Did Ancient People REALLY Believe in the Ancient Gods (i.e. What We Call Mythology)?

Factual Questions
21

I was just thinking about this last week. I was explaining Spider-Man to a friend who’s never read a comic book but loved Into The Spider-Verse, and I made reference to “the Marvel mythos”. And then it hit me… just as I eat up tales of super-heroism, I bet young Greeks and Romans did too. Is telling Superman stories any different than the feats of Hercules?

And imagine a gang of Early Norwegian kids: “Okay, who’d win in a fight? Thor or Balder?” “Are you kidding? Thor’s a god!” “Yeah, and Odin’s his dad!” “But he’d hesitate to hit his best friend, and then Balder’d surprise him!” “Sucker punch!” “And then Thor’d laugh it off and BAM!” “But Balder can’t be hurt by anything except mistletoe…” "Except mistletoe? Okay, that’s weird." “Hey, that’s the legend.” “No problem, Thor’d zap him with a tiny lightning bolt… that’d burn a hole in the seat of his pants!” “And Balder’s hopping in a circle, trying to keep his butt from showing and all of Asgard’s laughing…” “Fight over!”

But I’d guess it’s more like “This is a great story, sure I guess I ‘believe’ it”.

But it’s VERY different than believing a fact about the physical world.

22

“People and valuable property were sacrificed to those gods, so I’d say that yeah, the people actually believed in them.”

Or those sacrificed were just very unpopular. or had valuable property that was “needed” by someone with enough power and the idea of putting a religious spin on their deeds.

23

Though intertwined, religion and mythology should be treated separately, I think.

Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind is a must-read for understanding ancient religion. You needn’t agree 100% with his conclusions to find great insight in that book.

24

Greek and Roman religion and belief systems were very different from modern conceptions. Its, actually rather hard to provide an explnation for people like us raised in a different framework.

Someone upthread mentioned Hinduism. Which is probably most disimilar to Greek and Roman belief.

25

Sacrificed property, in this case, means burned or thrown into rivers or otherwise destroyed. Not, as I guess you are implying, merely confiscated by a ruling class. The people ranged from newborn infants to captured warriors. Some of them, I suppose, might have been unpopular.

26

That book was discredited decades ago. I don’t think you’ll find any reputable professional in any relevant field who agrees with it today.

27

From a lot of reading of ancient history over many years, I’d say there’s no doubt that most people believed in the ancient deities. There were a few intellectuals who didn’t.

The myths were not necessarily understood as literally true, however. A lot of them were allegorical.

28

The valuable property people threw into peat bogs in northern Europe did not go to someone in power, it went to the bog.

I expect it was much like now - some people were raving fanatics, some disbelieved, and most in the middle had some level of belief.

I’m not sure why you’d doubt that people would have sincere beliefs in their god(s).

29

Ohh boy! Is Dan Dennett, Co-Director of Center for Cognitive Studies and the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University a “reputable professional” in a “relevant field”? No, nevermind; I’ve been here before — the goalposts will be moved, then moved again, till finally “has been discredited” becomes “isn’t endorsed by at least 51%.” :slight_smile:

If you would deign to excerpt a view of ancient religion from Jaynes and explain why you think his idea is wrong, that could be a useful contribution. Instead this vague passive-voice discrediting is useless, especially since I wrote*** “You needn’t agree 100% with his conclusions to find great insight in that book.”*** Or is it your claim that 100% of Jaynes’ ideas are discredited?

Sometimes it almost seems the attitude on some controversial writings is “Oh good! It’s a long challenging read, but thanks to someone I can assume it is ‘discredited’ and dispense with trying to understand it.” :slight_smile:

One of these days, I shall discuss in some detail the use of these passive-voice discreditings at SDMB. That thread will be in BBQ Pit.

30

No. Philosophy is not a relevant field.

The general consensus among ancient historians, specialists in ancient literature and art, anthropologists, and neurologists is that he’s flat wrong.

There’s a reasonable overview of how he is seen today here. Basically, some people think there were a few things of interest among his wild ideas, but most think he just had wild ideas.

The wiki does have a section on “Issues with Jaynes’ proposal”. And you’ll find some intelligent discussion on reddit here

31

Around the year 1 AD, what we think of as “Greco-Roman mythology” was not widely believed to be literally true: At best it was useful for allegory (like a modern American might refer to “Uncle Sam” and “Lady Liberty” and so on), and at worst, just a source of entertaining stories (yes, much like comic-book superheroes). Ovid, in the preface to his mythology collection Metamorphosis, wrote “I prate of ancient poets’ monstrous lies”: He clearly didn’t literally believe his stories.

