Within the precinct of the Ara Pacis Augustae, around the central altar itself, runs a frieze that is smaller and considerably less eye-catching than the famous sculpted procession that wraps itself around the exterior walls. This so-called ‘small procession’ frieze is poorly preserved for much of its length, making interpretation of the specific event or occasion that it presented inevitably problematic. Nevertheless, the surviving scenes are sufficient to indicate that it once depicted Roman people engaging in a sacrificial procession.Footnote ¹ Victimarii, cult attendants responsible for the animal victims, are shown leading cows or oxen and sheep while carrying knives and other sacrificial instruments, a veiled male figure grasps a bundle of fasces (the rods and axes which signalled magisterial authority), a youth (camillus) clutches an incense box (acerra) and a single-handled jug, and on the inside left wing, mirroring the movement of ritual participants to the central altar proper, are six Vestal Virgins. These female priestesses, shown with differential heights which most probably signal their varied ages and relative positions within the exclusively female priesthood, are accompanied by two togate attendants (lictors) bearing fasces, one at the front and one behind, as well as another adult male togate figure (Figure 2.1).Footnote ² Inez Scott Ryberg described the figures of the Vestals, whose heads have all been damaged, as ‘arranged with stiff formality with almost no variation except in the heights of the figures’, although close inspection reveals that the four leading the group are carefully differentiated by the items that they hold.Footnote ³ The smallest Vestal at the very front of the line carries a cylindrical incense jar, and the slightly taller figure behind her most probably holds a simpuvium (a ‘dipping ladle’, sometimes referred to using the term simpulum). The two larger figures which follow the first pair originally held angular flat objects, the first sometimes reconstructed as tablets which most likely set out the procedures to be followed during the sacrifice. It is very possible that the flat object carried by the fourth Vestal was, however, a wooden board or tray (molucrum) on which rested mola salsa, the salt and flour mixture produced exclusively by the Vestals that was considered essential for the successful completion of immolatio (the action through which a victim was made sacred) at all public sacrifices.Footnote ⁴ The hands of the final two Vestals, probably the oldest, are unfortunately too damaged to be able to state with any certainty whether they also carried objects.

Figure 2.1 Detail of the small procession frieze of the Ara Pacis Augustae showing six Vestal Virgins carrying objects

(Photo by Mrs. B. Malter, arachne.dainst.org/entity/74045)

In this chapter I intend to bring the sensory, specifically haptic, potentialities of material objects, such as those which the Vestals are shown holding on the Ara Pacis relief, directly into discourse concerning the nature and production of Roman religious knowledge. This involves adopting an approach that combines perspectives derived from the study of both lived religion and material religion.Footnote ⁵ To do this I draw specifically upon the new materialist concept that agency (in this case religious agency) is best understood in terms of affect, and therefore as a product of the intertwining of both human and more-than-human things within assemblages. As Ben Jervis has pointed out, ‘As the product of relations capacities emerge with ways of life, and, as such, allow objects and materials to operate in ways, to generate affect, in some contexts which they do not in others.’Footnote ⁶ In the context of this chapter, this means considering the affect generated when particular types of portable objects and certain types of bodies are brought together in the specific setting of ritualised activity. It therefore entails exploring how the affordances or qualities of material things have the potential to make people feel and consequently think in certain ways when they combine with the sensing human body during rituals, and how this produces religious knowledge. More specifically, as we shall see, the knowledge affected by these relations can be categorised in two ways, as distal (‘away from’ the body) and proximal (‘near to’ the body) forms of knowledge concerning religion.Footnote ⁷ In this way, I argue that different forms of ancient religious knowledge were actively created through a multiplicity of lived experiences of ritualised action that brought human and more-than-human material things together, rather than existing only as something that was expressed through ritual behaviours or material allusions to them. By exploring quite literally what the Vestals’ experience of ritualised encounters with material things ‘felt like’, I propose that framing religious knowledge as a reflexive combination of the distal and proximal ways of knowing that emerged from these engagements with the material world can provide significant new insights into how individualised forms of religious knowledge might be both sustained and subject to change even in the context of shared communal or public rituals.Footnote ⁸

Instrumenta Sacra from Symbol to Substance

The small procession frieze of the Ara Pacis is one of the few iconographic representations of a group of Vestal Virgins known from Imperial Rome. The fact that these women are shown participating in what is evidently a ritualised procession connected with the proper performance of state religion and the maintenance of the pax deorum (‘peace of the gods’) means that it is frequently spotlighted as crucial evidence for the direct involvement of the priestesses in public or state ritual.Footnote ⁹ It also provides important visual confirmation of details reported by ancient textual sources concerning the Vestal priesthood as an order composed of girls and women of assorted age groups (each entered the order between the age of six and ten years old), with a differentiation of ritual responsibilities throughout the thirty-year period over which they served. According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Ant. Rom. 2.67.2), writing in the late first century BCE, the first ten years were spent learning the responsibilities of being a Vestal, the following ten performing those responsibilities, and the final ten teaching them to newer members of the order.Footnote ¹⁰ This aligns remarkably well with the way in which the Ara Pacis relief depicts what are essentially pairs of Vestals holding objects appropriate to each of these stages: preparatory or supporting cult instruments for the smallest and most likely the youngest, tablets and mola salsa essential for the success of the ritual performance itself for those in the second phase of their service, and (possibly) nothing for those who oversaw the proceedings and who, after many years, merely embodied the religious knowledge required for their role as teachers and overseers.Footnote ¹¹

