“Mediterranean Religions” or Abrahamic Traditions?

Abstract

Since we do not find a religion identified as Mediterranean alongside Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, we might want to conclude that it does not exist independently. Mediterranean religion is found in the complexities of the lived religion of the region rather than as a dogmatic cohesion.1 At the most basic level the term Mediterranean religion can be applied to those religions or mysticisms founded or widely practiced in the geography of the Mediterranean region.2 Today, however, the highest concentrations of practitioners of what we may call Mediterranean religion live well outside that geography. This poses the question: can the term apply to those Mediterranean religions now found outside the Mediterranean? To answer this question we must look at the unique distinguishing elements of Mediterranean religious experience versus Northern European, American, East Asian, and so forth. Mediterranean religion is deeply rooted in the long history of the region’s multiconfessional empires and competing hegemonies. One of the many important legacies of that fluctuating history reveals the most valuable distinguishing feature that the term offers, the sharing of sacred space and other sacra.3 This phenomenon does not seem to have accompanied Mediterranean religions to the various diaspora. The term is therefore relatively geographically fixed.Does Mediterranean religion have a historical period or periods? If we use the sharing of sacred space, common pilgrimages, and cross religious veneration of saints, the answer is clearly no.4 If we consider Mediterranean religion to comprise the dominant religions, then we certainly cannot date the beginning until the coming of Islam in the seventh century. This reduction, however, would erase the many religious influences and exchanges that led to the development and flourishing of Islam, so a more suitable term for this category may be Mediterranean religions—in the plural. If, however, the term is to be used to its full potential, then it must apply to those religions outside the Abrahamic faiths.I suggest using the term Mediterranean rather than Abrahamic to describe those religions defined by their interaction with one another, as it bears better witness to the long shared history of the monotheist religions. The current use of the Abrahamic nominative reduces the relationship of these religions to a shared foundation, limited and set a long time ago. The category is also helpful in that it is inclusive of the mysticisms, deviations, schisms, heresies, small cults, and polytheistic religions as well as religious orthodoxies. By shifting focus from dogmatic definitions and using this term from an anthropological and sociological perspective, shared sacra and festivals, particularly those connected with harvests and the ecology of the Mediterranean, become normalized.5Mediterranean religion should be approached with the frameworks of lived religion and with phenomenological methodology in mind. Shared sacra are found not only in the accounts of pilgrims, or architectural modifications to accommodate different faiths, but also in an institutional preoccupation with ritual conformity and segregation.6 This desire for ritual purity is expressed in Christian disciplinary canons and in pilgrimage/hajj guides.7 The preoccupation with conformity demonstrates the anxiety clerics and other officials felt regarding the syncretic habits of their coreligionists.8Mediterranean religions have been shaped by interactions with neighboring groups; Yahweh worship itself was recorded at shared “high places” in the book of Chronicles.9 With this in mind we see the value of a term that is outside historical limitation or dogmatic criteria.