384. The Roman Invasion: Gods on Hadrian’s Wall (Ep 2)

The Roman Conquest of Britain. The furthest western point of the empire. How did life change for ordinary people after the invasion? Why do Middle Eastern gods end up on Hadrian’s Wall in Northern England? And how does the famous gorgon face carved into stone in Bath blend Celtic and Roman spiritual beliefs? In Episode 2 of this series, William Dalrymple and Anita Anand are joined by Dr Eleanor Barraclough, author of Beyond the Walls: In Search of the Celts, to discuss how the arrival of the Romans altered the gods of these isles. Try Attio for free at attio.com/empire Summer sale is here: get an annual Empire Club membership for an extra 20% off with code SUMMER26. That's ad-free listening, early-access, every bonus episode, and full access to our exclusive members' series. Sale ends August 31st, so grab it before summer's over. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [email protected] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor: Bruno Di Castri Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Atio, the CRM of the new way of going to the market. On our show, we trace how people, power and ideas move through history. Often, what changes the story is not ambition alone, but the system behind it. For businesses, a CRM has long kept a simple record, who you spoke to, what was said and where things stood. Atio is the only agent-native CRM built for teams and AI agents to work together across every customer relationship. Revenue teams now have signals coming from everywhere, but signals only matter if you can act on them.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  You can ask Atio to prepare a meeting, draft outreach or surface the next step. So your team can move with speed, scale and quality without losing the judgment that good customer relationships require. Try Atio for free at A T T I O dot com slash empire.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Want to be the one who's always in the know about the game, the scores, the plays? Here's a tip, the Apple Sports app. Just pick your favorite teams and get automatic live updates without even knowing their schedules. And when your team scores, it shows up right on your iPhone lock screen, making it easy to check in anytime. So rule the group chat and download Apple Sports for free on the App Store or find it on your new iPhone.

• 1:31Speaker 02

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI, your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way. Because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai slash Spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai slash Spotify.

• 2:04Speaker 03

  Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon.

• 2:07Speaker 00

  And me, William Dalrymple.

• 2:09Speaker 03

  Coming up in this episode, the Romans arrive in the British Isles and merge the gods of their empire with the gods of the Celts. Persian deities arrive on Hadrian's Wall. We're going to be visiting the Cotswold Spa of the ancient world. And we discuss the first ever Christians in Britain. And we have with us the fabulous historian, author Eleanor Baraklaff to take us through. This is a rip roaring story.

• 2:35Speaker 04

  Thank you so much for having me back. It was slight chaos last time, so I'm amazed you let me back on.

• 2:40Speaker 00

  Slight chaos is what we do. Anyway, the idea behind this series came last summer when, just after seeing you Eleanor in York, Olive and I started doing a walk along Hadrian's Wall, which I hadn't done since my twenties. And what really struck me was those museums at Vindelander, which I know you filmed at. But also the museum I'd never been to before, the Great North Museum in Newcastle. And the sheer religious variety of all these Roman altars put up by guys in and around the wall. But also the continuity, because in the last episode, we had the Romans burning the Druids and massacring them all in Anglesey.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  And whether or not that actually happened, that was what, is it Tacitus says?

• 3:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:28Speaker 00

  And what you seem to see in Hadrian's Wall is the opposite. You have lots of Romans worshipping Celtic gods. So how do we square all that?

• 3:37Speaker 04

  I think the key to understanding it is whatever happens on Anglesey, it's not so much about religion. So it's not, it's not that they mine different religions in any way. It's the fact that the Druids represent, as far as we can tell, and I'm sure this is very much what you were talking about. It's not clear because we only really have Roman sources, so they're very biased. But what the Romans don't like about the Druids is this idea that they're a political institution. So they're organized, they're this indigenous network with the power to coordinate resistance to Roman rule. And that's certainly true in Gaul and Julius Caesar has particular problems with that. But that seems to be possibly what's going on on the western extremities of Britain.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  Are there's like a kind of Celtic version of the Islamic Republic of Iran with the sort of Mullah network running stuff?

• 4:28Speaker 04

  This is, this is the possibility that they would have viewed it like that. Yeah. And, and the other problem potentially is that what the Druids, whether or not, and what this actually looks like, what is, as far as the Romans are concerned, the real problem with the Druids in terms of their religious practice is that they practice human sacrifice. Romans are fine with other sorts of sacrifice. Human sacrifice has most definitely been outlawed. And this is something they really, really don't like.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Can I ask a question about the human sacrifice? Because you know, in the films, you know, we've seen depictions of, you know, children being bad and normally children. I don't know whether this is held up by any kind of fact, but I mean, who was sacrificed? Do we know anything more about the sacrifices?

• 5:09Speaker 04

  I think it's hard to tell because we're really reliant on Julius Caesar. We see it sort of perpetuating down the Roman sources, this idea of bloody sacred groves where the bodies are hanging up and everything's very nasty. But then again, you also see that, for example, Battle of Teutoburg in, what is it, nine CE? These are Germanic tribes. They're not sort of what we might think of as Celtic tribes. But once again, what the Romans are saying, when these three legions get wiped out beyond the northern borders of the Roman Empire, they're saying, yep, they hung up the Roman soldiers in groves. They sacrificed them. So it's this gory, and I mean, it's fair enough. You say it's a kind of film, it's a cinematic version of something.

• 5:49Speaker 04

  It's not to say nothing like this happened, but certainly they are painting it in these technicolor.

