Instead, our evidence is often incomplete or corrupted and can be tainted further by bias or misinterpretation. All of these elements render the tightrope between individual/subjectivist approaches (i.e. where religious experiences are seen as subjective and highly individual) and collective/constructivist approaches (i.e. where religious experiences are understood to be rooted in cultural and social factors) even more perilous to tread.Footnote ² The cross- and inter-disciplinary cognitive sciences, by viewing cognition as multifaceted – embodied, distributed, situated, extended, materialized, and enculturedFootnote ³ – offer new perspectives in understanding both individual and collective elements of rituals and ritual experiences.Footnote ⁴

In the last two decades, spurred by scientific advancements in neuroscience and the cognitive sciences, a growing number of scholars have begun to apply cognitive and sensory theoretical approaches to the study of archaeological and historical evidence, especially with respect to ancient religions and rituals.Footnote ⁵ This edited volume assembles a series of case studies from international scholars (at varying stages of their careers), which explore interdisciplinary aspects of religious ritual and ritual experience in the Roman world. Focusing on cognitive and sensory approaches, these case studies critically (re)examine established views and material finds relating to rituals and ritual experiences. As Esther Eidinow notes ‘some current ancient historical research … has tended to privilege mind or body as its focus … by distinguishing sensory from cognitive approaches’.Footnote ⁶ By understanding sensory and cognitive processes as inextricably connected, and by merging sensory and cognitive scholarship and approaches, this volume pushes disciplinary boundaries and offers novel interpretations. The case studies in this volume were chosen because they address elements of both polytheistic and Christian rituals, covering the period from the late Republic to late Antiquity, while offering a comprehensive examination of evidence (historical, archaeological, iconographic, and epigraphic) from Italy as well as (a range of) Roman provinces.

In discussions between contributors of this volume, it became clear that the cognitive approaches applied to ancient rituals were relevant not only to the ancient world, but reflect an approach to ritual performances and events that could be applied across time, space, and disciplines on a broad scale, including one’s own personal ritual experiences. While ancient religion is often placed in a separate realm, viewed with values and approaches that are distinct from modern society,Footnote ⁷ the case studies in this volume employ a broad range of cross- and inter-disciplinary perspectives to address fundamental and universal questions about religious ritual and ritual experience. These questions include:

• What role do the senses play in the performance/understanding/remembering of ritual?

• How does the organization of physical space (religious space, urban space etc.) inform ritual movement?

• What role do emotions play in religious rituals/performances?

• How does material culture reflect/inform ritual understanding?

• How are religious rituals learned/remembered/transferred?

Cognitive Science of Religion and Cognitive Historiography

The year 2020 marked the thirty-year anniversary since the founding of cognitive science of religion (CSR) as a discipline.Footnote ⁹ To understand the ways in which cognitive studies have shaped approaches to religion, and specifically to rituals, a brief exploration of this emerging field and its methodologies is necessary. The interdisciplinary field of CSR was initially established to challenge the approaches and theories of cultural determinism and extreme cultural relativism, which predominated in the study of religion in the second half of the twentieth century, and which lacked a comprehensive explanation for how religious concepts are formed, learned and diffused. Departing from earlier approaches, CSR asserts that religion and its components can be studied scientifically; that humans have innate inclinations to hold certain cognitive biases (such as the tendency to anthropomorphiseFootnote ¹⁰ divinities); and that cognitive processes, influenced by evolutionary, environmental, and cultural factors, can mould and constrain religious ideas, beliefs, and behaviours. As such, CSR scholars explore how religions are formed, and how religious ideas, beliefs, and behaviours are learned, remembered, and transmitted between individuals and groups (horizontal transmission) as well as through generations (vertical transmission).Footnote ¹¹ As CSR scholar Claire White states: ‘At the core, CSR scholars accept that religion is a product of the mind situated in its cultural environment.’Footnote ¹² Employing a methodology that deconstructs religion into principal components (e.g. religious rituals and experiences, supernatural agents, beliefs about the afterlife etc.), CSR scholars apply a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to formulate and empirically test theories and hypotheses concerning these components, in order to assess cross-cultural patterns of religious thought and behaviour. This methodology contributes to a more comprehensive and universal understanding of religion and religious phenomena.Footnote ¹³

