Greek religion encompasses the collection of beliefs and rituals practiced in ancient Greece in the form of both popular public religion and cult practices. These different groups varied enough so that one might speak of Greek religions, though most shared similarities such as a belief in polytheism.

Greek peoples all recognized the 13 major Gods: Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Apollo, Artemis, Aphrodite, Ares, Dionysus, Hephaestus, Athena, Hermes, Demeter, and Hestia, though various lesser gods were also worshipped. Different cities worshipped different deities, sometimes with epithets that specified their local nature.

Greek religion was declared to be a form of "paganism" by the Christian church that took over, and the term has also been used by followers of Hellenismos, a modern reconstructed form of the ancient Greek religion.

The religious practices of the Greeks 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 religion tempered Etruscan cult and belief to form much of the later Roman religion.

Terminology

Main sanctuaries of classical Greece.

Core concepts

Zeus, the king of the gods, and controller of thunder and the sky.

Theology

Ancient Greek theology revolved around polytheism; that is, that there were many gods and goddesses. There was a hierarchy of deities, with Zeus, the king of the gods, having a level of control over all the others. Each deity generally had dominion over a certain aspect of nature, for instance, Poseidon ruled over the sea and earthquakes, and Hyperion ruled over the sun.

Whilst being immortal, the gods were not all powerful. They had to obey fate, which overrided all. For instance, in mythology, it was Odysseus' fate to return home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, and the gods could only lengthen his journey and make it harder for him, but they could not stop him.

The gods acted like humans, and had human vices. They would interact with humans, sometimes even spawning children with them. Sometimes certain gods would be opposed to another, and they would try to outdo each other.

Some gods were specifically associated with a certain city. For instance, Athena was associated with the city of Athens, Apollo with Delphi and Delos, Zeus with Olympia and Aphrodite with Corinth.

Identity of names was not 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 these conflicts were because their followers were at war on earth and 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.

Twelve Olympians

See Twelve Olympians

Aphrodite riding a swan: Attic white-ground red-figured kylix, ca. 460, found at Kameiros (Rhodes)

• Zeus, god of thunder and the sky, and the king of the gods. Husband of Hera, and father to Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Hermes, Persephone and Dionysus.
• Hera, goddess of women, marriage and motherhood. Wife of Zeus.
• Poseidon, god of the sea and earthquakes.
• Demeter, goddess of the harvest, fertility, nature and the seasons.
• Ares, god of war, frenzy, hatred and bloodshed.
• Hermes, god of commerce, thieves and trade. Messenger to the gods.
• Hephaestus, god of metalcraft and fire. Blacksmith to the gods.
• Aphrodite, goddess of sex, love, beauty and fertility.
• Athena, goddess of wisdom, crafts and strategic battle.
• Artemis, goddess of the hunt, maidens and the moon.
• Hestia, goddess of the hearth and home.
• Apollo, god of the sun, light, healing, the arts, prophecy, the truth and archery.

Lesser deities

Lesser deities, who were in some way related to the Olympians, also existed. One of the most popular was Dionysus (who was commonly called Bacchus), a god of wine and spiritual ectasy, who was a son of Zeus. Another was Pan, a horned god of shepherds and folk music, and Hekate, a goddess of witchcraft and crossroads.

It was possible for a mortal human to become an immortal god. An example of this was Herakles, who was the son of the god Zeus, but whom had a mortal mother. By performing great heroic deeds, and through his birth, Herakles eventually became a god.

A 16th century engraving of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia.

There were also household deities, akin to the Roman lares.

Afterlife

See Greek Underworld

The Greeks believed in an underworld known as Hades. This was where the dead would go if the correct burial observances had been carried out. If not, then the spirit of that person would drift around as a ghost forever.

Mythology

See Greek mythology

Greek religion had a large mythology. It largely comprised of stories of the gods and of how they affected humans on Earth. Myths often revolved around heroes, and their actions, such as Herakles and his twelve labours, Odysseus and his voyage home, Jason and the quest for the Golden Fleece and Theseus and the Minotaur.

Many of the myths revolved around the Trojan war between Greece and Troy. For instance, the epic poem, The Iliad, by Homer, is based around the war. Many other tales are based around the aftermath of the war, such as the murder of King Agamemnon of Argos, and the adventures of Odysseus on his return to Ithaca.

The Greek creation myth was told in Hesiod's Theogony.

The mythology largely survived and was added to in order to form the later Roman mythology, and again became popular in Christian post-Renaissance Europe.

Scripture

There was no one core scripture held by all followers of Greek religions, such as the Christian Bible or Islamic Qu'ran.

Ceremonies

The ruins of a temple devoted to Zeus.

Temples

Often temples were built to the gods. Some of the grandest and most notable were the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, and the Parthenon, dedicated to the goddess Athena upon the Acropolis in Athens.

Temples contained a central room known as a naos, which contained a grand altar and statue of a deity. Priests would be employed to constantly monitor and give offerrings to the deity.

Notable Ceremonies

One ceremony was pharmakos, a ritual involving expelling a symbolic scapegoat such as a slave, from a city or village in a time of hardship.

Rites of Passage

One rite of passage was the amphidromia, celebrated on the fifth or seventh day after the birth of a child.

Festivals

Various religious festivals were held in ancient Greece.

Morality

One of the most important moral concepts to the Greeks was a fear of committing hubris, which constituted many things, from excessive pride to rape and desecration of a corpse. It was a crime in the city-state of Athens.

Mystery religions

Those who were not satisfied by the public cult of the gods could turn to various mystery religions. Here, they could find religious consolations that traditional religion 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.

History

Origins

Roman religion

When the Roman Empire conquered Greece, it took much of Greek religion and incorporated it into its own. The Greek gods were transformed into Roman deities and given new names; Zeus became Jupiter, Hera became Juno and Pan became Faunus. Some of the gods, such as Apollo, kept their original Greek names.

Christianization

In the late 4th century CE, the Imperial courts were predominantly Christian, as was the populace; 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 and temples, and ended the pagan games 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.

Revivals

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

Many neo-pagan religious paths, such as Wicca, use aspects of ancient Greek religions in their practice; Hellenic Reconstructionism focuses exclusively thereon, as far as the nature of the surviving source material allows. It reflects neo-Platonic/Platonic speculation (which is represented in Porphyry, Libanius, Proclus, 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 45,000 followers of the ancient Greek religion 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.

Notes

• 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.
• 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".
• Xavier Riu, Dionysism and Comedy, p. 104, "Dionysus comes from the Outside-- the other world".
• William Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, 1870, article on Zeus, http://ancientlibrary.com/smith-bio/3655.html
• Malcolm Brabant,

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
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• Dodds, Eric Robertson, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951.
• Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951.
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• 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. http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/gpr/
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• 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, http://www.ancientlibrary.com/smith-bio/
• William Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, 1870. http://www.ancientlibrary.com/smith-dgra
• 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.

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