The objects carried by the individual women in the relief, like the cult instruments (instrumenta sacra) that appeared in iconographic form on the frieze of the Temple of Vesta itself (Figure 2.2), have nevertheless rarely been examined in detail or been considered as material things in their own right. It is widely taken for granted, for instance, that these are visual symbols of the habitual presence of the Vestals at Roman public sacrifices, or identifiable emblems of their priestly office.Footnote ¹² Within existing scholarship the instrumenta sacra borne by the Vestals in the Ara Pacis relief therefore remain not only primarily symbolic, but also purely visual reference points, even if more recently they have been reframed as important indicators that on such occasions these women did not intend merely to observe but to act. As Meghan DiLuzio has argued for Roman priestesses more generally and the Vestals specifically, women used (real) implements such as these in (real) public rituals in order to assert their civic identity, revealing that women were involved in actively maintaining pax deorum.Footnote ¹³ When the Ara Pacis relief is examined through the lens of lived religion and material religion, however, the decision to depict these women clutching discrete objects raises a host of questions which build on DiLuzio’s observations concerning female ritual participation. In particular, with their mutual focus on what people and objects both do during the course of ritualised activities, these perspectives give rise to queries about what the Vestals were doing (or would do) with these objects, and how that might be explained in the context of what is known about Roman religion. Even more significantly, they draw attention to questions about the real-world or lived experience of engaging with specifically chosen material objects with discrete properties in the context of ritualised activities, or in other words what the objects themselves might also do. The perspectives of lived experience and material religion therefore make it necessary for us to ‘resist the temptation to personify ritual objects, that is, to read them as inevitably referring to the offices or persons of the priests who used them’,Footnote ¹⁴ and to instead seek ways to rematerialise such things (and in this case the women who grasp them) within our investigations, that is, to give real-world substance back to these symbols.

Figure 2.2 Restored fragments of the entablature frieze of the Temple of Vesta in the Forum Romanum at Rome (late second century CE).

Photo by the author

Other friezes depicting the instruments connected with Roman public sacrificial ritual indicate that instrumenta sacra were both familiar and meaningful to Roman people, who apparently recognised the centrality of physical objects in the performance of sacrifice. Cult instruments, including some of those carried by the Vestals on the Ara Pacis, were common features on temple façades and other monumental structures at Rome, with good examples found on the Temple of Divus Vespasian and Divus Titus in the Forum Romanum, the Arch of the Argentarii close to the Forum Boarium (Figure 2.7), and the already noted Temple of Vesta. Indeed, Laetitia La Follette has argued that cult objects on monumental friezes such as these are ‘explicitly dynamic’ in their presentation, often ‘represented in animated postures, as if in use, while others present themselves with handles raised, ready to be grasped … Depicted as if frozen in mid-action, the implements call attention to their function in ritual’.Footnote ¹⁵ There can be no question, then, that the cult implements depicted on friezes, and those which appear in use as part of altar scenes where an officiant is shown in the act of making a sacrifice, were based on real material objects that were seen, touched, manipulated, smelled, heard, and tasted by different participants in Roman religious ritual.Footnote ¹⁶ Nevertheless, given their powerful symbolic value and sometimes close connection with particular priestly offices,Footnote ¹⁷ it remains easy to overlook the fact that the acerrae, paterae, simpuvia, cultri (knives), and other instrumenta sacra shown in these reliefs existed in the physical world not only as realia used in ritual, but as material things that were both necessary and crucial participants within that ritual. That is to say that they were things that offered material qualities essential for certain ritualised actions: wine could not be poured onto an altar without a vessel first to hold it and then to pour it into the shallow and non-permeable materialness of a patera, the material properties of which, in turn, enabled the ultimate gesture of pouring to be carefully controlled; an animal victim’s body could not be cut without the hard, inflexible qualities of a metal blade that had the capacity to be sharpened to a cutting edge, just as that animal itself could not be sacrificed if it was not made of flesh and blood with material qualities susceptible to being altered by a sharpened metal blade.Footnote ¹⁸ Each of these things – object, liquid, and animal – had distinctive material properties which, when combined by ritualised activities, might generate particular types of affect within the world.

