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Michael L. Satlow, "An Enchanted World: The Shared Religious Landscape of Late Antiquity" (Princeton UP, 2026)
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Michael Satlow
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Podcast Host
Hello and welcome to New Books in Late Antiquity, presented by Ancient Jew Review. I'm Mike Motilla, and today we're talking with Michael Sadlow about an enchanted world, the shared religious landscape of late antiquity. The philosopher Charles Taylor argued that we live in a disenchanted world. Taylor develops this from Max Faber. Yes, but Taylor's point is it's not that nobody believes in God anymore. I mean, most people still do. His point is that belief has become an option. People can pray or not. They can go to synagogue or not. They can live based on a divinely inspired code, or by human rights, or by national laws, or just by that little voice in their head. Now, when exactly that happened is hard to say. But Taylor provides this image of a buffered self, the opposite of a porous one, subject to demons and spirits and magic and that kind of buffered self. It's one that seems, I don't know, most obvious to at least the kind of people who are going to read his book. And maybe this is a philosophical development, maybe this is an economic or a capitalist one, maybe it's a technological one. But whatever it is, that kind of buffering, that boundedness is something different from the pre modern world. And it's so different that it's sometimes hard for modern readers to really imagine life before the bumpers between heaven and earth kept us rolling through life. Michael Sattlow has attempted to show that before to Taylor's after. And he shows how this world can teach all of us, even the Taylorites among us, something new and fresh. The world of late antiquity, he argues, was an enchanted world, A world where everyday life was lived with the gods. The gods were as much a fact of life as par and kids and fires and chairs. People related differently to the gods than they did to their chairs, but they did relate to them. People would have been considered kind of stupid, or at least odd not to. And one mistake we can, we can make when we think about this enchanted world is to over label groups, to get really invested in religious identity. Especially late antiquity, as historians rightly say, is a time when Christianity and Judaism, they kind of take the shape that is still recognizable today. But these abstract groups, they were, and they remain to this day, kind of fuzzy creations of intellectual elites. The boundary lines and the identities, they weren't always so clear to people on the ground. That is identities kind of. They flare up, they become important at different times of the day or the month or in different places and in different company. Jews thought of themselves primarily through their ethnic, not religious, identity. The Greeks and Romans, the people that Christians kind of despairingly called pagans, they had their own nuanced, layered understandings of identity. Christians, like sometimes they cared a lot about if or how someone was a Christian, and sometimes they just wanted to trade with whoever had the best price of cabbage. Michael Sallow argues that the intellectual elites, in a sense then they created these identities that bishops and rabbis and Roman writers, they wanted to sharpen those fuzzy boundaries. They wanted to make them matter more often in more places and for more people. But because it's their literary works that survive, we can kind of too easily mistake their desires for the realities that we're trying to narrate. So when we divide people into groups, we can just all too easily forget the shared enchanted world that they all occupied. People in antiquity, of course, did divvy up the world, but most kind of shared a lot of background assumptions, and it's often easier to see the divisions. And that means that the real task for a modern historian is to put together lots of pieces of fragmentary evidence to try to see those shared that backgrounds. Let me try to give an example, just to clarify a little bit. Archaeologists, they've discovered like thousands of little prayer fragments. These are like little pieces of silver. They kind of look like crumpled up tinfoil. Longtime listeners might remember an episode with Laura Nasrala where we discussed these. But these kind of crumpled up prayer fragments, they give us a kind of insight into the daily prayers of late ancient people. And the kind of remarkable thing about them is that when we look at them, it's almost impossible to tell if somebody is Christian or Jewish or Greek or Roman or Maniche or any of the other religious identities we might pin on them. Everybody wanted their kids to heal. Everybody wanted their lovers to love them. Everybody wanted businesses to thrive and money to last. What we really learn, though, from these prayer fragments is that so so many people prayed. Michael Satlow's In Enchanted World reconstructs this shared religious or spiritual landscape, as he calls it. The book tells the story of late antiquity not as the rise of this or that religion, not like institutions or laws or canons or leaders, but is the story of everyday interactions with the invisible world. Most people weren't monks or rabbis or priests, but nearly everybody cultivated relationships with things unseen. So the point isn't that there was like a popular religion lurking under the official one. You probably don't need a book to know that. The goal is to understand how people between the third and seventh centuries in and around the Roman Empire, and sometimes in Persia, sometimes in the western regions of what was the Roman Empire, maintained those relationships between heaven and earth. Michael Sattlow is professor of Judaic and Religious Studies at Brown University. We're lucky to have him with us today. Michael, hi. Thank you for being here. Can you introduce yourself? Who are you and how did you come to write this book?
