Sarapis at Alexandria: The Creation and Destruction of a Religious “Public”

This essay uses theories from relational sociology, especially Eiko Ikegami’s work on ‘publics’, to investigate the development of the cult of Sarapis and its destruction. It explores these events as a series of interactions in which contestations of identities took place. It considers the mental states of the historical actors and the ideologies they held, as well as the social networks in which they interacted, and their larger context. This essay begins by considering the formation of identities positively, with the development of aesthetic cultural circles (‘Creation’). But in the second part (‘Destruction’) it adds the theories of Randall Collins and Eddie Hartmann to investigate how violence emerged from the complex emotional interactions of social groups, and the ways in which that violence may be linked with the attempt to create and/or maintain symbolic boundaries between perceived groups.