The rationale for this re-centring of material objects as thingly participants in ritualised assemblages alongside humans is set out in more detail in the following section, but for now it is important to note that continuing to regard instrumenta sacra as symbols which were merely emblematic of human action, or of a particular priestly status, diminishes the significance of the physical presence of the real objects to which the sculpted simulacra allude. Such a standpoint dematerialises these things, rendering them little more than visual representations indicative of purely human agency or otherwise abstract concepts. Acknowledging this also compels us to find alternative ways to evaluate the relief of the Vestals: the objects carried by the women may certainly indicate their position or specific role within the order, but their presence should also draw our attention to a once lived reality in which the real-world counterparts of these priestesses encountered and engaged with actual objects in the course of ritualised activities. These were, moreover, experiences that must inevitably have changed and diverged in multiple ways throughout their thirty-year service as priestesses, as their advancing status and role within the order demanded engagement with alternative material things, each with their own distinctive qualities. In other words, it should not be forgotten that the real-world counterpart of the woman shown carrying the molucrum may once also have experienced sacrificial processions through the medium of the small incense container or simpuvium carried by her companions. The frieze therefore provides a profitable starting point for exploring these ways of thinking about the place of things within the lived experience of ritualised action, prompting new understandings of the real-world lived experiences of Vestals, something which others have pointed out is otherwise very difficult to access.Footnote ¹⁹ At the same time, the frieze urges reflection on the ways in which such experiences contributed to the production of religious knowledge concerning the roles and responsibilities of the Vestal priesthood itself, and how each Vestal’s own personal religious knowledge could derive from what they did, and what material things did it with them.

Reassembling Humans, Things, and Religious Knowledge

The discussion so far has hinted at the possible merits of investigating what happens when ritual causes human and more-than-human things to assemble with one another, and I have begun to suggest that different types of religious knowledge might be created as a consequence of the material qualities that each of those things brought to that relationship. Before exploring the lived experiences and religious knowledge of the Vestals any further it is necessary to set out this underpinning theoretical framework in more detail, and to consider how and why it might offer a valuable way of approaching ancient religion.

First, what is actually meant here by ‘religious knowledge’? This can be a slippery term, used to describe communally recognised, officially sanctioned, or formally written doctrinal forms of transmittable information concerning how ‘religion’ should be understood or ritual acts performed in a specific cultural context, as well as highly restricted even confidential forms of knowledge that ritual specialists might dedicate time to studying, learning, or otherwise acquiring and may be expected to exercise ultimate control over access to.Footnote ²⁰ From a lived religion perspective, religious knowledge can also be defined as a profoundly personal, experience-based understanding of what religion entails based on the accumulation of an individual’s lived involvement with ritual activities.Footnote ²¹ It is this sense of the term that I adopt here, and the religious knowledge of interest in this chapter encompasses the myriad ways in which people experienced and recognised religious agency based principally on their own individualised familiarity with ritual activities, and what this taught them to understand about religion and themselves.Footnote ²² After all, ‘The notion that religious rituals must have a singular, clear, authoritative meaning that all participants understand and agree to is simply not a universal feature of religious practice.’Footnote ²³ For the Vestal priestesses (and others), religious knowledge might therefore be twofold. On the one hand it comprised the outcomes of their formal instruction in the ritual responsibilities and expectations of the Vestal order, their historically sanctioned status within Roman society and religious culture, and how their duties (and ongoing chasteness) related to the maintenance of pax deorum and the welfare of the state, conveyed via intermediary authority figures within the order such as the virgo maxima. On the other hand, this formalised knowledge developed in parallel with a Vestal’s own personal lived experiences of witnessing and then actively performing those duties from a young age, continually participating as an embodied individual in ritualised activities that caused her to feel and comprehend her religious responsibilities from a truly subjective perspective. These two aspects of religious knowledge, each arising from a subtly different experiential process, are best described in terms of the distal and proximal forms of knowledge introduced above.

Distal forms of knowledge concern the big picture, commonly comprising knowledge that is attained at a distance through the visual representation or aural communication of shared ideas. As Douglass Bailey observes, distal forms of knowledge can involve ideas which are broadly considered to be already complete or fixed, and which emphasise a state of order and hierarchy.Footnote ²⁴ In the context of this chapter, distal religious knowledge can therefore be defined as that which allowed the Vestals to understand how to be public priestesses, and specifically how to be Vestal Virgins, as well as how and why those ways of being were connected with the overarching configuration of Roman religion. This was knowledge that was broadly shared with the rest of the Roman population in the form of a communal knowledge of the (supposed) long-established fundamentals of how to do religion and why it should be done in particular ways, but which the Vestals acquired specifically and very formally in relation to their own discrete position.