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Michael Satlow
Well, thank you for having me and thank you for that wonderful summary. This book has been a long time in the making. I began as a social historian and really that's always what's fascinated me is getting had a deep sexual history, not in a structuralist way or a Marxist way, but in really trying to figure out who people are and to visit their world and to try to understand how it's the same and how it's different, especially from our own. So when I began my career, I was interested in issues of sexuality. And that led that was actually supposed to be the first chapter of my dissertation, which then became the second book, which is on marriage, thinking about the family. And that evolved into this kind of wider interest in how it is that people related to these divine beings which were so important to their world. And that took a long time. And actually I read another book in the middle of this because I got so stuck in this book. And here's the problem, and I think this gets to the heart of the enchantment, the. What we call religion. These interactions with divine beings is so entangled in the everyday life of people that it is really almost impossible to rip out and to disentangle and to look at separately. So if you're going to talk about it, you kind of have to talk about everything. And you can't talk about everything because that's not a book, that's many. That's the whole field. So I kind of got stuck in there and started to think a little bit in the middle about issues of textuality. I wrote this other book, how the Bible Became Holy, and then I was able to come back to it. And during the COVID year, the horrible year in which most of us were zoom teaching, which I actually dislike intensely, I was on leave, so I didn't have to. And so instead I really sat down that year and thought I would, you know, just kind of crack this nut and figure out some way to tell the story that I wanted to tell and to really. To bring people into this world that I've kind of been inhabiting for a decade.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, one of the things, like one of the ways that we try to break that, you know, like this religion is about everything down into smaller pieces, is this idea of identity, which is still huge, but. But you think this is a pretty unhelpful way to try to, you know, compress the huge issue. It's a common way that we talk about late antiquity, but, like, what is it supposed to help us see? And then what does it actually obscure when we talk about identity?
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Michael Satlow
So I think this is really an interesting phenomenon in the scholarship, and the scholarship has been. Yeah, I mean, this is decades old already. And I think it's probably connected to issues in our own, especially American culture, which is that identity matters. Identity is important. And there's a flood of scholarship, which I certainly participated, in, which you talk about identity formation. How is it that different kinds of identities are formed? How are these different kinds of barriers and slots created strategies of formation? But I've begun to think over the last several years that it's not totally helpful. It is not unimportant. People do have identities and they activate their identities, but the identities, they are activated particular identities in particular contexts. And also they're very subjective.
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Podcast Host
Right.
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Michael Satlow
I can think of my identity in one way, and you can think of it as something entirely differently. And my family is, like, totally annoyed at everybody's way of looking at my identity. So, I mean, these things happen, they become very complicated. And by focusing on the identity, I think, in a sense we're playing the game of the identity formers. Now, there's a natural reason we do that because they're the ones who mainly left the texts, as you pointed out in the summary. But really what I wanted to do was to push back against that and to say, let's look at the less differentiated landscapes and contexts in which people operated, which I think was pretty common. You know, when I go shopping, when I go through a lot of my normal everyday life, I don't at least consciously activate many of the identities that are ascribed to me and that I sometimes activate on my own. So. And I don't think that's so different from antiquity. And it's really kind of trying to drill into that and lean into that notion that let's. I talk about the identities in a chapter, but then I largely try to discard them and try to say, well, okay, these are people living in a less differentiated world.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah. I was reading a lot of the book as saying, we talk a lot about what it's like when the identities flare up. And I mean, that's great, but sometimes it's hard to remember what they're flaring up from what they're jumping out of. And you gotta actually understand that to understand the flaring in the first place. So you're skeptical of identity, but the book, it does care about how people were labeled and governed. So it's not like it doesn't matter at all, but it's kind of about where and how it matters. And in Christianity, you know, as a religion, that kind of gets pushed aside, but as a kind of. As an ethnicity or as a product of ethnic thinking, it is still helpful. Or, you know, Judaism as a religion might not make a lot of sense, but there are laws requiring Jews to pay specific taxes or prohibiting marriages between Christians and Jews that require some way of telling, you know, who's Christian, who's Jewish. I think I have that right. And then you get kind of really interested in this category of what you call, like, voluntary associations. Can you tell us a little bit about what. What voluntary associations help us understand about identities and how they matter?
