Dr. Francis McIntosh

And so...

all soldiers on the wall would have believed in deities, gods and goddesses, absolutely.

Whether they were sort of members of specific groups of religion would be different.

So Mithraism could only be a man, so you'd be allowed to worship him, but I couldn't.

I suppose I could have worshipped him, but I wasn't allowed into that.

And Mithraism seems very specific in that you went together and you did stuff at the temple.

Whereas I think a lot of other deities, you know, you could just believe in them and you didn't have to necessarily go to a temple and do specific activities.

And we know quite a bit in some ways about what happens in a Mithraic temple.

And it's more sort of, it's a set down sort of process, almost like a mass or, you know, a sort of religious ceremony, whereas it's not the same for a lot of other deities.

So I've danced around that question.

I think it's really interesting.

You know, what do we think of as a cult now?

You say cult now, and that's such a negative connotation.

And it's not always just religious, isn't it?

It could be about the world ending or, you know, that you think, you know, the government's taking it down.

And I think, yeah, its meaning would have had something very different in the Roman period.

But everybody believed that the deities had an impact on their life and that, you know, if you didn't keep them on side...

They could screw you over.

There we go.

Yeah, and some of them would have been local already.