These bottom-up, scientific approaches to religion have been especially lucrative with respect to the study of religious rituals. One particular contribution of CSR is in explaining how religious ideas, beliefs, and practices (including rituals) are successfully transmitted and why particular concepts and practices endure across cultures and throughout history.Footnote ¹⁴ Although most CSR scholars agree that ritualization initially developed among early human populations and that humans are psychologically predisposed to ritual behaviour,Footnote ¹⁵ the extent to which ritual behaviours are an evolutionary adaptation or a by-product of cognitive processes is still debated.Footnote ¹⁶ Whether one views the successful transmission and endurance of religious practices as an adaptation or a by-product, it is a universal truth that certain religious ideas, beliefs, and behaviours recur across time and societies. As Claire White states ‘This is in part because ideas are constrained by our experience of the world.’Footnote ¹⁷ The common constraints of ritual experiences, which have been observed across cultures, time, and space, reflect the illuminating results of cognitive approaches to rituals: finding commonality through a series of diverse and dynamic assessments. By integrating perspectives from evolution, cognition, and culture into the study of religion, CSR can provide us with a richer understanding of how human cognitive processes merge with environmental factors to produce and communicate ritual practices, and why humans have continued to seek out ritual experiences.

CSR approaches also address longstanding challenges in the study of ritual behaviours, in particular ritual deviations, emotional contexts (e.g. fear of rejection or anxiety), and group dynamics, as is explored further in Abigail Graham’s Chapter 4 in this volume. Since it is not always clear how performed ritual actions achieve the desired ritual goal (i.e. rituals are causally opaque) and since individual experience is limited, humans are therefore less prone to deviate from ritual behaviours which are perceived as traditional or ‘correct’. From an evolutionary standpoint, challenging group norms or refusing to participate in group activities may have resulted in social ostracism and death for our ancestors. Therefore, fear of social rejection and the desire to signal group commitment may also explain why individuals are prone to faithfully imitate and transmit ritual behaviours, and why aspects of ritual persist over time.Footnote ¹⁸

Why rituals persist can also be explained partly by the beneficial effects that they produce. In terms of effects on individuals, CSR research has shown that rituals contribute to improving the physical and mental health of ritual participants, such as reducing anxiety, as well as providing a semblance of control during tumultuous times.Footnote ¹⁹ Pascal Boyer and Pierre Liénard’s ‘Hazard Precaution System’ theory posits that when faced with unpredictable or threatening situations we spontaneously exhibit ritualized behaviours, which provide an anxiety-reducing effect and re-instil a sense of control over our environment.

The ways in which we cognitively process and experience the world around us influence our actions, which, in their turn, exert an effect on our cognitive and affective states.

At the level of the group, rituals serve to build trust, cohesion, and cooperation among group members, as well as to instil and reinforce group values (these effects are discussed in Blanka Misic’s Chapter 1).Footnote ²¹ Participating in extreme rituals can serve as a costly signal of group commitment and belonging, promoting trust and cooperation between group members.Footnote ²² For example, experimental research in CSR indicates that high-intensity and painful rituals create stronger bonds between ritual participants. Physiologically, extreme rituals can lead to increased heart rates and even synchronized heart rates among close-knit ritual participants and spectators, in addition to inducing feelings of euphoria, which opens ritual participants to social bonding as well as strengthening existing bonds.Footnote ²³ Rituals can also become Credibility Enhancing Displays (CRED) – an individual’s credibility is enhanced within their social circle when they actively participate in a costly ritual, with other individuals then being encouraged to follow and imitate their ritual behaviour, therefore successfully transmitting ritual knowledge.Footnote ²⁴

Although CSR research on the psychological, physiological, and social effects of rituals has yielded illuminating results, further research on ritual experiences is still needed. Only a few CSR researchers have focused on a detailed study of ritual experiences, such as Dimitris Xygalatas and his colleagues on experiences of extreme, fire-walking rituals (discussed further in the Conclusion chapter).Footnote ²⁵ Ann Taves and colleagues at the UC Santa Barbara Religion, Experience and Mind Lab Group have also conducted research on aspects of religious experience, such as near-death experiences.Footnote ²⁶ Research on religious experience has further been informed by neuroscientific approaches. For instance, neuroscientist Patrick McNamara has observed that specific areas of the brain which generate and process religious experiences also regulate a sense of Self, therefore arguing that religion (and religious experiences) can serve to develop one’s self-consciousness.Footnote ²⁷ However, criticisms have been laid against CSR research for focusing too much on cognitive processes and not enough on the roles of emotion, body, and environment in religion.Footnote ²⁸ Certainly, ritual experiences cannot be studied without all of these elements – we use our brains, our bodies, and our senses to perform ritual actions, and the engagement of our brains, bodies, and senses with our environment and our affective states produces ritual experience.