• 5:56Speaker 03

  In the worst possible propaganda. Yeah. I mean, it's going to, it's going to scare. So this, this is where the paradox comes in for me, Eleanor, and maybe you can, you can sort this out for me. Because Rome didn't like the Druids, you know, they, they were hostile to the Druids. So you've got them in Gaul, you know, being suppressed. And you know, you've got in Britain, a banning of Druidic practice. You've got Suetonius, as you just mentioned, marching to Anglesey to destroy the Druidic order. But then you also do have, and this is where I get confused, legionaries on, on Hadrian's Wall making offerings to local Celtic deities, which is something that the Druids would have done too. So what's that all about?

• 6:35Speaker 04

  This is it. So it's not about the gods themselves. The gods themselves, I think, as far as the Romans are concerned, are actually quite a big deal. And this is something that we see more widely as well. It's more about, it's this, I think it's interpretatio Romana, this idea of the Roman interpretation of foreign deities. So as they're going through the world, you encounter a local god. You often identify it with its nearest Roman equivalent. You give it a dual name and then the worship can continue, but it can now be legitimized by its association with the Roman divine order. So it's actually quite an inclusive theology, more than we might expect from what we think about when we think of the Romans versus the Druids.

• 7:20Speaker 00

  How does it work in practice at an everyday level on, if you're on Hadrian's Wall?

• 7:24Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, so it's this, I think it is the starting point that divine powers can be worshipped under different names, different versions of them, but they're fundamentally, as far as the Romans are concerned, the same powers. So you've got Jupiter in Rome, you've got Zeus in Greece, you've got Taranis possibly, although the etymology is slightly different there among the Celts. But this idea of the Deu Pater, the sky god, the supreme deity, sometimes sort of alighted with the thunder gods.

• 7:55Speaker 00

  Deu Pater is Sanskrit, isn't it? Yeah. And it becomes Jupiter when it gets west.

• 8:01Speaker 04

  Exactly. And obviously I've got to get a shout out, early shout out to my Vikings here because we've got the version there, which is Tier. Tier, once again, is that same word. So it keeps on reiterating, it keeps on coming back in all these different forms. And this polytheism is the most important thing we have to remember because the gods, as we say, are everywhere. It's not just, these are our gods, it's our way or the highway. It's, oh, nice to meet your version of this god. Let's see what we can do here. Let's see how we can honor them within a context that is local and fitting.

• 8:34Speaker 03

  Right, so I I'm always really struck by this, you know, first of all, the the ability to suck in every local, um, you know, kind of belief system so that you don't feel so foreign to the people that you've invaded and you've conquered. Is it more political or is it genuinely theistic where they think, you know, we've got loads of gods, plenty of room on this bench, move over, we can pull a few more in or repurpose them. I mean, what what is the thinking?

• 8:58Speaker 04

  Come on, everyone, in you come. We don't know, possibly a bit of both. Definitely, it's sort of, it helps if you have the locals on side. But what's interesting is that when we see, for example, altars being put up on Hadrian's Wall by, um, all sorts, but but say Roman soldiers particularly, but sort of the community generally, they are putting up of their own, as far as we can tell, volition, they're putting up altars to local gods a lot of the time. They don't have to do that. There's plenty of their own gods they can choose from. And what we have to remember there is that, and maybe we can talk a bit more about the context, because here I'm thinking about Hadrian's Wall particularly, but when the Romans come in, they're not all coming in from, say,

• 9:41Speaker 04

  Italy, you know, they're not, they're coming in from all over the place. So it's already this very interesting mix of different cultures.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  And that's very much there in that Newcastle Museum, but you've got, and we're going to come to this at the end of the program, but we've got Mithras and and all these very, very foreign Middle Eastern gods, as well as the Celtic gods.

• 9:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, very, very much that. It's, I think it's much more of, hey, we've got a long bench, everyone's welcome, squeeze up, here you go, and maybe you'll find a friend that you didn't realise you're related to on that bench of gods.

• 10:11Speaker 03

  Is it remarkable that we've got such detailed records of this? I mean, because it was such a long time ago, and as you say, it's sort of clash of civilizations, one is the conqueror, normally conquerors obliterate everything that they've taken over. But we have, we have records, we have relics, we have real tangible evidence of of of religious devotion in this kind of mishmash, patchwork kind of way.

• 10:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think sometimes we forget how lucky we are to have that. And Britain actually is particularly well evidenced as far as this is concerned, partly because of, it's not just the wall, I mean, Hadrian's Wall is really important, but you have these concentrations, and Hadrian's Wall is an extraordinary example of that, of military votive activity in one place. And you also find it in the urban centres in in different parts of of the Roman province, as it were. But there's also this wonderful thing, which is that the condition, because I I love that there's two extremes, because you get something similar going on in Egypt for exactly the opposite reasons. In Britain, it's cold and it's wet and it's boggy, and that often creates anaerobic conditions.

• 11:17Speaker 00

  Anaerobic's nothing to do with with keep fit?

• 11:19Speaker 04

  No, it is not.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  It's a lack of oxygen. It's a lack of oxygen. Yeah.

• 11:24Speaker 04

  So things don't decay. And of course, the reason I love, I love the kind of bookends of Britain on one hand of the empire, and then you've got Egypt is because it's very, very dry and hot. So it does the same thing, but for the opposite reasons. And so what this means is we've got all sorts of wonderful organic material, but we've also got the stones and the metal and everything else, thousands of inscriptions, hundreds of altars, all sorts of little objects like figurines and votive tablets and and little cursed little, we can talk a bit more about the cursed tablets from Bath, because those are fabulous.