At the same time, though, people of that era had just as much drive towards religion that we do (that is to say, very important to some who literally believe, important for cultural purposes for others, and of little or no importance for yet others). But that psychological need was filled, not by the Mt. Olympus mythology, but by the so-called “mystery cults” like Mithraism and Zoroastrianism (and, a little later, Christianity).

32

From a cognitive neuroscience standpoint, Jaynes isn’t viewed as merely wrong in his conclusions; he was ill-informed and wholly mistaken in his essential assumptions and premise. There is zero neurophysiological evidence for a ‘bicameral mind’ of two separate operating parts (the god-part giving direction and the man-part receiving it), and his evidence supporting consisted of little more than the reading of literature like The Iliad which did not use a first person or what we would term a third person omniscient voice in writing, and the assumption that schizophrenia and schizoassociative disorders are a reversion to the pre-integrated bicameral state, which is utter nonsense. His view that language is required to develop consciousness is not held by anyone studying neurolinguistics and biosemiotics, and the only basic premise that Jaynes espoused that is still accepted today is that strict behaviorism is inadequate to explain the complexity of human (or complex animal) psychology and then integration of experience into personality.

As for the o.p., as others have stated what we know of religious practices and pantheons of dieties today of the Ancient Greek, Hellanistic, Roman, Norse, and other traditions of the Near East has been filtered through Christian (primarily Catholic) writers and theologians who were often looking to put a Christian interpretation on it. In societies in which little primary written history exists and which converted completely to monotheistic Christianity, it is really impossible to assess how widely or sincerely the population endorsed the supposed theology other than to note that mysticism and the belief in unseen forces affecting society are a consistent presence in literature and social organization in all socities up to the present day, from gods and shamistic spirit religions through conspiracy theories and socioeconomic ‘theories’ with little or no evidence to support them.

Hellanistic and Roman traditions for which direct primary and authenticated secondary sources exist, henotheism and monolatrism are the evident, and while the dieties are attributed certain natural forces or influential characteristics such as fertility or hunting prowess, it is clear that they exist as much as an entertainment and social organization purpose they way modern peoples idenify themselves by identification with a football team, rather than a literal belief in a supernatural being who can be influenced to assist or provide protection. In early Roman Christian (pre-Catholic) practice the Jewish tradition and apostolic teachings based upon the speeches and purpored actions of Jesus of Nazareth were heavily mixed with the pre-Christian Gnosticism, with competing sects mixing philosophy and theology from different and often indistinct sources, not unlike modern evangelical Protestantism. Once Christianity became the Roman state religion and formal doctrines were established, a concerted effort was made to eradicate non-orthodox beliefs as heritical.

It should be noted that in this vein (and ignoring discussion of the “Holy Trinity”) the ostensible monotheism of traditional Christian (Roman, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox) communions is more akin to monolateralism with prayers for intercession delivered to saints which are, in effect, minor dieties within a pantheon goverened by the Judeo-Christian god, and are identified with certain professions or beliefs. So the notion that modern Abrahamic ‘monotheistic’ religions are somehow better organized or more consistent than pantheistic beliefs really doesn’t stand up to much scruitinty, especially when institutions such as the Catholic Church refuse to submit doctrinal assumptions and artifacts such as the Shroud of Turin to scientific assessment or objective criticism.

Stranger

33

I think we need to be cautious in taking the beliefs of elite intellectuals like Ovid as being representative of the whole society.

Christians always like to promote the idea that the Graeco-Roman gods were ‘silly’ and ‘nobody believed in them anyway’, but this is also a one-sided point of view.

Probably the closest we have to the the ancient religions in the world today is in India, as was pointed out above. There we find a similar situation, with many gods, many shades of belief, many ritual practices, and a mass of of ordinary people who most certainly believe in the gods literally, even in the 21st century.

There are plenty of pre-Christian writers who give accounts of divination, omens, appearances of deities in dreams, miraculous cures, etc., etc. There is the undeniable fact of large numbers of thriving temples, regular sacrifices and offerings, paintings and statues of deities everywhere, inscriptions honouring the gods. There’s no doubt that most people really believed in them, as in India today.

The mystery cults later became more popular, but existed side by side with the established religions.

When the Roman world was Christianized, Christianity was Romanized in the selfsame process, to an extent that I think many Christians are reluctant to admit. It’s natural that this would happen. It’s not for nothing that the head of the Catholic Church is called the Pontifex, the same title as the head of the Roman religion. The robes, the incense, the altars in churches, the processions of statues through the streets on festivals (that you can still see in Italy today), were all taken over from the Roman religion.

