For many readers, the title of this book will immediately call to mind Max Weber’s notion of the “disenchantment [Entzauberung]” of the world, describing the devaluation of religion in modern culture as opposed to earlier periods. Michael Satlow does not discuss Weber’s ideas at length, only offering a passing acknowledgement in the epilogue. Yet this basic inspiration from Weber runs throughout the book, showcasing how the Late Antique world “crackled with the energy of the supernatural” (11).
While highlighting the pervasiveness of ideas about the supernatural, Satlow also foregrounds common elements between different religious traditions, primarily Greco-Roman polytheism, Judaism, and Christianity. He makes the case for Late Antiquity as a period with a shared spiritual landscape, wherein:
Most people thought that the world was thick with supernatural beings, who were as real and had as much (if not more) agency as any person . . . This was an enchanted world, full of real if invisible beings. In this sense, “religion”—as a field of knowledge and practice that could be disembedded from the everyday practice of life—loses meaning (3).
Appealing to the perspective of lived religion, Satlow routinely characterizes supernatural interactions and relationships as part of everyday life, not sequestered within the walls of a temple or church. Rather than approach one or another religious tradition in isolation, he aims to tell a “story of how people thought about and interacted with the invisible world” (3). It is a story written with a popular audience in mind, but one that simultaneously offers a useful perspective for scholars of Late Antique religion.
Chapters 1 and 2 contextualize the period and the scholarly debates around religion for the non-specialist reader. Chapter 1 introduces the concept of Late Antiquity. Rather than beginning with Constantine and the ascendency of Christianity, as so many studies do, Satlow remains grounded within the perspective of lived religion, beginning instead with an imagined tour through an agora in 416 CE. Chapter 2 discusses the complexities of thinking about identity, especially group identity in the Late Antique world. There is, for instance, an excellent overview of the issues at play when one defines matters of ethnic versus religious identity. This is a deceptively complicated matter given that Late Antique Christians so routinely seized upon the rhetoric of ethnic identity to express their own religious identity.
Chapter 3 turns to the various invisible beings encountered in Late Antique sources, structuring the discussion in a hierarchical fashion, from supreme deities (e.g., YHWH and Zeus), to secondary divinities, angels and demons, intercessory figures, and spirits of the dead. This chapter effectively highlights how contemporary devotees from different religious traditions ascribed common roles and expectations to supernatural beings that were conceptualized on these various levels .
Chapter 4 examines the supernatural in the surviving texts of the elite. These ideas are broken down into three types of meaning-making strategies: mythmaking, which is broadly construed as “narrative forms of creating meaning” (106); philosophy; and law. This contrasts the elite views, which emphasize theorization and systematization of the supernatural, against the more widespread ideas of popular culture explored in the prior chapter. A particularly noteworthy discussion in this chapter dismisses the scholarly assumption of religion as functioning simply to make sense of the world, an intermediary stage lodged “between superstition and science” (123-4). Satlow critiques this reductive assessment as one based on the privileging of an elite conception of religion, which might not reflect wider beliefs of the populace. Instead, “[m]ost of the time explanation was at best a secondary function. People went about their daily lives in regular communication with invisible beings, mostly asking them for help or trying to keep them away” (124).
Chapter 5 explores methods of maintaining relationships with “invisible” beings. This opens with a useful discussion of terms like “popular religion” and “magic” that Satlow uses to further explain the value of the lived religion perspective. The rest of the chapter looks at four strategies for building relationships with the supernatural: 1) sacrifices and offerings; 2) prayers, amulets, and spells; 3) prognostication; 4) “contagious holiness”. The last of these themes concerns contexts of holy power “rubbing off” onto physical objects or spaces, though it is a somewhat underdeveloped section. There is only very brief discussion of holy objects like relics, despite the abundance of material that could have been explored more fully. Chapter 6 discusses the variety of specialists involved in communication with supernatural beings—dream interpreters, prophets, astrologers, necromancers, and even little-known figures such as liturgical poets for whom we have only sparse evidence. Phenomena such as the ubiquity of associating dreams with the supernatural and widespread desires to commune with the dead highlight additional commonalities within the Late Antique religious landscape. Specialists operating in such areas would have been in demand among people of all faiths.
The final two chapters turn to spatial and temporal aspects of the supernatural, respectively. For Chapter 7, this mainly concerns spaces of encounters with the divine, whether temples, churches, or synagogues. Satlow also briefly discusses the notion of “negative” spaces where demons congregated (e.g., theatres and bathhouses). Another noteworthy section examines cemeteries, tombs, and catacombs as places of worship, spaces often overlooked as sites of religious activity. Chapter 8 discusses various temporal dimensions of interactions with the supernatural. This includes religious festivals, devising calendars, the significance of certain days of the week as more holy than others, and the ubiquity of astrological thought.
Satlow frequently contrasts modern concepts with their counterparts in antiquity, a helpful framing for the non-specialist reader. He notes, for instance, the differences in modern and ancient conceptions of law (117), and the modern expectations for a separation between religion and politics (162). I was surprised, therefore, that there was no attempt at explicitly describing what “supernatural” as an overarching category should signify in the Late Antique period. Devising a concrete definition for the word is, to be sure, much like attempting to securely define “religion”. Both endeavors will only leave one tearing out their hair in frustration. Still, it would have been helpful to offer some remarks on how this category of ideas was approached in Late Antiquity as opposed to the modern world. I have sometimes encountered students claiming that the supernatural boils down to simply any “unreal” or “untrue” phenomena (whereas the natural is always the “real”). This binary and oppositional formulation seems to stem from the (over)influence of empiricism on modern society, leading to conceptualizations that anything beyond the natural is synonymous with the impossible. In contrast to the pervasive sense in Late Antiquity of the supernatural being “near at hand”, many modern observers (including some that are religious/spiritual themselves) tend to perceive a wider gulf between what is natural and what is supernatural. These circumstances are likely related to Weber’s observation of the modern world’s disenchantment, a contrast that could have been explored more directly.
The book is well-edited with few typographical errors. At moments, the latter chapters feel repetitive, retreading topics already discussed in earlier chapters, often in the same order. For instance, the linking of astrology to debates about (pre)determinism (183) was found elsewhere (153), and the concept of necromancy is presented (184-5) as if it had not been introduced earlier (155-7). The discussion of the apparent paradox of Late Antique synagogues with mosaic depictions of the zodiac (241-3) is strikingly similar to (albeit slightly more expansive than) the remarks on the same topic from the previous chapter (222-3).
As Satlow reiterates in the epilogue, his goal is to provide a descriptive history that “respects difference but foregrounds our shared fears and hopes, as human beings” (270). The book does indeed diligently acknowledge differences among religious traditions where they arise. But the accent on common elements is also a welcome perspective on the period. It is especially good to see such a book written with a wider audience in mind. Many other studies involving matters of Late Antique religion for popular audiences, most recently Alice Roberts’ Domination (2025), take a rather disparaging view of religious belief. Satlow instead offers a more humanizing and nuanced picture of Late Antique religious life. This further contrasts with prior scholarly tendencies to emphasize the religious contrasts and conflicts within Late Antiquity, and will hopefully inspire future scholarship on the commonalities that underlie these religious traditions.