• 11:55Speaker 00

  Well, that's where we're going next, actually. Let's go, let's go to Bath, because I think that was something where I first came across this as a school kid going around the the baths. And then you've got, as you say, these little curses, and at the middle of it, you've got that big Gorgon figure, who is Sulis, who who's kind of half classical, but also a bit Celtic with a kind of moustache. And he looks like the sort of guy you might meet in a pub in in sort of Sky or somewhere.

• 12:19Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, and we and we should say that Bath, you know, wasn't Aquasulis is is what it was known as. They wouldn't have, the Romans would not have called it Bath or Bath, they would have called it Aquasulis. So yes, talk a little bit about that, because likewise, my children, it's the one place that they were transfixed, and I dragged them around the country to try and improve them. They actually helped in Bath, they they were quite into it.

• 12:39Speaker 04

  Bath is, I have to say, one year, I actually made my now husband a birthday cake in the shape of the Roman baths. And, um, you know, we put jelly beans, uh, you know, there's another year we did Hadrian's Wall, you know, I mean, we're we're committed to this historical cause in this family, I'm going to say. But the lovely thing about Bath, and I think the reason that it's so, yeah, it's so enduring, it's so fascinating, is, well, let's start with the landscape, because there is nothing quite like Bath. And before the Romans arrived, you've already got these hot springs, and they seem to have been very important in some way, religiously speaking. But of course, the question always is the evidence, and we don't have much evidence for it. It's not the only geothermal

• 13:22Speaker 04

  set of springs in England or in Britain, but it is remarkable for the concentration and the temperature. So it produces, I think it's like a million litres of water a day, something like that. The temperature is about forty six degrees Celsius, you would not want to be diving into that. And you've got to imagine it bubbling up from the earth, it's steaming, it's it's red, it's it's full of iron, it's apparently inexhaustible, it just keeps coming, it keeps coming. And so for the pre-Roman Celtic-speaking inhabitants of the area, and I want to say the Deboni, I think I'm right, but you will get the emails if I'm wrong, or you can you can check afterwards. But we've got the likelihood that this is

• 14:03Speaker 04

  then a divine presence, is this idea, the other world is almost sort of reaching up and through. And again, you were talking about bog bodies with Ronald, you think that's a divine space between worlds. Well, we've got it here, except it's moving, it's alive, it's steaming, it's something, there's something really otherworldly about it that makes it incredibly important. Now, we think that the deity involved there is Sulis. And you mentioned the fact that it's Sulis Minerva when the Romans come in, and it's this sense, it seems, of these two goddesses here being conjoined. And so that's what with that, that's why we think it's Sulis. We don't have pre-Roman evidence that it

• 14:47Speaker 04

  is. In terms of Sulis as a name, possibly it's connected to a sort of proto-Celtic root, meaning something like sun. There's also, I think there's an Old Irish cognate.

• 14:58Speaker 00

  Solis, sort of.

• 15:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly, Solis. It's it's it's there, you know, Sol invictus, I think we'll probably come back to later if if we go. So this, it's important, this sense of the heat and the light and the, I I wonder whether that's what's going on.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  Well, there's, there's also, I mean, look, this, I'm very happy to open a new branch of scholarship, but Sulis also sounds like Surya, you know, Sanskrit word for the sun. Surya, so you know, there's sort of that, you know, Indo-European thing going on. I always find that really tantalising when I hear echoes of it.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  And human sacrifice in Hinduism too, until the nineteenth century.

• 15:34Speaker 04

  We've got to say, there's nothing new under the sun, pun entirely intended, right?

• 15:37Speaker 03

  Under the Surya Sulis. I mean, I I'm, you know, the beauty of Bath is that the earth seems to have given so much to this place. But, you know, it it was there before the Romans arrived. So the people who were there before the Romans, before they, you know, got their grout and tiling out, you know, did they also treat it as as a as a holy place?

• 15:58Speaker 04

  We we think so. We think that the the there is, you you've got to sort of, you're you're having to compare it with how it works elsewhere, because really, in terms of the archaeological record, you're we're dealing with the Romans. But yeah, it looks like, partly because the Romans are linking it to Minerva, that there is definitely this sort of religious associations with it beforehand. It's interesting as well that they link Sulis to Minerva. So we're not talking about Venus or Juno or Mars, you know, anything like that, where we, and we do see those elsewhere. Minerva is the goddess of wisdom and healing and craftsmanship. And so that identification possibly tells us something about how Sulis was understood by that.

• 16:41Speaker 00

  As a god of healing.

• 16:43Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly. So she's there already, and we can possibly extrapolate, and that maybe also tells us something about how she's.

• 16:52Speaker 00

  And Sulis is a girl?

• 16:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, Sulis, Sulis, again, because she's linked to Minerva, that and because we then have this fabulous, the very famous, um, she, is it bronze, what's it made of, that incredible head that they found in a sewer in the early modern period that looks like it is Sulis Minerva, this incredibly sort of, she's she's so.

• 17:12Speaker 03

  She's fabulous.

• 17:13Speaker 04

  She's fabulous, isn't she? And but she is Sulis Minerva, she's not Minerva. Maybe that's really, really important.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  And that takes us back to your curses.