Take a look at this scene from Franco Zeffirelli’s 1982 movie of the opera Cavalleria Rusticana. It’s set in a Sicilian village in the 19th century, and has a famous scene with an Easter parade. This was filmed in the town of Vizzini, Sicily. All the trappings of the real Easter parade in Vizzini were used, only some 19th century costumes were added.

Pagan festivals in Roman times must have been very similar indeed. Swap the statues of Jesus and Mary for statues of Jupiter and Juno, swap the one of Jesus with a sunburst and halo for Apollo with a sunburst and halo, make some minor changes to the costumes, and I have a feeling that a Sicilian of the first century BC would feel right at home.

See what you think. Watch to about 27:00

34

And FWIW for many followers of contemporary religions, their “beliefs” and more especially *their day to day practices *are also primarily markers of identity and means of social cohesion, something to get together about one morning a week and on special days to build up the community.

ISTM, one of the things that complicate how do we answer this question is just that, how we are looking back at it through the prism of our culture wherein our referents are based on the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. And the Abrahamic religions as we know them today are characterized by scripture and creed. Which leads to an interesting proposition: to those of us raised in this culture, “religion” includes reference to a specific set of mythical stories that are codified in Scripture, as officially part of the teachings. And there are a few broadly accepted formal statements of faith that sort of let you say, OK if person X says he’s Christian/Jewish/Muslim, we can expect him to believe in at least some of this. But AFAIK there is no one canonical “holy scripture” or one universal Creed/Shema/Shahadda of Greco-Roman or Germanic paganism, is there?

35

And according to Plato atheism and impiety were two of the things Socrates was accused of.

36

First of all, the RC church does not accept the Shroud of Turin as a Relic.
Next, besides the Radiocarbon,Vibrational spectroscopy,electron microscopic ,Blood stain,Anatomical forensics, pollen, botanical, weave, and digital image processing tests, you’re right- the Shroud of Turin has not been subject to scientific assessment . :dubious::rolleyes:

FYI- the RC church is very open to testing on the Shroud.

37

They seem to have all started out as separate deities that different groups did believe in at one time, and then get combined into a mythological universe together, moving things around and making it fit, which suggests some pliability of belief early on, albeit not a complete lack of belief. It’s more like “these are oral traditions, and we don’t know exactly what the truth is, but we can try to figure it out by putting all these stories together.”

Wikipedia gives the fifth century BCE as when the rationalists started fighting against the mythologists, so that’s a decent time to think that belief in myth decreased.

38

A great scholarly thesis on this very question exists where Ancient Greece is concerned - Paul Veyne’s *Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?: An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination *(Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1988). I can’t tell you what the translation’s worth, but the book in French is a wonderful read even beyond its value as good science.
Oh, and spoiler : because this is French academia we’re talking about, the answer to the titular question kinda boils down to “Quite obviously they did. But of course, they did not. It’s complicated.” :).

39

Let’s also note that there’s a distinction between believing in the gods, and believing that particular stories about the gods were literally true. You could very easily believe in Zeus, and that he really does smite people who annoyed him with thunderbolts, and really does bless people who sacrifice to him, but only believe some of the stories about him. Greek mythology didn’t have a canon, and various people believed various things, and some stories contradicted other stories.

So just because you told a story about the labors of Hercules didn’t mean you believed the story literally happened, even if you really did believe that Hercules literally existed.

40

As for the Romans, they seem to have had a very practical approach to religion and gods - namely, “it can’t hurt and this one seems to work”. They would perform a rite called *evocatio *before big battles by which they basically tried to spiritually bribe the other side’s god to their side. As well they would often amalgamate their conquests’ gods into their own cornucopia of gods - was it because they believed those gods really existed and evidently had done good things for those rich people wot had just been conquered ; or was it simply a politically expedient way to incorporate various cultures into the empire ? Yes.
And this kind of utilitarian approach to religion was interestingly mirrored by Native American people when they were first approached by missionaries and explorers like Samuel de Champlain & co back in the 16th century. There was little to no shared language at the time so obviously explorers couldn’t expound on the finer points of their triune divinity ; but when they came back later they noticed that the Natives had incorporated the cross into their designs or tattoos and sometimes seemed to imitate Christian religious gestures. Was it because “hey, these guys seem to have good luck, if we do like they do we’ll have good luck too !”, or a form of hospitality and welcoming (or trying to mollify) Europeans ? Again, yes. The question is exactly the same, and it’s just as impossible to categorically answer it, but both answers seem like valid interpretations of observed behaviour.