Animating Statues: A Case Study in Ritual

Abstract

This article argues that the practice of ritualized animation developed only late in Greek and Roman history, within a particular intellectual climate—the Platonizing religious system called theurgy. Ritualized animation enabled theurgists to work within a worldview that sharply distinguished between the physical and spiritual realms. I use my reconstruction of animation rituals as a platform to make some observations about how we should study ancient rituals, suggesting that scholars need to listen more attentively to what our sources say about their rituals than we have been accustomed to do in the wake of the theoretical legacies of social anthropology. Reconstruction of ancient animation rituals and their intentions “from the inside” aligns well with recent theories of ritual, even as the two offer different sorts of insights.