One promising way towards studying ritual experiences is by understanding individual brains and bodies as interconnected with each other and with their environments, therefore viewing cognition as embodied, distributed, situated, extended, materialized, and encultured. CSR scholar Armin W. Geertz has championed this view with his biocultural theory of religion ‘which is based on an expanded view of cognition that is anchored in the brain and body, dependent upon culture, and extended and distributed beyond individual minds … Geertz proposes that understanding which manipulations are at play in religion, and how they implement cultural values, alter emotional states, and interact with cognitive processing can enrich our understanding of religion’.Footnote ²⁹ The aim of this volume is to contribute to CSR research on ritual experiences and to build upon Geertz’s findings by analysing Roman ritual experiences as products of cognitive processes, affective states, and sensory organs – all of which are influenced by neurological, environmental, and socio-cultural factors. Yet, how can these cognitive approaches enhance our understanding of the ancient world?

Although the cross- and inter-disciplinary field of CSR is growing every day, it is only within the last fifteen years or so that historians, classicists, and other scholars of ancient religions have started to engage with CSR approaches, creating a new subfield of the discipline called cognitive historiography.Footnote ³⁰ Inspired initially by the pioneering work of CSR scholars such as anthropologists Pascal BoyerFootnote ³¹ and Harvey Whitehouse,Footnote ³² and philosophy and comparative religion scholars Robert N. McCauley and E. Thomas Lawson,Footnote ³³ scholars of cognitive historiography have enriched and pushed the boundaries of the study of ancient religions, especially through their (re)examination of ancient religious experiences and rituals. For example, Harvey Whitehouse’s ‘Modes of Religiosity’ theory, which describes ritual and ritual experience in terms of two modes – the imagistic and the doctrinal – has been particularly popular among historians and archaeologists, resulting in several publications which test Whitehouse’s model within various ancient religious contexts.Footnote ³⁴ In addition to the Modes of Religiosity approach, the application of a variety of other cognitive perspectives to case studies of ancient religions have further enhanced our understanding not only of ritual practices and ritual experiences, but also recast the way we now examine religious texts, religious objects, religious iconography, and religious beliefs and attitudes. These case studies range from the study of monotheistic religions (Judaism and Christianity),Footnote ³⁵ to the examination of select Graeco-Roman polytheistic cults (including Asklepios,Footnote ³⁶ Isis and Serapis,Footnote ³⁷ Cybele/Attis,Footnote ³⁸ Dionysos,Footnote ³⁹ and Bona DeaFootnote ⁴⁰), belief systems,Footnote ⁴¹ and religious experiences.Footnote ⁴²

More than with any other ancient cult, the application of cognitive approaches to the study of the cult of Mithras has yielded particularly fruitful scholarship to date.Footnote ⁴³ In general, the cult of Mithras has been approached from two cognitive perspectives: Harvey Whitehouse’s Modes of Religiosity theory for the study of Mithraic rituals,Footnote ⁴⁴ and Roger Beck’s ‘Star-Talk’ for the study of mental representations and astrological/astronomical elements of Mithraism.Footnote ⁴⁵ Luther H. Martin has emerged as the leading scholar in applying cognitive approaches, and especially Whitehouse’s Modes of Religiosity theory, to archaeological and iconographic evidence from the cult of Mithras. Martin’s work, among other contributions, has argued for the importance of emotionally arousing and imagistic aspects of Mithraic rituals, and has helped to dispel the ‘top-down’ approach to Mithraism (i.e. the view of a common, standardized Mithraic myth-narrative belief system among all initiates of the religion).Footnote ⁴⁶ On the other hand, Roger Beck’s application of cognitive approaches has helped Mithraic scholars gain a deeper understanding of astrological and astronomical belief systems of Mithraism. His ‘Star-Talk’ concept, as a way to understand mental representations and to decode systems of signs, has influenced not only Mithraic scholarship,Footnote ⁴⁷ but has also been applied to other ancient ‘mystery’ cults such as the cult of Isis.Footnote ⁴⁸ In addition to these approaches, the ever-growing body of cognitive research on social cohesion and extreme rituals,Footnote ⁴⁹ as well as ritual encoding and recallFootnote ⁵⁰ is helping to open new pathways to understanding ritual behaviour and ritual experiences both in modern and ancient religions.

