ancient Greek religion Archives - Page 3 of 4

Did Ancient “Pagans” Really Worship Nature?

If you go around and ask a bunch of people what “paganism” is, chances are, most people will tell you something like “nature worship.” It is true that some contemporary Neopagans do indeed worship nature, albeit in various forms and in various ways. Even many Neopagans who do not literally worship nature still hold nature in very high regard. This conception of “paganism” as “nature worship,” however, is, for the most part, not applicable to the ancient world.

The term “paganism” is problematic in a historical context for all kinds of reasons, but it is most often applied to the various polytheistic religions that were practiced in the greater Mediterranean region (i.e., the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe) in ancient times before Christianity. When we look at these religions, we actually find a rather startling absence of nature-worshippers.

For most people in the ancient Mediterranean world, nature was a frightening and dangerous thing that could never really be trusted. Most of the deities worshipped in ancient times by so-called “pagans” were not seen as personifications of nature or natural forces, but rather as supernatural beings governing certain areas of human endeavor. Some deities were associated with aspects of the natural world, but the deities themselves were almost always clearly distinguished from the phenomena with which they were associated. Furthermore, even those deities associated with natural phenomena were usually associated with cultural phenomena as well.

Yes, Kratos Is a Real Deity in Greek Mythology

I have never played any of the games in the video game series God of War. I don’t really have any interest in video games and, even if I did have an interest in them, I would never have time to play them. Nonetheless, as a Hellenist, I like to pay attention to how Greek mythology is portrayed in modern popular culture and I find it interesting that Kratos, the main character in the God of War series, is actually very loosely based on a real figure in Greek mythology.

In Greek mythology, Kratos is the divine personification of strength, the son of the Titan Pallas and the Okeanid nymphe Styx. Ironically, in ancient Greek sources, Kratos is portrayed as a dumb, overly violent thug who is unquestioningly loyal to Zeus and whose job is to enforce Zeus’s authority over all the other deities; whereas I’ve read that, in the video game series God of War, Kratos is apparently portrayed as a renegade demigod who kills all the major deities in the Greek pantheon, including Zeus.

Did Hades Abduct Persephone or Did She Go with Him Willingly?

In many sanitized modern adaptations of the story of Hades and Persephone, Persephone is portrayed as going with Hades to the Underworld willingly. This is the version of the story that is found in many books about Greek mythology intended for children and in the award-winning music Hadestown. This is not, however, how the story is portrayed in ancient Greek sources.

The ancient Greek and Roman accounts of Persephone universally agree that Hades abducted Persephone against her will and raped her. Both literary and artistic representations of the event unambiguously portray it as a forcible abduction. Ancient Greek and Roman poems give graphic descriptions of Persephone being brutally snatched and carried off, crying and screaming in desperation.

I don’t necessarily see the modern sanitization of the story of Hades and Persephone as a problem strictly speaking, but I do think that it is important to keep in mind that the versions of the story that were told in ancient times were much darker than the versions many people are telling today.

Are Modern Greeks Descended from the Ancient Greeks?

One thing I’ve discovered from reading questions and answers on Quora is that people are bizarrely obsessed with the question of whether modern Greeks are descended from ancient Greeks. It’s a subject that inevitably sparks a great deal of heated debate, with various non-Greek westerners on one side insisting that modern Greeks are not true Greeks at all while Greek people and various others insist that modern Greeks are truly descendants of the ancient Greeks.

The question of whether modern Greeks are truly descendants of the ancient Greeks has a long, sordid history that goes all the way back to the nineteenth century. I have decided to weigh in on this discussion to give some relevant background information, correct some prevailing false assumptions, and, finally, give what I consider to be a sound answer on the matter.

Carl Sagan Was Really Bad at History

Carl Sagan’s thirteen-episode documentary series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which originally aired on PBS in 1980, is the most watched PBS documentary series in history. The miniseries, which is, broadly speaking, about the history and importance of science, has had a massive influence on both our culture as a whole and on individual people’s lives. Many people say that watching Cosmos growing up was what inspired them to go into STEM.

Unfortunately, while Carl Sagan may have been a brilliant scientist and a great science popularizer, he was an unbelievably terrible historian and, in the show, he gets a boatload of facts about history blatantly wrong. Because Sagan was a scientist with an established reputation, though, many people have assumed that everything he says in the miniseries must be correct and, as a result, these misconceptions have spread and become embedded in popular culture.

