[Photos] UK 37 - Cilurnum III (Chesters Roman Fort)

[moonvoice]

This was a small museum but it was absolutely packed with artefacts.

So there will be two posts filled with pagan altars and other bits and pieces.

It's funny you know, I felt zero connection to the ruins and structures of the building while walking around them, but I felt something different while in the museum and I can't help but feel that's because this is where all the altars are.






Altar to Hercules



Altar, possibly to a woodland or hunting deity.



Altar to Jupiter of Heliopolis



Altar to Jupiter



You can also see here that the rows of items are so numerous that they're just one after the other.





Possibly Mercury



Mercury





Goddess Cybele and her attendant lions (of which only the paws remain)



Intaglios. One of the photos of these didn't turn out, and there was a little feist that was really cute.



Copper alloy Maenad



Ceramic vessels

Comments

[cmcmck]

That might be why the stretch of wall that really speaks to me is at Carrawburgh- there's a Mithraeum still in situ there.

[moonvoice]

Oh that's so awesome

[elinox]

That's a lot of artifacts crammed together!

[moonvoice]

Right? I can't help but feel that in a much larger museum everything would be spread out in all its glory, instead of packed in like sardines, but I like that too.

[silverjackal]

Is that a wolf (or a dog?) on the one relief beside the boar? I'm actually accustomed to museums like this. Many older museums are small, cramped, and crowded, with so many things on display that one can hardly navigate between them.

[moonvoice]

Quite possibly! And that's so awesome about being accustomed the museums like this, I actually sort of really dug the messy energy of it all. This was one of the places I was getting pinged really hard, which surprised me, because I get nothing at all at the sites themselves save like...the natural...sites themselves. But apparently being around hundreds of pagan altars will do something pretty huge. :D

[silverjackal]

LOL, well perhaps if the altars were *in situ* you'd feel differently about the sites, because obviously the altars are where the magic happens (for want of a better term). It makes sense to me that you'd get buzz off a large group because some of them must still have charge.

In my experience it's very variable what still has oomph and what doesn't. The temple of Isis at Philae still resonates powerfully to me, for example, even though the thing was picked up and moved stone by stone to a new location in modern times to prevent it being flooded when they created the Aswan dam. Granted, it was used until relatively recently (right into the 8th century of the modern era) but I don't think that's the entire explanation. Similarly a single statue of Sekhmet in the Egyptian museum just about knocked me down. Why that one, and not others that were equally original*? (We won't go into how awkward that is to have happen, and not wanting to be "that weird foreigner" by having a devotional freakout in the middle of a crowded museum.)

*I actually know the reason, but you likely know the explanation just as well as I.