At a certain point patterns emerge. I have lately begun to think of myself as a mixed media collage artist whose work over three decades has been dedicated to figuring the cultures of the late antique and early medieval western Mediterranean. Undergraduate work in history, anthropology, and art history; an MA in ancient history; a PhD in the same but with most course work in classics and religion (and throughout a series of inspiring teachers) seems to fit. Graduate school fascination with Augustine at Milan and Cassiciacum and Paulinus at Nola made clear the need for a multi-media sensibility. Both led on to Damasus and epigraphic poetry and epigraphic poetry leads back out to later papal Rome and the Visigothic Iberia of Isidore of Seville and Eugenius of Toledo. And now a deeper background beckons as well. The new cognitive science of religion suggests ways of linking the cult of the saints to certain forces that shaped archaic and classical lifeways that we call religious.