(Re-)modelling religious experience: some experiments with hymnic form in the imperial period

Abstract

Religious experience has been the topic of many different theoretical approaches. This paper starts from the premise that subjective individual experience is communicable only in terms of locally-available schemes, primarily linguistic, and thus ignores somatic signs such as ecstasy or frenzy. In the case of Greco-Roman Antiquity, this involves recourse to literary sources. The paper uses three Greek hymns of the imperial period, all of them experimental by comparison with "classical" models, to infer what we may call requisite rather than subjective experiences on the part of audiences. The hymns chosen are Mesomedes' Hymn to Isis (no. 6 Regenauer), the Orphic hymn to the Nymphs (no. 51 Ricciardelli) and the hymn to "Apollo" in PGrMag VI 30-38. The suggestion is that rhetorical analysis enables us to gain a mediated idea of the contrasting responses ideally evoked in the course of ritualized performance.