We’ll never know for sure of course. But it seems pretty clear to me, that while there was the odd educated skeptic among the tiny urban elite (e.g. the Seneca quote above) the vast majority of people did believe the myths as literal fact.
Apart from anything else in the absence of better scientific theories, dead gods hanging themselves on magical trees is as good explanation of the state of the world than any else.
Also don’t want to side track but the earliest examples of the Yggdrasil myth we have are from the 9th century AD, when Christian missionaries were active in Scandinavia so just as likely as been influenced by Christian teachings as vice verse (in fact given the lack of evidence of influence of Scandinavian culture on the middle east in the 1st century, much more so)
I imagine that the Great Thinkers and philosophers were skeptical, especially of many of the more… well I can only call them rather silly and immature foibles and antics the various Deities were supposed to be getting into.
But then there’s the common man. I have no doubt they believed. Certainly huge temples were built, costing a lot, and valuable sacrifices were made.
It’s easy to be cynical of these kind of roman ceremonies, but they undoubtedly took them seriously. The evocatio was a serious attempt to avoid offending a enemy god by sacking their city without their permission, it didn’t necessarily precipitate any cultural assimilation, the god in question was carefully re-housed in Rome with all due deference and ceremony but their city and its population did not fare so well.
Though actually the attitudes of Romans to these ceremonies are are good example of why the OP is more complicated than a yes/no answer. You can’t lump all “ancient times” together. Up to the earlier imperial period then the roman attitudes do (as far as we can tell outside the odd intellectual) tend to be that there was a literal pantheon of gods who needed placating with ceremonies like evocatio, or they’d get offended. By the time Christianity came along they had become more like empty ceremonies, and if Christianity hadn’t replaced them there was plethora of other Eastern cults (like Mithraism) which would have.
Yes, but that’s no proof in and of itself because Greek (and Roman) religion were very different from our own. Today, even believers typically go to church once a week, and it doubles as a small community event. In Ancient Greece, religion and religious festivals tied into actual political and civic systems, diplomacy, warfare etc… Animal sacrifices were just as much a way to placate or thank this or that asshole god as a way for the privileged elites to distribute free food to half of the city, who may have otherwise been in a more torches and pitchforks mood. Same goes for the various cults that featured sacred prostitution - yes, they served a religious purpose and ostensibly the fucking was a way to symbolically commune with the divine… but it was also fucking young girls & boys outside of the shackles of marriage AND a way for orphans and the poor to make an honest living. Even theatre was a religious ritual in honor of Dionysus - on top of being art, that is.
As for the big temples, yes, you could interpret their existence as “well they must have believed”… but it’s far from that simple. Building huge gorgeous temples was *also *a matter of civic pride and being better than that other city on the other side of the valley (who are obviously assholes) in an era and area of the world where there was a lot of strife and pissing contests between a hundred pissant city-states. It was also a way for the elites to both show off their wealth and ostensibly give it back to the city and not look like greedlords. Kinda like modern billionaires do philanthropy ; although back then generosity and just throwing money away and around was more fashionable than it is today. But that’s also an aspect of it - rich families competed among themselves for who could build the most lavish bullshit or throw the most extravagant feasts and feed the most people. All to one up each other… and also become popular among the masses, thereby courting both votes and judicial sympathy (remember, tribunals and lawsuits were a huge thing back then, and most of the juries were poor farmers who were in it for the free grub and couple of drachmae they earned as part of their legal duty).
That’s kind of the problem with answering the question, really. Religion was so thoroughly entwined with every aspect of civic life, it’s very hard to tell how much of it was really, honestly “believed” in the modern, absolute faith sense of the word. Same goes for myths and stories - maybe they did believe them to be literally true, maybe it was just a case of “well we don’t know so let’s pretend this because it’s as good an answer as any”, maybe they knew it was mostly bullshit but some of it was nevertheless of worth or contained the substantific marrow of truth (or morals) in them, or maybe they just enjoyed them for the stories’ sake. Certainly they were used a lot to illustrate this or that principle or moral lesson.
Oh, I have no doubt, and that’s really my point (though as usual, by the time I’ve written the beginning of an argument my mind is already three or four steps ahead and I end up writing disjoined shit). My notion is that soldiers tend to be very direct, no-nonsense kind of people (comes with the territory) but can also be a superstitious lot because, well, when it’s your life on the line every day you don’t want to miss any way to load the dice in your favour.
