Between Cognition and Culture Theorizin PDF

Pongratz-Leisten, Beate, and Karen Sonik.
Between Cognition and Culture: Theorizing the

Materiality of Divine Agency in Cross-Cultural Perspective. In The Materiality of Divine
Agency, edited by B. Pongratz-Leisten and K. Sonik. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2015.
Beate Pongratz-Leisten and Karen Sonik
Between Cognition and Culture: Theorizing

the Materiality of Divine Agency in CrossCultural Perspective
Abstract: Specifically addressing the means and manner whereby the divine
might be materialized or presenced in a particular matrix, divine images might
act on and interact with individuals, and inanimate or even animate objects or
entities might acquire a measure of divine agency so that they come to function, in effect, as (secondary) divine agents, this contribution (as well as the
diverse essays contained in this volume) maintains a central emphasis on and
exploration of the communicative potential and actuality of the material divine. It also explores, as a corollary, such issues as mimesis and portraiture in
the context of divine representations, the definition and application of the terms
animate and anthropomorphic to the material and materialized divine, and the
nuanced distinctions between the concepts of image, likeness, and representation as these are negotiated in diverse cultural and spatiotemporal contexts.
Keywords: Agency, animacy, divine, image, likeness, materiality, mimesis,
presence, representation
1 Matter Matters and Materiality

In recent decades, the development of materiality as a critical term and the
burgeoning interest in pursuing its implications across diverse disciplines
anthropology, art history, sociology, and the history and cognitive science of
religion among these has seen the expansion and nuancing of its use and
meaning beyond mere corporeity, the possession of physical substance.1 It is
1 This proliferation of uses across diverse disciplines has had some unfortunate repercussions: the concept of materiality has been (rightfully) criticized as not merely unwieldy but,
indeed, sometimes utterly opaque and impenetrable, Ingold 2007. It is vital, consequently, to
delineate those aspects of or approaches to materiality that are specifically relevant where the
concept is being deployed.
Beate Pongratz-Leisten, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University,
15 East 84 th Street New York, NY 10028, e-mail: bpl2@nyu.edu
Karen Sonik, Department of Art & Art History, Auburn University, 108 Biggin Hall, Auburn,
AL 36849, e-mail: ksonik@auburn.edu
frequently if not always intentionally delineated as overlapping with material

culture,2 itself a complex and somewhat protean concept diversely or even simultaneously signifying the material expression or reflection of human behavior or practice (Glassie 1999: 41),3 an active and dynamic social practice constitutive of the social order (Preucel 2006: 5),4 and a scaffold for distributed
cognition (Dunbar et al. 2010: 4; DeMarrais et al. 2004; Renfrew and Scarre
1998).5 In addition to these inherited implications, materiality has been productively delineated as a multifaceted concept in its own right: a means of
exploring both immateriality, the merely apparent, behind which lies that
which is real (Miller 2005: 1),6 and mutuality, the myriad ways in which material culture mediates social being (Preucel 2006: 5; Gosden 1994: 82 ff.), as
well as comprising a relational perspective on materials, one that obliges us
to think about their properties, qualities, or affordances (Hodder 2012: 191;
Ingold 2007; Graves-Brown 2000: 4).7
Concomitant with a renewed emphasis on the material, the eliding or obscuring of the traditional boundaries erected between art and nature (Pomian
1990: 6979; Daston and Park 1998: 26576; Daston 2004: 21, 24), subject and
object (Gell 1998; Miller 2005; Marcoulatos 2003), person and non-person (Hallowell 1960; Kopytoff 1986; Dubois 2003; Knappett 2005), human and nonhuman (Latour 1993, 1999), the mental and the material (Renfrew and Scarre
1998; DeMarrais et al. 2004), the functional and the symbolic (Hodder 1982;
Knappett 2005: 8), and spirit and matter (Keane 2003; Meskell 2005) along-
2 Some of the nuances of the various scholarly conceptualizations of material culture, materiality, and material agency are usefully unpacked in Hicks 2010 and further elucidated (if not
necessarily consistently interpreted) in the various other contributions contained in Hicks and
Beaudry 2010.
3 Any study of material culture, therefore, must inevitably grapple with its semiotic dimension
since material culture being a product of human activity inevitably signifies something
other than itself, Preucel 2006: 4.
4 As an example of this active functioning of material culture to shape, support, or constitute
social order, Preucel (2006: 5) cited Hodders (1982: 85) exploration of how different artifact
types could diversely function to support or to disrupt specific ethnic distinctions or flows of
information within the context of the Baringo district in Kenya.
5 For the elucidation of things in motion, see Appadurai 1986a: 5 ff.; Kopytoff 1986. For the
disembodiment of mind into material culture, with material culture not only comprising an
expression of human cognition but also playing an active role in the formulation of thoughts
and the transmission of ideas, see also Mithen 1998b: 78.
6 See also fn. 3 above.
7 Affordances were succinctly described by Graves-Brown (2000: 4) as characteristics of the
world that emerged only in the relationship between actor and matter. See, further, Gibson
1977, 1979; Lovelace 1991; Williams and Costall 2000.
Between Cognition and Culture
side a developing interest in thoroughly elucidating specific object worlds and

biographies (Kopytoff 1986; Gosden 1999; Meskell 2004b) has given rise to a
new and fruitful discourse on matters of matter in which the concept of materiality continues to play a central role.
The intention of the current volume is to scrutinize the notion of materiality in its contact with the divine and to reconsider its implications for human
cognition. Prerequisite to such an undertaking is the understanding that the
human mind operates using representations or mental contents pictorial,
compositional, and abstract and that experience automatically organizes
these in broader frameworks or schemas.8 Taking such cognitive mental states
and processes into account transforms the approach to materiality taken here
into something distinct from the consideration of matter as mere physical stuff,
that which is visible or tangible to the senses. If matter matters, it is the mental
framework assigning it meaning in particular institutional and cultural contexts that provides the explanatory pattern for why it matters. The contexts in
which it might occur, moreover, are by no means static or singular, so that
objects might come down to us with an entire complex trajectory. This approach to materiality, while it acknowledges alterations in the meaning of matter that might (and do) develop over time, should still be regarded as distinct
from the life history approach to things that has taken (productive) root in the
humanities and social science over the past three decades (i.e. Appadurai
1986b; Schiffer 1999; Meskell 2004b; Morgan 2010).
The cognitive approach espoused here, based on the epistemological condition that no human being can have direct knowledge of any thing (Carruthers 1998: 14) but depends rather on memory and active recollection working, essentially, by association not only allows for but, indeed, demands the
use of information gleaned from textual sources where it is available. It ties
into Mark Johnsons rejection of the rigid objectivist separation of understanding from sensation and imagination and his call for a theory of meaning that
highlights the dynamic, interactive character of understanding (Johnson
1990: 175; Lakoff and Johnson 2003). Understanding an object is a historically
8 Schemas or schemata, first postulated by the British psychologist Frederic C. Bartlett (1932)
to theorize the process whereby the past is flexibly utilized both to adapt to the contemporary
environment and to prepare for the future environment (Wagoner 2012: 1040), have since been
extensively explored and elucidated; see the discussions in Weisberg and Reeves 2013: 101
104; Anastasio et al. 2012: 12759; Hollingworth 2008: 14446 (specifically on scene schemas);
Brewer 2000. While there is some variability in the definition of the concept of schema, it
might generally be described as denoting a generic (and dynamic) knowledge structure by
which concepts and experiences are organized and processed.
and culturally embedded, humanly embodied, imaginatively structured event,

the meaning of which is always tied to a particular community.9 Meaning, in
such a context, becomes a matter of relatedness that is irreducibly intentional:
a mental event or symbol may possess meaning only provided there exists
some one for whom it is meaningful by virtue of its relation to something
beyond itself (Johnson 1990: 177) in this case taking divinity as a referent.
It is the specific performative actions of an individual, grounded in his or her
understanding and imagination, that establish a relationship between an agent
operating on behalf of a divinity and the divinity itself as referent and that
enables us to speak of objects or images as agents or even (detachable) parts
of the composite divine.10 In this point in particular, then, the stance on materiality adopted here diverges from that often adopted in material culture studies, according to which (materially existing) things possess a significance, and
a capacity to affect the world, that is independent of human action or manipulation of them (Tilley et al. 2006: 4).11 Whether meaning may actually be severed from language in this manner, indeed, remains unclear, and studies on
cognition continue to debate this point. The approach adopted here regards
cultural knowledge and cultural memory as central to and inextricable from
any discussion of the materiality of things, particularly as in this volume
things that have been assigned sacred status due to their consecration, their
use in cultic contexts, or their functioning as (secondary) divine agents.
2 A Definition of Terms: Divine, Sacral, and

Animate(d) Things
It is useful to include here a brief definition and elucidation of key terms and
concepts considered in this chapter and in the volume at large:12 divine, sacral
9 The contributions contained in DeMarrais et al. 2004 address some of these concerns.
10 The concept of the partible person, as delineated in Strathern 1988, and the concept of the
partible mind, as delineated in Gell 1998, have contributed to a productive conception of the
composite divine; see also (discussing the Mesopotamian context specifically) Pongratz-Leisten, this volume, 2011; also Bahrani 2003: 137.
11 Material culture meanings, as compared in Hodder (1989: 6478, 73) to meanings in language, have indeed been described as less logical and more immediate, use-bound and contextual than meanings in language, and, by virtue of these qualities, as non-arbitrary. While
this argument must necessarily be examined on its own merits, it emphasizes the necessity of
elucidating material culture meanings where possible.
12 Significant care has been taken, wherever possible, to ensure a consistency in the use and
meaning of specific terms and language throughout this volume.
or sacred, and presence. (Agency or doing, the capacity to act as a person or

at least social other, and anthropomorphism, the possession of human physical form and/or other human qualities, characteristics, or behaviors, are elucidated in the pertinent sections below.) The term divine, notably, is adopted
where appropriate and where possible in preference to the term God or gods;
it has the benefit of being both sufficiently neutral and sufficiently nonspecific
to be broadly applicable in the type of cross-cultural discussion undertaken
here. Divinity, moreover, need not necessarily be localized in a singular agent,
anthropomorphic or otherwise, but may also comprise a relative rather than
an absolute status, a cluster of qualities applicable and applied to varying degrees to a range of different types of things.13
Similarly broadly applied are the terms sacral or sacred, which describe
things deriving from, offering a channel or a portal to, or otherwise being formally associated with religious practice or even identified with the divine. Sacred objects, in opposition to mundane or even profane ones, were famously
defined by Durkheim (1964 [1915]: 47) as things set apart and forbidden. This
definition may be retained here provided that sacred (as divine) is recognized
as a relative rather than an absolute status, one existing on the latter end of
the continuum stretching between the ordinary and the special, and that thing
is understood as encompassing not merely material objects or matter but also
persons, phenomena, or events.14
13 This conceptualization of the divine as a relative category rather than an absolute one was
developed by Gradel (2002: 26) with respect to Rome and was productively applied to the Near
East by Pongratz-Leisten (2011 and this volume), who noted that divinity as a relative status
can be assigned to living and dead kings, ancestors, steles, and cultic paraphernalia. Further
pertinent analyses of divinities and divine status in Mesopotamia appear in Selz 1997, 2008;
Porter 2000, 2009. See also, on the challenges of constructing any hard and fast divisions
between the various supernatural (interstitial) entities of Mesopotamia, which overlap in various features and modes of functioning, Sonik 2013a.
14 A considered analysis of Durkheims treatment of the sacred appears in Riley 2005. Discussing things set apart or special (whether positive or negative), Taves (2009: 1014, 2729)
has also productively drawn on Kopytoffs (1986, esp. pp. 7383) analysis of the processes of
singularization and individualization. Importantly, the distinction drawn between sacred and
profane/mundane/secular is neither absolute nor applicable in all contexts, a point that has
been productively elucidated in a number of recent symposia and volumes on the ancient and
medieval worlds; see, as a small sample of these works, Ragavan 2013 (publishing a 2012
Oriental Institute Seminar), Walker and Luyster 2009 (publishing the results of a 2006 College
Art Association session); Gerstel 2006 (publishing a 2003 Dumbarton Oaks Symposium). Pertinent case studies forcing us to confront the fact that the borders between secular and profane
or mundane are often neither what nor where we might expect them to be, if they are to be
located at all, include two particularly striking material examples from the western medieval
world: the secular and sometimes sexually explicit or even apparently obscene pilgrim(age)
The term animate is applied here to describe the awakening of specific

