Religion in ancient Greece

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Greek religion encompasses the collection of beliefs and rituals practiced in Ancient Greece in form of cult practices. It is therefore the practical counterpart of Greek mythology. Within the Greek world, religious practice varied enough so that one might speak of Greek religions. The cult practices of the Hellenes extended beyond mainland Greece, to the islands and coasts of Ionia in Asia Minor, to Magna Graecia (Sicily and southern Italy), and to scattered Greek colonies in the Western Mediterranean, such as Massalia (Marseille). Greek examples tempered Etruscan cult and belief to inform much of the Roman religion.

The twelve gods of Olympus.

There was no single truth about the gods. Although the different Greek peoples all recognized the 14 major gods (Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Apollo, Artemis, Aphrodite, Ares, Hephaestus, Athena, Hermes, Hades, Demeter, Hestia, and Dionysus), in different locations these gods had such different histories with the local peoples as often to make them rather distinct gods or goddesses. Different cities worshipped different deities, sometimes with epithets that specified their local nature; Athens had Athena; Sparta, Nike and Artemis; Corinth was a center for the worship of Aphrodite; Delphi and Delos had Apollo; Olympia had Zeus, and so on down to the smaller cities and towns. Identity of names was not even a guarantee of a similar cultus; the Greeks themselves were well aware that the Artemis worshipped at Sparta, the virgin huntress, was a very different deity from the Artemis who was a many-breasted fertility goddess at Ephesus. When literary works such as the Iliad related conflicts among the gods because their followers were at war on earth, these conflicts were a celestial reflection of the earthly pattern of local deities. Though the worship of the major deities spread from one locality to another, and though most larger cities boasted temples to several major gods, the identification of different gods with different places remained strong to the end.

[edit] Terminology

Main sanctuaries of classical Greece.

It is perhaps misleading to speak of 'Greek religion.' In the first place, the Greeks did not have a term for "religion" in the sense of a dimension of existence distinct from all others, and grounded in the belief that the gods exercise authority over the fortunes of human beings and demand recognition as a condition for salvation. The Greeks spoke of their religious doings as "ta theia" (literally, "things having to do with the gods"), but this loose usage did not imply the existence of any authoritative set of "beliefs." Indeed, the Greeks did not have a word for "belief" in either of the two senses familiar to us. Since the existence of the gods was a given, it would have made no sense to ask whether someone "believed" that the gods existed. On the other hand, individuals could certainly show themselves to be more or less mindful of the gods, but the common term for that possibility was "nomizein", a word related to "nomos" ("custom," "customary distribution," "law"); to nomizein the gods was to acknowledge their rightful place in the scheme of things, and to act accordingly by giving them their due. Some bold individuals could nomizein the gods, but deny that they were due some of the customary observances. But these customary observances were so highly unsystematic.

[edit] Cultures

There was no single true way to live in dealing with the gods. "The things that have to do with the gods" had no fixed center, and responsibilities for these things had a variety of forms. Each individual city was responsible for its own temples and sacrifices, but it fell to the wealthy to sponsor the "leitourgeiai" (literally, "works for the people," from which the word "liturgy" comes) --the festivals, processions, choruses, dramas, and games held in honor of the gods. "Phratries" (members of a large hereditary group) oversaw observances that involved the entire group, but fathers were responsible for sacrifices in their own households, and women often had autonomous religious rites.

Individuals had a great deal of autonomy in dealing with the gods. After some particularly striking experience, they could bestow a new title upon a god, or declare some particular site as sacred. No authority accrued to the individual who did such a thing, and no obligation fell upon anyone else--only a new opportunity or possibility was added to the already vast and ill-defined repertoire for nomizeining the gods.

Tablet with a depiction of a sacrifice to the nymphs, from Pitsa (Peloponnese)

Finally, the lines between divinity and humanity were in some ways clearly defined, in other ways ambiguous. Setting aside the complicated genealogies in which gods sired children upon human women and goddesses bore the children of human lovers, after death historical individuals could receive cultic honors for their deeds during life--in other words, a hero cult. Indeed, even during life, victors at the Olympics, for instance, were considered to have acquired extraordinary power, and on the strength of their glory (kudos), would be chosen as generals in time of war. Itinerant healers and leaders of initiatory rites would sometimes be called into a city to deliver it from disasters, without such a measure implying any disbelief in the gods or exaltation of such "saviors." To put it differently, "sôteria" ("deliverance," "salvation") could come from divine or human hands and, in any event, the Greeks offered cultic honors to abstractions like Chance, Necessity, and Luck, divinities who stood in ambiguous relation to the personalized gods of the tradition. All in all, there was no "dogma" or "theology" in the Greek tradition, no heresy, possibility of schism, or any other social phenomenon articulated according to the background orientation to a codified order of religious understanding. Such variety in Greek religion reflects the long, complicated history of the Greek-speaking peoples.