The emergence of cognitive historiography and the broader application of CSR approaches to the ancient world offer vast potential for further study. This volume presents one small step in applying cognitive approaches, including aspects of CSR’s successful framework, to explore the role of ritual experiences in the ancient world. While ritual case studies in this work fall across a broad range of time, space, and purpose, they converge on similar aspects of ritual experience: the role of repetition, ritual deviation, group dynamics, object agency, and the evolution of a ritual within various emotional, physical, and spatial contexts. However divergent the resulting ritual experiences may have been, these components continue to emerge as the foundation of a ritual experience.

Cognitive Experience and Rituals: History, Memory, and Emotions

The relationship between rituals, history, and memory is clearly a productive one, in which an understanding of past rituals and performers can contribute to a better understanding of rituals in the present.Footnote ⁵² How we understand and access rituals as experiences and memories in a cognitive framework, however, is less clearly defined in classical scholarship. Simon Price, a leading scholar on ritual and memory in ancient history, had set out four contexts for the construction of memory: objects, locations (place and space), ritual actions, and textual narratives.Footnote ⁵³ Recent scholarship, such as Reference Dignas and SmithDignas and Smith’s 2012 volume Historical and Religious Memory in the Ancient World, dedicated to the late Simon Price, covers an impressive range of rituals across time and space and raises a number of questions about how ritual memory exists in the mind: is it stable or unstable depending on the approach, does it exist as only an image in the mind?Footnote ⁵⁴ These questions seem to be moving towards the concept of a cognitive framework for ritual and memory but, as observed by Julia Shear in her otherwise glowing review, engagement with broader interpretative frameworks and scholarship on ritual memory is needed:

Price’s contexts for constructing memory (objects, locations, ritual actions, and textual narratives) are very similar to the interpretive frameworks that have been employed by broader disciplines in assessing ritual performances; approaching rituals not only as scripted events but as individual and interactive cognitive ‘experiences’. Psychologists, philosophers, geographers, anthropologists, and archaeologists combine these contexts as part of a cognitive network through which concepts of ‘place’ and ‘space’ are defined: ‘Place is how we make the world meaningful and the way that we experience the world’; ‘Materiality, meaning and practice are combined in the production of a place of memory’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Anthropologists, psychologists, and scholars of ‘performance theory’ have used similar factors as a means of assessing how cognitive experiences impact the perception of ritual performances and their codification in memory.Footnote ⁵⁷ These interdisciplinary approaches assess ritual performances as embodied emotional events that are not only enhanced by cognitive experiences but defined by them.Footnote ⁵⁸ Studies of ritual spaces and performances illustrate how the experience of an event can transform a viewer’s concept of self, imbuing objects, spaces, and places with new meanings.Footnote ⁵⁹ Interdisciplinary scholarship on ritual and memory converge upon a similar point: how one experiences a ritual event impacts both its perception and its recollection.Footnote ⁶⁰ The inextricable connections between cognitive experience, the understanding of rituals, and their codification in memory are the founding principles of this volume and the tie that binds the individual case studies in the various chapters together.