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Michael Satlow
Well, these are things. These were very common, especially in the. The Greek and Roman worlds. And they were primarily. They were almost semi legal, semi corporatized sometimes. Sometimes they were more informal, but they were ways in which people created communities among themselves primarily for the function of helping each other during, after death. Creating, burying each other, creating this kind of support group and funding, you know, but they would also come together for a banquet every once in a while and eat together and so on. So these voluntary formations, you know, voluntary associations, they become really kind of one of the major ways in which people could identify as, let's say, a devotee of the particular divinity or angel or archangel or whatever figure this is so they could come together around that figure. I think with Jews, you have a long tradition of ethnic identity. So there definitely is this notion in the air of ethnicity. With Christians, as you point out, it is more complicated because Christians in some formations, I'm sure, did not want to see themselves as an ethnicity. And yet they often, as we have great scholarship on this, talk about kind of the way they thought ethnically about being a Christian. And this is actually, this is one of these issues that I think is true to the modern day Christians and Jews, the way they think about their identity as well as individuals rather than kind of as they're told institutionally. But the voluntary association might be a synagogue. Let's imagine this for a second, right? If you have a synagogue, is anyone policing who comes in and out of the synagogue? Is anyone policing who gives money in. I mean, where's the identity? I'm going to. In that case, I might identify myself as a Jew because I enter the synagogue and I participate in the affairs of the synagogue and I give money for the synagogue. Am I. Well, from a legal perspective, maybe I don't want to be a Jew because that might give me extra taxes and maybe I'm not, you know, find somebody down the street maybe doesn't think of me as a Jewish because I also think that that Jesus guy is maybe kind of cool too. So that's where things you know, get all fuzzy. But the, so the voluntary associations, I think are ways, you know, in which people, like a bowling club, they make communities here and you find them around, obviously, you know, you find churches that are dedicated to particular saints. And that's a, I think, a carryover of this kind of thinking.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like in the same way you can be a, like a baker or something, something like that. And you got your baker buddies. Like when you start thinking about religion not as its own kind of group, but it's like one of many different kinds of groups that people kind of, you know, they find some kind of core that they rally around. I mean, it's a more helpful way sometimes to understand kind of how rituals bring together a group. You know, the next chapter, it Talks about the idea of kind of projection. Like in religious studies, we talk about people projecting their. Their own ideas into the heavens a lot. And yeah, I mean, that happens all the time for everybody. But I think in, in late antiquity, it's. It's like, easy to get Protestant about this and to think when we say heaven and earth, what we mean is, like, God, an individual. And the chapter really lays out this, like, really messy layer of bureaucracy that would go into governing the Roman Sasanian empires. Like, by the 4th century, you have this huge rise in bureaucracy in the empire. And so there was. There was an emperor. Yes, but, like, the average person never sees the emperor. Right. Deal with some kind of intermediary people with discrete jobs and limited autonomy. And, you know, they could be lenient or strict, but, you know, none of those intermediaries get to make the rules. Right. And you say that that's actually how the invisible world works too, that nobody gets to see God and live. But you write that heaven was a busy, complicated place for Romans, Greeks, Jews, Christians and others. So, like, of course, you know, you have intellectuals writing books about sacred hierarchies. But on the ground, how do people navigate these systems? Maybe God at the top is easy to imagine, but can you tell us about. I'm going for an example here about Judaism and angels. How does understanding the kind of rise of bureaucracy and the bureaucracy of heaven help us think about these angels?
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Michael Satlow
Yeah, so I think to even kind of take a broader view, I would say we're talking about invisible beings. So you have this. It's not, as you say, we have this notion that, well, maybe there's something kind of between heaven and earth, that they're actually kind of different. Right. There's a barrier there. And I think in most people's mind, there maybe kind of is certainly to kind of the supreme God. And that could be Jupiter, it could be the Trinity, it could be, you know, the Adonai, the God of the Jews. But actually there are all these beings, like, walking around with us. I mean, I think they're here. That's the enchantment here. And you have to try to make sense of them only for a particular context. And that's like knowing who to call on for what. You want to have good relationships with as many of these beings as you can because someday, you know, you're going to need them. You're going to need them for your crops. You're going to need them to protect you. You're going to need them to protect yourself from illness and some of Them you just want to keep really far away from you. You. Right. So you're really busy with this kind of protective work as well. So you might start thinking. When you start thinking like that, you think, well, okay, there are certain beings that, as you mentioned, like the emperor, I mean, they're really powerful, important beings. And let's say I'm having a problem with something relatively minor, right. I have an itch that I want cured. And if I take that up to the emperor, that's dangerous, that's probably not wise because the emperor's not going to blow me off here and maybe actually kill me. So I'm going to try to find somebody, some being further down, what I think is imagined as a hierarchy who's a little more approachable. That might be the spirit of my dead Father, or it might be something a little bit that I have in my head as maybe an angel. Now, if we think of. There is abundant evidence that Jews turn to angels in late antiquity, as did everybody, for all kinds of things. So that's how they would have functioned. So it's a little bit more than the spirit of a person or a ghost or however we want to call it. They have all these different names for these things in antiquity. And it was muddled. I don't think, again, as the intellectuals are creating all these like, well, let's chart out really, the heavens, the relationship between all of these things. Did people care? I mean, even this really important distinction made by theologians of Christ and the Trinity and the relationship between these persons of the Godhead, it's like, who cared? Did people care? Some people certainly cared, but for many people, maybe it's not so relevant. You will turn to Jesus for this, that or the other thing, and not actually really care about whether it was born of the same substance or created and generated and all these different terms that. That rack the minds of some of these theologians.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, and people might care a lot about if the other person doesn't subscribe to the same or ascribe to the same creed as you do, but you might not actually understand it. Nobody understands the Trinity, but people care a lot if they disagree about the Trinity. And so exactly how that works can be tricky. For sure, you make this distinction, trace out this distinction between angels and spirits, and you write that the spirits don't so much act in the world the way a saint might, but they provide a shadow window into the netherworld. Can you tell us about these spirits and how were people invoking them? Why were they important to people?