Perhaps the most influentially wrong segment in the whole series is a twenty-two-and-a-half-minute segment in the last episode about the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria and the murder of the Neoplatonist philosopher Hypatia. In this one segment, Sagan manages to promote what seems like roughly half of all the misconceptions about the ancient world that I have ever debunked.

I wrote an article in August 2018 debunking misconceptions about Hypatia and another article in July 2019 debunking misconceptions about the Library of Alexandria. In both of those articles, I have noted that many of the misconceptions I debunk originated from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, but, in those articles, I did not address Carl Sagan’s PBS miniseries directly.

I have therefore decided to undertake the ambitious task of going through the entire segment about Hypatia and the Library of Alexandria and correcting all the inaccuracies I come across. This should give you some impression of how historically accurate Carl Sagan’s documentary really is.

Did the Ancient Greeks Really Believe in Their Myths?

On Quora, I have noticed there seems to be an endless number of questions dealing with the same overall theme: “Did the ancient Greeks and Romans really believe in their gods?” and “Did the ancient Greeks really believe in their myths?”

I think these questions are born from a strange discordance that people have noticed between the ancient Greeks’ reputation for rational skepticism and the stories we still tell about their gods and heroes—stories that—let’s face it—in most cases are pretty unbelievable to say the least.

Thus people have wondered, “How on Earth could a people so supposedly enlightened believe in such absurd stories?” As it turns out, though, believing in the Greek deities and believing in Greek myths are two different things; many people in ancient times believed in the deities without necessarily believing in all the stories attached to them.

Was Jesus Copied Off the Greek God Dionysos?

As everyone reading this is doubtlessly already aware, there are hundreds of memes and articles out there on the internet claiming that Jesus was “copied off” various pagan deities. The usual culprits include Horus, Dionysos, Mithras, Attis, Tammuz, Adonis, Sol Invictus, et cetera. I have already written a detailed article debunking claims about Jesus being copied off of Horus. Now I am going to debunk the claims about Jesus being copied off of Dionysos.

This article will be a lot more nuanced than my article about the alleged parallels between Horus and Jesus, however, since there really are some significant parallels between Jesus and Dionysos; they just aren’t nearly as numerous or as significant as Mythicists on the internet often claim. There is some evidence that some Christians may have intentionally shaped certain stories about Jesus in response to stories about Dionysos, but there is no good evidence to suggest that Christians just “copied” Jesus wholesale off of Dionysos.

No, the Romans Did Not Just “Steal” All the Greek Deities

Lots of people seem to wrongly assume that the Romans “stole” the Greek gods and just renamed them. People often portray this as though it were an act of plagiarism, like one student copying another student’s homework. It is easy to see how they have gotten this impression, since they know the Greeks came first and that the names of the Greek and Roman deities are used today interchangeably. The problem is that this is not at all what actually happened.

In reality, the ancient Greeks and Romans originally had separate deities with different names, different mythologies, and different attributes. These deities were worshipped in different and unique ways that were specific to the culture in which they were venerated. In other words, the Romans had their own deities. Then, due to immense Greek cultural influence in Italy, the Romans gradually came to identify their own native deities with the Greek ones.

In the process, the Romans adopted the traditional stories and distinctive divine attributes belonging to the Greek deities and attributed them to their own deities as well. Eventually, by around the first century AD or thereabouts, the Greek and Roman deities had become largely indistinguishable from each other and they were widely seen as the same deities only with different names.

Did the Ancient Greeks Ever Climb Mount Olympos?

If you know anything at all about Greek mythology, you are probably aware that the ancient Greeks believed that the most important deities in their pantheon, known as the δωδεκάθεον (dōdekátheon), which means the “Twelve Gods” in Ancient Greek, lived atop Mount Olympos, which is a real mountain in the region of Thessalia in northern Greece.

This has led many people to wonder why the ancient Greeks never climbed Mount Olympos and saw that there were no gods up there. The assumption that they never did this has led many people to assume that the ancient Greeks as a whole must have been deeply superstitious and uninquisitive.

The surprising truth, though, is that the ancient Greeks did climb Mount Olympos and it doesn’t seem to have destroyed their religion. In fact, by late antiquity, regular trips up the mountain seem to have become incorporated into the religion itself.

Ares Is Actually Kind of Pathetic

Sometimes it can be fun to debate which of the Twelve Olympians in Greek mythology were more powerful than others. Obviously, there is no doubting that Zeus was the most powerful, but the others are open to discussion. Because what a person considers “powerful” varies from one person to another, you can often make a case one way or another. I, however, think that the weakest of the Twelve Olympians in Greek mythology is clear and obvious: Ares.