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In her 1989 book *Greek Gods and Figurines,* the scholar Brita Alroth coined the term “visiting gods” to describe the puzzling phenomenon in which pilgrims would dedicate votive images of one god to another. For example, Greek travelers dedicated images of Hermes, Artemis, and satyrs in the sanctuary of Zeus and Dione at Dodona, and images of Aphrodite and Pan at the Heraion of Hera at Argos. Though the category of “visiting god” votives has recently been re-examined and critiqued by archaeologists (e.g. Arthur Muller, 2019), scholars have not focused on the material and spacial agencies of these votives, nor have they contextualized the votive within the lived experiences of the votive-dedicating pilgrim. Drawing on the work of materiality theorists Arjun Appadurai, David Freedberg, and Katie Rask, this paper explores two related frameworks for understanding the phenomenon of the “visiting god” votives. I argue that these votives can be understood as a means of expressing and instantiating spatial relationships in the ancient Greek landscape. They may have articulated particular cosmological and mythological connections between the divine resident of the sanctuary and the home community of the human visitor. I then show that the polysemous iconicity of the image allowed the pilgrim to not only articulate the presence of the visiting god, but also their own presence before the residents of the sanctuary. Contextualizing “visiting gods” images within the larger discourse on movement and the forces of materiality can expand how we understand the role of both votive and sanctuary space within the lived religious experiences in the Greek world. Bibliography Alroth, Brita. *Greek Gods and Figurines: Aspects of the Anthropomorphic Dedications.* Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1989. Muller, Arthur. “‘Visiting Gods’ Revisited. Aphrodite Visiting Artemis, or Bride?” *Hellenistic and Roman Terricottas.* Leiden: Brill, 2019
Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)
In recent decades, scholars of Greek religion have taken a particular interest in ritualized processions, especially toward major sanctuaries, and the embodied experience of participating in them. Less attention has been directed to individualized itinerant religious practices and experiences, or to the smaller shrines that travelers would have encountered along their journey. In this paper, I focus on portable objects excavated at a selection of roadside shrines on mainland Greece and their implications for understanding the intersection of religion and travel. In keeping with Georgia Frank’s on-the-ground, kinesthetic approach to portabilia (2023), I consider travelers’ origins and the expense of money, effort, and emotion that their journeys across the landscape would have entailed. Intimately connected with travelers’ bodies, portabilia possessed the twofold capacity to materialize personalized acts of religious devotion and to express, through repetition of customary forms of dedication, individuals’ belonging to a community of worshippers.