‘What Will You Give Me?’: Narratives of Religious Exchange (original) (raw)

Abstract

This chapter sets out to explore the dynamics of mortal/divine reciprocity in ancient Greek religion, suggesting that the paradigm of exchange in this context is one that we not only trace through narratives that have survived in our sources, but that also itself crucially comprised co-existing and competing stories. This process of story-telling was not only only descriptive process but also creative. Mirroring the dynamic of gift-giving, the development of a narrative is also itself the construction of a relationship that defınes the individuals involved and their roles. Like gift-giving, it is likely to comprise different rationales, producing multiple stories. Focusing on contexts of oracular consultation and healing, this chapter will examine how the multiple narratives that describe sanctuary activities, in turn, generated diverse social roles not only for worshippers, but also for the gods they worshipped. It explores the theme of the ontological status of the divine in these relationships of exchange, and the question of the development of a relationship of exchange in which one player does not exist. To explore these questions, this chapter uses theory of mind to examine the role of narratives of gift-giving in the generation of the divine, before drawing some overall conclusions about narratives, networks, and the generation of the divine. Accepted manuscript of paper published in Pilgrimage and Economy in the Ancient Mediterranean, edited by Anna Collar and Troels Myrup Kristensen, 187-203. Leiden: Brill, 2020.

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