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Michael Satlow
Spirits associate with especially dead relatives. The issue of piety to dead relatives is an important shared feature of, I think, most people in late antiquity. And you could argue much further outside of late antiquity and outside of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern world, too. And there's the idea that the spirit of a deceased family member would kind of hover around and they could be useful, especially because, well, they care about you. But there's a kind of inverse relationship. The more a being cares about you, the less power they have, right? So you can turn to the spirit, but the spirit doesn't have as much power. And there's a certain logic to this, right, because this is kind of how it works in the world. The CEO is not going to care so much about me, but has all the power. So in that way, these, you know, these spirit. But these spirits do have, like, some knowledge of the future. They were ascribed this kind of prognosticating skill. So maybe you could go to it. You can get a little bit of knowledge out of it if you're careful. Or at least because you think they have that, maybe they can look over you for a bit. But their agency is more limited. So when you get into these beings with more agency, again, do you call them agencies, angels? Maybe, maybe not. There's a certain kind of continuum here. They may have, you know, greater, greater juice in the world.
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Podcast Host
Yeah. K Pop Demon Hunters, Haja Boy's Breakfast Meal and Huntrick's meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi? It's not a battle. So glad the Saja could take breakfast
- [23:36]
Michael Satlow
and give our meal the rest of the day.
- [23:38]
Podcast Host
It is an honor to share. No, it's our honor. It is our larger honor. No, really, stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side. Participating McDonald's while supplies last. Stitch Fix Shopping is hard. Let's talk about it. I don't have time to shop, so
- [23:58]
New Books Network Announcer
I buy all my clothes, where I buy my seafood.
- [24:00]
Podcast Host
I just want someone to tell me
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Michael Satlow
what shirt goes with what pants.
- [24:04]
Podcast Host
I just want jeans that fit. Stitch Fix makes shopping easy. Just show your size, style and budget and your stylist sends personalized looks right to your door. No subscription required, plus free shipping and returns. Man, that was easy. I look good. Stitch Fix Online Personal styling for everyone. Take your style quiz today@stitch fix.com. so like, like, people understand kind of the everyday workings of invisible bureaucracies? I don't know, like, they understand that about as well as people today understand the workings of our government. Right. Like, you know, some people understand a lot, some people barely get it at all. And, you know, but, like, then there's, like, I don't know, activists today or intellectuals in late antiquity that do spend a lot of time trying to explain the invisible forces governing people's lives. And, I don't know, like, this is what we would usually call theology or philosophy, but. But you want to kind of recontextualize that work, that the kind of intellectual part of an enchanted world. I don't know, it works a little differently than what a theologian does today. So how does this kind of enchanted world change the way we think about Augustine or Plotinus, kind of what they were doing?
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Michael Satlow
I think if we think about it as organizing the world in which they see around themselves. Right. So they are not. It's not fully a kind of intellectual or philosophical pursuit. And this has to do also with some of the methodology of the book, which is complicated because it's very hard to get down to the level of, you know, where they don't have texts in the same way. But you see what I think are clear examples of people taking intellectuals looking at things that people are doing, understanding they're born in the same world, they live in the same world, they are among the people in that way, but then trying to organize it into some systematic way and to control it, to make it make not just sense, but sometimes when these people have positions of authority, they're trying to use this to further their authority. So Peter Brown has a nice example of this that he talks about with the bishop's appropriation of alms. Well, don't give alms to poor people. Give alms to us, and we'll give to poor people. And that, of course, has certain real power implications for the bishops and the control. So, yeah, let me just stop there.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, the work of the intellectual. I don't know, like, that's kind of how Roman Williams describes the work of theology. Like saying, like, what a theologian is supposed to be doing is like watching the way people organize their religious lives and then kind of like explaining it to them, like, breaking it down piece by piece. And I think that's kind of what Augustine or Plotinus, that's what you see them doing. It's just that, like, they're also, like, building up Augustine more than Plotinus, I think, is like building up an institution behind that. Right. In a way that, I don't know, maybe today, like, that part is just either obvious or isn't. I don't know. There's not the. I don't know. The role of the theologian is just so much smaller today than, you know, for someone like Augustine, who, you know, was a major player in his world, maybe that's part of the difference there too. You know, so people end up talking about these invisible forces a lot. But you talk about the kind of how the rituals and special objects are, like, what really make them real. And you talk a lot about this idea of contagious holiness. Can you talk about contagion and what that is, kind of how it works?