Recent scholarship on rituals in ancient history has benefitted from broader interdisciplinary engagement in many ways. Of chief importance for this volume have been assessments of rituals that transcend traditional script-based approaches. As noted by many scholars, the limitations of ‘text’ or ‘script’-based approaches to ritual are manifold: this perspective presents ritual from a single (often elite) perspective, depicting rituals as static, repeated events with a universal perception, function, and meaning, rather than as subjective experiences.Footnote ⁶¹ Without situating rituals in emotional contexts or applying practical human constraints, one risks disassociating these experiences from the cognitive frameworks that were used to create and retrieve memories. Script-based rituals often present perfectly enacted events with positive outcomes, which stand in contrast to the elasticity and variation (in both experience and outcome) that pervade performances in ancient and modern contexts.Footnote ⁶²

Key research initiatives on this topic include Angelos Chaniotis’s ERC project The Social and Cultural Construction of Emotions which integrated text, object, location as well as an emotional context in the recreation of a ritual event.Footnote ⁶³ This study and those that have followed transcend traditional limitations by incorporating a broader scheme of material evidence together with concepts of object agency, embodied spaces, and sensory experiences to illustrate the dynamic nature of rituals as events with numerous possible perceptions, meanings, and outcomes.Footnote ⁶⁴ Similarly, Rüpke’s approach, shaped by the anthropologist Meredith McGuire, assesses ‘lived religion’ which is ‘reconstructed as everyday experiences, practises, expressions and interactions’, providing a broader framework for exploring rituals.Footnote ⁶⁵ This dynamic framework addresses a larger corpus of religious materials, practices, and outcomes, highlighting variance, deviance, and failure in ritual performances, despite claims of repetition, consistency, and positive outcomes.Footnote ⁶⁶ Both Rüpke and Chaniotis employ imaginative approaches to ritual reconstruction, addressing the emotional contexts of ritual accounts as individual experiences with divergent expectations and outcomes. Their surveys and many others advocate further investigation of specific ritual experiences through the application of interdisciplinary cognitive approaches.Footnote ⁶⁷ These scholars also employ a wider range of primary source materials connecting history (often based on literary sources) with epigraphy, material evidence, and archaeological sites.

Experiencing Rituals: Challenges in Cognitive Approaches

This volume contributes to existing dialogues on ritual and cognition by providing a series of individual case studies on cognitive experiences of ritual in the ancient world. Approaching memory and ritual as a ‘lived experience’, the chapters employ a range of cross- and inter-disciplinary perspectives as well as a broader line of questioning on how ritual proceedings were constructed, performed, processed, and remembered as an experience of the mind, the body, and the external environment (material world). This approach also builds upon Simon Price’s contexts of ritual (objects, locations, ritual actions, and textual narratives), using cognitive and sensory approaches to expand the scope of ritual as a cognitive and sensory experience. The ritual case studies in this volume are not meant to be definitive accounts of rituals but reflections of the plurality of experiences, perspectives, and outcomes an individual might have. Understanding how we experience events on a cognitive level is not so much a means of ‘knowing’ how rituals were perceived but a means of exploring what we don’t know about ritual experiences: how we are captives of subjective experiences, memories, and evidence. The variance of ritual experiences in these case studies illustrates both how and why dynamic approaches to ritual experiences are necessary, through a means of critical and imaginative engagement with a broad range of evidence.

Constructing a broad-ranging study of ritual experiences across the Roman world has a number of limitations. Providing one account of a ritual can present it as a singular or universal experience with a consistency in context, audience, atmosphere, performance, imagery, and outcome that may not reflect the reality of ritual performances across time and space.Footnote ⁶⁸ It is difficult to employ a ‘universal’ approach to assessments of ritual experiences – each place/space, each context, each ritual action and object, was as unique as the individuals or religious communities who participated in the event. Even when accounting for a successful recreation of the same environment and a perfect repetition of a specific ritual action, the shifting cognitive and affective states of the participants and performers would have influenced ritual experiences, rendering each experience inimitable. The existence of a single account of a ritual, therefore, should not be taken as proof of a singular experience or audience.

