“Votives With Motives” Podcast Project

*Intro Music Begins*

 

Sylvia [00:00:00] Hello, welcome to Votives with Motives.

 

Lily [00:00:00] The podcast about votives.

 

Sylvia [00:00:01] I’m Sylvia. I’m a classics and studio art double major.

 

Lily [00:00:05] I’m Lily. I am a classics and anthropology double major.

 

Gwen [00:00:10] I’m Gwen. I’m an art history major.

 

Jax [00:00:12] I am Jax. I am a religion and art history major.

 

Sylvia [00:00:17] Thank you for coming. We are here to have a chat about the ancient Greek gods and how we can see similarities between how they were worshiped in ancient Greece and how other people worship today. And we hope that you’ll come along and join us for the ride. So, Lily, how do we kind of hear about the world of ancient Greek ritual and the ancient Greek deities from material culture in sort of archeology and anthro?

 

Lily [00:00:48] So a lot of what we know about Greek rituals is because of the extensive archeological record of Greece. I mean, there are thousands upon thousands of artifacts that have been found throughout Greece in the Mediterranean. So from there, we can discern a lot, a lot of information about how ritual religion sort of played out back then, as well as through like word of mouth myth. So it’s those two sources of information that we use to analyze what we find. Because when you see art and you see votives, for example, that suggest relation to each other, they are able to be paired and then talked about and written about.

 

Sylvia [00:01:31] And then we can make conjectures based on what we are finding from there as well, which allows us to sort of piece together the story of classics in ancient Greece. And once we hear about this, I know a lot of ancient Greek theories were practiced with some people following them in some areas and some people following them a bit differently in other areas with their own defined idea of the deity they’re worshiping. So Gwen do we see that at all in like, religions as they pop up later?

 

Gwen [00:02:01] Yeah. So I’m coming from this with a perspective and like a pretty deep background with the Roman Catholic faith. I will say with specifically Roman Catholicism, we have saints and they don’t really function the same way that the Greek gods would because we do technically fall under monotheism. So how I kind of like describe the Saints is that they’re like the models that you want to be when you’re following Roman Catholicism. They’re like kind of considered to be the best examples of what you should be,as someone that follows this faith. And the way you like kind of worship them is that a lot of places will have you like lit candles for them at like it’s not really an altar. It’s just like this little like stand that has candles and there’s either a statue or stained glass of the saint and you light a candle, say a prayer for whatever your intention is. I don’t know if there’s really anything like that with the ancient Greek religion.

 

Sylvia [00:03:03] There are also a lot of rituals that take place around all of the polytheistic gods, and I feel like so much of religion is steeped in ritual. So, I mean, like, Jax, are there any sort of rituals that we see in Roman Catholicism or other forms of Catholicism that we can compare with the ancient Greek ones?

 

Jax [00:03:27] Absolutely. In modern-day Catholicism, there are the saints and there is the tradition of lighting votives for them. They also have feast days, which is something that we would see something similar to in the ancient religions as well. There’s also the whole ritual of communion with the wafer and the wine and the prayers and the specific movements and dress and sounds and scents and how it is not just an action, it is a performance in a way with the procession and priests and helpers and everything. So those are some two very big kind of ways we can compare ancient polytheistic religion practices to modern monotheistic practices.

 

Sylvia [00:04:32] Could you tell us a little bit more about what sort of would happen on these bigger feast days?

 

Jax [00:04:39] Well, it’s more of a celebration of that saint. So there are so many saints. There are saints particular to different regions. For example, there is Saint Nicholas, who is commonly thought about as Santa, though he is not in this context. He is Saint Nicholas of Myra, and he is the patron saint of Greece. And his story, his legend, is one steeped in both gift-giving piety and also sailing. And so there’s a lot of sailboat imagery and thought about sailing on his feast day, as well as obviously eating and celebrating together.

 

Sylvia [00:05:26] Because this is something that would happen once a year. A feast day is like a saint gets their special day every year. And that is also something that we do see in ancient Greece with the polytheistic gods where we see each God has a specific festival and a specific place that celebrates them in a certain aspect. And there will be rituals, there will be feasting and there will be things that they do that are associated with that God paying homage to that God in that aspect, in the way that we can with Saint Nicholas, with sailing. But Gwen, I know you have a background, but is there anything you were wondering about sort of the classical world as well?

 

Gwen [00:06:04] Yeah, there definitely is a lot that I don’t know personally about the classical world. So one of the questions. This is going to go to Lily. What archeological evidence do you know that supports the info we have on the Greek pantheon? Is there anything that was ever unexpected and changed what we know about it?