• 17:23Speaker 04

  Well, no, let's let's think about the Gorgons first, because you mentioned the Gorgon. So we think Gorgon, we think woman, right? That's, you know, anyone who's Clash of the Titans, all the rest of it, we've got a female Gorgon figure. He's most definitely male, he has an enormous beard. And it's been suggested that he may, it's hard to know what's going on with him, but he seems to encapsulate that whole religious syncretism and the tension that's sort of held and embodied within that. Because the idea of a Gorgon's head on a temple is totally standard Roman practice, that's fine. But then there's something really Bretonic, sort of Celtic, we might say, this wild hair and the moustache and this like glaring, I mean, I'm sure Nita, when you took your children, your children were just there staring at it.

• 18:08Speaker 03

  They love to be terrified by it. But I I when I looked at it, it sort of reminded me a bit of the green man, you know, that you see stretching back into, you know, early British folklore as well, that kind of sort of, you know, hair that could be alive, like grass or, you know, that that kind of thing.

• 18:24Speaker 04

  That's such a good point. I've never thought of that. What what I would love to see is because what people are now able to do, there's these wonderful, um, uh, research projects where they

• 18:34Speaker 03

  Use spectroscopy to find out what colours these now grey pieces of carved stone would have been painted.

• 18:40Speaker 00

  There was a great show at the Met in New York last year with all these classical statues in these sort of bright, I mean, it wasn't very nice to look at, but it was fascinating to know what they.

• 18:48Speaker 03

  I don't like it. I like my, I like my statues white and grey, which is really throws me, throws me when they get lips and, you know, blush and stuff. I don't like it.

• 18:58Speaker 04

  I can wonder if, if we've got, I have no idea, but any sense of what the Gorgon would have initially have been painted. So yeah, would he have been more of a fertility figure? Would they, would his, his hair have been green or would it have been blue? Is he something to do with sort of, you know, Neptune, Poseidon type sea god, which also would fit the context. So who knows? But, um, yeah.

• 19:20Speaker 03

  Okay. Well, you look, Willie mentioned cursed tablets. Now tell us a little bit about that because that really is a fascinating thing about Bath.

• 19:28Speaker 04

  The cursed tablets are absolutely amazing. So they are written in Latin for the most part, but they do actually have some Celtic names or Bretonnic names, we might say as well, both in terms of the thieves and the victims. And so these are ordinary people of Roman Britain. They're literate enough to write Latin. But as I say, some Roman names, some Celtic names, and they are carrying their grievances to a sort of Romano-British goddess, Suleus Minerva, in the temple. And we've got to think about the sorts of things that that it's like, you know, someone stole my cloak, someone stole my shoes, someone stole my pants. And you can see again, because they're bathing there, it's not just a religious outfit. They go there to get clean and they're in the baths, having a lovely time.

• 20:13Speaker 04

  You know, eating their, you do, I don't know if you remember, there's this wonderful depression in, in a line outside the main bath where people were queuing up for their oysters. So they're saying they're eating their oysters, throwing them in a pile, having a lovely time in the water. They come back and someone's stolen their pants. And so they write it first up and they're like, where are my pants? Give me back my pants. Just imagining all these Roman Britons walking home through the streets of Bath, dripping wet and naked.

• 20:37Speaker 03

  These are, are, you know, sort of curses, but they're not saying, I want you to kill the person with my pants. That's not what they're asking, right?

• 20:45Speaker 04

  It's more like, may this person not sleep, that may they not have any rest until my pants are returned, you know, there's, and there's, there's other versions of that. There's one where it's, um, someone's stolen a ring. This is not one of the cursed tablets. It's from elsewhere in Britain, but it's very much like, again, may he not sleep, may he not eat until this person whose name I'm just going to slip in here because I definitely know who it was who did this, has returned my ring to me. Thank you very much. So, and you get these things widely, but at Bath, it's just this wonderful concentration that gives you a sense of the texture of everyday life in this city.

• 21:19Speaker 00

  Back at the Wall again. Now we've moved from Bath up to Northumberland. We're on the edge of, of, of Caledonia with the kind of pix making dirty faces and throwing insults over the moorland. What are the Celtic gods that the people there are absorbing into their pantin?

• 21:38Speaker 04

  Yes. So we've got all sorts. It's in some ways, you might think of it as a microcosm of the whole religious Roman world, sort of broadly beyond Britain as well. Because you've got the Roman state cult, you've got the, the worship of the emperors, for example, but you've also got mystery religions incorporated from the east. You've got local deities. So it's just this bubbling, boiling, melting pot of all these different religious ideas coming together. We've got some really wonderful ones. I was up there looking, it was, it was basically in one field. Um, you find this wonderful goddess, Coventina. And she is, or seems to be, an incredible native goddess from Roman Britain, but she's particularly associated with

• 22:23Speaker 04

  a sacred spring at Cora Fort, which the Romans would have called Brocaletia. And I cannot say that without saying broccoli. So I'm very proud of myself right now for, I've got that. But it's, she's very local. She's, she's not even local to the Wall. She seems to be local to one part of the Wall, but she's very popular there.

• 22:41Speaker 00

  There's a very good little, little museum there, isn't there? We went to last year. Yeah. It's full of her stuff.

