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This chapter continues the analysis of changes in ritual by looking at the evidence for cult in the demes, which were constituted as corporate bodies only in 507. They took over some local cults from other groups, but also developed new cults of their own. Attention is paid to deme finances and the impact on them of the developing cash economy; to the influence of drama; and to festival calendars and their evidence for divergences in dates between city and deme celebrations of the same festival. New suggestions are made about the transfer of cult funds to the Acropolis in the years preceding the Peloponnesian war (Kallias decrees); the Prerosia/Plerosia; the calendar of the Tetrapolis; and the ‘greater demarchy’ of Erchia. It is argued that cult in the rural demes is not dominated by ‘fertility rites’. The influence of the farmer’s year on ritual calendars is seen as an ongoing component of the logic and aesthetics of cultic innovation, rather than as a survival of tradition.

This chapter focuses on chronography, that is, the scholarly field which concerns the organization and articulation of time. It examines the extant fragments of the ancient chronographic tradition, which was initially dominated by competitive culture of Hellenistic scholarship, and by figures such as Eratosthenes of Cyrene and Apollodorus of Athens. Methodological problems, such as that of generic classification, are addressed throughout. The chapter deals first with works concerning Greek city-calendars, especially the festival calendars, before moving on to those which focus on the articulation and expression of linear, historical time. Here are treated issues of synchronism; the establishment of important dates, such as that of the fall of Troy and the acme of Homer; the correlation of fixed chronological markers with continuous systems, such as lists of eponymous magistrates, kings, or Olympic victors; the development of universal chronologies; and the notion of literary time-frames.

This chapter discusses the festival calendar, the importance of circus games, the iconography of the Circus Maximus in the 4th century, and the pompa circi and the Christian emperor. The festival calendar was an ancient means of exposing very large numbers of spectators to the presence of the gods; the utility of the circus and its ceremonial made it an early platform for the promotion of the imperial cult. Christian emperors and their functionaries sought to keep the Circus Maximus and its races intact. Through their exploitation of the festival calendar, they increased the number and frequency of the entertainments which characterized the observance of feast days. They were thus able to continue and enhance what their pagan predecessors had sought through the promotion of the same institutions: the keeping of their names and achievements before the populace of Rome.

In the book of Deuteronomy there is a close relationship between memory and food. To examine this relationship use is made of the anthropological work by David Sutton, Remembrance of Repasts. The book of Deuteronomy is rhetorically poised between the wilderness and the Promised Land, and at this liminal point Deuteronomy uses food as a vehicle for articulating Israel's memory of Exodus, wilderness and Conquest. In doing so it makes a number of radical developments from the book of Exodus in its description of the Canaanite cult and in defining Israelite religion focused around pilgrimage feasts to the chosen cultic centre. It also defines the identity of the chosen people through narratives of hospitality or inhospitality that underline the Deuteronomic requirement to offer food to the poor and vulnerable.

An investigation of Byzantium’s strained relationship with its Thracian neighbours, this chapter explores how the Byzantines tried to distinguish themselves from their barbarian neighbours through myths and legends, citizenship policy, and their festival calendar (which is reconstructed). In practice, it is suggested, the Byzantines had a much closer relationship with the Thracians than is usually assumed, but this is deliberately covered up in our myths, inscriptions, onomastics, and Patria accounts in an effort to emphasize the Greek credentials of the controlling city of the Bosporus.

This chapter investigates two issues that were closely related to the prominence of immigrant lineages and deities within Japanese cultic life. The first concerns the degree to which cults of karakami and disease deities were embedded within the worldview of the Chinese festival calendar. The principal focus in this regard will be a cluster of ritual practices such as animal sacrifice, roadside rites of propitiation and pacification, and the cult of the Weaver Maiden and the Cowherd, two of the best-known astral deities in the Chinese pantheon. A cluster of weaver and cowherd deities from locales across Japan that were adopted by the Yamato court prior to the Nara period is also examined. It is argued because the Yamato court's adoption of the Buddhist tradition was closely linked to a broader appropriation of continental political and cultural forms, the early Buddhist tradition both helped promote and to a surprising degree was in turn shaped by continental ritual technologies for the propitiation of spirits. The chapter considers a series of legends from the Nihon ryōiki, the oldest Buddhist tale collection in the Japanese islands. These legends suggest that the use of substitute bodies, the naming of spirits, and even meat offerings to spirits may have played an important role in the formation of popular Buddhist tales and beliefs.

This chapter explores a small set of poems and legends that feature royal emissaries who prostrate themselves and crawl as they call out to women with whom rulers have become enamored. Because the motifs of crawling and “calling out” appear related to rites of calling to the spirits of the recently deceased, these legends offer a glimpse into the means by which the myths and legends associated with the Chinese festival calendar came to inform even apparently native cultic practices and literature. Once the sources used in the construction of these legends are analyzed, three salient features involving Chinese rites of sericulture become apparent. First, these legends of crawling and calling out, and the poetry associated with them, amply illustrate the degree to which motifs from Chinese legends of weaving and sericulture informed the literature of the period. Second, the immigrant kinship groups that transmitted the technologies associated with sericulture to the Japanese islands were also likely sources for the diffusion of such weaving cults and legends. Finally, the silkworm's ability to “die” within its cocoon, only to re-emerge as a moth capable of flight, meant that rites of sericulture in Japan were associated not only with the acquisition of wealth, but also with resurrection and immortality.

This chapter explores the role played by rites of sericulture and resurrection in the formation of the cult of Amaterasu no Ōmikami, the founding ancestor of the royal lineage. It focuses on one version of the myth of the Heavenly Grotto, in which Amaterasu is called back from the land of the dead after she has impaled herself with a shuttle while weaving in a ritual chamber. Because this legend served as the mythic basis for the Rite of Spirit-quieting (Mitama Shizume Matsuri), one of the main pillars of court ritual, it was of enormous importance for the royal cult. The chapter reads the myth against a series of narratives from the third and fifth months of the Chinese festival calendar that call attention to a broader network of sericulture rites and legends centering upon the violent death of young maidens and the subsequent propitiation of their spirits. These legends so influenced the construction of Amaterasu as a royal ancestor that she is represented not only as a weaving maiden but also as a silkworm goddess spinning silk from cocoons in her mouth.