 

Lily [00:06:23] So the archeological record is something that constantly changes. So it’s not stagnant. It’s constantly being updated. And with every new find that we have, it either is a huge revelation or it’s just a smaller piece of the puzzle that kind of gives us more information about what we already know. So as we already know, going back to the topic of food from last segment was that people, you know, they eat and they talk and they spend time with one another. And we have found evidence of that all throughout Greece. And it kind of varied where you were. So if you were near the coast, a lot of the meals that you would be having would be seafood and mainly based on like ocean-acquired meals. So there were findings of scallop shells, other mollusks and other items that are votives like shells, like really pretty shells that would have been dedicated to gods as well as used in some sort of ritual to whichever god it would be. So I found a little bit of information about how Demeter had been given seashells for the start of a harvest, and that was like an ocean harvest, I suppose. And that’s kind of what I found about it, as well as for Apollo, where he has this background and like being the sea, what one might call a patron saint of like seafarers back then, you know, they really look to him for guidance on the water. And so towns would dedicate seashells and like dinners to him in that same way that we do to our patron saints.

 

Gwen [00:07:58] That’s definitely really cool. I didn’t know that. I’m really happy that I do now. Okay, so this one’s going to go to Sylvia. There’s obviously a lot of ancient Greek religious art, but what about classical texts that match it? How is that are made and used according to classical text? And is it really true?

 

Sylvia [00:08:19] So “truth” is a thing that’s a little bit hard to pin down, but we do see a lot of religious art on vases and a lot of paintings on ceramics. And some of these we can match up with ancient mythological texts that we have. We do have both, of course, The Iliad and The Odyssey, which were written by Homer. And both of these are kind of the baseline for how we think about the ancient Greek pantheon. They are some of the older texts that we have, and they’re ones that have been identified as sort of like a Greek national epic. And we do have art that backs up what we see there. We have art featuring Achilles. We have art featuring many of these people. And we also find a lot of art that matches up what we have in ancient Greek tragic plays. We have a lot of art of Hercules, who, of course, we know from ancient Greek myths and all of these things. So while the gods very much vary from place to place, there are characters that show up again and again, and these myths are retold on the vases in that way.

 

Lily [00:09:36] It’s from Homer that we know a lot of information about what pastimes were like, right? We also get a lot of geographical and fit information from him. And I found an instance of how Homer had written about this particular cave, the Cave of Eleuthia at Knossos, this cave. He wrote about it, and it was actually found by archeologists.

 

Sylvia [00:10:00] That is super cool!

 

Lily [00:10:01] They found ritual remains of like, practicing within the cave. And then I also wanted to talk a little bit about tablets, because tablets are where we get a lot of literary evidence. But there are so many tablets that we’ve found in the years that how is so much information. There are so many. And there’s one in particular. It’s called TN316 and it has inscriptions on it that talk about making dedications, like who made them, who they made them to, why they made them, what they made. So there is a lot of literary evidence, not just in texts, but also on tablets.

 

Sylvia [00:10:36] Yeah, but a lot of religious art does back up. What we see in plays from the time in plays like the Oresteia and other things like that. So in ancient Greece, these myths were definitely stories that were told and these stories were told both in play form, in literature form and then in artwork. So the truth doesn’t necessarily matter. What matters is that there were these recurring characters that these people put faith in.

 

Lily [00:11:06] Okay, so slightly shifting topic. This question is for Sylvia. What is the significance of the Greek pantheon of gods in relation to ancient religion? How might one be able to contrast it with the Roman pantheon of gods?

 

Sylvia [00:11:21] So a lot of people think that the Greek and Roman pantheons are kind of 1 to 1. You know, Ares is Mars, Athena is Minerva, Hera is Juno and all of that. But they’re actually a little bit different. They are sort of evolutions of the ancient Greek pantheon, but they’re also evolutions of a different Etruscan pantheon, which is why the gods differ in importance. Athena is super-duper important to Greek religion, but Minerva is less important to Roman religion. So we see different prioritization of gods, gods with different levels of power, gods with different methods of worship. So while we see that there is a lot of parallels between the two, we do also need to remember that there are differences there as well. In Roman religion, we see that there are two different triads that are very important. We have the Capitoline and the Aventine Triad, and the Capitoline Triad was a group of three deities that were very important to the aristocracy in Rome. And this is Jupiter, Juno and Minerva. So we do see Athena / Minerva being very important there, but she’s important in a different context and a different association than she is as Athena, where she is a lot more militant, and she has a lot more different aspects. A lot of the Roman deities only have like maybe a couple aspects versus a different aspect for each city-state that you’re in.