In contrast, proximal forms of knowledge are a deeper, more personal and subjective way of knowing. Proximal knowledge is highly context-specific, arising from direct embodied and sensory engagements with the physical world, rendering it continually open to change.Footnote ²⁵ Proximal knowledge can be acquired via visual and aural means, but is usually associated with more intimate forms of sensory perception derived from broadly haptic experiences (e.g. touch, taste, kinaesthesia, and proprioception). This form of knowledge is constantly created and reworked by a person’s own situational and inevitably changing sensory experience of different aspects of the material world. This means that proximal religious knowledge can be described as a way of knowing that derives from uniquely personal and in-the-moment embodied experiences of lived religion, and specifically from the engagement of human bodies with other things (more on this shortly). The significance of this form of religious knowledge remains under-valued in studies not only of the Vestals but of Roman lived religion more generally, and yet as already noted the representation of the Vestal Virgins on the Ara Pacis small procession frieze, where each figure is presented carrying a different cult instrument, points towards ways in which this oversight might be rectified. Indeed, the relief suggests that the proximal religious knowledge that each priestess developed during the course of that otherwise shared ritualised act must have differed slightly from that of her peers, partly because they all performed subtly different roles, but also because each did so with direct sensory reference to a particular material object. This observation lies at the crux of the argument presented in this chapter and I will examine its implications more closely in the next section. Here, however, it must be noted that proximal religious knowledge of this sort will always remain at least partially connected to distal forms of knowledge concerning why an activity or ritual performance takes a particular form. This means that any individualised forms of religious knowledge produced by the Vestals’ divergent embodied experiences also remained grounded in the bigger picture, always explainable with reference to their self-identification as Vestals and the associated distal forms of religious knowledge they consequently held in common with one another and the broader community.Footnote ²⁶ For this reason, although the following analysis is concerned primarily with identifying the proximal forms of religious knowledge that the Vestals’ ritualised experiences produced, especially those involving sensory engagements with material things, the didactic processes whereby distal forms of religious knowledge were also acquired cannot be entirely ignored.

If proximal forms of religious knowledge arise from lived experiences of ritualised encounters with the physical world, as outlined here, the second big question must be, precisely how do material things contribute to this? The short answer is that they contribute by being equal participants in the production of religion itself. To understand this, it can be helpful to break it down into a series of steps that make it possible to identify (1) how things help to produce the religious agency at the heart of specifically religious ways of being (i.e. lived religion) that is (2) experienced via the sensing body, and (3) ultimately embodied as religious knowledge. This means beginning with religious agency itself, reframing it as something that happens – that is to say, a specific type of affect or difference that is made to the world – when humans and other things form active relationships in ritualised contexts, rather than thinking of agency as an independent property possessed by, ascribed to, or latent within one thing alone. This way of defining religious agency builds on new materialist theorising which asserts that agency (or affect) is neither inherent to humans nor to other more-than-human things such as material objects.Footnote ²⁷ Instead, agency is relational and better understood as resulting from relations between things.Footnote ²⁸ Put another way, neither humans nor other things can act in or on the world entirely on their own: to make a difference or to bring about a change their properties or qualities must combine with those of other things.Footnote ²⁹ In this way all types of agency are situationally specific, of-the-moment, a product of particular things coinciding at particular moments in time and space. The corollary is that specific types of agency, including religious agency, are produced when things form relationships under very discrete circumstances, in this case ritualisation. The ways in which ritualisation causes this agency to be produced, and its perceived affects, are subsequently experienced as lived religion. Felt through the human bodies which are participants in those relationships, this agency becomes embodied as proximal religious knowledge.

These ever-changing relational bundles of things with the potential to affect one another and thus produce agency, can be termed assemblages, and examples of these situational groupings are made visible to us on the Ara Pacis relief, where each Vestal is shown sharing a relationship with a different cult instrument.Footnote ³⁰ That is to say that, despite clearly participating in the same sacrificial procession with the same intended outcome, the priestesses evidently did so while physically engaging with the varied affordances of the discrete material things that this ritualised process caused each of them to temporarily assemble with: a cumbersome angular tablet, a simpuvium weighted differently at each end, the rough, gently warming fabric of an earthenware vessel, and so on. Their experiences of how religion was produced in that moment, and the ways in which this became embodied as religious knowledge, were consequently individualised. This, in turn, has significant implications for how we understand Vestal identity, as well as the multifarious nature of Roman religion itself, even for those charged with upholding its strictest traditions.

Acknowledging that agency is relational compels us to pay greater attention to the qualities and potentialities of all the things brought together during ritual, not just the human participants. That means assessing the potential affective qualities (sometimes referred to as affordances) of the things with which the sensing human body might combine during the course of ritualised activities.Footnote ³¹ Since things can move in and out of assemblages, and since their particular affordances might come to the fore only when they combine in certain ways, the agency and subsequent proximal religious knowledge that is produced by ritualised assemblages remains constantly in flux and open to negotiation.Footnote ³² Although this was true for all participants in Roman religion, it is something that can be identified in uniquely specific terms for the Vestals, who we have already seen in relationship with different things on the Ara Pacis relief, and who we know took on different ritual roles and responsibilities over the course of their lives as active members of the order. Examining these potential experiences offers a chance not only to demonstrate the value of the theoretical approach outlined here, nor even just to appreciate the lived experience of the Vestals in new ways, but it also makes it possible to explore how an individual’s religious knowledge might be subject to change, and why that might matter for our understanding of ancient religion.

