Gender, Animals, and Cosmology: Human-Animal and Human-Human Relations from Iron Age to Roman in Britain and Gaul (20 min)

Presenters

Alena Wigodner, Princeton University

Abstract

In studying the ancient world, “religion” is an etic concept that can cause us to place modern divides between sacred and secular. “Cosmology,” in contrast, requires us to step beyond deities worshipped and festivals celebrated and work to glimpse more comprehensive means of organizing and understanding the world. A cosmology approach lends insight into the complex impacts of the transition to Roman rule as we track aspects not only of practice but of meaning across time. In this paper, I investigate understandings of gender, fundamental to both individual identity and social structure, through animal symbolism. Some argue for an understanding of Celtic religion as animism: gods were not human in form, but animals had souls and power. In Animals in Celtic Life and Myth (London 1992, 241–42), Miranda Aldhouse-Green argues that in the transition from Iron Age to Roman, animals went from being equal partners with humans to the charges of humans, an inferior class whom it was humans’ job to control and care for. Through a cosmology approach, I examine how relationships between humans and animals (1) changed across the transition from Iron Age to Roman and (2) were connected ontologically to the dynamic between men and women. As part of a study of offering assemblages from sanctuaries across Roman Britain and Gaul, I catalogued animal imagery across offering types. A comparison of the animal imagery dedicated to gods to that dedicated to goddesses reveals a clear relationship between goddesses and wild animals and between gods and domesticated ones. This suggests a gendered civilization (masculine)-nature (feminine) dichotomy in Roman-period cosmology not reflected in iconographic and burial evidence in the Iron Age. This case study provides an example of cosmologies in transition during this critical period while also helping us to develop critical guidelines for studying cosmologies across boundaries.