ABSTRACT
Animal sacrifice was the most important ritual in the Roman Empire and therefore depictions of animal sacrifice figure prominently in Roman visual culture. In recent scholarship on Roman religion and Roman iconography, however, the theories established in the second half of the last century have been abandoned but without creating alternatives or any explanatory models at all. That led to a situation where the ritual of animal sacrifice is understood as self-evident and/or not interpretable. As a consequence, visual depictions of animal sacrifice are currently analysed in extremely positivist ways by iconographically scrutinizing ever-smaller figurative elements and neglecting religious contents. In the vibrant field of cognitive science of religion (CSR) many theories and approaches have been developed during the last years, which can help to remedy this deeply unsatisfactory situation. The way in which this may be done is illustrated by taking the ritual of animal sacrifice and its depictions in Roman Asia minor as an example. In order to achieve this, the chapter focuses on the cognitive resource depletion (CRD) model. That model helps us to get not only a profound understanding of animal sacrifice, but also an explanation for the relevance of visual depictions: according to the CRD model, the exposure to rituals prevents individuals from forming causally and intentionally meaningful representations of religious interactions because the goal-demoted and causally opaque actions characterizing ritualized behaviours demand precious cognitive resources which would otherwise be available for processing symbolic content. The depletion leaves participants with an inferential gap, which amplifies a search for meaningful interpretations of the ritual after the event. Thus ritualized behaviour facilitates the communication of collective propositions. These can be communicated by means of both verbal narratives and visual depictions. Thus an explicitly cognitive approach to animal sacrifice and their depictions could help – inter alia – to resolve the old dichotomy between strictly orthoprax ritual practice and lacking religious emotions and belief.
