Dale Martin’s Inventing Superstition is a book that would generally not come to the attention of folklorists, which is a shame because so much of what Martin does is relevant to any folklorist interested in superstition, religion, and magic, and the complex interplay between the vernacular and the elite in cosmological and religious beliefs. Martin examines debates about superstition in Greek and Roman antiquity. For folklorists, the implications of these debates and the history of the term superstition are important: although few folklorists now would be content to describe “quaint beliefs” as “superstitions” (as was common only a few decades ago) or subscribe to the views of Frazer or Mauss on the subject, there is still a tendency to see religion (or science) and superstition/folk belief as oppositional.
Martin wrote this work partially to support his contention that, contrary to modern readings, “superstition” in Græco-Roman texts could not refer to belief in the supernatural, which was not a concept at the time. He maintains that reading discussions of superstition prior to the eighteenth century as references to the supernatural seriously misrepresents the thoughts of people using the term. His history and arguments in pursuit of this endeavor provide a wealth of data that can be mined and interpreted by scholars in classics as well as many other fields, including religious studies and folkloristics.
Martin’s examination comes from a philological tradition within classics/religious studies that takes words themselves very seriously. He therefore takes the literal meaning of deisidaimonía, “fear of daimones” ("daimones" are powerful spirits, whence the modern English "demon"), as a starting point and examines usage of the term as a reference to fear of the actions of daimones in the world of mortals. The earliest usages of the term were somewhat equivalent to English "religious" or "god-fearing", and could be used in positive, neutral, or negative senses. Over time, however, it came to be more generally used in a negative sense to refer to anything considered “spooky,” depraved, or foreign to the Græco-Roman world (and therefore probably hostile to the Empire).
Folklorists will find Martin’s analysis of Theophrastus’ famous “The Superstitious Man” (probably written in the fourth century BCE) insightful and useful. Theophrastus depicts someone who is so concerned about appeasing daimones that he is scarcely functional because of all the prayers and propitiatory actions he must carry out. For Theophrastus, superstition was fundamentally a matter of æsthetics: the proper, dignified man would make appropriate offering to the daimones, but would know what behaviors were excessive or unseemly. What Theophrastus delivers then is a portrait of the (low-class) vernacular religion (i.e., superstitions) of the day, which differed in degree, but not in kind, from proper (upper-class) religion.
In the period Martin examines, the “average” people thought that gods and daimones could be good or bad (and needed to be appeased and dealt with carefully). The philosophers, on the other hand, thought that daimones, who were ontologically superior to (i.e., more powerful than) humans, had to be morally superior to humans as well. In their view all beings were arranged in a hierarchy of power and goodness, with the gods on top, followed by daimones, heroes, men, women, animals, insects, plants, etc. More powerful beings were, ipso facto, morally superior (Martin calls this assumed order the “Grand Optimal Universe”). Accordingly, for the philosophers, the commoner’s fear of daimones was irrational.
Martin does an excellent job of highlighting the social tensions at play in discussions of superstition in antiquity. Particularly intriguing is Martin’s discussion of how charges of superstition were traded between early Christians and their pagan opponents. Pagan philosophers accused Christians of superstition because Christians would not offer incense to daimones (since daimones were inherently benevolent, there was no reason except fear not to make offerings to them). The Christian response (exemplified in the writings of Origen of Alexandria) was that it was the pagans themselves who were guilty of superstition: their offerings of food and incense to daimones proved that they feared them. (Origen went further to argue that Christians, by definition, could not be superstitious since they had God on their side and did not need to fear daimones.)
Thus, in the classical world, the same action (sacrifice) could be either proof of superstition or proof of its absence, and the definition of superstition depended on who happened to have the dominant social position at any given time. The concept of superstition is often a cover for deeper societal issues, so that an examination of superstition is a rich vein for scholars of culture. Martin’s analysis serves as a warning to anyone who would assume that religion and superstition are real things that exist outside of social relations and are recognizable on the basis of etic characteristics alone, a position still maintained by a fair number of researchers in religious studies and classical studies.
In conclusion, Martin’s work is one that anyone interested in worldview, vernacular religion, or the history of intellectual activities will find useful and engaging. He shows that many of the scholarly issues we grapple with today are hardly of new mint, but rather were literally millennia in the making. His deft analysis of the Pagan/Christian debates on superstition are particularly relevant at a time when new religions like Wicca and Neo-Paganism are forcing scholarship to reconsider basic assumptions about the nature of religion, belief, and worldview.
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[Review length: 892 words • Review posted on October 17, 2006]