That Fertile Field

In the fall of 2022, archeologists ­digging through the clinging mud in an abandoned vegetable garden near the Tuscan spa town of San Casciano dei Bagni poked at a layer of tiles and made a startling discovery. Hidden under a protective cap of terra cotta was a bronze thunderbolt, the emblem of the almighty god Jupiter and a sacred object from the first century, consigned to the earth in the Roman ritual known as fulgur conditum, or buried lightning.

Other people’s religious practices, unmediated by the rationalizing of theologians, can’t help but seem just a bit weird, not least because they are often ancient and atavistic even to the robed priests who direct them. The power of ­ritual lies in its very strangeness and remoteness: the further such sacred ceremonies and duties can be distanced from the drab and familiar present day, the closer they must be to the time and place and attitudes of the faraway gods who preside over them. Rome in the first century...