Assessing rituals as cognitive processes can be challenging: there are so many rituals, places, and experiences in antiquity; what can be gained by reconstructing a single experience? Several recent edited volumes on ritual and ritual experience address the study of specific and individual rituals as a means of exploring a single event within a broader framework of cognitive perspectives (e.g. how a ritual may have functioned socially, politically, spatially, historically, performatively).Footnote ⁶⁹ Chapters in this volume illustrate a number of ways in which cognitive approaches can contribute to our understanding of rituals as experiences. Blanka Misic’s Religious Learning Network (RLN) theoretical model (Chapter 1) illustrates how rituals could be learned and transmitted through engagement with objects, people, places, and events, which formed a dynamic network of memories. Chapter 2 by Emma-Jayne Graham and Chapter 3 by Vicky Jewell explore this concept further in terms of haptic experiences. These object-based studies employ interdisciplinary approaches to sensory engagement between objects, images, performers, communities, and places.Footnote ⁷⁰ Stepping beyond ritual objects themselves, this work also explores how one can recreate ritual experiences without surviving ritual objects, by using accounts of ritual and/or ritual performances in literature and epigraphy together with surviving ritual contexts. The final two chapters, Chapter 4 by Abigail Graham and Chapter 5 by Steven Muir, use cognitive approaches to explore the transformation of a ritual performance through a broad range of sources, from literary accounts to the ‘lived’ experience of an individual engaging with ritual objects and spaces.

Rituals As Cognitive Experiences: Differing Contexts and Approaches

Examining ritual experiences across a broad scope of time (from the late Republic to the fourth century CE), space (across the Roman Empire), and religion (Pagan and Christian, state cults and foreign cults in Rome, as well as local cults in context), the volume does not claim to provide a comprehensive survey of rituals and ritual experiences across the Graeco-Roman world. This expansive scope does, however, illustrate both the variability and syncretism that define ancient religion, demonstrating why its beliefs, rituals, sacred spaces, objects, performers, and audiences require dynamic and flexible approaches. On the whole, the volume aims to show how different cognitive approaches to experiencing and remembering rituals can contribute to our understanding of rituals as dynamic and emotional acts, which were subject to a lived experience. As Emma-Jayne Graham notes in Chapter 2 (p.84):

Each case study in this volume considers the role that experience and cognition could play in the perception of a ritual event; how a sensory experience with a specific place, time, and gestures could shape the meaning and perception of ritual as well as the way that it was remembered in the human mind.

In the first chapter Blanka Misic proposes a new, cognitive-based theoretical model for analysing rituals, called the Religious Learning Network (RLN) model, in order to explain how religious knowledge (including ritual proceedings) could be learned, remembered, and transmitted among worshippers. Relying on archaeological, iconographic, and epigraphic evidence, she tests the RLN model within a case study of Nutrices Augustae – a cult of protective mother-goddesses whose worship was almost exclusively restricted to the city of Poetovio (modern-day Ptuj, Slovenia), located in the Roman province of Pannonia Superior. The model sheds new light on the type of rituals performed within the cult and demonstrates that rituals were learned and transmitted through a combination of emotional attachment and repeated sensory exposure to fellow worshippers and the cult environment (objects, places, and events). These elements helped to create a dynamic network of memory associations in the form of a life-experience narrative for the worshippers, therefore facilitating the storage and retrieval of ritual memories.

In the second chapter, Emma-Jayne Graham examines religious knowledge from another cognitive perspective. Combining ‘lived religion’ with haptic, materially-informed approaches, she explores the important role that objects played in the production of religious knowledge. By examining the frieze of the Vestal Virgins from the Ara Pacis Augustae, Graham demonstrates that the diversity of ritual ‘lived’ experiences, combining human and more-than-human material things, created differing types of religious knowledge. In her chapter, Graham sheds new light not only on the possible ritual experiences of the Vestals but also on how the study of individualized religious knowledge can contribute to broadening our understanding of public and communal rituals.

In the third chapter Vicky Jewell adds to the analysis of haptic and materially-informed approaches by exploring how polychromy informed worshippers’ engagement with ritual space and ritual objects. By examining perceptions of colour on Mithraic reliefs and inside Mithraea, Jewell contributes to broadening our understanding of Mithraic ritual and ritual experience. Jewell combines ancient literary and philosophical explanations with modern scientific examinations of sight and perception of colour, in order to decode some of the semantic messages which colour may have conveyed to the ancient viewer and worshipper. Jewell shows that colour, in addition to form, design, and decoration of Mithraea, served to instil fundamental concepts of the universe among worshippers of Mithras.