Getting Hands-On with the Vestals

The possibility that the bodies of humans and the material qualities of more-than-human things might combine in the course of Roman lived religion is perhaps harder for us to begin to imagine than it was for Romans themselves, who already occasionally acknowledged it by identifying individuals through their thingly relationships. Most well-known is probably the simpulatrix, a woman ‘devoted to divine matters’ who was named for her use of a ladle (simpuvium or simpulum) for dipping into and pouring wine at sacrifices (Figure 2.3).Footnote ³³ The simpuvium is almost certainly the item carried by the second Vestal on the Ara Pacis frieze and will be examined more closely shortly. In the case of the simpulatrix, we encounter what seems at first to be a primarily semantic blurring of human and more-than-human things into a new, composite thing, but it is a linguistic blending that may nonetheless reflect a lived reality: both the qualities of the body of the simpulatrix and those of the ladle were required to combine in order for ‘divine matters’ to happen. The work of Celia Schultz on the burial of unchaste Vestals points towards a further example in which it was seemingly difficult for Romans to completely abstract religious agency from a deeply entwined person/thing framework. Observing that, much like ‘the burial of defunct cult materials’, disgraced Vestals must be buried in a particular way within the sacred boundary of the city of Rome (pomerium), Schultz proposes that ‘Like a broken statuette or bones left over from a burned sacrifice, an unchaste Vestal might be seen, in a sense, as a decommissioned sacred entity, as something polluted but still sacred: not profane, but not ritually perfect (and therefore not ritually usable) either.’Footnote ³⁴ In other words, the physical body of a Vestal found guilty of incestum (being unchaste) could not simply be disposed of like any other body, instead it was treated in the same way as cult objects or votive offerings, as a thing that had become sacred and inalienable by being dedicated to the divine but which circumstances now demanded be removed or put out of circulation. Here, in conceptual and in real terms, it was not possible to separate out religious agency from a human Vestal and other more-than-human things.

Figure 2.3 Bronze simpulum/simpuvium (ladle), late first–early second century CE. Height 11.4 cm. The simpuvia used by the Vestals took this form but were made of earthenware rather than metal

(Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accession No. 00.13.14. Used under CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain license)

However, to understand how Vestals might produce their own personal religious knowledge based on their ritualised relationships with things it is necessary to think through what their lived experiences might have been. To do this we can use what is known about the items carried by the Vestals on the small procession frieze, and the relative positions of the women within the group of six priestesses, to investigate the potential affordances of these readily identifiable body/thing combinations. Here I focus primarily on their tactile and haptic affordances, adopting the broad understanding of touch advocated by sculptor Rosalyn Driscoll who extends it beyond ‘contact with something by the skin’ to encompass ‘kinaesthesia, proprioception, balance, temperature, pain, and pleasure – indeed the whole body’.Footnote ³⁵

Let’s begin with the smallest Vestal figure at the front of the processional line who, using her left hand, grasps a small, cylindrical, slightly globular vessel or jar with a narrowed neck and flared lip (Figure 2.4). The vessel is commonly identified as a small container for incense, reminiscent of those which appear in private altar scenes where they are also shown cupped from beneath using one hand (see the female figure in Figure 2.5).Footnote ³⁶ As a material object this vessel was very different from the larger, angular acerrae that appear frequently in reliefs depicting public or state sacrifices, where they are held, again usually from beneath using one hand, by young male attendants (camilli). Examples of acerrae can be found elsewhere on the Ara Pacis: on the north procession frieze two male youths grasp incense boxes with raised relief decoration. One, identified as an attendant for the Septemviri epulones (‘the Priesthood of Seven Diners’), holds an acerra bearing images of a tripod, flute player, and bull, and also has a mantele (towel) draped across his forearm and a jug in his right hand (Figure 2.6), while the other bears a box showing a scene of a victimarius and bull.Footnote ³⁷ At the western end of the small procession frieze a similarly youthful figure is shown holding a rectangular acerra in his left hand and a jug in his right. Acerrae also feature in friezes of cult instruments, where they are sometimes shown with their hinged lids partially open, as if caught in the moment at which the grains of frankincense contained within them were about to be removed and cast onto the flames of the altar. It is clear, then, that the incense container clasped by the smallest Vestal was materially differentiated from those carried by male attendants in public sacrificial processions. Whether sacrificial occasions sometimes caused the counterparts of this young female figure to carry other types of incense container remains unknown, but what is important for this study are the specific affordances of the one that she is depicted interacting with here.Footnote ³⁸

Figure 2.4 Detail of the small procession frieze of the Ara Pacis showing the first three Vestals, preceded by two male figures

(Photo by G. Fittschen-Badura, arachne.dainst.org/entity/73351)

Figure 2.5 Detail of an altar from the Vicus Sandalarius, Rome (2 BCE). The relief shows an altar scene with the emperor Augustus, Gaius Caesar, and an unidentified woman with a libation bowl in her right hand and an incense container cupped in her left. Florence, Uffizi Gallery, inv. no. 972

