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The Cult of Saints and Popular Religion among Syriac Christians: First Soundings
This contribution offers a preliminary survey of the diverse contexts and means through which veneration of saints among Syriac Christians interacted with the lives of ordinary believers, influencing their religious practices and worldviews, and, in turn, undergoing changes as a result of their agency. However, given the scarcity of regional and period-specific studies on the development of the cult of saints among Christians of Syria-Mesopotamia, it would be premature to attempt to draw a comprehensive picture of the role played by the cult of saints in popular religion among Syriac Christians. Moreover, the available evidence presents several peculiarities that pose a significant obstacle to such an undertaking, including the dearth of archaeological material, particularly from properly conducted excavations, and the uneven distribution of textual sources in terms of genre or historical period. Taking these limitations into consideration, the following discussion will focus on two primary avenues through which the power of saints could be harnessed to benefit simple believers, namely, the use of saints’ relics and the invocation of saints’ names. The analysis will rely heavily on two bodies of evidence: one, comprising primarily hagiographical and canonical works, attests to the various uses of saints’ relics in the practices of popular devotion among Syriac Christians, while the other, consisting of amulets and incantations, sheds light on the role played by saints in the tradition of Syriac Christian magic.