• 22:46Speaker 04

  I love that. I love, because I always feel a bit sad when you see, and I understand why it happens, but religious, um, sort of artefacts that have been placed somewhere so carefully, that have been removed in the modern day from where they were. Because for me, that feels like they've been removed from their, their whole context, the reason they were there. I always imagine the, the, the local gods just sitting there going, oh, they're taking my coins away. Oh, that, oh, okay, never mind. But this one is quite nice because at least they all left it together. Thousands of coins she's got and altars dedicated to her by Roman soldiers. And there's these, one very famous one, this extraordinary relief, and it's three women, um, and they're sort of separated, but they're together and they're pouring out

• 23:32Speaker 04

  from these vessels, the waters of what seem to be her sacred springs. It looks like she's the one in the middle because she's dressed differently. She's almost got, it almost looks like armour, but I'm not saying it is armour, but she's, she's dressed differently. Possibly the two on either side of her, her, her attendants. Maybe they're nymphs of some sort.

• 23:50Speaker 00

  They like to do three of anything, don't they, the cults? There's lots of three goddesses.

• 23:55Speaker 04

  Yes, this sort of triple aspect idea. And we've got other examples of that.

• 24:00Speaker 03

  I was going to ask you about another local deity. I hope I say right. Antonositicus. Did I? I ran at it.

• 24:05Speaker 04

  So glad you said that, not me.

• 24:07Speaker 03

  Antonositicus.

• 24:10Speaker 03

  You, the, the trick is, Eleanor, you run at great speed and hope not to get concussed. So let's talk about Antonositicus, which I've now nailed. I mean, he sort of reminds me a little bit, and this is what I also find interesting, of a Mr. Tumnus type of creature, you know, that curly hair, two little horns. You know, it, it just shows that we have a collective memory that gets passed on one way or the other. Tell us about Antonositicus. What is he for and who is he local to?

• 24:34Speaker 04

  Right. So, yeah, exactly as you say, imagine a little cute Mr. Tumnus type figure, possibly. He's from, well, it looks like slightly further east along the Wall. So he's known from the fort at Benwell. He seems to be a very local deity because there's this one temple at Benwell or Conde Curum is the, as the, look at me running up to, to the name and hoping.

• 24:56Speaker 03

  Fast and hard. That's what you need to do. Okay.

• 24:59Speaker 04

  So, so we can, we can locate him somewhere near Newcastle. He's basically one of the Geordie gods. He's been described as, which I love.

• 25:05Speaker 00

  He's got a flat cap.

• 25:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's great. He's such a, so he's, he's associated with, um, one temple, and I think it's like three altars and a sculpture of him, exactly as you say. He's got this beautiful, these, these locks of hair and then these two locks that just come around. And it's like horns, not horns, but they do look quite horn-like, exactly as you say. There is another one. And if you see again, the, the sculpture of him, he absolutely looks similar from a little further away. The fort at Bynchester, he was found in this ancient rubbish dump in this midden. Someone put him there. And here, again, he's got these two little pokey horn hair bits. And he's also got this torque around his neck. And we might remember sort of the most famous torque wearer, Boudica, you know,

• 25:50Speaker 04

  it's Cassius Dio quite a lot later, who says that she wears this torque. But we know from other sort of Bretonnic hordes, for example, we've got this kind of torque, this kind of golden, often big, thick, heavy necklace going around. And he seems to have one of these. So he's already sort of signalling Bretonnic, local, indigenous through this Celtic, we might say. So is this idea here that he's a local god, he's worshipped locally, he's absorbed into this Roman, British frame, uh, Romano-British framework, because he's there being worshipped as the fort, or at the fort by the soldiers.

• 26:25Speaker 00

  So in India, you have in a sense, two tiers of gods to this day. You have the big universal gods like Lord Shiva and Lord Vishnu and Madurga, who are all over the place. But you also get the little gods who have their particular hillock or their tree clump or, or their feric waters bubbling up red or something. Is the same thing happening in, in Newcastle and, or what would have been the, the site of Newcastle centuries later?

• 26:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think, I think potentially so, just given that there are local ones and they are definitely there. Um, but, but then we also have ones that we might recognise their names of because they're not local in that way. And there's, if we sort of come off the Wall for a bit, if we go south, we've got a really good example of this, um, Mars Nodens. And obviously everyone knows Mars as a god. So this is someone where we, we've got the, we've got potentially the local pairing with the not local.

• 27:24Speaker 03

  That, so you know, you, you have that pairing in, in Lydney, in, in Gloucestershire, which I know very, very well, actually. Uh, yeah, beautiful place. Yeah.

• 27:32Speaker 00

  You and your fancy Cots World holidays.

• 27:35Speaker 03

  I have a very fancy friend in Lydney, uh, who's, yes, who's, who's got a very lovely place there. So tell us about that pairing. Who, who's Nodens? And because there is, there is a kind of, um, there's a very exciting link to, to Tolkien with, with Nodens, which I want you to tell me about.

• 27:49Speaker 00

  We've got C.S. Lewis and Tolkien in this episode already.

• 27:52Speaker 03

  Well, I was going to say, I, I should really explain. I said Mr. Tumnus as if everybody knows, uh, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Mr. Tumnus as if he's our accountant, the podcast accountant. He's a, he's a thorn character in a book you may not have read called The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. But tell us about Mars Nodens.

• 28:08Speaker 04

  He would, by the way, totally have been an accountant.

• 28:11Speaker 03

  Would have nailed it.

• 28:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:14Speaker 04

  So Mars Nodens is one, but exactly as you say, so he's linked to Lydney in Gloucestershire. And we've got to think a little bit about the context in which his temple there, or a temple complex, this is, there's big stuff going on here. It's basically like a spa, health resort, something like that. It looks like-

• 28:31Speaker 00

  In the Cotswolds, it's perfect. It's the, it's the Chipping Norton set from the first century.

