Dr Sabine Neuman (Marburg) `Imaginary Gods: The Cults of the Graeco-Egyptian Deities in Ancient Athens'

In the fourth century BC, the first sanctuary for the goddess Isis, was built in Athens by Egyptian immigrants. Cults for the Graeco-Egyptian deities, Isis, Sarapis, Harpocrates and Anubis, are attested in Athens and Attica until late antiquity, enjoying great popularity among the ancient Athenians. Earlier research studied these deities mostly in erms of their distribution and treated them more or less as exotica. In this seminar, however, I will show how the cults of the Graeco-Egyptian gods were religiously appropriated and integrated into the local cultic landscape through the actions of individuals and groups. In doing so, I raise the question of the many possible meanings that these cults could have had in the local context of Athens at different times. As a new approach, I apply Cornelius Castoriadis’s theory of ‘the social imaginary’ to describe how a ritual, a sanctuary or an iconography of a god was imagined and shaped by the agency of individuals and groups.