ABSTRACT
This chapter draws upon archaeological evidence from the late antique fountain of Anna Perenna at Rome to spotlight questions about magic in the ancient world, specifically its relationship with broader religious strategies. It considers the place (fountain), objects (inscribed lead canisters), bodies (organic poppets) and divine things that made up the ritualised assemblages that formed in different moments at this discrete location. Hence, it demonstrates the value of analysing the overlapping thingly components of ritualised assemblages as a collective and with reference to a single case study by explicitly setting out to reassemble the disparate components of the assemblages that lie at the heart of ritualised practices. This chapter also demonstrates the analytical value of using assemblage theory to contribute towards wider debates in the study of Roman religion by examining one particular form of proximal knowledge characterised as ‘magic’ and its relationship with not necessarily mutually exclusive distal forms of ‘religion’.