divine images or objects as well as the presencing (discussed below) of the
divine within particular material matrices.15 In some cases, certainly, one might
better discuss such sacral or divine things within the framework quite literally, in some cases of things that talk, composites of different species that
straddle boundaries between kinds (Daston 2004: 21). The term animate,
however, remains useful in that it foregrounds a practical grappling between
made things, which are produced or crafted through human agency or mediation, and divine or sacred things, with respect to which human agency is often
effaced or even explicitly denied a grappling that frequently leaves traces in
originating contexts even where it has been deliberately downplayed or effaced
in theological theorizing. The Greek term acheiropoieta, for example, identifies
miraculous portraits or representations that were not made by any [human]
hand, encompassing in the Christian tradition such images as the Mandylion
(Image of Edessa). The acheiropoieta are not limited to this context, however;
ancient Greek sources include various accounts of divine images that had miraculously appeared, having fallen perhaps from the heavens or yielded by the
seas, and that were understood as products of divine rather than human agency.16 In Mesopotamia, for its part, written sources referred to the birth (Sumerian tu(d); Akkadian [w]aldu) rather than the making or crafting (epu) of cult
statues, which could also be recognized as divine or gods (ilu) even prior to
the performance of the rituals (ms p and pt p) that enabled them to interact
with humans and to both receive and give attention (Walker and Dick 1999:
badges, which are extant especially from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Koldeweij
1999, 2005; Jones 2002, 2004; Stockhorst 2009), and the confounding (at first and even second
or third sight) grotesque, bizarre, and sometimes astonishingly graphic renderings in the margins of otherwise sober religious manuscripts (Randall 1966; Camille 1992, 1994; Hamburger
1993; Nishimura 2009). This being said, the delineation of particular spaces, objects, and persons as sacred in specific (if delimited) contexts remains both legitimate and, in our opinion,
necessary for analytical purposes.
15 The term animate(d) is here used in preference to living (vivified or enlivened) as a descriptor for matter or images perceived in their originating contexts as possessing or attributed with
agency: (social) agency, which may be possessed by all manner of things and images, is not
equivalent to biological life or to the full spectrum of human agency, though this latter may
be possessed or demonstrated to a greater degree by animate(d) formally, spontaneously, or
otherwise matter. The term living image (Freedberg 1989; Mitchell 2005) is deliberately eschewed here to avoid entanglement with certain unintended connotations that it has acquired
in recent theorizing; see Van Eck 2010: 18 n. 3.
16 The ancient Greek accounts of divine images linked with ephiphanic arrival narratives is
thoughtfully explored in Platt 2011: 92100. See also main text below for a more detailed discussion of this phenomenon.
116 ff.; Smith 2001: 18487).17 The ms p, moreover, also included an explicit
and quite thorough disavowal of human intervention in the making of the divine image by the craftsmen involved (Berlejung 1997: 6162), suggesting that
this remained something of a sensitive point: the hands of the craftsmen involved in the making of the statue were in a symbolic but quite viscerally
effective gesture severed using a tamarisk wood sword; the craftsmen swore
that the craft deities rather than they (the human makers) were essentially
responsible for the making of the statue; and the tools that had been used in
the making were wrapped in the body of a sacrificed sheep and placed in the
river, an act denoting their return to Nudimmud or Ea, the craft(y) god (Dick
1999: 4041; Walker and Dick 1999, esp. pp. 70, 81, 99100, 11415).
Even in cases where the role of human agency in creating divine objects
or images was acknowledged or recognized, a certain ambivalence is often apparent or is even explicitly addressed in associated narratives relating to the
authorization of these divine or sacral things. In Classical Greece, for example,
gorgeous and lavishly crafted chryselephantine statues of the gods were commissioned from extraordinary and renowned artists such as Pheidias and Polykleitos (Lapatin 2001).18 These same statues, however, might yet rely on material signs of divine approbation as the thunderbolt approving Pheidias Olympian Zeus for their legitimization or might even yield pride of place as cult
objects to less obviously crafted (worked by human hands) or even assertively
uncrafted objects or images (as aniconic representations or the acheiropoieta
mentioned above).19 And yet, while they did not undergo formal rituals of
17 The complex and somewhat variable relationship between the divine and the material
body or matrix in which it was presenced (the cult statue, for example) in Mesopotamia is
explored by Schaudig (2012), who notes examples in which the destruction of the statue is
associated with the death of the god as well as cases in which the relationship between the
two is severed or the two appear to remain distinct; see also fns. 26, 53, 65 below.
18 Artists (or artisans or craftsmen) working in the ancient world and the Middle Ages do not
conform to the model of artist as genius that developed during the Renaissance, see Panofsky
1962; Wallace 2013; also the nuanced consideration of the terms individualism and genius in
Wittkower 1973. Art works in these periods, far from being driven by the (relatively) modern
Western ideals of innovation, autonomy, and imagination, were variously and perfectly legitimately constrained by such demands as those of patrons and of tradition and type; see, for
example, Shiner 2001: 2224 (ancient Greece); the contributions in Li et al. 1989 (China, Mongolia). In some regions and periods, moreover, copies and even mass-produced objects and
images were created that may with some justification be subsumed under the category of art.
See, for example, Ledderose 2000 (on China); Gaifman 2006 (on ancient Greece); Anguissola
2007 (on Rome); Assante 2002, Winter 2003, and Sonik 2014: 26771 (on Mesopotamia).
19 See, for example, the discussion of the respective roles, treatment, and functioning of the
Athena Parthenos and the Athena Polias in fifth century BCE Athens, and the discussion of
10
awakening, the inherent potential for animation possessed by Greek statues

(Lapatin 2001: 5; Steiner 2001: 10634), chryselephantine or otherwise, remained: accounts survive of their autonomous movement, speech, and other
communication of the will of the gods they represented or even at least temporarily presenced or presented. In the Middle Ages, for its part, the Life of
Saint Gregory as it is recounted in the Legenda Aurea 20 describes the saints
encounter with a woman who, having baked the altar bread with her own
hands, cannot believe that it is the body of Christ (Bynum, this volume).21 Upon
Gregorys prayer, the bread visibly transforms into a bleeding finger. The disbelieving womans faith having been restored, Gregory prays again, and the finger reverts to bread. In all cases, if with necessarily distinct implications and
outcomes, the term animate remains an expressively appropriate one to describe the revelation of the divine within or as or as associated with the
thing.
At the last, the term presence in the context of this volume draws on the
theorizing of Gumbrecht (1999, 2004, 2006), who explored the production of
presence as a potential other of mimesis in his analysis of representation and
nonrepresentational phenomena. Presence, in his analysis, might be characterized as the convergence of an event-effect (Gumbrecht 1999: 359): The notion of presence, in this context, refers primarily to the dimension of space.
Based on the Latin verb producere (to bring forth), producing presence
means to put things into reach so that they can be touched (Gumbrecht 1999:
355). This notion of producing presence, in the context of the discussion in this
volume, is abbreviated to presencing or presenting, and encompasses multifarious modes of rendering the immaterial and specifically the immaterial divine material, accessible, and relatable. With respect to the meanings with
which the various materializations of divinity discussed here have been en-
Greek images associated with epiphanic arrival rather than epiphanic appearance in the main
text below.
20 The Legenda Aurea or Golden Legend was compiled by Jacobus de Voragine (ca. 12291298
CE).
21 An iconographic tradition associated with the miraculous appearance of the finger in the
bread or wine exists, with extant images known from the twelfth and sixteenth centuries (a
miniature and tapestry, respectively), Bynum 2006: 209. A distinct if better known iconographic tradition of the Gregorymass, in which Christ appears as the Man of Sorrows to Pope Gregory
the Great, popular in 14001550 CE in Germany and the Low Countries, as well as in England
and France, is distinguished by Bynum (2006) as distinct from the story and visual depiction
of the finger, and unrelated to issues of doubt or proof of transubstantiation. The religious
experience should, rather, be understood as one in which seeing constitutes seeing through
(Bynum 2006: 21516, 227) or seeing beyond.
11
dowed or have otherwise accrued, and the modes by which these meanings
are recognized by individual viewers, the perspective adopted in this volume
is that it is not presence alone but also an individual beholders (physical and
intellectual) experience and cultural memory that allows for the construction
of meaning on the one hand and the recognition or identification of meaning
on the other. While Gumbrecht notably distinguished between the two dimensions of physical experience and interpretation,22 the approach taken here
draws on the conceptualization of experiential realism (experientalism) delineated in cognitive linguistics (Lakoff 1987; Johnson 1987), which understands bodily or physical experience as shaping linguistic encoding.
3 Presenting and Presencing the Divine:

Religious Pictures and Animate(d) Things
Why, and how, do things, particularly sacral or divine and seemingly inanimate things, act? 23 What makes specific matter or materials or forms uniquely capable matrices for presencing or presenting, rather than merely representing, the divine?
In Mesopotamia, materials such as gold, silver, and lapis lazuli were assigned and regarded as inherently possessing various pure or sacral prop-
22 Gumbrecht ultimately offered an interesting model of ideal meaning-culture as opposed to