Greek religion spans a period from Minoan and Mycenean periods to the days of Hellenistic Greece and its ultimate conquest by the Roman Empire. Religious ideas continued to develop over this time; by the time of the earliest major monument of Greek literature, the Iliad attributed to Homer, a consensus had already developed about who the major Olympian gods were. Still, changes to the canon remained possible; the Iliad seems to have been unaware of Dionysus, a god whose worship apparently spread after it was written, and who became important enough to be named one of the twelve chief Olympian deities, ousting the ancient goddess of the hearth, Hestia. It has been written by scholars that Dionysus was a "foreign" deity, brought into Greece from outside local cults, external to Greece proper. ^{2 3}

Quoting Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, article on Zeus, "According to the Homeric account Zeus, like the other Olympian gods, dwelt on Mount Olympus in Thessaly, which was believed to penetrate with its lofty summit into heaven itself (77. i. 221, &c., 354, 609, xxi. 438). He is called the father of gods and men (i. 514, v. 33 ; comp. Aeschyl. Sept. 512), the most high and powerful among the im­mortals, whom all others obey (II. xix. 258, viii. 10, &c.)." ⁴

In addition to the local cults of major gods, various places like crossroads and sacred groves had their own tutelary spirits. There were often altars erected outside the precincts of the temples. Shrines like hermai were erected outside the temples as well. Heroes, in the original sense, were demigods or deified humans who were part of local legendary history; they too had local hero-cults, and often served as oracles for purposes of divination. Religion was first and foremost traditional; the idea of novelty or innovation in worship was out of the question, almost by definition. Religion was the collection of local practices to honour the local gods.

Scholar Andrea Purvis has written on the private cults in Ancient Greece as a traceable point for many practices and worship of deities.

A major function of religion was the validation of the identity and culture of individual communities. The myths were regarded by many as history rather than allegory, and their embedded genealogies were used by groups to proclaim their divine right to the land they occupied, and by individual families to validate their exalted position in the social order.

[edit] Mystery religions

Those whose spiritual leanings were not satisfied by the public cult of the gods could turn to various mystery religions. Here, they could find religious consolations that the traditional cultus could not provide: a chance at mystical awakening, a systematic religious doctrine, a map to the afterlife, a communal worship, and a band of spiritual fellowship. Some of these mysteries, like the mysteries of Eleusis and Samothrace, were ancient and local. Others were spread from place to place, like the mysteries of Dionysus. During the Hellenistic period and the Roman Empire, exotic mystery religions like those of Osiris and Mithras became widespread.

[edit] Hellenism

Main articles: Hellenistic religion, Neoplatonism, Hellenistic Judaism, Greek magical papyri, Imperial cult (ancient Rome), and Gnosticism

[edit] Christianization

Main article: End of Hellenic Religion

In the late 4th century, the Imperial courts were predominantly Christian, as was the populace^{[citation needed]}; Christianity tolerated relatively few internal quarrels; and a deep conviction that right belief, orthodoxy, was what mattered to God. The Christian emperors closed pagan oracles, temples and end the pagan games by decrees, in a series of increasingly stringent decrees. Finally, the public practice of the Greek religion was made illegal by the Emperor Theodosius I and this was enforced by his successors. The Greek religion, stigmatized as "paganism", the religion of country-folk (pagani) - other scholars suggest the force of paganus was "(mere) civilian" - survived only in rural areas and in forms that were submerged in Christianized rite and ritual, as Europe entered into the Dark Ages.

The European Renaissance scarcely touched Greece. Renaissance humanism in Italy and western Europe included the rediscovery and reintroduction of the culture and learning of ancient Greek thought and philosophy, which included a renewed appreciation of the ancient religion and myth, reinterpreted from a humanist point-of-view. it was very important to the greeks

[edit] Polytheistic revivals

Main article: Hellenic Neopaganism

A ceremony at the annual Prometheia festival of the Greek polytheistic group Supreme Council of Ethnikoi Hellenes, June 2006.

"Hellenismos", as the religion was named by the Emperor Julian the Apostate,^{[citation needed]} has experienced a number of revivals, in the arts, humanities and spirituality of the Renaissance as well as contemporary Neopagan Hellenic polytheism.

Many neo-pagan religious paths, such as Wicca, use aspects of ancient Greek religions in their practice; Hellenic polytheism focuses exclusively thereon, as far as the fragmentary nature of the surviving source material allows. It reflects neo-Platonic-Platonic speculation (which is represented in Porphyry, Libanius, and Julian), as well as Classical cult practice.

The overwhelming majority of modern Greeks are Greek Orthodox. According to estimates, there are perhaps as many as 10,000 polytheist followers out of a total Greek population of 10 million. The Neopagan revival is limited largely to the transient communities of the Greek islands and isolated mountain villages of the Pindos range and Western Macedonia. Temple worship is unknown, there are no real congregations.