So in my opinion yes, they did absolutely believe evocatio did something, provided something, was worth taking the time to do. Which is the important bit. But that does not tell us why they thought it was important enough to “waste” time on, when effort and time are both very dear resources in warfare. Did the generals and priests who did it really expect some form of direct, observable divine favour (or that if they didn’t they might get smote for real) ? Was it just a way to take care of the grunts’ morale ? Was it done for intimidation (i.e. “THERE ! Now even your god is with us, you’re all alone you poor dumb bastards ! We’ll cut all of yer tonkers ooooooff !”). Or did they do it because, well, they’d always done it this way and why change it since it’d demonstrably taken them this far ? Was it all of that ? None of that ? Something else ?
We don’t know, and can’t tell. But it’s good times to talk about it and wonder all the same
Obviously we’ll never know for sure, but it seems to me that you kind of have to take them at their word, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary. The generals and priests in question said “We expect some form of direct, observable divine favour”.
Just like church goers nowadays, probably run the gamut from “atheists doing it to appease granny” to “believes every last word of bible is literally true”. But generally if you go to church every Sunday, its probably because you believe in a literal Christian god at some level. So absent any evidence to contrary I am comfortable saying most regular church goers believe in God.
Same for someone reliably sacrificing to Apollo every week.
See, I’m a lot more skeptical than this because a lot of people say things because they feel they have to, even though it’s bullshit and we know for a fact that it’s bullshit. Without trying to get too political on this, many politicians tend to harp on respecting traditions and family values - but they have just as many if not more tawdry affairs than the rest of us. So what does that say about their “family values” ?
Furthermore, we have to mind the inherent bias in what we’ve got about them - what was written in stone and the public declarations of Emperors or aristocratic elites is one thing, but our political talk that gets recorded, our States of the Union and whatnot tends to be a lot of nice sounding bullshit that is very different from the reality and how the sausage is made. You polish the things you write in stone (pun so very intended).
Why should dead old Greeks be any different ?
And your bringing up church-goers is also quite on point here because I’m Protestant. Now I know that in the US that’s most Christians - here in France it’s a lot less and it means different things. For example, I just told you and I really do self identify as Protestant - but I haven’t gone to temple in 25 years and never ever believed in any god. In fact, the majority of French protestants are really agnostics at best, even those who do go to temple. Protestantism is a culture as much as it is a religion down here. And going to church is a community ritual - we’re few and far between so we tend to congregate more, we “advertize” ourselves more, we wear our Huguenot crosses not because we have any kind of belief but because that’s our symbol of “otherness” and maybe someone will ask us what it is. Or maybe it’ll piss off a Catholic, which is just as good :). It’s networking, it’s a door to volunteering in the community and helping the needy for those who go for that sort of thing, it’s a social convention (although that’s perhaps more true in the US where it’s perfectly fine to invite a coworker to your church - it weirded me right the fuck out however :))… So going to church is and means a lot of different things and plays a lot of different roles for people.
And of those who do go to church because they believe in god, well, there are obviously many many shades and nuances of belief from fundie “every single word of the bible is litteral truth” to “it’s metaphors mostly” to those who don’t even believe in that god but believe there is some sort of vague directing force and christianity is one way to connect with it and so on and so forth.
Actually, I thought of a better, more relevant example : during WW2, the German soldiers’ belt buckles were engraved with the words “Gott mit uns”, “god is on our side” (or “may god be on our side”, depending on how you interpret it). Does that mean the Nazis believed in god or were religious ? Well, we have pretty strong evidence that they really, but really weren’t - that most of the higher ups were quite spiteful of christianity in fact. So, not that. Does that mean the grunts themselves were religious ? Probably not - they had no say in their uniform’s design of course. Depends on the guy, I’d say. So why did Hitler/Hugo Boss go for it ? Well, probably because that kind of “Kinder Kirche Küche” symbol was useful to placate or snowjob the German conservatives ; and furthermore the “Gott mit uns” slogan in particular had been used by the German military since the 18th century so keeping it looked good for the Prussian military elites and Hitler didn’t want to rock that particular boat overly much (despite his own profound loathing for them).