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Michael Satlow
Yeah, you would think. And this becomes a theological problem for the theologians and the intellectuals. It's like, well, if the Spirit. Does the Spirit have a body? If so, is that body in a particular place? Is there more holiness in one place or another place? If you have. I mean, this is a kind of. This becomes a very important and famous debate among Jews later on.
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Podcast Host
Right.
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Michael Satlow
If you have a God that's everywhere. Right. What's the deal with the Temple? Is there something special about that? Is there something special about the Kotel, the Western Wall? Is there more God there? There more holiness? And I think people generally do, or they're attracted to this idea that in fact, there are objects and people and places that are holier or there's more. There's more divine energy there than others. Now, once you have contact with that, though, and there are all these really, again, very interesting strategies of sometimes keeping people at a distance from that which has the most holiness. This is the standard architectural structure of a temple or a church or a synagogue. The thing that kind of focuses the holiness is somewhere in the back, somewhere walled off, there's a nave, there's a niche, whatever it happens to be, to keep people a little bit far from it, and I think to emphasize its holiness. But that doesn't mean people don't want to touch it. And they come close and they touch it, and there's. Are they. Whether it's a saint's garment or a bone for, you know, in a Christian tradition. So you certainly have this notion of, I think, you know, contagion. You want a little piece of the text with you, or there's something that is going to bring with it a little bit of that holiness.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah. Can you tell us about Torah scrolls and, like, how contagious contagion works with them?
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Michael Satlow
There's a very set of interesting conversations or discussions that the rabbis have about the sanctity of Torah scrolls and trying to kind of Keep them, in a sense, non contagious. You don't want to touch them. They're so contagious, you don't touch them. I think people were probably touching them. So there was. Stephen Fine argued that it's really the Torah scroll that makes a synagogue holy for the rabbis. So you take the Torah scroll out of the synagogue and now it's just a building. Even the rabbis weren't so comfortable with that idea. I think on the one hand they kind of said, sure, yes. But on the other hand it's like, well, what if you just buy a kind of decommissioned synagogue, a synagogue which has been totally emptied of all of its sacred texts and make it into a latrine? They're not so comfortable with that. I think they're reflecting this kind of general wider discomfort that there's still something special about that space. And sure, you can kind of sell, but you shouldn't really make it a latrine or a brothel or anything, you know, that's too yucky.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's like some kind of like sacred remnant or residue or something like. Like you. I don't know, it just feels. Feels icky. Yeah, that makes sense. All right, so the book wants us to kind of think a little bit less about intellectuals describing identities and more about symbols, myths and rituals that help maintain relationships. But people still do have leaders, or maybe better you call them technicians. Right. People who mediate between heaven and. And earth. Heidi Wendt, a former Brown student, I think, described this as a world full of freelance ritual experts. And there's all kinds of people doing this work. We've got aristocrats and senators who are also priests. There's dream interpreters and astrologers and necromancers and holy people and ascetics. And then you have this kind of final catch all category that includes elders, that includes Greek titles that we usually translate as priests. So can you tell us how does differentiating these social roles help us understand the world better? Maybe let's start with that. There's all these roles and people wanted to distinguish them in some way. Why do they want to distinguish them? How does that help us understand enchantment?