Subsequent to a 2006 court decision that officially recognised the revived ancient Greek religion, followers aspire to have the right to perform marriages, baptisms and funerals as afforded to druids in Britain who worship at Stonehenge, and Danish believers in Thor and the Nordic gods.⁵

[edit] Notes

• ¹ Martin Litchfield West, The Orphic Poems, p.148, cf. Figure 2, entitled "Patterns of Shamanistic influence in Bronze Age and Archaic Greece" - a map showing the migration of Central Asian shamanism to the Greek colony of Olbia in Scythia (now in Ukraine), down to Proconnesus, then down to Samos. On p.146, West writes: "There is reason to believe that in classical times, Shamanistic practice and ideology extended across the Steppes into the northern territories of the Indo-European tribes, from Northwest India and Bactria to Scythia to Thrace. It is also in Ionia that we located the development in the sixth century [BC] of an ecstatic Bacchic cult which adopted Orpheus as its prophet (as also did Pythagoras). And we saw that this cult flourished right on the northern shore of the Black Sea, at Olbia, where a Scythian King participated in it (pp.17-18). One is led to wonder how much of the shamanistic influence which we detect in the culture of the archaic Ionians came to them in fact from their own Pontic colonies, and the direct contact with the Scyths which they had there." West then cites some works, including Shamanism by Mircea Eliade, pp. 390-1, 394-421 and Scythica by Karl Meuli.
• ² M.L. West, ibid., p.17. "In another place Herodotus tells us of a cult of Dionysos Baccheios, Dionysos of the Bacchoi, at Borysthenes (Olbia), one of the noteworthy of all Greek colonies".
• ³ Xavier Riu, Dionysism and Comedy, p. 104, "Dionysus comes from the Outside-- the other world".
• ⁴ William Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, 1870, article on Zeus, [1]
• ⁵ Malcolm Brabant, "Zeus devotees worship in Athens", http://news.bbc.co.uk, 2007-01-27. Retrieved on 2007-01-24. 

[edit] References

• Albertus Bernabé (ed.), Orphicorum et Orphicis similium testimonia et fragmenta. Poetae Epici Graeci. Pars II. Fasc. 1. Bibliotheca Teubneriana, München/Leipzig: K.G. Saur, 2004. ISBN 3-598-71707-5. review of this book
• Walter Burkert, Greek Religion. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1987. ISBN 0-674-36281-0. Widely regarded as the standard modern account.
• Walter Burkert, Homo necans, 1972.
• Cook, Arthur Bernard, Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion, (3 volume set), (1914-1925). New York, Bibilo & Tannen: 1964. ASIN B0006BMDNA
  • Volume 1: Zeus, God of the Bright Sky, Biblo-Moser, June 1, 1964, ISBN 0-8196-0148-9 (reprint)
  • Volume 2: Zeus, God of the Dark Sky (Thunder and Lightning), Biblo-Moser, June 1, 1964, ISBN 0-8196-0156-X
  • Volume 3: Zeus, God of the Dark Sky (earthquakes, clouds, wind, dew, rain, meteorites)
• Dodds, Eric Robertson, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951.
• Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951.
• Lewis Richard Farnell, Cults of the Greek States 5 vols. Oxford; Clarendon 1896-1909. Still the standard reference.
• Lewis Richard Farnell, Greek Hero Cults and Ideas of Immortality, 1921.
• Jack Finegan, Myth and Mystery: An Introduction to the Pagan Religions of the Biblical World, 1989. ISBN 0-8010-2160-X
• George Grote, A History of Greece: From the earliest period to the close of the generation contemporary with Alexander the Great, 1846.
• Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 1903. An early classic, against which many modern accounts have reacted.
• Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912. [2]
• Jane Ellen Harrison, Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 1921.
• Karl Kerényi, The Gods of the Greeks
• Karl Kerényi, Dionysus: Archetypical Image of Indestructible Life
• Karl Kerényi, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter. The central modern accounting of the Eleusinian Mysteries.
• Karl Meuli, Scythica, 1935.
• Jon D. Mikalson, Athenian Popular Religion. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983. ISBN 0-8078-4194-3.
• William Mitford, The History of Greece, 1784. Cf. v.1, Chapter II, Religion of the Early Greeks
• Clifford H. Moore, The Religious Thought of the Greeks, 1916.
• Martin P. Nilsson, Greek Popular Religion, 1940. [3]
• Martin P. Nilsson, History of Greek Religion, 1949.
• Robert Parker, Athenian Religion: A History Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. ISBN 0-19-815240-X.
• Andrea Purvis, Singular Dedications: Founders and Innovators of Private Cults in Classical Greece, 2003.
• William Ridgeway, The Dramas and Dramatic Dances of non-European Races in special Reference to the Origin of Greek Tragedy, with an Appendix on the Origin of Greek Comedy, 1915.
• William Ridgeway, Origin of Tragedy with Special Reference to the Greek Tragedians, 1910.
• Xavier Riu, Dionysism and Comedy, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1999. ISBN 0-8476-9442-9.
• Erwin Rohde, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1925.
• William Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, 1870, [4]
• William Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, 1870. [5]
• Martin Litchfield West, The Orphic Poems, 1983.
• Martin Litchfield West, Early Greek philosophy and the Orient, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1971.
• Martin Litchfield West, The East Face of Helicon: west Asiatic elements in Greek poetry and myth, Oxford [England] ; New York: Clarendon Press, 1997.

[edit] See also

• Greek mythology
• Orphism
• Magic in the Greco-Roman world
• Religion in ancient Rome
• Roman mythology
• Paganism