Cartographier les mondes divins à partir des épithètes. Prémisses et ambitions d’un projet de recherche européen (ERC Advanced Grant).

Abstract

Writing the history of ancient religion has always started from individual gods and the concept of pantheon, seen as a fixed aggregate. Divine figures are described as persons or personifications linked by kinship or affinity, such as Aphrodite or Astarte, “goddesses of love or/and war”, etc. Such static definitions have oversimplified, even distorted, our understanding of religions in Antiquity. Gods are actually multifaceted powers, not individuals. The spectrum of each god’s powers is expressed through a set of epithets linked to their names. The large range of epithets shows that pantheons functioned as complex, fluid and relational networks of divine powers. These networks thus reveal the cartography of the divine worlds as well as human strategies for communicating effectively with the gods. The MAP project (ERC Advanced Grant 741182) rethinks the process of defining, naming, and organising the divine world in the Greek and Semitic areas, by adopting a radically new focus: divine epithets.