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Michael Satlow
Well, I think just as you have to know the right being to go to for a particular thing, so do you have to know how to approach that being? That's where you may need some help. So you can approach that. The normal way of creating a social relationship, be it with one of these invisible beings or with a human being, is through gift exchange. So that's what Sacrifice ultimately is. And there are all these different forms of sacrifice and these forms of gift exchange. But it's not so easy always to give a gift to an invisible being. You're not quite sure where to put it. You don't quite know how to address it, so that being gets it. So you do have. I would shy away from leaders because we have a different notion generally of what a leader is. Like you go to somebody for guidance, or that person is somehow proactive. And I think that probably misleads us in this context. Instead, I want to make a gift to a God or to an angel or something, and I have to go to the right person to do that. And that might be what we would. What would be a, you know, a Roman priest or something. The language here gets complicated in the original text because the Roman priest is different than a Christian priest. And we're using different terms often. But, you know, there's some overlap here and there. So you have to find the right person and that, yes, sometimes that's going to be a priest who has a role in the temple, and that's kind of formal. And they actually will put that on their inscriptions when they die, the priest of this or the so on. But often it's somebody hawking their wares in the agora, where, you know, you go up to the person and you say, I need an amulet, or a scribe, or it might be somebody who is taking care of the local house church in some way. And they get this title, this Presbyterian title, which is so vague and complicated that it's hard to know. But again, but the, you know, when you get into the legal authorities, they try to define what this means because it comes with a tax break. So it becomes very important to define some of these roles in time. So you just have to know. Kind of depends what you're doing, because that you don't usually don't know. You don't know how to inscribe the bowl or the little amulet to get to the goal that you want to get to.
- [35:02]
Podcast Host
Yeah, I'm trying to understand the category, too. So we've got all these different kind of technicians, I guess. What is an elder doing that is similar to what a dream interpreter is doing? They're both mediating between heaven and earth, I think. But I found this a helpful way to think about this agora of spiritual leaders or all these different spiritual entrepreneurs. But can you tell us. One of the goals of this book is to get us to think less about identity and more about that kind of shared landscape. So can you tell us about the kind of shared landscape that keeps elder and dream interpreter in the same field?
- [35:39]
Michael Satlow
Yeah, I'm not sure how much they're actually in the same field because that's very different. If you're going to go to a. Basically you would go more to the dream interpreter, right? The elder or the presbyter or the priest or however you want to define this term. This is much more of a catch all category of unclear technical skills. Dream interpreter has very clear technical skills. And you know, you want to find that person and they actually there's a whole business of dream interpretation in antiquity. They have their own manuals and you find the dream interpreter. Now here's the identity thing and why it's so interesting. If you're Jewish, do you look for a Jewish dream interpreter? The rabbis talk about this because they want that. And in fact, that dream interpreter is going to try to interpret your dream in terms of scriptural references and things of that nature. I think it's likely that that's not the case, that you go to the dream interpreter who works and that may cross what we have as kind of traditional religious boundaries. At the same time, if you're a dream interpreter and you want to make more of a living, you might, because you get a coin for this. You don't do this for free or meal or something. You would want to expand your customer base by not limiting yourself just to Christians. And we know a lot of this about dream interpretation, especially because both bishops and I mean Christian intellectuals and Jewish, the rabbis and even in the imperial law, they yell at them a lot. Dream interpreters, we know they're active and they can cause problems. Because knowing the future, dream interpretation is often seen as a way to, you know, to get into the future, to know it. That can be politically very dicey.
- [37:43]
Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess. Right. I think that's like. It's politically dicey. It's also. Tell me what you think about that. I was thinking in kind of like the way people of all religious faiths now will go to a psychic kind of, because it's fun. I get the sense that sometimes people go to dream interpreters because it was fun to hear. I don't know, what does this thing mean? And then you can imagine the religious leader being like, why'd you go to this person instead of that person? And you know, sometimes it's. It's dangerous and it's going to cause a bad omen. And sometimes it's just like you're enjoying the wrong thing. I Don't know if that sounds right to you, but I'm not sure whether
- [38:24]
Michael Satlow
I would think it's fun. I think that there's, you know, I mean, there's a real fear involved in this because I think a lot of people thought too, that once the dream is interpreted, that kind of activates the dream.
- [38:41]
Podcast Host
Sure.
- [38:41]
Michael Satlow
Now that activation can actually be bad. Right. So I think there's a little bit of perhaps of dread sometimes when you went to a dream interpreter and you have these manuals show that the same dream. And we see this back, actually, even in the Bible, in the Genesis story of Potiphar and Joseph and the interpreter, the same dream can have radically different meanings, good or bad. So I, you know, I. If you're hoping for a good interpretation, and we have a rabbinic story that makes fun of this, you give the dream interpreter more money and hope that, you know, that was going to activate something.
- [39:25]
Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah, that's. That's helpful. Thank you. Okay. So, you know, people are maintaining relationships with the invisible in all kinds of ways. And you talk about how space really matters with this, too. You told us a little bit about kind of synagogues and, you know, what happens when the Torah scroll comes out of it. But can you tell us about kind of these, like, shared religious buildings, like how, you know, one building turns. It goes from, you know, a temple into a church or something like that. Like, these buildings are being kind of swapped all the time. Can you tell us about that?
