Invisible Statues: Between Iconography and Performance in Ancient Greek Depictions of Daimones

Kate WHitAKER, Harvard Divinity School ’26

How does a religious tradition make contact with what it cannot see? Despite appearing hundreds of times in Archaic and Classical Greek literature, daimones left no trace in the material record: no statues, no temple friezes, no red-figure silhouettes. Walter Burkert concluded that there was simply no image and no cult.

However, as exhibited in Sophocles' Oedipus Cycle, the tragic stage functioned as an alternative medium of religious materiality, making perceptible what visual and cultic media could not. Where pottery and statuary failed to render daimones approachable, performance succeeded. This talk will argue that Sophocles enables divine affectivity to become a collective and embodied theatrical experience, transforming the invisible into the ritually present.

5:00 pm
Wednesday, April 22
Abigail Adams Institute
14 Arrow St, Ste G10
Cambridge, MA 02138

Kate Whitaker

Kate Whitaker is a second year MTS student at Harvard Divinity School in Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. She works on myth and ritual in Greece and pre-Roman Italy, and she is primarily interested in sensory experience of food in religion. Outside of school, Kate is an avid baker, painter, and enjoyer of reality TV.