• 28:36Speaker 04

  And this promontory that it's up on, oh, it's a lovely view. It's overlooking the Severn Estuary. And we've got to think as well, you know, the Severn Estuary has that incredible tidal bore wave event that happens. So it's already this place that again, we think of, you know, Sulis Minerva, same sort of thing here. It's associated with a place where we've got unusual landscape features, things going, the power of the natural world that you can actually see there. So Nodens is very much a British deity. He seems to have been associated with maybe hunting and healing and water. And also, interestingly, dogs. There's lots of little dog statuettes that are found there. And it's been suggested this is because dogs are associated with healing in the classical world because, you

• 29:19Speaker 04

  know, they can lick wounds. So there's this kind of curative aspect to their presence there. And the idea is that this Lydney sanctuary, this Cotswolds spa lovely, lovely place is a place of healing. People come to sleep, to maybe receive visions. So it's not all physical healing, but very much it's this, it's this sense that they can heal their bodies and their minds in the context of this religious deity. And the temple has this long hall. It's designed for maybe a guest house. It's got baths. It's even got a little amphitheatre. And so we've got this sense of Nodens as a healer, as a visionary, paired

• 30:00Speaker 04

  with Mars, because in the Roman world, he has his, his own healing aspects. And so it's, it's, it's this coherent theological matching, we might say there. And as you say, Tolkien wrote a paper on him. Tolkien loved him. This is, he was, he was really young. This is, this is way pre Lord of the Rings.

• 30:20Speaker 00

  1932.

• 30:21Speaker 04

  1932, exactly. So I think sometimes we forget that Tolkien was a serious scholar. He's professor of Old English at Oxford. And within this context of him being, you know, this very serious scholarly don, he writes a philological appendix, which I don't think is quite as exciting as, as what he writes later on, but sort of, you know, let's, let's go with it.

• 30:45Speaker 03

  Well, look, we talked about the pairing, we talked about absorption, but what happens to, you know, the Celtic religions, fully formed religions? We'll find out after the break.

• 31:03Speaker 02

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI, your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claud.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claud.ai/spotify.

• 31:26Speaker 05

  Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. While others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com.

• 31:41Speaker 06

  Hey, Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Now, I don't know if you've heard, but Mint's premium wireless is $15 a month. But I'd like to offer one other perk. We have no stores. That means no small talk. Crazy weather we're having. No, it's not. It's just weather. It is an introvert's dream. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three month plan, $15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes

• 32:10Speaker 03

  and fees extra. See mintmobile.com.

• 32:16Speaker 03

  Welcome back. So Eleanor, you know, the Celtic religions, the Celtic tradition, poetry, art, it stands proudly different. And in of itself, you know, you know, when you're looking at a Celtic cross or a Celtic, you know, sort of a piece of ephemera. Is that also the same with religion, that it is distinct stubbornly so, and no Romano-British nonsense is going to get in the way?

• 32:42Speaker 04

  I think this is, this is a story very much of adaptation. And where the resistance, that stubbornness happens, that's where we get the friction. But where we see, I think the Celtic art is a really interesting one, because it's, what we, what we think of when we say Celtic art is it's sort of Latent style.

• 33:00Speaker 00

  We should explain that term because it's an important one. Latent is a place in Switzerland, which is not somewhere we normally associate with Celts if we're thinking of sort of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. But this art style begins in Central Europe.

• 33:13Speaker 04

  Exactly. And that reminds us that when we're talking about these Celtic speaking cultures, they are very much connected. We're here in Britain and Ireland, we're out on the fringe of that. But that's part of the reason that it survives so long. And when we think of Celtic art, specifically maybe the Latent style, it's flowing patterns.

• 33:32Speaker 00

  Trumpic spirals and yeah.

• 33:34Speaker 04

  We see that often in, say, you know, Iron Age deposit cultures, ritual cultures, if we're thinking about religion.

• 33:41Speaker 00

  Battersea Shield.

• 33:42Speaker 04

  Battersea Shield, exactly. Thrown into the Thames, Llinkarigbach over on Anglesey, all these places where we see this distinctive style. Exactly. What's really interesting is that we know the Roman style is different. It's essentially naturalistic. It's more about the accurate representation of bodies and things. But what we see in Britain is this co-mingling of these two styles in all sorts of extraordinary ways. And I was up on Hadrian's Wall, you mentioned Vindeland, and I was making a programme up there about Celtic influences there. I mean, it is an incredible place. There's nothing quite like-

• 34:21Speaker 00

  One of my favourite places. Everything you want from Northumberland in one sort of concentrated burst.

• 34:28Speaker 04

  That's it. That's exactly. And an excellent cafe as well, I have to say.

• 34:31Speaker 00

  Very good cafe with excellent coffee. Yeah.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  So what makes this place so special? Why do you love it so much?

• 34:36Speaker 04

  Oh, so many, other than the cafe. Well, these brooches. So these brooches were found within the context of the Roman thought, the garrison, you know, the, the, the whole sort of military establishment there. But there's one, for example, it was this dragon-esque brooch. It was inlaid with coloured enamel, very gaudy. And I remember Andrew describing it as a fusion fashion item, which is, I think, an excellent phrase, because it very much is, is based on the indigenous art forms that are there. There was another one, it was a little silver one, it had open lattice work.