In the fourth chapter, Abigail Graham applies cognitive theories to interpreting and reconstructing a specific ritual event: Salutaris’s procession at Ephesus in the second century CE. Through a careful examination of the monumental inscriptions (including a script of how the procession was meant to take place: Salutaris’s foundation), the surviving urban context, and a contemporary (albeit fictive) account of a procession in Ephesus, Graham attempts to reconstruct the ritual within practical and emotional constraints, juxtaposing the claims of the text with the reality of the ritual experience. Employing Chaniotis’s ‘Murphy’s Law of Ritual Events’, she explores the variant experiences and outcomes (successes and failures) for viewers, performers, as well as the objects, spaces, and places involved. Is repetition a medium for the expression of solidarity or change? Her survey of a single ritual event illustrates the complexity and capricious nature of performances as emotional and sensory experiences, whose perception and memory were subject to many variables.

In the fifth chapter of the volume Steven Muir reconstructs the Christian pilgrim Egeria’s experience of a Good Friday ritual in Jerusalem during the fourth century CE. Through a detailed consideration of literature, archaeological context, and object agency, Muir considers the networks through which Christian rituals were experienced, remembered, and recorded as complex ritual drama. Examining the archaeological site and space of the sacred procession, he employs aspects of place theory as a means of situating the ritual experience within a specific context: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Then, applying performance theory to the complex relationships between individuals and ritual objects (e.g. the ring of Solomon, fragments of the true cross), Muir assesses the sensory and emotional engagement between performers and a network of symbolic images or ‘the props of faith’. His study illustrates how ritual performances could transform ritual objects, which were often constructed for the performance, from props into powerful and emotive symbols of faith.

Overall, this volume is an attempt to explore the cognitive processes through which we experience rituals and the role this framework can play in embedding meaning. Exploring the different sensory and cognitive networks of ritual experience in Roman religion, these studies illustrate the plurality of ways one could experience and remember a ritual. By critically assessing and recreating rituals and their sources, this work also demonstrates the various ways that one can approach rituals as dynamic and emotive experiences. The aim is to set singular ‘eyewitness’ accounts within a broader cognitive network of lived experiences and embodied interactions between individuals, objects, spaces, and actions. The global appeal of this work lies in the emerging field of study (cognitive and sensory experience), the broad range of material (Pagan and Christian), and the geographic scope of the work (from a local temple in Pannonia, to an iconic monument in Rome, to a spectacular festival at Ephesus), which offer a wide yet uniquely inclusive view of Roman religion. These case studies contribute to scholarship across a broad range of disciplines, engaging readers at various career stages from undergraduates to experts in fields of history, archaeology, religion, anthropology, memory studies, and beyond.

Concluding Thoughts

In his 2017 article, Armin W. Geertz praises cross- and inter-disciplinary scholarship stating: ‘It is exciting and admirable that scholars of the classics have opened their arms to the new cognitive approaches and the results and theories of neuropsychologists. This area is indeed in urgent need of exploration because their results are clearly relevant to our field of expertise.’Footnote ⁷¹

The present volume is an answer to his call and hopes to further the disciplines of cognitive historiography and cognitive science of religion by applying and testing cognitive theories within a wider array of Graeco-Roman cults than has been done before (Nutrices Augustae, Vestal Virgins, Artemis), as well as by contributing new cognitive perspectives to more conspicuous religions (by examining theatrical aspects of Christian rituals, and effects of polychromy on ritual experience in the cult of Mithras).

In approaching the study of ritual and ritual experience from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives (archaeology, classics and ancient history, religious studies, psychology and cognitive sciences, sensory studies, and performance studies) this volume offers scholars and students in Humanities and Social Sciences a wide yet uniquely inclusive view of Roman religion. Many preceding publications on Roman religion are constrained not only by disciplinary barriers (requiring advanced knowledge of ancient languages, cultures, and disciplinary terminology); but also by topical (often focusing on a specific cult, religion and/or religious practice) and geographical (examining a specific province or settlement) limitations. This approach can impede non-specialist readers from gaining a grasp of the complexities of Roman religion. By critically examining a series of different rituals and concomitant religious experiences across time and space in the Roman Empire, this volume emphasizes the universal importance of cognition in constructing, performing, experiencing, and remembering religious rituals. Focusing on cognitive and sensory experiences of Roman ritual is also an approach to ancient religion that is relatable to broader audiences – all of whom have at one point in their lives participated in a ritual. Observations made in this work represent a point of connection between cultures, societies, and religions both ancient and modern, with global relevance and transdisciplinary application.