presence-culture types. In the former, in which presence and meaning appear together, the two
are not merely in conflict but fundamentally incompatible: in our overly Cartesian context,
presence phenomena always come as presence effects because they are necessarily surrounded by, wrapped into, and perhaps even mediated by clouds and cushions of meaning,
Gumbrecht 2004: 105106. In presence-cultures, however, in which Cartesian dualism and the
externalizing of the mind did not prevail, Gumbrecht (2006: 31819, 323; 2004: 81) postulated
such cultures integrated not only physical but also spiritual existence into their frames of
human self-reference, so that humans belonged to (and located themselves within) the world
of objects rather than standing outside this. The latter model (presence-culture) has compelling implications for the ancient Near East, in which experience and meaning might be regarded as peculiarly or particularly embodied, but cannot be applied uncritically even in this context.
23 The animate/inanimate divide is not necessarily universally recognized (Ingold 2006,
though the discussion here is quite nebulous) or negotiated in identical ways across diverse
cultural contexts. The Sumerian language, for example, has two genders described as animate
and inanimate, though the terms personal and impersonal have been suggested as an alternative (Michalowski 2008: 22). This latter suggestion unfortunately still does not resolve the question of how different types of being or thing are divided or perceived as acting.
12
erties that rendered them particularly suitable for use in cultic contexts and
for the making of divine or sacral things (Benzel, this volume; Winter 2012,
1999; Hurowitz 2006).24 The relationship between such materials and the
things they composed, however, was not a unidirectional one. If the inherently
pure status of specific materials was a precondition for their use in divine statues or images, the materials themselves simultaneously produced (or, at least,
contributed to producing) the potent agency of the things for which they were
used through this selfsame inherent purity. More, the choice of a particular
exotic wood for the body of a divine statue, as well as the coating of its face
and hands with gold or silver and the inlay of semi-precious stones for its eyes,
enabled the animation of the statue or cult image in Mesopotamia by not only
signaling or reflecting but also (to some degree) establishing or creating its
authoritative status or fitness to presence the divine. While this enablement, in
and of itself, was not yet sufficient to fully awaken the statue, the combination
of the cultural knowledge assigning particular qualities to the matter used, the
deliberate fabrication of the statue using this matter, and the ritual performance of the washing of the mouth and the opening of the mouth (ms p and
pt p) 25 ultimately transformed the statue into a sacred subject with which
some degree of intersubjective encounter had become possible (Lynch 2010:
4054, 49). The image became a full manifestation of the divine, a presentation
rather than re-presentation of the referent (Winter 2000a: 131). It is useful to
consider the Akkadian term almu in this regard. Once translated as image or
even portrait, almu has been effectively refined to excise the insinuation of
mandatory physical similitude even as it continues to denote a natural representation: a portrait, then, might be regarded as a copy of a real person, in
contrast to the almu, which retains the potential to become a person in its own
right, a being rather than a copy of a being (Bahrani 2003: 12527).26 The
24 Similar magical or sacral qualities appear to have been attributed to particular materials
in ancient Greece; see the discussion of chryselephantine statues in main text and fn. 83 below.
25 An opening of the mouth ritual was also performed in Egypt to animate mummies and
divine images and enable them to partake of offerings and, in the case of divine statues, also
to receive petitions, see Roth 1992; Lorton 1999; Meskell 2004a: 89 ff; Meskell 2004b: 11214.
The cult statue in Egypt, however, does not seem to have become a divine manifestation in
the same manner as in Mesopotamia or India: the statue functioned as the ka, the (transient
or perishable) material receptacle or body for the ba, the essence or presence of the god,
but it remained a statue (bes or sekbem) rather than the actual god (netcher), see Teeter 2011:
4344; Assmann 2001: 45 f. See also, however, the slightly different take on this in Meskell
2004a, esp. pp. 89 ff.
26 The term almu has been a subject of particular concern in Near Eastern studies; see further on this subject Winter 1992: 169 ff., 1997; Bonatz 2002; Slanski 2003/2004: 32123; Machinist 2006: 162 ff.; Frahm 2013: 102 f.; Sonik, this volume.
13
attribution of such personhood to particular objects or images does not necessarily imply the possession of the complete spectrum of attributes possessed
by a human being (Gell 1998: 126 ff.) but does properly intimate a potential to
exercise (or to be perceived as exercising) agency in specific contexts.
In India, sacred Hindu statues or images may also be awakened through
specific ritual performance: the process of this awakening includes netronmilana, opening the eyes, thereby releasing the potent divine gaze (Davis 1997:
35; Eck 1998: 88). If the god is able to look out upon the world, a corresponding
opportunity for human worshippers to gaze upon the god darshan, seeing,
and, reciprocally, being seen by the deity is subsequently provided (Eck
1998). The revealing of the eyes, whether by removing a beeswax covering laid
overtop them or by painting or carving them in, is similarly significant with
respect to Buddhist image consecration ceremonies intended to presence the
Buddha (Swearer 2004: 79, 7795; Gombrich 1966: 2425).27 Once awakened,
the living image is subsequently maintained as a (divine) person through perpetual liturgical action: it is awoken and put to bed, bathed and fed, and
dressed and entertained, as well as being the recipient of prayer and itself
functioning as a participant in ritual (Davis 1997: 67; Lachman 2014: 37072).
The animate(d) statue or image anthropomorphic or otherwise is not, then,
merely a passive recipient of human action; the divine manifest in these images might be petitioned for material or spiritual assistance and thus presumably
possesses the capacity to respond to such petitions. Accounts of specifically
Hindu images in medieval Indian literature, moreover, record their active physical engagement with their human devotees; they may move, speak, perform
miracles, resolve disputes, and act as rulers and administrators (Davis 1997: 7,
2930). The recognition of both the human devotees and the materially manifested divine in these contexts as active and socially embedded agents, and of
the interaction between them as a reciprocal, multifaceted, and dynamic one,
has reclaimed the animate(d) Hindu and Buddhist statues from being analyzed
exclusively from the perspective of contemporary (Western) values, specifically
those of aestheticization, desacralization, and secularization (Faure 1998:
76869; Reinders 2005: 6162; Lachman 2014: 37273). The latent or, perhaps
27 An important article by Winter (2000b) that appears to draw on the concept of darshan
explores visual cathexion in Mesopotamia and reveals a similar emphasis on gazing at and
being gazed upon by the deity, and the similarly striking potency of the divine gaze. On the
gaze of divine and supernatural entities in the ancient Near East, see also, Fleming, this volume; Sonik 2013b (the monsters gaze in pictorial and literary contexts); Dicks 2012 (the divine
gaze in literary sources); and Asher-Greve 2003 (the gaze of the goddesses in third millennium
sources); also Elsner 2007, esp. pp. 1926 (on viewing Atargatis at Dura Europa in Syria).
14
better, dormant divinity immanent within animate(d) images after even long
after their removal from their original cultural contexts and their repositioning as works of art has also been explored in a striking treatment by Davis
(1992: 43), as has the potential for the assignment of other types and even
degrees of agency to divine objects or images by actors outside the theological
system in which these originated: Bringing with them differing religious assumptions, political agendas, and economic motivations, others may animate
the very same objects as icons of sovereignty, as polytheistic idols, as devils,
as potentially lucrative commodities, as objects of sculptural art, or as symbols
for a whole range of new meanings never foreseen by the images makers or
original worshipers (Davis 1997: 7).28 These nuanced approaches have enabled the productive consideration of animate(d) images and things from less
accessible civilizations, as in an ethnographic study by Irene Winter (2000a)
that drew on the treatment of modern Hindu (and Buddhist) 29 religious images
to elucidate ancient Mesopotamian ones.
The treatment of formally animated or awakened images as living persons
possessing the capacity to act their wills and to physically interact and communicate with their human worshippers is here deliberately distinguished from
the practice of idolatry, defined in this context as the theologically erroneous
attribution of love and reverence to an inanimate image (index) or icon of a
sacred referent rather than as properly due to the sacred referent itself as
only facilitated by the viewing of its image. The highly pejorative connotations
of the term idolatry, its relatively neutral denotation notwithstanding, render
it a challenging term to redeem despite Gells (1998: 96, 12324) powerful attempt to reclaim it as the true name for the worship of images.30 Given the
unfortunate but undeniable strength of the historical associations of idolatry
with false-ness, however, so that the word idol itself became, and in many
respects, continues to be a metaphor for epistemological error in Judeo-
28 This analysis is very much in keeping with the cultural biography approach so influentially
explicated in Kopytoff 1986.
29 There is a perceived mimetic aspect to at least the original image of the Buddha (Lachman
2014: 371; Thompson 2011: 415; main text below) that should not be extrapolated to the images
of the ancient Near East. While there is a tradition of authoritative divine, royal, and other
images in Mesopotamia, these do not rely on physical or physiognomic resemblance to the
prototype or referent for their legitimacy or, where they demonstrate such, their agency; see,
Sonik, this volume; Winter 2009, 1997, 1989.
30 Gell (1998: 9654) compellingly argued for the worship of images in certain contexts as
emanating not from credulity or ignorance but rather from the same fund of sympathy which
allows us to understand the human, non-artefactual, other as a copresent being, endowed
with awareness, intentions, and passions akin to our own (1998: 96).
15
Christian and, consequently, the current Western tradition (Daston 2004: 12),
the term here is limited in application to instances where images improperly
usurp the devotion properly due to their referents or prototypes rather than to
instances where animate(d) images functioning as legitimate (if frequently
still secondary) divine agents properly receive the worship due to the divinity
they present or presence in their original cultural and theological contexts. This
does not mean, of course, that theoretical discussions locating the two types
of religious image within a single category are without utility, and it certainly
does not preclude legitimate questions about how the proper or improper functioning of religious images within their original cultural contexts should be
determined. The gap between official theology and individual or private practice may comprise, in some cases, a vast one.
In the Byzantine world, the apparent blurring of the lines between sacred
images or icons and their referents or prototypes by viewers or worshippers
led, at least in part, to renewed fears of idolatry and the famous adoption of
iconoclasm as official doctrine under Emperor Leo III (717741 CE).31 Matters
unfolded somewhat differently in the west, where idolatry was certainly of
theological concern but did not comprise a pressing public concern or impel
a similar policy of sustained iconoclasm until the advent of the Protestant
Reformation in Germany in 1521 CE.32 Prior to this time, and even after this
time in other parts of Europe, idolatry was regarded as an abuse of religious
pictures but not one demanding condemnation of the entire institution of images (Baxandall 1988: 42). Religious pictures, after all, fulfilled a legitimate
and quite significant function as instructional and devotional aids. In his late
thirteenth century CE Catholicon, John of Genoa cited three (quite strategic)
reasons behind the establishment of images in churches: 1) the instruction of
31 Some instances of relic destruction appear to have occurred alongside the destruction of
images but there seems no evidence of a general persecution. Various martyrs of the first
period of Byzantine iconoclasm or iconomachy, beginning under Leo III in ca. 726 CE and
continuing under Leos son Constantine V (741775) and grandson Leo IV (775780), and of
the second period, beginning under Leo V (813820) and continuing to a lesser extent under
Michael II (820829) and a greater extent under Theophilus (829842), are examined in Talbot
1998. Theological and aesthetic concerns remain firmly at the fore in the discourse on
iconoclasm (Barber 2002), however, social, political, economic, and other issues driving or
at least affecting this phenomenon have not gone unexplored; see for example Brown 1973
(iconomachy and monachomachy); Gero 1977 (iconoclasm and monachomachy); Talbot 1998:
xiixiii (for a summary of various theories and approaches, some now discarded); Brubaker
and Haldon 2011 (for an extensive historical analysis of the period ca. 680850 CE).
32 For the Northern European iconoclasm of the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries, see, for example, Freedberg 1977, 1988; van Asselt et al. 2007.
16
the illiterate, for whom images served the same function as books for the literate; 2) the promotion and reinforcing of specific religious subjects and themes
in the memory and thoughts of the viewer; and 3) the stimulation of devotional
feeling (and, presumably action), it being understood that such might be
aroused more effectively by things seen than by things heard (Baxandall
1988: 41). It is interesting to note, then, that there yet exist striking and graphic
accounts of the visible animation of specific religious images and objects in
Western Europe during the Middle Ages (Bynum 2011, this volume). At this
time, unconsecrated statues and paintings of individuals walked, wept, bled,
and otherwise engaged or interacted with the viewer; typically unconsecrated
relics, matter directly deriving from or having been in contact with the bodies
of deceased holy persons, stood in for and exercised the miraculous power of
the whole; and food stuffs, consecrated bread and wine, visibly transformed
rather than invisibly transubstantiated into organic human flesh.
In all of the cases discussed here, divine or sacred things animated ritually, spontaneously, or otherwise and not only functioned but also were recognized as persons or at least as social others.33 What is pertinent here, however,
is less how these various instances of animation were similar (while this may
be interesting, it is at best a superficial consideration34) and more how and
why particular objects, some anthropomorphic in conception but others emphatically not, came to present or presence the divine in the individual contexts in which they originated and how a cross-cultural consideration of this
question might illuminate in new ways these individual investigations.
33 For the qualities possessed by an object or thing as person or social other, among these
self-propulsion or intentionality, see Malle 2005: 22829 (drawing on Tagiuri and Petrullo 1958:
x); Gell 1998: 123; and the very interesting discussion of other-than-human (and particularly
supernatural) persons in Hallowell 1990. Such qualities, notably, need not coincide with the
full range of qualities possessed by human/biological others but they are sufficient for (some
level of) social interaction: social agency is not dependent on or identical with biological life
though the agency possessed by and attributed to specifically animate(d) images can certainly
be fuller in scope, see fn. 54 below. The role of intentionality in defining or delineating object
agency has been challenged as insufficiently nuanced in some contexts see, for example,
the brief summary on the subject in Feldman (2010: 149), who argued that since even individual humans may act without any conscious evaluation of what their actions mean and [since]
their actions often have unintended consequences, a definition of agency that rests on intentionality is too restricted but is retained as significant in reference to the divine things
discussed here.
34 Though published too late to be addressed in this volume, a thoughtful and nuanced elucidation of the value of comparative scholarship (including key issues, positive outcomes, and
potential pitfalls) focusing specifically on the history of religion and exploring especially the
complex and critical issue of pseudomorphism appears in Bynum 2014.
17
4 Object Agency (Primary and Secondary): Divine

and Sacral Things
The recognition that even mundane or ordinary objects and images can (and
do) possess agency in social relationships, functioning as persons or social
others in their interaction with human beings, has in recent decades yielded
productive avenues of research in diverse disciplines, among these the cognitive science of religion, anthropology, and art history. In his influential work
exploring the attribution of life or, more accurately, agency or intentionality to objectively inanimate things, phenomena, and even events, for example, Guthrie (2007: 37; 1993: 3954) persuasively argued for the development,
at least in part, of animism and anthropomorphism as false positives or byproducts of human perception biases and of the conceptual framework
called theory of mind [ToM], which render us particularly sensitive to detecting the presence of agents and to indicators of complex (and especially human)
agency in the environments we inhabit.35 While these sensitivities occasionally
lead us astray, so that we may sometimes attribute agency where none exists,
at least they ensure that we are not often caught off our guards: as memorably
noted by Guthrie (1993: 6), it is better for a hiker to mistake a boulder for a
bear than to mistake a bear for a boulder.36 If Theory of Mind, the capacity
for representing and reasoning about the mental states of others (biological
persons, inanimate objects, and otherwise), has been extensively and usefully
examined with respect to the origins, development, and functioning of religious beliefs, it should necessarily be considered as only one of multiple potentially relevant factors in this context rather than an explanatory catch-all
(Bynum, this volume). While theoretical approaches and insights from the cognitive sciences can and do offer valuable new perspectives on or explanations
for specific phenomena that have typically been the province of the humanities
or social sciences, with the cognitive science of religion and neuroaesthetics/
neuroarthistory comprising particularly rich and stimulating fields of enquiry,
such new perspectives and theories must be applied in nuanced, often carefully limited, and above all culturally mediated ways.37 The specific aspect of
35 The initial study on Theory of Mind, Premack and Woodruff 1978, focused on the chimpanzee. For the subsequent development of the concept and its application to human development
and interaction, see Carruthers and Smith 1996; Mithen 1998a, 2000, 2013; Malle 2005; Grdenfors 2013.
36 For a rather different and challenging if not utterly convincing view of the animate vs.
the inanimate, and animacy, see Ingold 2006.
37 A powerful case study demonstrating the value of and need for precisely such cultural
mediated interpretation is Gells (1992: 46) famous analysis of the Trobriand canoe boards,
18
Guthries work that is most relevant to the studies contained in this volume,
indeed, is not his treatment of the development of anthropomorphism or animism though this also has had important (if necessarily limited) influence
on some of the contributions here but rather his elucidation of agency, the
concept famously adopted and adapted by Gell for his theory of art, as invisible and polymorphic, [so that] all manner of phenomena are potential agents
(Guthrie 2007: 52).
Gells (1998: 96) anthropological theory of representational art, focusing
on the production, circulation, and practical use of indexes that have relevant
prototypes, was predicated on the treatment of artworks, images, icons, and
other representations as persons (or person-like) or, at least, social others,
that is, sources of, and targets for, social agency.38 The referent or prototype
in this context possesses agency (doing) and is the thing that the index represents not necessarily in a mimetic sense or stands in for (Thomas 1998:
ix). The index, for its part, is the visible, material (physical) thing, the material
entity capable of mediating the agency of its referent: it motivate[s] inferences,
responses or interpretations (Thomas 1998: ix; Gell 1998: 13).39
In championing a de-aestheticization of the (anthropological) study of art,
articulated as a position of deliberate methodological philistinism, a resolute
indifference towards the aesthetic value of works of art (1992: 42; 1998), Gells
work catalyzed productive new research directions for the types of religious
which possessed particular visual and material properties (bright colors, bold contrasts, and
eye spots) that exploited to some degree certain characteristic biases of human visual
perception. Gell argued compellingly, however, that the efficacy of the canoe board as a tool
of psychological warfare depended not on its disturbance of the viewers perceptual processes
but rather on the fact that this disturbance was interpreted (in its original cultural context) as
evidence of the magical power emanating from the board. It is this magical power which may
deprive the spectator of his reason. If, in fact, he behaves with unexpected generosity, it is
interpreted as having done so. Without the associated magical ideas, the dazzlingness of the
board is neither here nor there.
38 Gells work, published posthumously, has yielded a striking number of very productive as
well as sometimes problematic applications; see the useful and nuanced analyses in Layton
2003; Rampley 2005; Knappett 2005; Tanner and Osborne 2007; Morphy 2009; van Eck 2010.
For art historical purposes at least, it is usefully considered alongside several related but independently conceived theoretical studies, among these Mitchell 2005 and Pasztory 2005, and,
on the subject of religious art (or religious visual culture) specifically, Morgan 2005, 2010.
39 The icon, a term that has been mostly eschewed in the context of this volume, is in Peircean terms a thing that physically resembles its referent or prototype. For an unpacking of the
complex and problematic relationship between Peirces theory of signs and Gells theory of
agency, see Layton 2003; also, more briefly, Davis 2007.
19
objects and materials discussed here.40 Such works, where assigned uncritically to the category of art, and specifically art in the Western sense of being the
non-utilitarian objects of disinterested aesthetic contemplation, had too often
been neutered and neutralized, their undoubted aesthetic aspects privileged
above their other qualities and modes of functioning and interaction.41 The
adoption of a deliberately non-aesthetic approach to religious objects and images, then, enabled a renewed emphasis on both their materiality and their
agency, and the multiple and complex modes and manners of their functioning
in and on the world, affecting as well as being affected by the worshipper
or viewer. While Gells work has facilitated the construction of vital new frameworks within which religious objects and images might be productively analyzed, however, it is by no means a universal remedy: it may be something of
an antidote to the aestheticization of sacred images that scholars such as Faure
(1998) have legitimately decried but it has also raised new issues (intentionally
40 In arguing for methodological philistinism as a prerequisite to devising an anthropology