 

Lily [00:12:50] You know, whenever I think of Greek and Roman pantheons and like trying to match them up, I’ve kind of like using Athena as an example. I never saw her directly related to Minerva. I kind of saw her as maybe Minerva and the goddess Roma like together. That would be if that was something that existed. Yeah. I feel like those two gods together would be more like Athena than Minerva is by herself.

 

Sylvia [00:13:20] They would definitely be. Roma is sort of a personification of Rome as a goddess. She is militant, but she also sort of takes care of Rome as a city in the same way that Athena Polias does that for the city of Athens. She can be militant. She can be Athena Nike, which is Athena in a victorious aspect, or she can be Athena in a craft person aspect with her being the patron of weaving versus Rome, splitting that up into several different deities who can have different aspects in terms of their military power.

 

Lily [00:13:54] All right. Shifting from Roman-like symbology, I kind of want to talk a little bit about Greek symbology. So this question goes out to Gwen. How does symbology of the Greek pantheon of gods display itself within the realm of art history? Where does it appear and how does it manifest?

 

Gwen [00:14:11] Well, I’ll start with how it first comes up. So like the first real thing that we have of any sort of ancient Greek art comes from the Mycenaeans. And I mean from what I have researched, there’s a lot of debate on what this art actually is, but so far what they have been able to identify is more just like mythological creatures, not necessarily any of the gods yet. So I think like the Art of the Gods comes a lot later on when we start thinking of like the temples that we know now. I feel like the eras that those are from. That’s when I really start getting like the Greek art. But the way it displays itself definitely is a little bit tricky. Because we do see it in Greece itself. But I know we’re trying to get away from the topic of Rome, but it’s just kind of impossible to get away from it because the Romans did take so much of their inspirations from Greece. And one of the biggest artworks that comes to mind when I feel like comparing these things is the loggia di psyche. So basically it’s the whole like wedding story of psyche and Eros. And this is in the villa farnesina. Yeah. So it’s just like this giant villa, the fresco itself, it’s on the ceiling, it’s by Rafael, and it kind of like presents itself as like a dining hall situation. And the whole thing is just here’s this big celebration in a place where we would do celebration. So that’s definitely how it comes up. In later art history is that you see it as like a symbolism situation where like they take these myths and they make frescoes out of them and they put them in certain rooms of our homes, and it symbolizes like what event would be going on in that home, like specifically with this, like, dining hall situation.

 

Lily [00:16:10] All right. Well, shifting over, I wanted to ask you, Jax, is there any sort of contention surrounding the excavation of religious sites? When we think of places like Rome and of Greece that are highly excavated. It’s hard not to think about how people back then might feel now about their sites being dug up and things being taken and put in museums. Do you feel any sort of way about that as somebody who is very in touch with their religion and, you know, religious sites?

 

Jax [00:16:39] There’s always going to be contention around excavation of religious sites. There are going to be the people who say, no, no, no, leave it as it is. And then there are going to be the people who go “yay” dig it up. And I’m somewhere in the middle. I find myself personally okay with the excavation as long as it’s done properly and with respect for the religion. I know there’s the tomb of Saint Peter underneath the Vatican, which has spent a lot of time getting excavated, but very carefully done. And it is it has been and still is a place of worship. And something like that also happened in Delphi, I believe, where through one cataclysm or another, things got destroyed and shifted. And then a new group of Greeks came and built a new thing and continued to worship and sometimes even repaired the old, damaged pieces and built them up again. So I think this idea of excavating when it is involving taking things away, that’s when things get really questionable. But when it is involved with building things back up to continue worship in the space where they were meant to be worshipped, I think that’s a truly beautiful thing.

 

Lily [00:18:00] I mean, as somebody who is currently in an excavating class, I cannot even stress how much care we take with everything we take out. And it isn’t even a religious site, it’s just a site out in Northwoods well, you know, I’m digging out of old rusty nails and we’re taking so much care, so I can’t even imagine what it might look like over at religious sites where I imagine the care is just tenfold.

 

Jax [00:18:24] So, Sylvia, how is the belief in a single god or goddess used as a way to worship the Pantheon as a whole, if it ever was?