• 35:13Speaker 00

  We should say that there's often more in common than we imagined. But you mentioned knotwork, Kanita, but those Roman pavements have exactly the same knots that you later see on Celtic crosses.

• 35:23Speaker 04

  This is it. And I think that's it. There is, there is often a lot more that is recognisable as we move between cultures, because we don't have those hard lines between them. A really good example of that, actually, because one has just been discovered, sort of a couple of months ago, they announced it. There are these incredible vessels that we find dotted around. There's some in Britain, I think there's a couple in France, a couple in Spain, and a Spanish one's just been found. And they're basically, they look like they might be retirement gifts. They're souvenirs that come from Hadrian's Wall. But you see on them again, this fusion of styles. So you often have the little turrets, the square

• 36:04Speaker 04

  lines of Hadrian's Wall with the stones. But then you have this amazing swirling mass of sort of Latent style artwork on there too. And I think that's conscious, is saying, look, I was here at this lovely exotic place and look at this lovely artefact I got when I retired.

• 36:19Speaker 03

  I mean, it's completely appropriate that a knot should, you know, tie together two different cultures. I think that's wonderful. But I mean, I just, I'm interested to know how the Roman religions influence back. You know, so how much do we find, you know, Zeus and Mars and Minerva in Scotland or Wales or Ireland? Do we have that sort of bounce back as well?

• 36:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a really interesting one. I think it's hard to tell. Part of the reason is because when we move outside the Roman centres, we don't know how much they are really being influenced by Rome that's come in and sort of imposed its socio-political sort of programme on it. So basically, if you are, everyday stuff like, you know, coming in from the hinterland and selling goods, you are going to have that. But if we're getting out from there, it's hard to tell. In the case of Wales, for example, Wales is very much part of that Roman province for the most part. Lydney is very close to the Welsh border, for example. So yeah, it looks like there is that movement between. So about 100 miles north of Hadrian's Wall, we have the short-lived Antonine Wall, which

• 37:22Speaker 04

  is sort of the first to the Clyde Line.

• 37:26Speaker 00

  Ruff Castle.

• 37:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and Berdun, where they, they, oh, we, we won't get into that because I, there's, I was reading recently, this amazing study of the poo that was found in, in the latrines from Berdun. Well, actually, it is, it is relevant. It was showing you what the Roman soldiers were eating and how much of it was imported versus local. And so in this poo, you have a microcosm, I think, of the religious situation up there as well, this movement between cultures. The altars there are very mixed religiously speaking. But beyond the Antonine Wall, where you don't have that same sense of settlement, you have incursions, you have invasions, but you don't have-

• 38:05Speaker 00

  You have massacres on a big scale.

• 38:06Speaker 04

  You've got massacres. Yeah, exactly. And famously Calgagis's speech saying, you know, you, you make a desert and you call it, you call it civilisation, you call it an empire, you know. But here, there's the possibility that they are taking Roman artefacts, things like coins, and using them as votive deposits. So like, for example, when they're building, what, new buildings, they're, they're putting brooches and bronzes in these ritual contexts as deposits. But it's harder to tell beyond that. Ireland, obviously, they don't conquer Ireland in the same way, but Roman material certainly does appear in Irish contexts, religious contexts specifically.

• 38:46Speaker 03

  Can we talk about the thing I know that William's obsessed with? And that is Mithras and the presence of Mithras, who is a Persian Far Eastern deity. But you do find him in this sort of porridge of belief that you're describing.

• 39:01Speaker 00

  And quite prominent. A Mithraeum on, on Hadrian's Wall and more, and another one in Imbresk near the Antonine Wall.

• 39:09Speaker 04

  Yes. So these are really important. And I should just say, porridge of belief has to be the title for this series. That is-

• 39:15Speaker 03

  Excellent.

• 39:17Speaker 04

  I am totally with you. Mithras is just fascinating. So we have to remember how- Sort of cosmopolitan, the legionaries stationed on the wall, really were. So, you know, we've got North Africans, we've got Syrians, we've got Gauls, Spaniards, all sorts.

• 39:33Speaker 00

  Stations.

• 39:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is it. And so they are bringing all these incredible gods with them. It's the things that travel with them in their minds.

• 39:41Speaker 00

  And writing home for woolly underpants.

• 39:45Speaker 04

  Exactly. So Mithraism is one of the great enigmas of religious history. And I think those who worshipped Mithras would have been extremely pleased about that because that was the whole idea. It's a mystery religion. The central teachings were revealed only to initiates. They weren't written down for outsiders. And so we don't really know very much. What we know, as far as we can tell, is that Mithras is this divinity. He is possibly born in a cosmic egg. I think there's one at the Great North Museum where he's.

• 40:17Speaker 00

  There is. He pops out of an egg, like a little sort of, you know, David Attenborough's sort of starling or something.

• 40:23Speaker 04

  We know he kills a sacred bull in a cave and then possibly from the bull's blood, sort of the life of the world sort of springs forth. So it's very much this sort of rooted deep time cosmology. And now, in terms of those who worshipped Mithras, there's seven grades, which I think are linked to the seven planetary spheres. And they move through these seven grades. And it's very hierarchical. You know, there's feasting and there's ordeal. It's almost Mason-like. I think that's probably the nearest thing. And the Mithrae, these temples to Mithras are underground, or they resemble caves. And it's where mostly, or

• 41:03Speaker 04

  I think exclusively, really, men get together. It's particularly popular with soldiers and merchants.