of art, Gell (1992: 4142) compared it to the principle Peter Berger (1967: 107) described as
methodological atheism in his treatment of the sociology of religion. Both approaches, despite
the productive scholarship they have yielded, have been justifiably criticized as too reductionist albeit on different grounds. On the former, arguing that it is vital to distinguish between
the anthropologists aesthetic response or judgment to a work, which may properly be suppressed or suspended, and the aesthetic value a work possesses in its originating culture,
which is a just subject of enquiry, see Morphy 2010: 24 n. 5; Winter 2007; Dutton 1994 (but see
also the nuanced analysis of the implications and impetus for Gells argument in Thomas 2001:
23). On the latter, for the argument that methodological agnosticism (Smart 1973), an acknowledgement that the objects of our experience are not all entirely constructed socially,
is a more appropriate form of bracketing in the sociological study of religious experience than
methodological atheism, see Porpora 2006: 57 ff.
41 The application of the term art to the material remains of ancient and non-Western civilizations remains problematic. This is less because such civilizations lacked a native concept of
art as a discrete category of thing (see Baines 2007) and more because the classification of an
object as art has tended to privilege its aesthetic aspects over or even to the exclusion of its
other political/ideological, religious, social functioning. The term is nevertheless retained
here in preference to such categories as visual culture for two reasons: (1) it remains a useful
and relevant classifier, delineating a group of objects that are usefully considered in company
with each other; (2) the historical weight of the term is such that to deny a civilization its
possession of art is (arguably) to exclude it from the ranks of common humanity. For thoughtful if diverse commentaries on art as a human universal, see Dissanayake 1992, 2008; Dutton
2009; Morphy 2010. For considerations of the applicability and utility of the term art to specific
cultural contexts, see also Danto 1988, Dutton 1993, and Gell 1996 (on African art specifically,
though the discussion here also addresses issues more broadly relevant to non-Western and
ancient arts in general); McCallum 1994 and Lachman 2005, 2014 (Buddhist art); Winter 1995,
Ross 2005, and Sonik 2014 (on ancient Mesopotamian art); and Baines 1994, 2007 (on ancient
Egyptian art).
20
and unintentionally) with respect to the desacralization and secularization of

religious objects and images and the complex role of aesthetic or at least affective properties or attributes in their functioning.42
Particularly significant considerations both in the context of this chapter
and in the larger context of this volume, which addresses the agency of divine
and sacral things and materials from multiple different perspectives and in a
range of different contexts, are (1) the nature and extent of the (primary or
secondary) agency possessed by different (culturally-specific) categories of
thing; (2) the context-bound scope of an objects agency within the specific
framework of its communication or intersection with humans and the natural
world and, where applicable, the extent to which the exercise of agency is
affected by the objects explicit awakening or animate status ritually induced, spontaneous, or otherwise; and (3) the concepts of anthropomorphism
and, to a rather lesser extent, of iconicity and aniconicity as they pertain to
the conceptualization of divine things.
The discourse on the nature of the agency attributed to and exercised by
divine and sacral things necessarily draws on Gells theoretical model of the
distribution of agency (1998) and Stratherns model of the partible person
(1988). This comprises a particularly productive framework within which to
analyze and conceptualize the relationship between the divine and its material
manifestations as it allows for an understanding of divinity as composite, capable of distributing its agency into a diverse constellation of (culturally specific)
indexes. These may include, depending on the cultural context, such diverse
things as statues or images, celestial bodies, various (inanimate and animate)
attributes, the temple, parts of the divine body itself, the divine blood, relics,
or even the divine splendor, voice, gaze, or name.43 Crucially, not all of the
various materializations or manifestations of the divine are considered equivalent to the divinity or even to each other.44 For the purposes of nuanced
analysis, then, it is useful to distinguish between the divinity as primary agent
and all of the various media distributing its agency (its indexes or indices,
42 The need for closer attention to the complex relationships between the aesthetic or affective aspects and the agency or functioning of objects and images is particularly urgent with
respect to religious or sacred things but may be similarly emphasized with respect to other
types of artwork or thing; see Winter 2007: 5962, 1995: 2579; Tanner 2000b, 2001.
43 See in this volume Bynum (on relics, flesh, and blood); Fleming (on the divine gaze);
Pongratz-Leisten (on the statue, divine body parts, and celestial body); Rendu Loisel (on the
voice); Sonik (the divine body and its attributes).
44 A context-bound and culturally specific question is, indeed, whether any of the various
divine materializations are considered equivalent to the divine or possessed of its full range of
agency.
21
which are not themselves equally desirable, functional, or even capable of

presencing the divine in all contexts) as secondary agents, thus rendering transparent the cline from empowering source to empowered manifestation (Winter 2007: 55).
Even as we differentiate the divine from its secondary agents for the purposes of objective or at least external analysis, however, we must continue to
contend with the frequent (and cross-culturally apparent) human conflation of
the referent and its (re)presentation, of the source of power or agency (the divine) on the one hand with the thing mediating its presence (the material index)
on the other a conflation that has provoked theological theorizing and debate
throughout human history. While this conflation is evident in numerous and
divergent contexts, it (often) seems evident to different degrees depending on
the nature of the material index itself: the physical body or body parts of the
divinity are distinguished from the external objects or things acting on behalf
of the divine and are assigned different scopes (and sometimes, arguably,
spheres) of agency. It is here that the epistemological aspect of the human
mind working on the basis of memory and culture as determining factors in
the knowledge of how one might properly interact with the divine in specific
contexts comes in. As an example, various attributes and symbols were conceptualized as having divine status in the ancient Near East; they were not,
however, thought to represent the divinity in a mimetic way nor considered to
be equivalent to the entirety of the divinity. Rather, they had a referential quality alluding more to one particular aspect or role of the divinity, so that they
represented part of its distributed agency within a specific (and rather sharply
delimited) context. By contrast, things or materializations linked with the
physical body or its capacities, as the statue,45 specific body parts,46 the voice
and dream visions, and even the name as an index of the personhood of the
divinity seem to represent a fuller spectrum of the agency of a particular divinity.47 The categorization or even ranking of secondary divine agents and the
peculiar contexts in which they legitimately function(ed) are thus subjects that
demand further investigation.
With respect to the second consideration articulated above, then, relating
to the context-bound scope of an objects agency, it is important that we remain
45 See fns. 26, 53, 63.

46 See, for example, the discussion of the divine or demonic hand as causing disease in the
ancient Near East in Heeel 2007, Scurlock and Anderson 2005, esp. pp. 429528; Bck 2014:
4576; also see, on the divine body and its parts, Pongratz-Leisten, this volume.
47 In the context of medieval Christianity, see also wine as a substitute for blood, body parts,
and relics in Bynum 2011.
22
cognizant of the distinction between the agency externally attributed by the

(modern) analyst and the agency internally marked by specific practices or even
language within the objects originating cultural context until and unless
they may be shown to be congruent [italics ours] (Winter 2007: 4243; Morphy
2010: 27980). This point, moreover, informs the question of whether an objects formal or informal imputation with subjectivity and some degree of intentionality (the capacity to act its will) affects the nature of its agency or, perhaps
more to the point, the nature of its interaction, both perceived and real, with
the human. Gell (1998: 96154, esp. pp. 12152) himself addressed this issue in
slightly different terms, discussing the distinction between religious images
functioning as aids to worship or piety, which would still have possessed social
agency and a measure of personhood in their capacity as things, and those that
were themselves worshipped.48 While recognizing that these two categories
comprise less a polarity than a spectrum, even those objects or images attributed to or approximating the second type acquired agency their status as autonomous persons or social others49 in significant part through its distribution from their referents (Winter 2007: 54; Pongratz-Leisten 2011). Formal consecration or ritual awakening or animation, of course, were not the exclusive
modes of or prerequisites for the acquisition or exercise of agency by a divine
or sacral thing. As noted above, the particular matter or materials selected for
the crafting of religious objects could but did not always (Bynum, this volume) possess unique intrinsic magical or sacral properties that rendered
them particularly and obviously appropriate to the presenting or presencing of
the divine and that could, indeed, impel, or at least enable, animation and
the establishment of an objects (still distributed) agency (Benzel, this volume;
Winter 1999, 2012; Platt 2011: 9697; Lapatin 2010: 14041, 2001).
The third and final consideration relates to the relationship between the
physical form of an object or image and the nature of its agency. On the one
hand, as Gell (1998: 98) suggested, the distinction between iconic and aniconic
representations is something of a blind: An aniconic idol is a realistic representation of a god who either has no form (anywhere) or has an arbitrary
48 While this is a use of images that Gell (1998: 135) termed idolatrous, seeking as he did to
reclaim idolatry from its accumulated pejorative connotations, the term is not applied here
being, in my view, irredeemable to cases where images properly received worship as legitimate (if still secondary) divine agents; see main text above.
49 Objects or images that have been ritually animated or that are attributed with (some degree
of) animacy may possess rather more in the way of biological functioning or requirements
(requiring bathing, feeding, dressing, and other types of personal care) than sacred but inanimate objects.
23
form, in the particular body he inhabits for the purposes of being worshipped
by his mortal devotees [it] is an index of the god Whatever the idol looks
like, that, in context, is what the god looks like, so all idols are equally realistic.50 That said, the idol was clearly and deliberately shaped in many contexts presumably with the intention that it ultimately resemble or possess
some (not necessarily mimetic) likeness to, or otherwise share some type of
attribute with the divine referent (1998: 135).51 Specific forms, as the anthropomorphic, the known theriomorphic, or even some types of irreal therianthropic, enable or at least suggest the possibility of engaging in accustomed modes
of interaction.52 The careful articulation of those familiar organs of communication, which are equally those through which human veneration might be
most clearly expressed as the eyes and the mouth is particularly notable,
as are certain of those rites performed to explicitly and formally animate or
awaken sacred or divine objects in specific cultural contexts: for example, the
eye opening of Buddhist and Hindu statues, the revealing of the face and especially the eyes of Dagan at Emar (Fleming, this volume), or the mouth washing
and opening of Mesopotamian cult statues. Specifically anthropomorphic objects or images do not necessarily make for more efficacious or consequential
matrices for the presenting or presencing of the divine; however, they do emphasize particular communicative potentials in a way that objects adopting
other forms do not a point that may contribute, in some contexts, to the
50 In her discussion of aniconism in ancient Greece, Gaifman (2012: 4 ff.) noted the apparently
self-contradictory nature of the phrase aniconic image, as well as the shortcomings of any
attempt to define the term aniconic against that which is representative of something else or
that which is a likeness of something else. Despite the fuzziness of the term, it was retained in
Gaifmans work, as it is here, in the absence of anything better able to designate a particular
phenomenon in the realms of art, visual culture, and religion (2012: 5, 1746).
51 Gell (1998: 13536) discussed this in the context of the so-called internalist theory of agency, according to which the depiction of the body was concerned less with realistically or mimetically rendering that body and more with a desire to signal the existence of a mind (and,
consequently, some degree of intentionality) within it. The sundering of mind from body (Cartesian Dualism), however, and the privileging of the former over the latter, are not universally
observed, see fn. 22 above. See also, specifically relating to the ancient Near East, Westenholz
2012 (addressing the critical issue of whether and in what contexts mind may be distinguished
from body); Bahrani 2008: 77 (arguing that the body was not merely the locus of existential
identity but contained innumerable possibilities of and for semiosis beyond those relating to
mere personal identity); also Sonik 2012 (specifically addressing the ramifications of bodily
transformation or metamorphosis in the ancient Near East in contrast with those apparent in
Classical and medieval contexts [Buxton 2009, 2010; Bynum 2001: 1536]). We ought, consequently, be wary of uncritically appropriating or applying this model.
52 Gell 1998; Hoskins 2006; Guthrie 2007: 3762, 46.
24
privileging of the anthropomorphic form for the presenting of the divine even
where many other forms are in simultaneous use.53
In addition to the agency they might have acquired through formal ritual
awakening or animation, through embedding in particular social praxis, and
through the very matter or materials constituting them, divine objects might
also gain and exercise their agency through their physical or sensual interactions with the human viewer. Three-dimensional and textured, their visual and
tactile properties have the potential to blur what we might regard as sharp
ontological distinctions as those between the animate and inanimate, and between animal, vegetal, and mineral (Bynum 2011: 30) this despite the fact
that, cognitively, the human mind possesses the capacity to discern animate
from inanimate things already in the early stages of childhood (Opfer and Gelman 2011).54
5 Mimesis and Divine (Re-)Presentation:

Authoritative Images
For the modern scholar, the interaction with the physical materiality of the
divine simultaneously casts in high relief the tensions between object and image, image and likeness, likeness and representation, and likeness and content,55 tensions that may in many cultures ancient and modern be negotiated markedly differently in practice than in theological theorizing. While Western cultures more traditionally operate with the concept of mimesis, likeness
and representation in other contexts (as in the ancient Near East) may be associated with qualitative properties,56 so that images and even portraits may be
53 A famous example is detailed in the Sun God Tablet of the Babylonian King Nabu-aplaiddina (ca. 888855 BCE), in which the anthropomorphic cult statue of the sun god appears
to be privileged over or preferable to the sun-disk that temporarily (but not illegitimately)
presences the god, see main text below; Sonik, this volume.
54 But, of course, for the innate (and seemingly adaptive) perceptual sensitivities that bias us
toward attributing agency and intentionality where none may objectively exist, see the discussion in the main text; fn. 33 above. For the implications of these sensitivities for animacy,
anthropomorphism, and religion, see Guthrie 1993, 2007; Malle 2005; also Boyer 1994, 2001,
2003; Sperber 1994; Barrett 2000, 2007.
55 For the ancient Near Eastern material, see the discussions in Winter 1997: 35981, 363;
Bahrani 2003.
56 Pongratz-Leisten (this volume, 2011: 142 f.), for example, discusses the late second millennium BCE narrative Enuma elish (V 12), in which the stars are described as being in the likeness (tamlu) of the gods: ubaim manzza an DINGIR.DINGIR GAL.GAL / MUL.ME taml-
25
constructed to convey the (or at least a) true idea of persons and things rather
than privileging physical or physiognomic similitude. The emphasis may well
be on enabling cognitive recognition (Winter 2009: 267) rather than relying on
physical imitation as a basis for identification.57
It is useful in this context to consider the subject of royal portraiture as it
developed in a range of cultural contexts.58 Portraits in the context of the ancient world have been (understandably, given their prevalence) most extensively elucidated in the context of imperial Rome. The image of Octavian is
particularly interesting in this regard, undergoing a deliberate overhaul in the
period around 27 BCE, when the young and victorious Octavian having defeated Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 BCE and subsequently consolidated his power and rulership came to be commonly known as Caesar Augustus
(Figure 1.1). The new portrait type marking his transformation has been described as an artificial construct, a mlange of Classical forms that have been
intermixed perhaps with a few genuine physiognomic features or references:
the result is less a mimetic depiction of Augustus and more a material delineation of Augustus unique role and status (as Caesar) in the Roman polity (Zanker 1988: 99). While the newly constructed portrait of Augustus may have retained some physical resemblance to its human subject, it is notable that the
emperors image itself spawned a phenomenon described as Bildnisangleichung (Massner 1982): this saw other members of the Julio-Claudian dynasty
deliberately adopt in their own portraits specific (and iconic) physiognomic
unu lum uziz, He [Marduk] made the position(s) for the great gods, / He established (in)
constellations the stars, their likeness. Far from evoking the Western notion of likeness as
resembling the outer (material) qualities or physical appearance of the gods, however, tamlu
(from the Akkadian malu, to be similar or equal) suggests a similarity in quality and/or
nature.
57 Cognitive recognition, as defined by Goffman (1963: 113), may link a person or, here, an
entity to specific details or information that might be exclusively linked to his or her personal
identity as name, particular biographical points, etc. or may locate a person within a larger
social or other category: Cognitive recognition, then, is the process through which we socially
or personally identify the other. Social recognition, in contrast to cognitive recognition, is the
process of openly welcoming or at least accepting the initiation of an engagement a ceremonial gesture of contact with someone, Goffman 1963: 113. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the
performance of the latter may depend on the success of the former.
58 Pertinent analyses have focused primarily on the image of the king, see Kantorowicz 1957:
8797, 31617 (medieval western Europe); Marin 1988 (Louis XIV); Perkinson 2009 (late medieval France); Bann 1984 (nineteenth century CE Britain and France); Belting 1994: 9899 (ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome); DAmbra 1998: 9698 (imperial Rome); Tanner 2000a (for a
complex analysis of veristic late Roman portraits not limited to royal representations); and
Winter 1989, 1997, 2009 (ancient Near East).
26
features or formal devices derived from the images of Augustus in order to

evoke and to establish their relationships with him and, through him, with
legitimate rulership and authority (Fejifer 2008: 272; Fittschen 2010). The visual kinship established between portraits thus simultaneously constructed
and signaled the kinship of the portraits referents. Political/ideological (and
no doubt also aesthetic) considerations trumped, even if they did not entirely
efface, physiognomic verisimilitude in such official images and yet this in no
way undermined their legitimacy or validity as true representations.
Fig. 1.1: Museum purchase, Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund 2000308. Carrara
Marble Portrait of the Emperor Augustus (ca. 271 BCE). 40.5 (h) 23.2 (w) 24 (d) cm.
Courtesy Princeton University Art Museum (IAP). Princeton University Art Museum.
The royal image in Mesopotamia, as elucidated particularly by Irene Winter (1989, 1997, 2009), took the matter even further. In this context, an image
could be legitimately claimed as a true royal likeness by the king regardless of
even token physiognomic resemblance it was a alam-arrtiya, literally an
official image of [my] kingship, rather than a private image of the man who
filled the office of kingship (Winter 2009: 266).59 The purpose of the pictorial
59 The emphasis on rendering the office of rulership rather than the individual ruler is also
evident in ruler representations or portraits from other contexts. Writing of Mayan rulers in
the Classic Period (ca. 250900 CE), for example, Marcus (1974: 92) noted their portrayal with
conventionalized faces characterized by serenity, formality and rigidity, conspicuously contrasting in this regard with images of contorted, grimacing, and painfully expressive prisoners.
Taking a narrower view of portraiture in this case than Winter (2009), she suggested on this
27
representation in such cases was to effectively permit the viewers cognitive

recognition of embodied kingship, an institution handed down from the gods
and properly held by one who, being divinely favored, had been also been
divinely (physically) perfected (Winter 1989).60 The rulers official image might
be further manipulated or deliberately constructed to convey specific qualities
of his rulership. Gudea (ca. 21502125 BCE), Prince of Lagash, for example, was
attributed with an exposed and very muscular right arm, signaling his continued possession of indomitable physical strength and potency despite the storied peace and prosperity of his reign (Winter 1997: 580). Still, it is the textual
inscription borne on the image of the king that frequently serves to historicize
and to particularize the representation of the ruler (holder of kingship), and to
identify him as a specific sovereign (Winter 2009: 266). The royal image in this
cultural context comprised a legitimate and accurate likeness of the royal person despite its lack of similitude to the physiognomic features of the individual
occupying the office of kingship at any one time.61
With respect to divine or sacred images, the relationship between (authoritative) physical presentation or representation and the divine itself must also
confront and ultimately mediate a number of urgent but culturally specific
rather than broadly applicable theological considerations. A popular legend
recounting the origins of the original sandalwood image of the Buddha describes how thirty-two craftsmen were transported up to the palaces of heaven
that they might directly observe the distinguishing features and marks of the
Buddha and thereby create an accurate representation or veritable icon
(McNair 2007: 99100; Lachman 2014: 371). On the Buddhas return to earth,
prototype and image confront each other, with the statue prostrating itself before the Buddha, and an opportunity arises for the image to be directly legiti-
basis that individual portraiture in Mayan art might be said to focus on the prisoners rather
than the rulers; on Mayan portraiture, see also the thoughtful discussion in Houston and Stuart
1999, esp. pp. 9495, n. 19.
60 The Sumerian King List famously begins by recording the descent of kingship from heaven
to the ancient city of Eridu (ll. 12), after which it is serially held and transferred between the
legendary kings of various significant Mesopotamian cities: [nam]-lugal an-ta ed3-de3-a-ba /
[eri]dugki nam-lugal-la, After the kingship descended from heaven, the kingship was in Eridu, Black et al. 19982006.
61 Brilliant (1990: 14) has notably argued that some level of similitude, regardless of how
artificially constructed or construed, is vital to the relationship between portrait and prototype.
This idea was developed by Irene Winter (2009: 258) in relation to the Gudea statues from
Mesopotamia, in the context of which she identified Gudeas chin (regardless of whether it is
an actual or an artificially constructed physiognomic quotation) as his signature element: in
concert with the often inscribed label of his name and titles on the body of the statue, [it]
allows for both recognition and the perpetuation of his chosen PR image.
28
mized: the Buddha accepts, or authorizes, or consecrates the reproduction in

question, and effectively the very concept of anthropomorphic reproduction.
The statue this particular statue as well as the idea of the statue in general
is thus imbued with the Buddhas presence through the actual contact with the
Buddha himself (Thompson 2011: 415). The process of animating subsequent
Buddhist statues, reduced to five primary ritual sequences by Faure (1996:
247), is notable for including, alongside the opening of the eyes,62 the insertion
of relics or other cult objects into a hollow located either within the body itself
or in the statue base, and the establishment of a relationship between a new
statue and one that is already established and powerful as through the use
of a cord linking the two together. Both the placement of relics within the
statue in the first case and the cord in the second case depend on (here explicitly physical) contact with previously authorized objects or images: the cord in
the latter case, indeed, might be compared to an electrical or even umbilical
cord that binds the new statue into a lineage extending back to the original
image directly authorized by the Buddha (Swearer 2004: 80). The efficacy of
such physical contact in authorizing new (re-)presentations further recalls the
legend of the original image of the Buddha, which derived its authoritative
status not only through its physical replication of or similitude to the original
or prototype establishing a basic mimetic relationship but also through its
subsequent direct contact with the Buddha.
It is interesting in this context to consider the mode whereby divine images
in the ancient Near East might be legitimized, a mode that was not dependent
on or, at minimum, not limited to any physical or physiognomic resemblance to the prototype. The famous Sun God Tablet (SGT) (Figure 1.2), recording the restoration of the sun god Shamashs statue and temple at the ancient
south Mesopotamian city of Sippar by the Babylonian king Nabu-apla-iddina
(ca. 888855 BCE), offers some insight into the complex and multifaceted relationship between authoritative divine images and the divine itself in Mesopotamia during the late second and early first millennia BCE (Sonik, this volume;
Woods 2004; Slanski 2000: 105112; Dick 1999; Walker and Dick 1999).
Lost for nearly two centuries by the time Nabu-apla-iddina came to power,
having apparently been destroyed or taken during the Sutaean raids that took
place during the reign of Adad-apla-iddina, the missing anthropomorphic cult
62 The opening of the eyes is not necessarily prerequisite to, nor on its own typically sufficient
for, the animation of statues of the Buddha but is particularly pertinent to the discussion here
as it is linked to issues of mimesis at least insofar as the degree of resemblance to the
human or divine model can sometimes contribute to the magic trapping of the forces that
bring the icon to life (Faure 1996: 247).
Fig. 1.2: BM 91000. Late Babylonian Period Limestone Tablet from Sippar (ca. mid-ninth
century BCE). Sun God Tablet. 29.2 (h) 17.8 (w) cm. Courtesy British Museum.
29
30
statue of the sun god at Sippar presented the kings of Babylonia with a conundrum: how was a new cult statue of the god to be constructed in the absence
of an authoritative image on which to model it? It was not sufficient, after all,
to construct just any statue and to perform the relevant rituals to awaken or
animate it. It was necessary that the image be an authoritative one both
authorized by and acceptable to the god with its authoritative status being
determined on the basis of such factors as its incorporation of or constitution
with the appropriate materials and its endowment with the proper attributes
and symbols in order for the image to be accepted by the god and for the
divine to be awakened in its matrix.63 Two solutions to the problem of how to
represent as well as how to present or presence the sun god within his
temple at Sippar were ultimately discovered. The first, undertaken during the
reign of Simbar-shipak (ca. 10251008), was to emplace the sun-disk, a symbol
of Shamash, within the temple where the anthropomorphic cult statue had
previously stood. Situated thus, the sun-disk received offerings and presumably presenced the divine and interacted with human devotees in much the
same manner in which the cult statue had previously been accustomed to do.
While there is no indication that the legitimacy of the sun-disk as a material
presence of or meeting point with the divine was in question, it does seem that
it remained a less ideal image than an anthropomorphic one in its specific
capacity as cult statue. This is indicated by the events of Nabu-apla-iddinas
reign in the early to mid-ninth century BCE, when a model for an anthropomorphic image of Shamash was at last recovered in the form of a fired clay relief
and promptly seized upon to guide the crafting of a new cult statue of the god.
In thinking about the relationship between the divine and the image of the
divine, it is useful here to note the (probable) limitations of the newly discovered clay relief model, which should likely be imagined as being relatively
small in scale and bearing only a two-dimensional rendering (of a three-dimensional anthropomorphic statue?) of the sun god.64 Fortunately, the types of
information necessary to construct a new and legitimate anthropomorphic statue of Shamash would not have included precise physiognomic features: the
cult statue, after all, was not a portrait in the traditional sense and would not
have relied on a mimetic relationship to the god for its authoritative status. It
follows that there need not be a precise mimetic relationship either between
the depiction on the clay relief and the soon-to-be crafted new anthropomor-
63 This process of awakening, and the recognition that the god is not coterminous with the
image, has been the subject of a brief but nuanced discussion by Smith (2001: 18385).
64 See the discussion on the possible form of the clay relief model in Woods 2004: 38; 42,
also fn. 70 below.
31
phic cult statue of the sun god. What the legitimacy of a divine image would
have depended upon was its acceptance by the god on the one hand and its
capacity to evoke cognitive recognition on the part of the viewer on the other.
These two prerequisites, notably, may be variously met through information
the clay relief model would at least have been capable of providing: the placement of the anthropomorphic body in the proper pose or position;65 the inclusion of the relevant attributes or symbols of the god (as rays rising from his
shoulders);66 potentially, if the relief were painted, an indication through the
use of specific colors of the proper materials to be used for the constitution of
a legitimate divine body;67 and perhaps also the inclusion of (at best) one or
two schematically rendered signature elements that might further assist in
the cognitive recognition of the specific god rendered.68 In addition to providing various types of information useful for the construction of a new and authoritative anthropomorphic cult statue of the sun god, the fortuitously discovered clay relief also served another purpose: it functioned as a vital link in the
chain connecting any new image modeled upon it to an older and (presumably) duly authorized and divinely accepted anthropomorphic image of Shamash, thus ensuring the continuity of a pictorial stream of tradition (Sonik,
this volume, 2014).69
As a final note on the Sun God Tablet, it is worth noting that it includes a
reference potentially insinuating the notion of an archetypal (divine) image,
the design of which originated with the gods, which was intended to be recreated in the newly constructed cultic image modeled on the discovered relief.
65 The goddess Inana/Ishtar, for example, is recognizable on a number of cylinder seals (as
the Old Babylonian seal BM 130695, discussed in Sonik, this volume) due to her frontal face
and torso, the weapons arising from behind her shoulders; one bare leg also emerges from her
robe and is set upon the neck of a lion, her associated animal attribute. It is possible though
not confirmed that this is (one of) the form(s) in which her cult statue was rendered.
66 The horned helmet functions as a general divine signifier; personalized attributes, which
enable the viewers recognition of the image as a specific divinity, include but are not limited
to such things as individualized weapons, a particular animal (natural or hybrid monster), and
in some cases also an astral symbol. It is not clear that the agency of the divinity is distributed
into all of these attributes in the same way the placement of wild animals and monsters
beneath the foot of the anthropomorphic figure of the god indeed suggests they retain something of an independent (and would-be rebellious) primary agency.
67 While little in the way of pigment remains visible to the naked eye, close study has revealed traces of once vibrant color on some clay plaques and figures, among them the socalled Queen of the Night (BM ME 2003,0718.1), formerly the Burney Relief.
68 See fn. 57 above.
69 One might compare this to the chain of images created when Buddhist images are authorized, see main text above; Swearer 2004: 80; Faure: 1996: 247.
32
The relevant passage refers to -ur-ti al-mi- / ir-pu a ha-a-bi / GAR-