(Photo: Album/Alamy Stock Photo P3YKCP)

Figure 2.6 Detail from the north frieze of the Ara Pacis showing a cult attendant for the Septemviri epulones grasping a decorated acerra in his left hand

(Photo: Lanmas/Alamy Stock Photo EN8YP4)

Despite playing a similar role in terms of bringing the incense to the altar and holding it ready for the presiding official to extract its resinous substances, the religious knowledge produced by the Vestal’s experiences differed from those of a camillus. In part this was because, as a Vestal, her bodily action was, if not mundane, certainly a frequent occurrence integral to the habitual performance of her identity, whereas for the camillus playing such a central role in a public sacrifice represented a potentially more infrequent honour.Footnote ³⁹ Consequently, the young Vestal rationalised her experience in relation to her own existing distal knowledge concerning her duties as a public priestess, not only in the sense that she understood how this action produced religion, as well as how it embodied and performed that part of her identity, but because she understood that one day she would perform the role carried out by the Vestals who accompanied her – that is, she contextualised this of-the-moment experience of lived religion in relation to a predictable future one. Meghan DiLuzio has similarly highlighted how, despite having ‘only a minor role’, the participation of the youngest Vestals ‘was nonetheless vital to the success of the ritual as a whole and undoubtedly had a profound impact on the fledgling priestesses’.Footnote ⁴⁰ The proximal knowledge that the youngest Vestal developed in parallel to this confirmation of distal religious knowledge, was nevertheless shaped by her physical relationship with the object that she carried, and textured by the religious agency that together they produced.

Based on the relief alone it is difficult to identify the material from which the vessel’s real-world counterpart was made, although its size and form suggests fired clay. Glass is unlikely, given the absence of any attempt to illustrate the contents of the vessel, and although some acerrae were probably made using ivory the Vestals were associated by ancient writers with the use of very traditional instrumenta sacra made from simple materials, rather than the sort of expensive, exotic luxury exemplified by ivory or, for that matter, metals.Footnote ⁴¹ The incense container was therefore probably some form of earthenware or ceramic, meaning that it was not especially heavy, but neither was it lightweight. Carrying a ceramic pot in one hand for a protracted period of time would mean that the bearer became increasingly aware of its dry, rough texture in her hand, but also its solidity and weight in her wrist, forearm and shoulder. Twisting one’s arm so that the palm faces upwards strains the outside of the forearm especially, even more so when bearing weight and when that position is sustained for a period of time, lessened only slightly when the elbow is brought close to the side of the body. Of course, she could have swapped the jar from hand to hand, or used both at once, but there is good reason to think that bearing incense containers in one hand may have been a ritual requirement. As already mentioned, visual evidence suggests that acerrae and other incense containers were consistently carried in this way, and evidence for people demonstrating the use of a similar one-handed cupping type of grasp comes from reliefs illustrating the incorporation of other portable cult objects into ritualised processions. For instance, Brian Madigan has pointed out that small statues are regularly carried on the palm of one hand, observing that ‘the regularity in the appearance of these gestures argues for their following a ceremonial decorum’, perhaps even the existence of culturally accepted ways in which to hold objects connected with cult.Footnote ⁴²

The slightly awkward stance that the properties of the jar and these ritual requirements compelled a Vestal to maintain throughout the course of a lengthy procession and prolonged ritual at the altar created a complex haptic lived experience. The small size and rough surface of the vessel perhaps afforded a more secure grip than the properties of a rectangular ivory acerra, which might make the task of a camillus more difficult as his hand was prompted to become increasingly sweaty. Nevertheless, combining her body with this material thing in this way undoubtedly caused the Vestal to become increasingly aware of her body in space, the awkwardness of carrying an item in her outstretched hand requiring her to move, walk, and maintain her balance in ways that were markedly different from other members of the procession, as well as from her everyday experiences of non-ritualised movement. It can be easy to forget that, like other people, the Vestals interacted with objects on a daily basis entirely outside of their ritual requirements. Carrying incense containers with discrete material forms, as part of a ritualised procession, would therefore have produced subtly divergent embodied experiences of the agency that was being produced and lived in that moment by those particular body/thing assemblages. Ultimately, equally divergent proximal religious knowledge also emerged.