 

Sylvia [00:18:35] So what we see whenever there’s a large group of deities is that there are always going to be some that are going to be more important for people than others are. Say you’re, you know, average Joe Athenian Weaver. You would feel a super strong tie to Athena in pretty much every aspect of your life versus, say, your average Joe Athenian blacksmith. You might have more of an influence by Hephaestos on you with your personal worship. So worship of any of these deities is a way to worship pantheon and give strength to the Pantheon. But there’s always going to be one person who you’re going to pay special attribute to as your patron deity of a sort. The deity that oversees the direct aspects of your life is going to be the one that you probably worship the most. And because everyone has a different deity that is their special deity for them, they all do get worshiped together as a whole. And the collective Greece worships a collective pantheon. Even if each person is paying special attention to just their 1 or 2 people.

 

Jax [00:19:48] Fascinating. Thank you so much. Lily, archeologically speaking, what are the kinds of motives and dedications that we might find for deities at any given site, seeing how deities were worshipped?

 

Lily [00:20:03] So at any given site, you’ll find a variety of different votives and they’ll all range in either quality and quantity and what they’re made of. So some lower, I guess, quality votives, although they were all valued pretty much the same way. It didn’t really matter what the votive was made for. When you thought about religion, it was more that you were giving it and the reason why you were giving it would have been something like shells or maybe rocks or something as a gift to the deity. Some higher-quality items might be bronze statuettes, jewelry, any sort of precious metals. More precious stones would be something that somebody who is wealthier might give or that a city might give. And these votives, we found them in treasuries and in and around altars. They’re found here and there. And there’s just a wide variety. And usually those of the same variety would be found in the same areas. So, when it comes to things like jewelry and bronze figurines, terracotta figurines, and ceramic vessels, those survive a lot better than something, say, like a shell or food scraps, like bones from a sacrifice because those materials that have more carbon in them tend to break down. We’re talking about votives from thousands of years ago.

 

Jax [00:21:29] Thank you. And again, kind of bouncing off of that religious object trajectory, how were the cult of saints seen as similar to the Greek and Roman pantheon and how were their art objects similar or different to that of Greek offerings?

 

Gwen [00:21:52] Yeah. So I feel like with like the cult of saints and objects meant for them, they kind of are meant for viewing in some senses because like, what I mentioned earlier, the like setups for them where you see the statue or a stained glass figure of them like they’re very much meant for viewing. And then you also get little trinket type things for the Saints. So I feel like that’s a little bit different from what I’ve learned about how the Greek gods were worshiped. Specifically, when I think of the temples and like the statues that are there specifically just for the god and no one really sees them. The way like treasuries function too like even though sometimes they kind of don’t always end up being really for the god and they’re more just a showing-off thing. They also very much remind me of how people will like, give certain things to saints. Like they’ll leave it at the feet of statues. And you see this a lot with like Saints that we still have the bodies of people who do like really big worship to those saints because they’re very special. Having the Saints body intact is very rare. But like even just like a body part, like that’s like such a big deal. So like they get worshiped a lot. That reminds me of the Treasuries, which is like giving all of these meaningful things to the gods.

 

Sylvia [00:23:16] So I know that sometimes having the bodies of the saints doesn’t always entirely match up with how many fingers of them might have actually existed. Is it important that they are the actual bones of the figure, or is it a little bit more about the intention of it? Like how we know with like the ancient Greek idols of the gods didn’t matter, that it wasn’t actually the god for all intents and purposes, it’s the god, is it kind of the same way with bodies of saints?

 

Jax [00:23:46] So one of the more common examples of this saint has way too many body parts is John the Baptist and his four heads. They’re all equally worshiped because there is no consensus as to which head is truly John the Baptist’s head, if any of them even are. But they’ve all performed miracles. They’ve all become so worshiped that the idea of getting rid of one of them is just inconceivable because this is the head of John the Baptist. Even if there are three others that are also the head of John the Baptist, as well as with fragments of the cross of Jesus Christ, because Jesus and Mary did not leave bodily remains. So the cross and its fragments are hugely popular relics, and there’s enough cross fragments to make about like ten crosses. But we don’t talk about that because we again, we can’t exactly say which one is a relic, which means we can’t say which one isn’t a relic. So they’re all relics and they’re all worshiped as relics, which means they’re relics. And it’s about– sometimes it is just about the intent and the worship that even if we can’t exactly prove that it is the true cross, it’s basically the true cross.

 

*Outro Music Begins*

 

Sylvia [00:25:11] This has been votives with motives. Some of the sources we referenced were: Burkert’s Social Functions of Cult, Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey,

 

Lily [00:25:23] and for archeological anecdotes I referenced chapter ten of Andrea Hartmann’s book Values and Revaluations titled Beyond the Bones: Relics and Greek Temples, as well as a 1960 article by Michael Jameson from the journal, Archaeology, called “Mycenean Religion,” and an article by William F. Albright titled “Archaeology and Religion” from 1959.