u si-ma-ti-, a relief of his image, / a fired clay (impression) / of his appearance and attributes [insignia] (SGT III 1921; Woods 2004: 85). The key word
in this passage is uurtu, which certainly designates a graphic design70 but
which also possesses another meaning, according to which it may reference a
(divine) design, plan, concept, [or] ordinance (CAD s.v. uurtu A). The use of
this term here suggests at least the possibility that the recovered image is a
divinely decreed and authorized one, one that is to be precisely imitated in
specific not necessarily physiognomic respects in the human attempt to re-create
it. If this was indeed the intended implication of uurtu here, the cult statue
newly created during the reign of Nabu-apla-iddina would comprise a secondary epiphany of an unalterable divine archetype. Such an understanding of
events, though necessarily speculative, only reinforces the other messages inherent in the Sun God Tablet inscription, which reiterate the particular divine favor
and divinely legitimated status enjoyed by Nabu-apla-iddina during his reign
the material manifestation of which was his access to a model from which to
create an anthropomorphic cult statue of Shamash rather than merely having to
make do with the sun-disk that his predecessors used (Sonik, this volume).
Devotional objects, as Caroline Bynum has pointed out, do not look like
the divinity and yet evoke its presence, and the relic does not look like but is
a piece of a saint,71 possessing as such the same qualities as the whole agent.72
It is, ultimately, through cultural learning and experience that we recognize
the material object as a medium pointing to or marking the presence of the
divine, or that we recognize a physical image that possesses the likeness of
even if not a direct physiognomic resemblance to the divinity that is its referent. If we think of representations not as symbols but rather as mental con-
70 King (1912: 120 n. 4) argued that the clay model might have been a figure in the round but
this is no longer generally accepted; see Woods 2004: 94 n. iii 1920.
71 Caroline Bynum in her comments during the panel dedicated to the volume Idol Anxiety
(Ellenbogen and Tugendhaft 2011) organized at the Humanities Center of New York University
on September 19, 2011.
72 Discussing the analogy between reliquary (and contained relic) and statue in the Middle
Ages, Belting (1994: 299) noted that both comprised proofs of a saints physical presence and
resembled each other in appearance: the nature of this resemblance is worth elucidating further here. The medieval body part relic (and/or reliquary) as pars pro toto (literally the part
for the whole) was the body of a saint, who remained present even in death and gave proof
of his or her life by miracles. The statue represented this body of the saint and, as it were, was
itself the saints new body, which, like a living body, could also be set in motion in a procession
[italics ours]. See also, on the nature and functioning of medieval body-part relics and reliquaries, Bynum and Gerson 1997; Hahn 2012: 117141; on pars pro toto epiphanies, fn. 99 below.
33
structs, which have referential entities potentially possessing but not limited
to their material aspects, then physical representation can be more usefully
conceptualized as presenting or presencing the divine to enable communication rather than as a process of mimetic representation. This notion of presencing the divine brings the active process of creating a likeness to the fore, and
makes the divine or the divinity explicitly recognizable in terms of referential
qualities and attributes rather than in terms of mere pictorial representation.
6 Internal and External Representations:

The Materiality of the Mental Image
The papers published in this volume, as well as those presented at the workshop on the materiality of divine agency at its inception,73 further reveal the
necessity of defining what is meant by the term image. This is, after all, not
necessarily to be equated with a material object or to its (external) form; it
may comprise, rather, a mental representation.74 But what is the relationship
between the mental and the material, and how might the two inform or shape
each other?
It is worth interjecting a few remarks here on Michael Baxandalls important study on the Period Eye (1988), which touched on related issues in its
perceptive discussion of the relationship between the cognitive style and the
pictorial style of fifteenth century Italy. The images extant from this period are
predominantly religious pictures a description referring not merely to the
specific subject matter that they evinced but also to their institutional functioning, intended as they were to stimulate and facilitate particular intellectual and
73 This was held on April 29, 2011 at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New
York University.
74 The complexities of distinguishing mental from physical images, and of delineating the
relationship between these, have attracted ongoing attention in art historical, psychological,
history of religion, and neuroscientific discourses, as well as in other disciplines; see, for example, Mitchell 1986: 1019; Simons 2008, esp. pp. 8083; Faure 1996: 24243; Damasio 1999:
31820; Johnson 2007: 6465; Bennett and Hacker 2008: 4143. It is important to note on this
subject, however, that the use and meaning of the term mental image may well vary across
disciplines and even across the work of scholars within any one discipline, so that no single
universally applicable definition is possible. In the context of this discussion, Mitchells (1986:
919) delineation of mental images as being mutable rather than static or absolute and involving all the senses rather than being exclusively visual, is a useful one though physical or
material images may share these properties to a greater extent than one might expect.
34
spiritual pursuits (Baxandall 1988: 40). The nuances of the (visual) artists role,
and of the relationship between artist, image, and viewer, are carefully unpacked: The painter was a professional visualizer of the holy stories. What we
now easily forget is that each of his pious public was liable to be an amateur
in the same line, practised in spiritual exercises that demanded a high level of
visualization the painters were exterior visualizations, the publics interior
visualizations (Baxandall 1988: 45). The extant artworks of this period should
not be understood as absolute or utterly self-contained creations: rather, the
artist would have understood that his or her artwork would interact with the
viewers pre-existing internal representations on the subject. The artist, in such
a context, must negotiate a fine line: his or her external (material) visualization
should generally evoke a specific referent and permit its cognitive recognition
and yet not compete with or efface the particularity of the viewers internal
(if still culturally influenced and mediated) mental visualization of such. The
primacy of the mental image is stressed here both in the modern scholarly analysis of Quattrocento paintings and in the contemporaneous fifteenth
century written documents on religious art and its purposes and functioning
(Baxandall 1988: 4647). The mental image itself, however, if it was articulated
through internal meditation during prayer, presumably drew on information
imparted in orally delivered sermons, written accounts (for the literate), and
religious pictures themselves (however lacking in detail), these last used in
some cases for instructional purposes. The relationship between internal and
external images was necessarily a reflexive one.
The mental image in the context of this discussion, as a social and cultural
construction itself informed by cultic practice and theological concepts and
theorizing, may be translated into material representations, physical and literary/verbal (as created, for instance, during the performance of prayer or in
encounters with mythological narrative), and, ultimately, shaped and reshaped
by these. Such an understanding of the physical or material image in whatever form it takes as ultimately deriving from or being generated by the mental
image forces us to re-evaluate our stance on the established antagonistic
models of iconism and aniconism in religious systems: If the mind is conceived as a picture-making machine, how could worship and contemplation
proceed without images? (Clark 1992: 66; Carruthers 1998: 7273; Sonik, this
volume). In the discourse on medieval iconoclasm especially, the image functions as a doctrinal referent concerned with the anthropomorphic image of
God.75 If we regard the image as a cognitive referent, however, the spiritually
75 The complex functioning of the image of the divine, and the understanding of this functioning, is elucidated in the unfortunate story of the monk Sarapion (a hermit in the Scetis
Desert of Egypt), who, in his simplicity, mistook an (anthropomorphic) image, held in his
35
adept human actor might still see God in his glorified splendor even in the
absence of external (material) visualizations.76
The recognition that the human mind needs to see its thoughts as organized schemes of images (Carruthers 1998: 3) offers the potential to refine the
notion of the materiality of divine presence in the context of communication.
What is more, the making of mental images also applies to the process of composing a prayer and to its actual performance. The acts of composing and
performing are alike in comprising cognitive processes of gathering tropes and
figures to elicit divine agency, thus representing arts of memoria and deep contemplation (Carruthers 1998: 4). The pertinent tropes, of course, must be recognized as deriving their potency and efficacy from their place within and reference to shared traditions, education, and experience, and thus comprise social
and cultural phenomena. Memory works not as the ability to reproduce a text,
formula, or list of items by rote learning but rather as a matrix of a reminiscent
cogitation, shuffling and collating things stored in a random access memory
scheme, or set of schemes a memory architecture (Carruthers 1998: 4).
It is thus not only the object or the image of the divinity that elicits a
particular affective response; memory images also have a cognitive element in
that they serve as cues to the image and are emotionally colored, to the extent
that memories were once regarded as bodily affects (Pongratz-Leisten, this volume).77 In other words, both the material image and the mental image operate
in evocative ways and are equally linked with the transmission of knowledge
and memory. Such knowledge is culturally learned and shared among a particular group of people, allowing an individual from that group to recognize, for
example, a specific divinity in a particular (context-bound) manifestation of its
agency. The question of how handmade images or devotional objects differ
from images of the mind, and of the precise significance and ramifications of
materializing the divine presencing the unreachable and inaccessible in some
sort of matter and rendering it thereby visible and tangible is thus one which
must be addressed within the individual cultural contexts within which such
images or objects originated and functioned.
mind, for a truthful representation of God (a matter of mimesis). Once Sarapion has had his
error explained, he is laid low by grief because without the image he was accustomed to use
in order to pray, he can no longer find God, Carruthers 1998: 72; also Sonik, this volume.
76 This being the case, it is no surprise to find that mental representations could equally be
subject to iconoclasm where deemed incompatible with doctrine as so poignantly demonstrated in the story of Sarapion, fn. 75 above.
77 The Stoic philosophers in particular were cited by Carruthers (1998: 14, 280 n. 17) as being
of crucial importance to the elucidation of the emotional content of images.
36
7 Encountering and Experiencing the Divine:

Anthropomorphism Across Cultures
In investigating human interaction with the divine, the desire and capacity for
communication on both the human and the divine parts should be regarded
as central to religious activity. Communication presupposes the interaction of
at least two agents, and so it is necessary to define precisely what divine agency means in terms of imagining divinities as causal agents with human-like
properties that yet possess particular qualities that violate our ontological expectations (Boyer 1994: 100102; 2001: 6171).78 Omnipresence and omniscience, for example, which establish a divinitys efficacy for the community of
believers and responsiveness to the particular requests of the individual, comprise exactly such ontological violations.79 As divine presence can materialize
in many forms, a crucial step in discussing the materiality of divine agency in
cross-cultural perspective is elucidating what individual disciplines bring to
the notions of agency (discussed above) and anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism in particular, when considered cross-culturally, emerges as a critical
term. Frequently used to reference specifically human shape or physical form,
it has become clear that this is too restricted a denotation. In the context of
its application to the divine, anthropomorphism might be extended to signify
human-like behaviors, capacities, or other qualities even in the absence of human form.
Astrological omen compendia from Mesopotamia, for example, reference
particular celestial phenomena using anthropomorphizing language, so that
planets and stars are described as possessing both agency and feeling despite
their lack of human appearance: a lunar eclipse, for example, was couched as
the distress of the moon god The metaphor implies a conception of the
physical moon as a representation of the god Sin, otherwise descriptive language about the god Sin would have no necessary connection to the moon
78 Ontological categories are abstract concepts (i.e. animal, person, tool) as opposed to concrete ones (i.e. bird, dog, hammer). Religious representations are described by Boyer (2001:
62) as mental representations fulfilling the following conditions: First, the religious concepts
violate certain expectations from ontological categories. Second, they preserve other expectations [Religious concepts] describe a new object by giving (i) its ontological category and
(ii) its special features, different from other objects in the same ontological category. Basic
ontological categories, where combined with striking but limited violation [are rendered]
particularly powerful and highly memorable, Tanner and Osborne 2007: 11.
79 This is not to say, of course, that either omnipresence or omniscience is a necessary or
consistent feature of the divine in all cultural contexts.
37
Fig. 1.3: BM 118561. Early Dynastic Period Limestone Plaque (ca. 2500 BCE). Upper Register:
Nude male (king?) followed by three worshippers pours libation before anthropomorphic
seated god. Lower Register: Nude male (king?) followed by frontally rendered female priestess and two attendants or worshippers pours libation before date-palm stand in front of
temple. 22.9 (h) 26.3 (w) cm. Courtesy British Museum. Trustees of the British Museum.
(Rochberg 1996: 47585). The anthropomorphizing of Mesopotamias divinities