Of course, the experience reconstructed here for the Vestal at the head of the procession also differed from that of the young woman who followed behind her and who had perhaps once stood in her place. As noted earlier, the second Vestal is thought to carry a simpuvium or ‘dipping ladle’. The material qualities of the real-world counterpart of this item can be established with even greater certainty than for the incense jar, since ancient textual sources refer to it directly. As Rebecca Flemming points out, the simpuvium ‘appears in the literary sources as a symbol of traditional Roman austerity and piety, retaining its plain earthenware construction and religious centrality, while all around it objects were becoming over elaborate and corrupt’.Footnote ⁴³ In terms of the potential affordances of its materialness, the simpuvium offered to the Vestal’s hands a comparable level of hardness and inflexibility as the incense jar, as well as a surface that gradually warmed to prolonged touch. Nevertheless, its distinctive form, especially the weight imbalance introduced by the combination of a thin, comparatively lightweight handle projecting from a heavier, rounded bowl, required that she hold it very differently (see the simpuvia depicted in Figures 2.3 and 2.7). As seems to be demonstrated by the Ara Pacis relief, the simpuvium was an object which, unusually, needed to be carried using two hands, in part to ensure that its status as a respected instrument of cult was communicated through its almost reverential presentation to onlookers, and in part to guarantee that it remained motionless and under the full control of the bearer. That is to say, in order to prevent it from inadvertently swinging free and coming into contact with other things, the heavy bowl needed to be grasped, not only the handle. Once again, holding the ladle safely in front of her body compelled the Vestal to feel it through her body in ways that put certain perceptible strains upon it. It required her to walk and move in particular ways, unable to use her arms for balance or interact in a tactile way with the world around her other than through her feet and legs, her lived experiences affected directly by the ways in which her body detected and responded to the properties of the object in her outstretched arms. The kinaesthetic and proprioceptive experiences of carrying a simpuvium in the ritualised context of a sacrificial procession were also almost certainly not the same as other occasions on which she carried something using both hands: here they were contextualised by her distal religious knowledge and shaped by the ways in which she experienced the resulting religious agency of that body/thing relationship.

Figure 2.7 Detail of the eastern passageway frieze of the Arch of the Argentarii (Rome), depicting instruments used in the cult. Note the long handled simpuvium second from the right.

Photo by the author

The simpuvium was used by the presiding official to sample the wine that formed part of the sacrificial offering, not necessarily by the individual Vestal who is shown carrying it within the procession. The way in which she became assembled with the ladle was therefore different from that experienced by the person presiding over the sacrifice: she engaged in deeply tactile ways with an instrument that was used by others primarily in relation to taste. This conceivably prompted some dissonance between her distal knowledge and proximal experience of how the simpuvium affected religion that drew attention to or heightened awareness of her own personal encounters with it. In short, it was the ritualised process of carrying it that, for her, was experienced as lived religion, not the process of dipping and tasting. These contested experiences, and the discrepant forms of knowledge that arose from them, hint once again at how a single ritualised act might produce proximal forms of lived religion and religious knowledge. For the Vestal, these experiences may have amplified her self-awareness of the supporting position she played in the sacrifice, as she was able to quite literally feel the limitations of her participation. In this way, the production of proximal religious knowledge may also have contributed to her developing personal identity as a Vestal, emphasising that although limits were placed on her experiences, she was nevertheless on this occasion granted greater responsibility than the younger Vestal in front of her, and she would one day be at the very heart of the sacrifice, like the Vestals following behind her. That is to say that carrying an earthenware ladle could produce religious knowledge that affected a particular understanding of her identity as a Vestal. Crucially this identity was built, at least in part, on what lived religion felt like as a Vestal rather than purely on the factors that scholars traditionally consider to have been important to these women, namely their gender, virginity, and peculiar social status.Footnote ⁴⁴ What is more, this strongly suggests that engagement in ritualised activities was a further way in which Vestals understood their own relational and perpetually developing identity as they progressed through the stages of their service.

Damage to the third Vestal figure in the Ara Pacis procession makes it difficult to reconstruct the item(s) that she carried. Even so, the way in which her clothing drapes, especially the fact that, when compared with the fourth Vestal who she otherwise resembles, its folds are shown as having been brought closer to her body by the position of her angled left arm, makes it evident that that she once carried something that rested in the crook of that arm. The damaged remnants of it can be detected projecting above her forearm. As noted earlier, it has been suggested that this was originally a set of tablets used to support the sacrificial process.Footnote ⁴⁵ Regardless of the identification of the object, the use of the left arm is again notable, and appears especially surprising in the context of ritualised gestures given that this side of the body was commonly associated with impurity and misfortune.Footnote ⁴⁶ The decision to depict the Vestals exclusively touching cult instruments with their left hands seems to have been deliberate: if this was not otherwise reflective of a ritualised reality then it would have made more artistic sense to place items in the hand closer to the viewer, where they would be more easily visible. Indeed, the sculptor has presented the figures of the Vestals as if they are turning outwards slightly towards the viewer, making it easier to see the left side of their bodies and, therefore, the objects that they grasp. This apparent anomaly might be explained in terms of the practicalities of ritualised action, allowing the bearer of an item to use their right hand for further manipulation of it as part of the culmination of the sacrificial processes, rather than the preparatory stage represented by the procession. In other words, the right hand was free to be used to extract something from a vessel or board, or to pass the item to someone else.Footnote ⁴⁷

