This chapter explores how religious knowledge, including rituals, was learned and transmitted by putting forward a novel, cognitive-based, theoretical framework for analysing ritual practices in the Graeco-Roman world. This framework, termed the Religious Learning Network (RLN) theoretical model, is tested within a case study of archaeological and epigraphic evidence of Nutrices Augustae, a cult of local Pannonian healing mother-goddesses. Applying the Religious Learning Network model provides an insight into the types of rituals that may have taken place within this cult as well as the cognitive and social effects that these rituals may have produced upon the ritual participants. This chapter demonstrates that rituals were learned and transmitted within intimate circles through cult members’ interaction with objects, places, and events; forming a dynamic network of memory associations that helped in the encoding, storage, and retrieval of religious and ritual memories.

There is a great deal of archaeological and epigraphic evidence for the ‘menagerie of the divine’ that was Roman Britain, yet this evidence is often accompanied with little context that helps us to understand exactly what the significance of such cults was. The chapter introduces the character of Roman popular religion and analyses the evidence for the main categories of godlings in Roman Britain, including genii, the Parcae and mother goddesses and deities of nature such as nymphs and fauns, arguing that such cults became much more significant during the fourth-century ‘pagan revival’ that followed the accession of the pagan emperor Julian in 361. In particular, the extraordinary cult of Faunus revealed by the Thetford Treasure – along with other ecstatic nature cults apparently testified by the archaeological record – suggests that the fourth century was an important time for the development of distinctive and inventive Romano-British interpretations of Roman pagan religion, which may form the cultural background to the strong traditions of otherworldly beings found in later British culture.

The realization that cult images existed in the Iron Age has profound implications for our understanding of Romano-Celtic art. These earlier images likely served as the basis for later provincial representations of native divinities, which are not, as often proposed, later imperial period inventions. This chapter opens with an exploration of the continued use of Iron Age idols in the Roman period. Wooden images probably served as the main vehicle of transmission of iconography from the Iron Age and first century AD to the more abundant Roman stone representations of native divinities of the second and third centuries AD. The chapter considers monuments that contain purely native or combined native and Roman iconography, including depictions of Cernunnos, the mother goddesses, and Jupiter columns, before turning to the varied style and distribution of images of the gods with conventional Roman iconography. A final section examines how Mithraic cult images differed in form from earlier more static representations of the gods. We should envisage cult images as being continuously born throughout the Iron Age and Roman imperial period, existing side-by-side and in competition with older and newer images, with iconography following current and local trends and demands.