A modern airline passenger, concerned about safety, will purchase travel insurance. In ancient times, however, travel was far more dangerous, and there was no insurance.
Bandits, wild animals and hostile local populations threatened those traveling by land, the standard route to the Holy Land for Byzantine pilgrims. Whether on foot or donkey, pilgrims faced the characteristic dangers of remote, unfamiliar territories and harsh climates. Winds and gales, rains and storms, 057submerged rocks and crude or nonexistent harbors all made sea travel—the choice of more affluent pilgrims—an even more dangerous venture.
Without travel insurance, it is not surprising that ancient travelers turned to the supernatural to help ensure their physical safety in transit. For protection they used amulets, including earthen tokens and flasks for oil or water,1 that were thought to provide a miraculous antidote to danger. Eulogia, literally “blessing,” is the generic term for these implements.
The surviving artifacts provide us with a kind of travelers’ art. Merchants and sailors too must have depended on amuletic protection, but, strangely, they left no substantial merchants’ art or sailors’ art. So, when we speak of travel art of the Byzantine period, we really mean pilgrimage art. Pilgrims were, after all, late antiquity’s quintessential travelers.
The artifacts we will be looking at come from the eastern Mediterranean basin and date between Emperor Constantine’s discovery of the Holy Land in the early fourth century and its conquest by Muslim Arabs in the mid-seventh century. Most of the items date toward the end of this period, to the sixth and seventh centuries, the most materially productive period of Byzantine pilgrimage.
The efficacy of these eulogiai was not to be doubted. One account tells of a monk who was halfway into a sea journey when a violent wind came up and the sea became extremely rough. The passengers panicked as the captain and crew prepared to abandon ship. Fortunately, the monk was carrying a eulogia containing reddish earth (called “dust”) from the base of the column of Saint Simeon Stylites the Younger, who, as indicated by the term “stylites” (from the Greek stylos, meaning “pillar”), lived on a column:
The monk took the dust [konis] of the saintly servant of God that he carried with him as a blessing [eulogia], and after having put it into water, he threw it on the sea and sprinkled all the boat, saying; “Holy servant of God, Simeon, direct us and save us.” With these words, all those on the boat were impregnated with perfume, the sea water surrounded the boat like a wall, and the waves were powerless against it.2
Simeon’s “dust” was quite famous, especially for its medicinal powers. It was also used to cure an ailing donkey, grow hair on a bald man and restore a vat of sour wine to its former sweetness.
Dozens of eulogiai depicting Simeon have been found throughout the Mediterranean basin (see photo, below). These tokens are identifiable by an image of the saint atop his column and, occasionally, by the inscription “Eulogia of St. Simeon in the Miraculous Mountain.”3
Another efficacious amulet contained holy dust, or “manna,” reputedly exhaled by the sleeping St. John the Evangelist in his tomb at Ephesus (see photo, below). According to one account, “If there is a storm at sea and some of the manna is thrown in the sea three times in the name of the Holy Trinity and 058Our Lady Saint Mary and the Blessed Saint John the Evangelist, at once the storm ceases.”
These saints protected Christian seafarers of early Byzantium much as Isis had protected the pagan seafarer a few centuries earlier. The association of Isis with the sea is well attested from the late Ptolemaic period onward, when she was identified as mistress of the winds, inventor of the sail and protector of seafarers. Her most characteristic maritime iconography shows her holding a billowing sail.
Hundreds of Byzantine pilgrimage eulogiai have been found, many bearing iconography directed toward some specific amuletic function. For example, a hoard of about three dozen pewter ampullae from about 600 A.D. includes two examples depicting Jesus walking on water (see photo, below). This is an unusual theme in pilgrimage art, which usually portrays some locus sanctus (literally, “holy place”), a site venerated by pilgrims because of its traditional association with a particular Biblical event. Jesus walking on water, however, is not associated with a locus sanctus. Therefore, the ampullae should probably be understood as having been made in response to the anxieties and prayers of sea travelers: “As Christ saved his disciples on the Sea of Galilee, so also may he save me on my voyage,” they may have prayed.
This interpretation is reinforced by an inscription found on another pewter ampulla from the same hoard, which reads “Oil of the Wood of Life that guides us by land and sea.”
This inscription’s reference to land as well as sea indicates that eulogiai were also helpful for protecting land travelers, although here the surviving evidence is usually less explicit. Careful examination of a hoard consisting of 93 stamped iconographic tokens, purportedly found northeast of Antioch, helps us identify eulogiaithat may have been intended for pilgrims who traveled by land.