- [39:53]
Michael Satlow
Yeah, I mean, that's a fascinating progression. So often, you know, I mean, we have several examples of this that we could see clearly. A lot of times you cannot see it clearly, but you have some kind of natural feature in the landscape that makes it kind of religiously or spiritually significant. I just kind of draw back for a second on that one, because that also is an important part of understanding holiness and time. You have an undifferentiated landscape. You have undifferentiated time, and there are certain moments or certain places that kind of look special. It's a spring, it's a waterfall. Or when we talk about time, it's maybe sunrise or a full moon. These visible markers. These visible markers become important for people well before late antiquity, and they become places of veneration, places where they thought there's more access to the. To the divine, to the spiritual world. Over time, these places, these natural places get built, and those buildings, let's say, may have been one. May be a Greek temple on top of one of these springs or by one of these Springs. And over time, that Greek temple, let's say two things might happen to it. One is that it's abandoned, it just falls into disuse. Or Christians come and they convert it to a church, and that conversion might be forceful, or maybe it's a friendly takeover. We don't know. There's a whole scholarly narrative how Christians came in and destroyed all the pagan temples and built churches on them. But the reality, we think now, it was much more complicated than that. And a lot of them had been abandoned before. So why would you build a church on top of a pagan temple? And the reason is because ultimately people thought that there was a kind of innate or attached holiness to this space that they wanted to continue, but just under a different guise. So I think that's kind of. That's a. That's a nice example of the way that this. They share this landscape. They may. Some people might come and they revalue it, they reidentify it, but nevertheless, it probably still becomes a place where not just people, not just Christians who adhere to the new church come, but other people in the area might still come to that place too, because it is still, in fact, has this innate holiness.
- [42:37]
Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, it's one of the moves that the book makes about. You look at how all these different temples, churches, synagogues, they have all these kind of similar sanctification processes. Right. And one way to talk about it, it's like, well, yeah, look, the Christians come in and they take over and they destroy the temples, and then they have to sanctify it. And you're looking at it and saying, like, if all these different groups are, like, have kind of rituals that they do to make a building holy, it means this was happening a lot. And people had some sense of, like, yeah, we do need to change it. But also there is something special here.
- [43:12]
Michael Satlow
Right. Or you just, you know, build this church down the street.
- [43:16]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [43:17]
Michael Satlow
Across the way. Right. That's the easiest thing to do.
- [43:19]
Podcast Host
Right.
- [43:19]
Michael Satlow
You don't have to pay the demolition costs.
- [43:22]
Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But there's, like. There's already, like a hub here, so we might as well, like, stick with this area. Right. Like, I don't know, Church planters don't do similar things. Like, you go to where the people are.
- [43:33]
Michael Satlow
Right.
- [43:34]
Podcast Host
But what about cemeteries? Do cemeteries work a little differently?
- [43:38]
Michael Satlow
I mean, not really, in a way. Well, these are places of the spirits, so it was less a matter kind of.
- [43:45]
Podcast Host
Of the.
- [43:45]
Michael Satlow
The holiness. Except when the people are holy, because the people are there. If they're holy people there. And this becomes, you know, a major issue, especially in, especially in Christian circles, but even in Jewish circles in which the dead generally are impure. You know, there you, you, you still came as part of your piety action to your family. You visit, and you did certain kinds of things there to try to connect to those spirits.
- [44:15]
Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah. So space ends up being one way people divvy up the world. And like you said, time is too. And late ancient people had all kinds of ways of keeping time. Like, it can drive historians mad, the different kinds of calendars. They had seven day weeks, eight day weeks, all that kind of stuff. But you talk about this kind of, I don't know, shared project of building sacred time. And a big part of this involved having people try to celebrate holidays on the same day. There's big fights about the date of Easter or Passover. Right. So can you tell us a little bit about how did people keep time? And I don't know what is how they keep time? Help us understand about an enchanted world.
- [44:57]
Michael Satlow
I think time is often more locally kept than we think. So when you look at the natural world. Right, the natural world has a particular way of keeping time. The female body has a particular way of keeping time. People as they age have a more linear way of keeping time. So there are all these different kind of indicators. If you're thinking about, like, the calendrical world. The calendrical world, the lunar cycle especially, is a visible way of keeping time in a way that the solar cycle is not. Right. So I think that people get more attached in many ways to a lunar cycle. But as we all know, the lunar cycle can be slightly differently observed. You know, is it a full moon or almost a full moon? Well, today it's all cloudy. I can't really see the full moon. I think it's there, but I'm not so sure. So you probably had some level of difference among different religious communities. I mean, even among, let's say, a community of Jews in one town, a community of Jews in another town, it's probably done on a communal level rather than on a. Well, on, like what we would call a, I don't know, a national level or an individual level. Right. So a community, you know, would. Would go into an observance together. There is a lot of struggle to get control of that timing. And we see it. You know, I'm so fascinated every year with when Ramadan comes to watch, like the Saudis. The Saudis control Ramadan or they, they exert that control by putting out the. The official word about when it begins or when it ends. So a lot of people in antiquity were trying to do the same thing. And the rabbis have a very elaborate system that they discuss that probably was not faithful to the historical reality about how it is that the calendar calendrical information was spread. But as you said, when the identity issues come up and the Christian theologians are trying to figure out Easter and they're trying to not make it Passover or some want to make it Passover.