So there you go, an example of military religious pageantry that is utterly meaningless as a form of religion, but was done because… shrug, essentially. Doesn’t matter, doesn’t hurt, might stir shit up if not done. Sold.
I imagine it was similar to how the United States is today regarding belief in Christianity. You have:
Atheists
Agnostics
Doubters who attend Church out of social custom or maybe a Deist view
Doubters who’ve given up on the formalities but still hold a vague belief
True believers that Christ existed and died for us but agree that some of the Bible is Myth
True believers who believe the bible is the inerrant word of God and every word is true.
The numbers of people who would fit in each category has increased in some and decreased in others over the past 200 years.
But that’s when the modern analogy breaks down, by the 1940s science had provided a good alternative explanation to “this bad thing happened because we didn’t appease a supernatural entity”. Though still I’m not sure you’d be wrong in assuming most of the troops that wore those buckles believed in a literal god (Germany was still pretty religious).
In the early 1700s when the Gott Mit Uns motto was adopted by Prussia that success on the battle field was the result of backing of a literal God was accepted as fact, by both the leadership and cannon fodder. The idea that it WASN’T would have been far out crazy “pseudoscience” idea, restricted to the odd eccentric academic. Likewise for the Romans or Vikings a millennia or two earlier.
Yeah but see, I doubt that too ! Because in my opinion and experience, people aren’t idiots, to simplify things. That is to say, they really are, but they tend to think for themselves too. And it’s really, really hard to swallow the notion of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omniscient god when you can plainly see that there is disease and accidents and toothaches and so on.
Now, I know that the concept of “god” was written about a lot, a LOT a lot in the 18th century, so much so that we got “good bye” out of it (an abbreviation of “God be with ye”. You’re welcome for that etymological hard on. Or maybe that’s just me). But did people REALLY swallow it all, Bible hook and sinker ? I’m not so sure. And I’m even less sure having read Carlo Ginsburg’s “The Cheese and the Worms” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1980) - a book which, in the end, boils down to “maybe rural hicks with time on their hands had a thought or two, too !”
In that I can say there is evidence you are wrong. Unlile anceint times, in the 16th-18th century we don’t just have lots of writing about god, we have a lot of writing about people’s individual thoughts on god. As that’s what the continent spanning wars of religion had been fought about for the last couple of centuries.
And those writings clearly show people at all levels of society believed and cared deeply about a literal god.
You live in a more civilized place than many of us do. Lots of churchgoers really do believe. In the South people bring up God all the time in casual conversation with strangers. The paper in Charlotte, North Carolina ran a little editorial asking the general public to cut down on the “God blesses” and “God loves you” since they were scaring the tourists. The major road by the airport there is named after Billy Graham. And a scary number of Americans believe in Young Earth Creationism.
There may have been a lot of people in the 17th century who said that God decided who won and lost battles… but you’ll notice that the people saying that still put a heck of a lot of effort into making sure that they had a large, well-equipped army. God is on the side of the big battalions.
Yes, but how much of those writings were about social conventions, or just saying what people are supposed to say, or just not thinking about it much ? OK, so maybe I do have a hard time taking people at their word and have a dire case of the Suspicious Bastardness :p. But when you think about it, there was no percentage in being openly non religious in the 16th century and especially after the Reformation, when those wars you’re talking about meant that dissenting from the norm could get you killed ; and there wasn’t really any safe outlet for voicing doubts. So the fact that most people didn’t voice doubts with religion doesn’t tell us much. And then again, you’ve got Henry IV’s famous “Paris is worth a Mass” quip, which does tell us some people didn’t take it overly seriously - because obviously if you’re actually worried about the state of your soul and your afterlife prospects and you believe the Right Form of Worship ™ (r) (c) is important towards that, then you put it above worldly politics, right ?
And no, I don’t believe the wars of religion could be *solely *attributed to religious fervour either - they were also about run of the mill politics, about communities dissenting from the main stream (and/or following their leaders - most conversions to or from Protestantism had a top-down component), about the Catholic Church defending its very rich bacon and influence, about Us vs. Them and tribalism… so it’s complicated :). Their brutality and taboo-breaking events alone speaks to that - aaaand I could regurgitate a year of uni courses and talks with teachers about it if you want, but we’re getting pretty far off topic as it is :o.
The discussion seems to have later drifted mainly to Christianity and much later times, or using what some people think about other people’s beliefs today as what ‘must’ have been true of ancient people.