The tokens depict a variety of locus sanctus scenes familiar from other eulogiai: the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Adoration of the Magi, the Baptism of Jesus, the Entry into Jerusalem, the Adoration of the Cross, and the Women at the Tomb. One of the tokens portrays the healing of a blind man, indicating a medicinal function. Among the many Christological locus sanctus scenes, one predominates: fully one-third depict the Adoration of the Magi (see photo, below); this is twice the proportion of any other scene, and well over three times the frequency rate of the Women at the Tomb, although this latter iconography was associated with the most important locus sanctus in the Holy Land, whereas the Magi were a secondary attraction at a secondary site—Bethlehem.
This same statistical disproportion is evident in pilgrimage-related jewelry depicting locus sanctus scenes. The portrayal of the Adoration of the Magi on these pieces of jewelry often includes a guiding angel over the Magi, even though the New Testament does not mention one (see photo, below). Moreover, some of the Adoration pieces also included the invocation “Lord, help.”
Why so many Adoration scenes? Why the angels?
Part of the answer is that virtually all pilgrimage-related artifacts functioned as amulets, deriving their strength from a combination of medium (blessed soil, oil or water), image and words. Thus, the guardian angels increase the eulogiai’s protective powers.
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The pilgrim sometimes gained the blessing (literally, the eulogia) of his pilgrimage encounter through ritualized mimetic identification with the sacred heroes and events along his route—for example, by throwing stones at the grave of Goliath “to gain a blessing.”4 Or it could entail a more subtle, ongoing identification with a particularly appropriate sacred figure whose career was believed to provide a model for the pilgrim’s own. The Magi, gift-bearing strangers who traveled by land to the Holy Land to worship the infant Jesus, were Christianity’s archetypal pilgrims; but more than that, with divine protection, according to the Gospel of Matthew (2:12), they returned home safely.
Traveling by land, the pilgrim with a eulogia portraying the Adoration of the Magi thus effectively became a Magus. Protected like the Magi, he or she would go home unharmed.
Within the broader framework of Christian piety, it was the responsibility of every man and woman to study and imitate the lives of saints to perfect his or her own virtue. The Magus would then be seen as a model for spiritually motivated travel (by the pilgrim) and for pious gift-giving (by the donor).
On a still more basic level, the rationale for the amuletic identification of pilgrims with the Magi—and the primary motivation for carrying pilgrimage artifacts with iconography like this—may lie in the primal belief in magic, much as it may be seen to operate on gem amulets and among magical papyri and inscriptional phylacteries of the period. The Magi could be seen as immune from the dangers associated with pilgrimage, and the pilgrim in possession of their image could likewise feel immune.
A modern airline passenger, concerned about safety, will purchase travel insurance. In ancient times, however, travel was far more dangerous, and there was no insurance. Bandits, wild animals and hostile local populations threatened those traveling by land, the standard route to the Holy Land for Byzantine pilgrims. Whether on foot or donkey, pilgrims faced the characteristic dangers of remote, unfamiliar territories and harsh climates. Winds and gales, rains and storms, 057submerged rocks and crude or nonexistent harbors all made sea travel—the choice of more affluent pilgrims—an even more dangerous venture. Without travel insurance, it is not surprising that […]
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For more on eulogiai, see Gary Vikan, “‘Guided by Land and Sea’: Pilgrim Art and Pilgrim Travel in Early Byzantium,” in TESSERAE: Festschrift für Josef Engemann, Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum, supp. vol. 19 (1991), pp. 74–92; and Byzantine Pilgrimage Art (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1982).
2.
See P. van den Ven, “La vie ancienne de S. Syméon Stylite le Jeune (521–592),” in Subsidia Hagiographica 32 (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1962 [part 1], 1970 [part 2]); and Harry J. Magoulias, “Lives of Byzantine Saints as Sources of Data for the History of Magic in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries A.D.: Sorcery, Relics, and Icons,” Byzantion 37 (1967), p. 256.
3.
Vikan, “Two Unpublished Pilgrim Tokens in the Benaki Museum and the Group to Which They Belong,” in Thymiama: In Memory of Laskarina Bouras (Athens, 1993), pp. 341–346.
4.
Vikan, “Pilgrims in Magi’s Clothing: The Impact of Mimesis on Early Byzantine Pilgrimage Art,” in The Blessings of Pilgrimage, Illinois Byzantine Studies 1, Robert Ousterhout, ed. (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1990), pp. 97–107.