- [47:21]
Podcast Host
Right.
- [47:21]
Michael Satlow
They're struggling. But what about Christians on the ground? When are they actually observing Easter? In which communities are they doing this and how are they doing this? We have very little information on that, I think. But we do have attempts later on to kind of reconcile some of these calendars, as you pointed out.
- [47:39]
Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah. I just sometimes forget what a big deal it was to people, though, of like, I don't know, you know, like you're used to, I don't know, like, Athanasius letter about the dating of Easter or something like that. But then, like, all the way in, like Bede's Ecclesiastical history. Like, every third story is about, you know, how this terrible person is keeping the wrong date of Easter. Like, it is just like, it's like one of these go to's of like, you're not one of us if you're not doing the calendar this way. And like you said, the thing that the more sophisticated historian should do is say, yeah, if you're complaining about it this much, it's because nobody's doing it. These were not settled matters and probably because there just wasn't really a way to settle the matter, especially out in England. But anyway, just something that popped in my head. Right.
- [48:30]
Michael Satlow
No, it's technologically very hard.
- [48:32]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [48:32]
Michael Satlow
To. To keep people on the same calendrical page.
- [48:35]
Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah. Anyway, that's. Yeah. Just fun to think through that too. You know, we're kind of getting to the end here. Like, what do you hope people take from a big book like this?
- [48:48]
Michael Satlow
So I'm trying to. I think the main arguments that I'm trying to push is to get away from identity and to think more. Really. There are two things that I'm pushing both as a historian, because I think that it opens up different avenues and different ways of thinking about the historical world that professionally we engage in, but also beyond that for our own world, is to think a little bit harder about sort of push more the story about what we share than about what divides us. And maybe that is me also responding to this particular moment in time, in our own lives, political lives and so on. You know, identities can be very dangerous as well as ways of creating community. So they are double edged swords. So that's one point. And the other point is this point of enchantment. And I'm glad you, you know, talked about Taylor and Weber at the beginning because, you know, it's funny, Weber talks about disenchantment a lot. He hardly mentions enchantment. That's like just a side thing. He just, you need enchantment to get to disenchantment, which is what he's really interested in. But this notion of, you know, rationalization, transactionalism. And I guess part of the reason that's on my mind a lot is that I'm a teacher and the teacher, in terms of my teaching and my relationship to my students, I would like it to not be as transactional as I think they sometimes see it. Where I give information, they give me work, I give them a grade. That's our relationship. This teaching is relational. And I think the relationality of not just teaching, but a lot of other things in life that was particularly driven home to me during COVID where, you know, you, you had less opportunity at that, where you were mediated by zoom, which is. Takes something away from that energy, that human energy. So to think a little bit harder about what it, what it might mean to live in a world in which we were more relational not just with each other, but also with these forces that might be greater than us, whether or not we believe in gods or a particular religion or not. So all those things are kind of swirling around, I think, for me, and things that I hope that people walk away from the book with a different way of not just seeing late antiquity, but our own lives and the possibilities that are in front of us.
- [51:28]
Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great. All right, last question. What are you working on next?
- [51:34]
Michael Satlow
Happiness.
- [51:35]
Podcast Host
Oh.
- [51:36]
Michael Satlow
So I've been teaching a class on happiness in the pursuit of the good life, where we look at positive psychology and religious and philosophical texts on happiness and the good life and try to create some kind of productive discussion between them. And the class turns out to be very popular. And it's gotten me engaged in a particular kind of dialogue set of texts that I find really fascinating. So I will probably be pursuing that alongside of a couple of grant projects I'm working on on the application of AI to ancient texts. So these are two very different projects, but we are using AI to reconstruct especially citation networks in ancient and some modern texts as well.
- [52:34]
Podcast Host
Ah, sounds great. Well, it's been a real pleasure talking. Thank you for this and I hope to hear more about that soon. Okay, take care.
- [52:43]
Michael Satlow
Likewise. Thank you for having me.
- [52:58]
Podcast Host
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoy enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees, extra fee, full terms@mintmobile.com.