(Pongratz-Leisten, Sonik, this volume), then, should not be regarded as limited
to pictorial or literary conceptions of the divine as human in form (Figures
1.31.4). It was also manifested in the attribution of human characteristics,
capacities, and behaviors to various phenomena, inanimate objects, and nonhuman entities that were associated with the gods and that came to function
as secondary divine agents. This phenomenon, of course, is not limited to
Mesopotamia but is evident in numerous other cultural contexts as well.
That said, deities materially presenced in or even depicted or imagined
with physical forms or bodies resembling those of biological persons, even if
these are therianthropic or theriomorphic rather than fully anthropomorphic
(and even if these same deities may also be presenced or manifested in objectively inanimate things), offer the capacity for a much more seamless anthropomorphization of their range of social behaviors and embeddedness and of
38
Fig. 1.4: MMA 1989.361.1. Neo-Assyrian Period Chalcedony Seal (ca. eighth-seventh century
BCE). Worshipper kneeling in front of Ishtar image; winged gatekeepers flanking.
3.1 (h) cm. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art (IAP). The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
their interactive potential with other deities and with human worshippers than
other types of things. Equipped with such forms, gods might marry and bear
children and mingle openly or covertly with kings and even with ordinary mortals. The possession of such (apparently) relatable forms and behaviors should
not be regarded, however, as having a straightforward or unambiguous effect
on the human relationship or interaction with the divine.
A useful case study in this context is ancient Greece, which is notable
especially from the fifth century BCE for the apparently essential physical
and behavioral anthropomorphism of its gods. Delineated, indeed, as extrahuman both in their pictorial representations and in the extant myths and narratives, so that their bodies, while human shaped, diverge from the merely
human in scale, fragrance, beauty, luminosity, or other features,80 the gods
demonstrate the full range of human emotions and passions, dialed permanently to maximum;81 they are fully socially engaged with each other, embedded in complex divine social networks and households (marrying; bearing
80 These features and their effects are discussed in Lapatin 2010: 14142; Kindt 2012: 41. This
divergence from the merely human is apparent also in the cult statues of the gods; see the
discussion in Osborne 2011: 206.
81 Emotions such as lust, anger, sorrow, vengefulness, love, and pain are pursued or acted
upon with single-minded intensity, and are lent extra weight by their potentially devastating
ramifications for mortals caught up in divine affairs.
Fig. 1.5: BM 1866,0415.63. Classical Period Red-Figure Squat Lekythos (ca. 400380 BCE).
Zeus visits Danae in the form of a shower of gold. 17.8 (h) cm. Courtesy British Museum.
Trustees of the British Museum.
39
40
Fig. 1.6: BM 1856,1226.48. Classical Period Red-Figure Neck Amphora (ca. 440 BCE). Zeus
takes the form of a bull to carry off Europa. 32 (h) 18.5 (w) cm. Courtesy British Museum.
Trustees of the British Museum.
41
Fig. 1.7: BM 1864,1007.275. Classical Period Black-Figure Hydria (ca. 475 BCE). Peleus grapples with a metamorphosing Thetis. 20.3 (h) cm. Courtesy British Museum. Trustees of the
British Museum.
42
children; possessing parents and siblings, retinues and servants; etc.); and
they are intimately embedded also in human social networks and relations, at
least in myth, frequently metamorphosing into various objectively animate and
inanimate things to pursue, consummate, or escape these relations (Figures
1.51.7), only to subsequently resume their anthropomorphic physical forms
when these particular actions are concluded (Buxton 2010: 8990). But what
is the relationship between divine anthropomorphism as materially evinced in
text and image, mental (re-)presentations of the divine, and human encounters, experiences, and interactions with the gods in ancient Greece?
Three points emerge as particularly significant in this regard. The first is
that the increasingly perfect physical anthropomorphism of cult statues,82 as
exemplified by Pheidias chryselephantine Athena Parthenos (ca. 438 BCE) and
Olympian Zeus (ca. 430 BCE), arguably magnified rather than minimized at
least in some respects the gulf between human and divine (Figures 1.81.9).
The Parthenos may have been human in form but both its massive 38-foot
height and the materials from which it was composed, brilliant gold and ivory,83 were efficacious in conveying the unique nature of the divine to mortals,
enabling ephiphanic experience through the divine radiance attributed to
[and also presumably rendered visible in] naturalistic forms or precious metals (Platt 2011: 9697). Beyond these pictorial cues and the overwhelming aesthetic effect and pleasure afforded by at least some of the cult statues (Steiner
82 The nuances of the definition and proper application of the term cult statue in the context
of Greece were briefly addressed by Lapatin (2010: 131): following Irene Romano, he delineated
the term as denoting a major or significant image of a deity that may look much like other
representations of that deity but that is distinguished by its special setting (within a shrine,
temple, or sanctuary), its association with or role as the focus of cultic practice (as indicated
by its reception of offerings), and its capacity to stand in or substitute for the deity in specific
contexts. While there is ongoing debate about the applicability of the concept of cult statue to
the ancient Greek context (Donohue 1997; Mylonopoulos 2010; Pirenne-Delforge 2010: 12930),
the term is retained here for lack of a better one in reference to images of the gods in all
periods that meet the conditions outlined here.
83 As rare, expensive, and luminous materials, gold and ivory not only pleased the gods but
also were considered to possess intrinsic magical and aesthetic properties that manifested or
materialized the beauty, charis, that was an attribute of the gods (Lapatin 2010: 14041). In
his useful discussion of the peculiar properties of gold and ivory in the context of ancient
Greece, and of the relationship between the use of these materials for cult statues and the
effective conveyance of divinity, Lapatin (2001; 2010: 140) cites the myths of Pelops and Pygmalion as well as passages from Pliny the Elder (Natural History 8.31), Pausanias (5.12.2), and
Artemidorus of Daldis (Oneirocritica 2.39); see also Vernant 1991b: 3645. For the assignment
of sacral properties to materials such as gold, silver, and lapis lazuli in Mesopotamia, see
above and Benzel, this volume; Winter 2012, 1999; Hurowitz 2006.
43
Fig. 1.8: ROM 962.228.16. Plaster Model of Pheidias (Lost) Chryselephantine Athena Parthenos (ca. 438 BCE) by G. P. Stevens with additions by Sylvia Hahn (ca. 1970 CE). 1 : 10 Scale.
With permission of Royal Ontario Museum. Royal Ontario Museum.
44
Fig. 1.9: BM 1948,0410.4.73. Artists Reconstruction of Pheidias (Lost) Chryselephantine

Olympian Zeus (ca. 430 BCE); Engraving by Philippe Galle after Drawing by Maarten van
Heemskerck (ca. 1572). 21.2 (h) 26.1 (w) cm. Courtesy British Museum. Trustees of the
British Museum.
2001: 101103), the distinction between human and divine was similarly preserved in written accounts of the gods, as in descriptions of their capacity for
easy mutability and astonishing metamorphoses.84 If the gods were typically
or even essentially anthropomorphic (in form and behavior), the anthropomorphic was yet entirely insufficient to encompass them. As underscored by the
fate of the unfortunate Semele, the notion of divinity in ancient Greece was a
combination of that which is human and that which is incommensurable-withthe-human (Buxton 2010: 90; 2009: 158, 17790; Steiner 2001: 8081; Gould
2001: 20334).
84 As Buxton (2010: 90; 2009: 16768) has noted, however, the metamorphoses undertaken
by the gods were frequently into other anthropomorphic bodies rather than into animals or
inanimate objects.
45
The second pertinent point in this context is that the perfect anthropomorphism of the Classical cult statues was not evident in divine images of earlier
periods, a fact that seems not at all to have inhibited their mediation of the
divine. Earlier aniconic and semi-iconic (here referring to non-figural or schematically figural) images were certainly known,85 some existing contemporaneously with or even developed subsequent to the perfectly anthropomorphic
statues of the Classical Period (ca. 478323 BCE).86 Pheidias gorgeous chryselephantine Athena Parthenos notably existed contemporaneously with the earlier and simpler olive wood (semi-iconic?) Athena Polias on the Athenian Acropolis.87 Indeed, the perfecting of the anthropomorphic divine form in the Classical cult statues has been argued to coincide with a general decline in the
statues capacity to actually presence the divine (Steiner 2001: 102103):88 Vernant (1991a: 152) famously delineated a shift, occurring from the turn of the
fifth to the fourth century BCE, from the presentification of the invisible to
the imitation of appearance. It is at this time that the category of figural representation emerges in its specific features and, at the same time, becomes attached to mimsis the great human fact of imitation, which gives it a solid
foundation. It is worth noting in this respect that it was the Athena Polias
that continued to remain the focus of official cultic practice and ritual activity
as the Panathenaic Festival on the Acropolis even after the erection of the
fabulous Parthenos. Some scholars, indeed, noting that there is mention of
85 Among divine representations, Vernant (1991a: 152) notes the aniconic brute stone, beams,
pillar, and stele; the theriomorphic or monstrous Gorgon, Sphinx, and Harpies; and the anthropomorphic (iconic or semi-iconic), ranging from schematized to the naturalistic. See also
Steiner 2001: 81; Kindt 2012: 45, 51. Most recently, for an in-depth study of aniconism in Greek
antiquity, see Gaifman 2012.
86 For the contemporaneous display of in some cases even in the same general spaces
as aniconic and semi-iconic representations of the gods even when iconic (fully figural or
naturalistic) images were known, see Steiner 2001: 8089; Platt 2011: 83 ff; Spivey 2013: 44
45, 18990.
87 For a discussion of the range of postulated reconstructions of the Athena Polias, from the
aniconic to the fully figurative, see Platt 2011: 92; also Lapatin 2001: 78. For the use (or, more
accurately, lack of use) of the terms Parthenos and Polias to denote the cult statues of the
goddess Athena in antiquity, see Lapatin 2010: 12730.
88 This is not to say that the developing anthropomorphism of divine images was (solely)
responsible for the apparent decline in the presentification of the divine. Discussing the distinction between the Archaic Period, when the gods were not yet distinguished from their
statues, and the Classical Period, when the worship of statues was problematized, Bremmer
(2013: 9) has emphasized the effects of the establishment of both the Dodekatheon (the standardized group of twelve gods) and the hero (as intermediate entity) in enlarging the distance
between the mortal and the divine; see also the useful discussion in Marconi (2011: 16162).
46
neither a priestess nor an altar of Athena Parthenos nor much in the way of
evidence for the statue having been offered dedications or sacrifices, have argued that the Parthenos was not technically a cult statue at all and the Parthenon, by extension, was not technically a temple, or at least not a temple to
the goddess (Hurwit 1999: 27). Other scholars, however, have countered with
the apparent presence of a table within the Parthenon, presumably for cultic
offerings of some sort to the Parthenos (Lapatin 2010: 132; Mansfield 1985: 232
n. 19; Donohue 1997: 4344),89 though acknowledging the continuing significance of the Athena Polias.
In other parts of the Greek world, too, semi-iconic or aniconic images continued to be significant during and after the Classical Period. Such images,
notably, were also associated with epiphanic experience but evoked this not
through the awesome splendor of their physical forms or appearances, being
made often only of wood though the olive wood used for the Athena Polias
had particular sacred qualities and also being comparatively simple in form.
Rather, their sanctity was located in origin myths of epiphanic arrival (Platt
2011: 9596): they might fall from heaven, as the Athena Polias itself or the
statue of Artemis at Ephesus or Dionysus Cadmus at Thebes; be recovered from
the sea, as the statues of Dionysus at Methymna, Heracles at Erythrae, and
Hermes Perpheraios at Ainos; or otherwise be bound up with heroic traditions,
as the statue of Artemis at Brauron, said to have been brought there by Iphigeneia (Pausanias I 33.1); the wooden Hera at Samos, said to have been brought
by the Argonauts from Argos (Pausanias VII 4.4); or the pear wood Hera at the
Heraion in Argos, said to have originated in Tiryns where it was dedicated by
Peirasos, son of the eponymous founder of Argos (Pausanias II 17.5).
There is not evident, then, a clear evolutionary development from the (cult)
statue as religious image to the statue as aesthetic artwork (Vernant 1991: 156
57; Lapatin 2010: 14142; Marconi 2011: 16061). Rather, the status of images
and their relationship to their referents seems to have been or to have become
an issue of critical concern in the Greek world, one diversely mediated by dif-
89 See also fn. 82 above on the meaning and applicability or inapplicability of the term
cult statue in ancient Greece. Gaifman (2006: 271) offered a striking alternate conception of
the relationship between the Parthenos and cult, arguing that even while the Polias remained
the focus of cultic activity in the Athenian Acropolis, it was the Parthenos that emerged as the
instrumental emblem [italics ours] of the Athenian cult of Athena Polias in Athens in the midfifth century BCE, a role embedded in daily experience through the statues replications on
objects such as a painted vase or a terracotta token. The form and appearance of the Athena
Polias, in contrast to the oft-imitated Parthenos, are virtually unknown (Gaifman 2006: 259);
Athenian bronze coins from the later third century BCE possibly but not conclusively offer
a possible reflection of this elusive figure; see Kroll 1982.
47
ferent individuals across divergent or even singular spatio-temporal moments.90 On the one hand, the blurring of the line between divinities and their
cult statues is suggested by a range of examples from throughout much of
Greek history. An episode in Homers Iliad (Book VI 36066) records the Trojan
womens carrying of offerings to the statue of Athena within her shrine and
their prayer that she take pity on their suffering but the goddess physically
rejects their plea by nodding her (or at least her statues) head. Pausanias (ca.
110180 CE), in keeping with common practice, frequently refers to statues by
the names of their referents without differentiating them as images, and further
records the active intervention and consultation of divine images in everyday
human life, from their healing of the ill to their offering of prophesies or information.91 In other cases, accounts survive of the chaining of divine statues
to prevent their or, rather, the divinities departing or desertion or, more
ominously, to check their or, again, the divinities dangerous or inimical
proclivities or powers (Pausanias III 15.7, 15.11; Barasch 1992: 3639).92 On the
other hand, philosophers such as Xenophanes, Heraclitus, and Plato explicitly
challenged the anthropomorphizing of the gods in the first case and the confusion of the image with the imag(in)ed in the latter.93 In Aeschylus Eumenides
(ll. 397405; Collard 2002: 96), the miserable Orestes makes his way to Athenas altar and statue in order to beseech the goddess but Athena is not perpetually or permanently present there. She hears the clamor of his cries only from
a distance, being engaged with other business, and comes (or returns) to find
90 This does not negate the general shift in the relationship between the divine and the divine
statue occurring during the turn from the Archaic to the Classical Period that was articulated
by Vernant (1991) and considered more recently in the context of other visual, social, and
historical developments in Marconi 2011; Bremmer 2013.
91 Pausanias (VII 22.23) records, for example, the enquiries put to a statue of Hermes in the
marketplace of Pharae; see also Spivey and Squire 2005: 82; Elsner 1998: 203205; Osborne
2010: 6668.
92 Bremmer (2013: 1112), recounting Menodotus account of the binding to a willow bush of
a statue of Hera, observed that bound or fettered statues (especially of Ares, Artemis, and
Dionysus) in the Greek world shared several specific qualities, being venerable in age or at
least archaic in style and being also potentially dangerous (possessing the capacity to escape
the temples or religious sites where they were located), and being linked also to rites of
reversal. See also Steiner 2001: 105108, 15268; Meuli 1975: 103581.
93 Xenophanes (ca. 570478 BCE) criticism of the anthropomorphizing of the divine is preserved only second hand in a citation by Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150215 CE). For Heraclitus contemptuous account (Diels and Kranz 1952, fragment B5) of those who prayed to statues
as if they were chattering with houses, not recognizing what gods or even heroes are like,
see Steiner 2001: 79, 12125. For Platos views, see Laws 931a; also the discussions in Lapatin
2010: 133; Squire 2011: 16061.
48
Orestes seated at her statue: From far away I [Athena] heard a cry summoning
me from Scamander, where I was taking possession of a land where the Achaean leaders and chieftains had assigned to me for ever, root and branch, a great
portion from their captured spoils From there I have come in swift pursuit
with unwearied feet, wingless and with the folds of my aegis flapping.94 And
various surviving vase paintings explore the relationship between the divine
(or semi-divine) and the statue: a black-figure composition depicting the Rape
of Cassandra appears to represent Athena herself (as her statue[?], which otherwise does not appear) actively intervening as the lesser Ajax profanes her temple (Marconi 2011: 158 fig. 12);95 a red-figure calyx krater from Taranto (ca.
400375 BCE) depicts a statue of the god Apollo bearing a bow and phiale
within his temple while the god himself appears outside the temple playing his
lyre;96 and an Apulian column krater (ca. 350 BCE) depicts a bemused Herakles
observing the painting of his own image (Figure 1.10).97 In light of this diversity
of views, the authoritative cult statue of the god in ancient Greece, whether
aniconic or iconic (and specifically anthropomorphic), might be best characterized as being distinct from and yet still a channel for accessing and, at least in
some cases, also pleasing the gods (Auffarth 2010: 470, 47678; Lapatin 2010:
136, 140). Where it was authorized by the god, as through divine inspiration,
revelation, or an explicit sign of divine approval, the statue mediated and even
periodically though not permanently presenced the divine.98
94 The significance of this episode for the relationship between the divine and statues of the
divine is briefly discussed in Auffarth 2010: 470; Meineck 2013: 17376.
95 For this and other treatments of this scene, which in later periods might see Athena represented as a statue or depicted twice, once as an independent entity standing behind her statue,
see Marconi 2011: 159 fig. 13, 162 fig. 15; Bremmer 2013: 9.
96 This interpretation of the imagery is generally but not universally accepted and it remains
possible (though we think unlikely) that two images of the referent (Apollo himself) are depicted here rather than images of Apollo and his statue respectively. This example may be considered alongside a red-figure South Italian vase, a Lucanian bell krater by the Pisticci Painter
(ca. 430420 BCE), that again depicts both Apollo and (apparently) the statue of Apollo; Marconi 2011: 163, fig. 16; Platt 2011: 114 ff.; Lapatin 2010: 13335; also Auffarth 2010: 470.
97 A fragmentary vase by the Iliupersis Painter (ca. 350325 BCE) bears a similar scene, Lapatin 2010: 13335.
98 A famous episode from Pausanias (V 11.9) records Pheidias prayer to Zeus to indicate
whether the god approved his statue (the Olympian Zeus). A thunderbolt signaled the gods
approbation. The divine origination and/or approval of the image in which the god was to be
presenced (or, at least, mediated) may be paralleled with the Mesopotamian requirements for
an authoritative and legitimate form for the divine image; see main text above. For the distancing of the image from the mortal craftsman in Greece, akin to the distancing of the cult statue
from the mortal craftsman in Mesopotamia, see Tanner 2006: 4855.
49
Fig. 1.10: MMA 50.11.4. Late Classical Period Red-Figure Column Krater by the Group of
Boston 00.348 (ca. 360350 BCE). Herakles watches painting of his own statue. 51.5 (h) cm.
Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art (IAP). The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
50
The third and final point has to do with the interaction between the material and the mental, and the modes in which the developing anthropomorphic
conceptualization of the gods affected and was affected by the rather emphatic
(and in some cases deliberately awe-inspiring) materiality of the divine statue
in ancient Greece, particularly from the Classical Period onwards. This interaction emerges as a strikingly complex and reciprocal one, particularly when
viewed through the lens of epiphanic experience: The tangible physical presence embedded in the human form enabled the Greeks to see and recognize
their gods, thus making the concept of divine epiphany possible; by the same
token, the epiphanic experience must have been instrumental in the creation
of the earliest Greek cult images (Henrichs 2010: 33). Once the relationship
between a specific deity and a particular cult image had been established, however, the interaction necessarily became something of a reflexive one: the likeness of the cult statue could, and often did, shape subsequent epiphanies
the physical manifestation of the divine to humans in dream or waking visions
and the corresponding recognition of the divine by the human which in turn
presumably shaped subsequent cult statues.99 The increasingly anthropomorphic images and behaviors of the gods, moreover, arguably stimulated and
enabled particularly intense channels of communication between human and
divine even as they, paradoxically, reinforced the enormity of the gulf between
the two different types of being.
Prior to leaving this discussion, it is useful to touch upon the phenomenon
evinced during the Middle Ages (Bynum, this volume), which saw a striking
increase in Eucharistic miracles during the period between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries CE. Divine presence manifested in explicitly non-anthropo-
99 See also the discussion in Gell 1998: 25, which recognizes a type of feedback loop between
material images and mental representations. Epiphany, significantly, was not necessarily visual (it might be aural or olfactory, for example) but it was necessarily sensual, insofar as
manifestations of divinity can only gain significance through human perception, Platt 2011:
10 ff. (on Greece); Bynum, this volume (on the European Middle Ages); Rendu Loisel, this volume (on Mesopotamia). Platt (2011: 258 ff.) explored epiphanic dream visions and the role of
dreams in the mutually reinforcing and reciprocal relationship between epiphany and image,
and noted also (2011: 10 n. 33) the delineation of so-called pars pro toto epiphanies by Petridou, in which divine emblems or attributes are experienced metonymically as manifestations
of the gods themselves, underscoring the fact that a purely anthropomorphic conceptualization of the divine in ancient Greece is rather too limited and limiting; see also fns. 50, 85, 87
above. The bibliography on epiphany in the ancient Greek context is vast. Several useful sources, which include additional bibliography, include Burkert 1997; Marinatos and Shanzer 2004;
Bremmer 2008, esp. 21533; Osborne 2010: 6870; and a forthcoming edited volume announced from Petridou and Platt; also, on human divine encounters in the context of Late
Antique divination, see Johnston 2010.
51
morphic matter bread and wine despite the ready accessibility of pre-existing human-shaped (or part thereof) holy things such as relics, statues, and
wall paintings. Of particular interest in the context of this discussion is not just
that apparently inanimate food stuffs animated, becoming quite literally true
meeting places with the divine, as Bynum termed them, but also that this
animation coincided with the anthropomorphization of the food stuffs: bread
and wine visibly transformed into bleeding flesh to signify their presencing of
the divine.
Fields such as psychology, evolutionary biology, and cognitive science (Atran 2002; Boyer 2001, 2003: 11924; Barrett 2007) have long observed that the
human mind tends to assign human properties such as intention, will, responsiveness, and goal-directedness to inanimate objects, non-human entities, and
even to natural phenomena or events (ToM).100 Such findings have important
implications for the investigation of the materiality of divine agency as they
suggest the minds need for some type of image or representation to act as a
focus for human-divine interaction. Theory of Mind has further demonstrated
that, regardless of whether supernatural beings are imagined in inanimate,
invisible, polymorphic, anthropomorphic, or abstract terms, human interaction
with such beings always occurs in the anthropomorphizing mode of communication and that all these various forms are attributed with (or perceived as
possessing) agency. Physical anthropomorphism is certainly not a prerequisite
for a particular material or matrix to effectively presence or present the divine
indeed, it may hamper such presencing in certain cases and contexts but it
does have the potential to enable particularly intense access to the otherwise
inaccessible and uncontainable, suggesting some level of common ground for
the purposes of engagement and communication. Even where the divine is
seemingly immaterial (or inanimate or aniconic, for that matter), conceptualized as an incorporeal power or as pure divine will, it is still typically imagined
or conceptualized in anthropomorphic terms or attributed with anthropomorphic capacities or behaviors in order that it explicitly remain able to see, listen
or respond to, or act on behalf of humankind.
8 Frameworks of Communication: Primary and