The fourth Vestal’s hands are again poorly preserved, but several scholars have suggested that she originally carried a wooden board (molucrum) bearing mola salsa, the dry mixture of salt and spelt flour essential for immolatio (Figure 2.8). If this is the case, then the Vestal was charged with the greatest responsibility of all six, since no public sacrifice could be successfully performed without the presence of this substance, made only by the Vestals once a year and stored and supplied directly by them.Footnote ⁴⁸ Engaging with the wooden board on which the mola salsa was placed may have recalled earlier lived experiences of carrying other items during previous processions, with its weight and the necessity of balancing it with one hand inevitably producing comparable sensory experiences. The figure has her left arm outstretched, however, as if presenting the item to onlookers. This gesture, combined with balancing the board on a flat palm, rather than grasping it with the fingers, will have strained the muscles in her forearm considerably more than was experienced by the other Vestals. Walking while maintaining this posture cannot have been easy. It also brought other challenges: although there is some disagreement about whether mola salsa took the form of a dry mixture or was shaped into cakes, it seems probable that it was the former given that it was intended to be sprinkled on the victim, meaning that the Vestal who carried it faced the possibility that the loose mixture might be brushed off the board, even becoming dislodged by a strong gust of wind.Footnote ⁴⁹ At the same time she could perhaps smell the mixture, certainly feeling its salty dryness against the skin of her fingers. The board that combined with her hand was made of wood, potentially rough or highly polished depending upon how it had been worked, its surface likely soft enough to become pitted and worn, perhaps bearing the scars and indentations of many years of use. In tactile terms the wooden board felt very different from an earthenware vessel or ladle, offering properties that were otherwise unique within the ritual experience of the Vestals and, once again, creating a very specific in-the-moment experience of a Vestal’s contribution to the production of religious agency. Assembling with the materialness of that item in that way and under those circumstances cannot have failed to (re)affirm her responsibilities and identity as (perhaps) virgo maxima. Combined with seeing her fellow Vestals in front of her and sensing the presence of her elders behind, this was a unique experience of lived religion, producing a very specific form of knowledge concerning her religious identity, both in relation to the state (her distal religious knowledge) and her own personal identity and the continued culmination of her life as an individual Vestal (her proximal religious knowledge).

Figure 2.8 Detail of the small procession frieze of the Ara Pacis showing the final three Vestals, followed by a male figure

(Photo by G. Fittschen-Badura, arachne.dainst.org/entity/73365)

Conclusions

For the real-life counterparts of the six Vestal Virgins who appear in iconographic form on the Ara Pacis, the relationships forged with the material things that this shared ritualised occasion caused them to become assembled with produced particularly individualised ways of being in the world, even when they occurred at the same specific moment. The religious agency that these body/thing combinations worked to produce was embedded within their bodies as lived religion and consequently understood as characteristic of a way of being that was appropriate to that moment and their personal place within it. These experiences, in short, involved relational assemblages at work, producing very personalised lived religion and, in turn, proximal religious knowledge. Although the names and histories of some individuals are known, the Vestals are typically portrayed by both ancient and modern writers as an otherwise homogenous group of women united by their shared ritual responsibilities, unique social and gendered identity, and distinctive chasteness. Ultimately, however, investigating the potential ways in which Vestals at different moments in their priestly lifetimes participated in real-world processions in combination with the tactile and haptic qualities offered by different material things, makes it possible to recognise that the nature of religious agency and proximal religious knowledge ensured quite the opposite: despite sharing in the same activities there could never be any sort of singularly ‘Vestal experience’ of a public sacrifice, or anything else.

Acknowledging the variability inherent within ancient lived religion is important principally because it suggests that even the most strictly traditional elements of Roman religion – those which on the surface appeared to Romans (and which still appear to us today) as unchanging, inflexible, and almost inevitably encoded within Roman ways of being – could still provide space for personal, deeply individualised experiences of lived religion. Being a Vestal did not mean giving up one’s own personal religious knowledge in favour of an official, collective, or uniform knowledge handed down to them or pre-determined by the Roman state and the responsibilities of the order. This could never occur, simply because, like other participants in ritualised activities, individual Vestals produced the very religion that they lived, the religion on which their own proximal religious knowledge was predicated, with their variable of-the-moment embodied experiences texturing that knowledge and preventing it from ever remaining entirely stable or fixed. Nor did it mean that the lived experiences and personal religious identity of each Vestal must necessarily have been entirely invested in her sustained chastity. Scholarship on Vestal identity continues to assert the central significance of their status as virgins, to the point that it has become very difficult to characterise their experiences without reference to it.Footnote ⁵⁰ This chapter has countered that trend by demonstrating not only how it is possible to begin to understand Vestal identity without constant recourse to their chasteness, but also how the religious knowledge of the Vestals of ancient Rome, and the ways in which they lived the religion they worked to produce, was crucial for the ways in which they understood the world and their place in it. The lived experiences of the women who upheld some of the most traditional religious ideas of ancient Rome highlight quite how potentially fluid and constantly in the process of becoming Roman religion truly was.