Dec 26, 2025 07:02 PM
https://aeon.co/essays/the-word-religion...-necessary
INTRO: We tend to think of religion as an age-old feature of human existence. So it can be startling to learn that the very concept dates to the early modern era. Yes, you find gods, temples, sacrifices and rituals in the ancient Mediterranean, classical China, pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. What you don’t find is a term that quite maps onto ‘religion’.
What about the Romans, to whom we owe the word? Their notion of religio once meant something like scruples or exactingness, and then came to refer, among other things, to a scrupulous observance of rules or prohibitions, extending to worship practices. It was about doing the right thing in the right way. The Romans had other terms as well for customs, rites, obligations, reverence and social protocols, including cultus, rituals and superstition. Yet they weren’t cordoned off into a realm that was separate from the workaday activities of public life, civic duty and family proprieties.
What the Romans encountered abroad were, in their eyes, more or less eccentric versions of cultic life, rather than alien ‘religions’, in our sense. It was assumed that other localities would have other divinities; in times of war, you might even summon them, via evocatio, to try to get them to switch sides. But the local gods and rites of foreigners could be assessed without categorising them as instances of a single universal genus.
Even after the empire became officially Christian, you still don’t get our sense of ‘religions’... (MORE - details)
INTRO: We tend to think of religion as an age-old feature of human existence. So it can be startling to learn that the very concept dates to the early modern era. Yes, you find gods, temples, sacrifices and rituals in the ancient Mediterranean, classical China, pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. What you don’t find is a term that quite maps onto ‘religion’.
What about the Romans, to whom we owe the word? Their notion of religio once meant something like scruples or exactingness, and then came to refer, among other things, to a scrupulous observance of rules or prohibitions, extending to worship practices. It was about doing the right thing in the right way. The Romans had other terms as well for customs, rites, obligations, reverence and social protocols, including cultus, rituals and superstition. Yet they weren’t cordoned off into a realm that was separate from the workaday activities of public life, civic duty and family proprieties.
What the Romans encountered abroad were, in their eyes, more or less eccentric versions of cultic life, rather than alien ‘religions’, in our sense. It was assumed that other localities would have other divinities; in times of war, you might even summon them, via evocatio, to try to get them to switch sides. But the local gods and rites of foreigners could be assessed without categorising them as instances of a single universal genus.
Even after the empire became officially Christian, you still don’t get our sense of ‘religions’... (MORE - details)
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