Secondary Divine Agents and Agency
Part of our task in this volume was to broaden the notion of materiality beyond
the physical object and to understand how things and thought relate to each
100 See fns. 33, 35 above.
52
other and specifically how the human mind works in experiencing the divine.
In pursuing what Caroline Bynum (2011: 20, 32) has called the materialization
of piety and resituating body in matter, and in inquiring into the functioning and meaning of holy matter, we might through investigating specific
frameworks of interaction and communication succeed in gaining insight
into issues beyond those of objectification, production, or the value embodied
in commodities and their place in gifting and exchange, as well as of the exercise of power through material culture and technology (Bourdieu 1977; Miller
1987; Graves-Brown 2000).
Experience, after all, always occurs in the context of particular frameworks, and it is the experience of the frame that elicits particular responses,
as was ingeniously demonstrated by the art historians Ernst Gombrich (1979)
and Michael Baxandall (1988: 29108). Gombrich undertook a compelling enquiry into the human response to the frame in which a particular object or
image was set while Baxandall elucidated the important concept of the period
eye, recognizing human visual perception as relying not only on innate skills
(and a common ocular apparatus) but also on learned skills based in and developing out of contemporary socio-cultural practices and contexts.101 From a
slightly different perspective, the subject of framework and context has been
explicitly taken up by psychologists and neuroscientists exploring the making
and perception of objects and images, the physical factors and other contextual
features of the visual field as they interact with both common human physiological structures and individual psychology, and the effects of a viewers previous personal and socio-cultural experiences on what and how he or she sees.
Discussing art specifically, though the implications of his analysis are not restricted to art objects, Solso (1994: 102) observed that artworks are always experienced in context: context here not only includes such things as the physical and sociopolitical environment within which art is observed and the people
in ones company during this observation but also is shaped by the personal
knowledge and prior cultural experience of the viewer and by common human
physiological structures: Basic perception is fixed by physiological structures
that are jointly enjoyed by all members of the species [but b]oth individual
psychology and common physiology contribute to the perception of art. Personal knowledge and experience, moreover, is not randomly or arbitrarily
101 For responses to the concept of the period eye at the time it was posited, see the discussion in Langdale 1998; also Tanner 2010. More recent studies have considered the gendered
eye, for example, as well as the cultural eye. The latter, posited by Coote (1992: 248), might
comprise a societys way of seeing, its repertoire of visual skills, which I [Coote] take to be its
visual aesthetic.
53
stored in the brain; it is, rather, systematically organized around themes, or

schemes, that are important structures in the understanding of art, as well as
of the world at large (Solso 1994: 102).102 Schemas or schemata, comprising
both the organization of information and the rules governing its use and combination, once activated, enable us to make particular inferences about particular objects and images, whether these are mundane or sacred, and to construct larger interpretations of them (Solso 2003: 714, 22360).103
In specific relation to our inquiry into the materiality of divinity, the social
context of communication was closely pursued as potentially determining the
manner in which divinity materialized or was ultimately presenced within a
material matrix. All social frameworks involve rules (Goffman 1986); Alfred
Gells inferred intentionality of things and artifacts, consequently, only operates effectively if the particular constraints and conditions of a frame are fully
exploited rather than neglected by the agents involved. Various examples from
Mesopotamia, as an example, demonstrate that specific settings provide for or
accommodate specific materializations of divine agency and that these settings might, moreover, provide clues for decoding or fully accessing the particular divine agent under consideration.104 In the context of the cult, it is not
only the anthropomorphic statue but also the various associated symbols or
attributes that may function to present or presence the divinity. The latter (symbols and attributes), however, typically function in more narrowly delimited
contexts than the anthropomorphic image which comprises a significantly
less trammeled agent, one capable of a significantly broader spectrum of do-
102 See also fn. 74 above. The relationship between personal (visual and other) experience
and the making of art has been relatively recently, if controversially, explored in a discussion
of neural plasticity in Onians 2007a, 2007b: 117; for thoughtful critiques of Onians work, see
Tallis 2009; Rollins 2009. Productive discussions of the relationship between visual experience
and history and visual perception include Deregowski 1972, 1999; Hochberg 1972; and the very
useful summary of scholarship contained in Phillips 2011.
103 See fn. 8 above. Solso (1994: 116) offered an example of a street schema advising us of
which features to expect and how they might interact with each other: We expect to see a fire
hydrant near the street and not flying high in the air. A homogeneous population may possess
a more-or-less common schema, however, individual variations and expectations remain,
these depending on individual knowledge and experience. Schemas, moreover, though they
remain dynamic even once formed, may be sufficiently powerful to mislead or overwhelm
direct perception and memory, see Brewer and Treyens 1981, and the discussion of their study
in Solso 1994: 11620. See also, however, the issues with the scene schema specifically raised
in Hollingworth 2008, esp. pp. 14446.
104 In her analysis of the notion of portraiture in the Persian tradition, Soucek (2000) stresses
the aspects of setting and action as clues for decoding the image of particular historical persons in Mughal and Qajar paintings.
54
ing. Standards and weapons of gods, for their part, could be rented and taken
on journeys, during the course of which they acted as divine witnesses to the
performance of an oath taken in the context of tax collection or the establishment of the boundaries of a lot. Other examples abound: during thunderstorms, the weather god Adad materialized in his voice, while celestial bodies
functioned as instantiations of the divine in the context of divination. It is
cultural knowledge of the particular framework within which such secondary
agents legitimately functioned that allows us to recognize and to delineate the
full scope and spectrum of divine agency and to elucidate the various modes
of its interaction with humans and the mundane world.105
The fluid notion of divine agency frequently resists modern (and even ancient and medieval) attempts at absolute structuration, which often privilege
the anthropomorphic conceptions or human-shaped images of the divine to
the detriment of its other complex and manifold manifestations. The scope and
variety of these manifestations, their specific significations, and the modes of
their functioning are delineated and elucidated in the remainder of this volume.
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Between Cognition and Culture: Theorizing the

Beate Pongratz-Leisten and Karen Sonik

Between Cognition and Culture: Theorizing

1 Matter Matters and Materiality

Beate Pongratz-Leisten and Karen Sonik

frequently if not always intentionally delineated as overlapping with material