• 41:12Speaker 03

  Is it because it's very, I was going to say testicular, but it's sort of quite of manly and men associated with men. I mean, is that why the soldiers love it as much as they do?

• 41:20Speaker 04

  Could be the hierarchy. They're like, yeah, I know what this is. You know, they're all.

• 41:24Speaker 03

  I know what a regiment is. I know how that works. I recognise that.

• 41:27Speaker 04

  Exactly. And certainly, again, I'm not saying they're like masons, but there's something in that sort of sense of, okay, so we know who to look to, we know who we have to keep on side. You know, there's that sense of wheels within wheels, which works very well.

• 41:42Speaker 03

  So we, I mean, look, into this porridge, we should sprinkle some raisins of Christianity now, shouldn't we? Because, you know, it is the, you know, it is the newest religion on the block. How does that get sucked in? And where do we start seeing it?

• 41:56Speaker 04

  So Christianity, the raisins of Christianity arrive, probably, sort of, we can see them start to arrive in the second century. And it's the same channels that bring Mithraism and other eastern religions there. So it's soldiers and merchants and, you know, it's the ordinary movement of people across the empire. And that's what we have to remember. This is a really fluid place. By the late second, early third century, there are hints of Christian communities in Britain. But it's really important to remember, we have very little evidence for this. We do have, so St Albans, you know, so what was Varulamium, one of the places that Udika attacks back in 60, 61 CE. We see there some of the earliest

• 42:39Speaker 04

  evidence for organised Christian communities, because Albin himself is martyred there. The problem is, we've got a whole range of dates to play with. This can be anything from 209, possibly, up to 304. So the dates are disputed, but the point is, the tradition is old and it reflects some sort of real events.

• 42:59Speaker 00

  And you begin to get those lovely villas in East Anglia with Cairo and the Beardless Christ, the stuff in the British Museum.

• 43:06Speaker 04

  Exactly. And that Cairo is very important because we've got the Emperor Constantine associated with that. He's a critical figure. But he's also a very British emperor because he's proclaimed emperor at York in 306. So the legionaries have just watched his father die and they proclaim him emperor. And then there's all this fighting. And then this culminates with his victory at the Milvian Bridge in 312. And this is where he's said to have seen this Cairo figure in the sky and like words saying, you know.

• 43:37Speaker 00

  By this sign I will conquer.

• 43:39Speaker 04

  Exactly. By this sign I will conquer. And what follows is Christianity, up to this point, has been a persecuted religion, a legal religion, subversive, in quite a similar way to when we were talking about the Druids, that same sorts of political subversion that the Romans really don't like. But suddenly, we've got the Edict of Milan in 313, which legalises Christianity. We've got the Council of Nicaea in 325. Story goes there that St Nicholas, who's basically Father Christmas, punches a heretic. We've got a lovely mug that says, St Nicholas punching heretics since 325.

• 44:17Speaker 04

  But the point is that Christianity is becoming sort of very linked to the imperial machine. So, you know, and eventually it becomes the state religion.

• 44:27Speaker 03

  Well, what is interesting to me is that even though you have it as a state religion, we saw an echo of this when we did our Egypt series, where you suddenly had, you know, someone deciding that we're not going to worship the gods anymore, we're just going to do the art in the sun disc. And everyone goes, yeah, no, no, we definitely will. But they will keep their shrines secretly at home. Is that what happens with Christianity? You know, the heralding of this new religion and everyone goes, no, no, this is terrific. But we'll just keep, we'll keep our stuff going the way we would have.

• 44:52Speaker 00

  Mars knowens.

• 44:54Speaker 04

  Yeah. I think this is something that, again, we see over and over and over again when Christianity comes in. Because the issue with Christianity is that it's saying, one god, you worship this and nothing else. And most religions outside that tradition are polytheistic. And they're like, well, I mean, he can join the party, he can sit on the bench. But, I mean, we're not getting rid of the bench. So it looks like, yes, there's something like that going on. We've got, I mean, there are examples even of, you know, there's pagan votive activity at sort of rural shrines in the same locations that you have villas with sort of Christian altars, for example. So you've got this sense that, I mean, even within the same household, maybe it's the same individuals who are sort of swinging both ways. Maybe it's different individuals within the household. Maybe there

• 45:38Speaker 04

  are tensions as a result of that. You know, I'm not saying it's necessarily easy, but certainly it's not like everyone wakes up one day and say, oh, well, I guess we're all Christian now. And, you know, we can just push that bench out the door.

• 45:50Speaker 00

  So we're going next to the conversion of Ireland's St Patrick, who's born in Britain and takes Christianity with him. That's going to be in our next episode. But as we see, when you come back later in the series, this isn't the end of paganism. There's a whole new chapter of paganism waiting to unfold. So anyway, lots more porridge and many more raisins to come.

• 46:16Speaker 03

  Porridge for everyone. Anyway, listen, thank you very much. You'll be back. And of course, if you want to listen to that, if you want to get early access to things, extra bonus episodes, join our club, empirepoduk.com. Empirepoduk.com. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Anand.

• 46:35Speaker 00

  And goodbye from me, William Durumpur.

• 46:46Speaker 02

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claud.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claud.ai/spotify.

• 47:11Speaker 05

  Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. A fad to some, the future of money to others. We see crypto's trillion dollar swings. The end of jobs or the end of human struggle. We see the endless funds fuelling the AI hype. While others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com.

• 47:40Speaker 07

  Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz and Allbirds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into... Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com/specialoffer.