But I think that makes an interesting topic boring. The interesting part is trying to figure out how much pre-modern people really did think like modern people and in what ways they might not have. Which is actually difficult to see directly for reasons including those you cite.
The fictional show “Vikings” from the History Channel isn’t the greatest fictional show IMO, and not strictly historical either. But I find its take on Viking religiosity interesting and reasonably plausible. Some characters are true believers in the Norse gods and really hate the Christians for religious reasons. Others are privately cynical about all religion in a familiar modern way…perhaps this is a projection of modern sensibilities, perhaps such people always existed in some numbers, who really knows? For others it’s just their culture and their set of common ideas which facilitate communication and unity. In some plots twists some of the gods seem to actually be real. I think it just illustrates how you can come up with all kinds of possible attitudes which might or might not have been held by various people of the time, but it’s very hard to prove any of them with the limited view of their inner lives we have from, as you say, mainly Christian writers.
I agree that human sacrifice is good evidence that a religion was taken seriously in some sense. But of course that could also be an expression of power and dominance of some people over other people. And it’s kind of a rough tool. We can infer that pagan religions with common human sacrifice were taken more seriously than say the Greco-Roman gods in the later stages of that religious/mythic tradition. But how exactly did most people view it? That’s still hard to know.
IIRC Gibbons in Decline and Fall has a whole chapter discussing why the Christian religion so quickly and definitively replaced Jupiter and his buddies in a generation. Main reason, fanaticism. The Christians who cared, cared a lot more. The Zeusers just went with the flow. I gather it was “good enough”, not “Compelling”.
Barbara Tuchman in A *Distant Mirror *quotes some bishop complaining to his superiors in the mid-1300’s that there are men who believe that humans are no different than donkeys and other animals, they live their lives, are done, die and are gone and there’s no God or afterlife. It’s nothing new.
My impression after a quick immersion in Hindu mythology during a tour of India 9which oddly enough, included many temples)… Hinduism seems to have been where Greeks, Romans, and the area would have been today if monotheistic fanatics hadn’t driven over them… Local deities, gods of local landmarks and attributes were slowly either added to the pantheon or conflated with the gods of others (much like Zeus=Jupiter, Mars = Ares) until it became, thanks to conquest, the common theology of a wide area. Time allowed the keepers of the faith to fine-tune the legends and smooth the contradictions.
It seems obvious that spiritualism (small “S”) is an attempt to explain the natural world and the randomness of life. Humans are pattern monkeys - we even think we see patterns where there are none, faces in the dark and shadows, Jesus in random patterns on toast, and directed action behind the randomness of life. The more thoughtful seem less convinced to ascribe motives to Nature, or the weather, or happenstance of life. Just so with everything. The peasants of the middle ages might have believed the bible, but how many today think a prophet made the sun stop moving across the sky, or that Jesus cured lepers, raised someone from the dead, and made a huge feast for hundreds from one basket of loaves and fishes? Science has provide better explanations, even if we’ve never seen Schrodinger kill a cat (or not).
I doubt that religion was ever a substitute for physics; it was probably from the first an existential, metaphysical framework. E.g., if there was a drought it might be because the gods were angry, but not that holes in the sky that let the rain fall through were literally plugged up.
Re. the bicameral mind: no, we almost certainly did not first develop consciousness in historical times. But I wonder if societies based on ritualized child abuse (see infanticidal child rearing) were so widespread that many societies in fact did consist largely of people suffering from disassociation. IOW, Jaynes may have been right on some points for the wrong reasons.
Yeah, regardless of my general distaste for Gibbons, that seems to be broadly correct. A couple years ago I came across the record of an impiety trial of some early bishop or other in North Africa, and the Roman governor seemed to go out of his way to smoothe things over - it’s the bishop who wouldn’t budge. The gist of it was that the bishop had enjoined his followers not to take part in the yearly ritual celebrating the divinity of the emperor and disrupted the event, and thus was facing the death penalty. The whole trial can be paraphrased as
“look, just… just apologize and do the thing and no one’s getting hurt here. You don’t even have to believe in the thing, but your not doing the thing is problematic socially-speaking and my higher ups are telling me to kill you”
“So kill me already !”
“But I don’t wanna. I really don’t, it’s going to make everybody angry. So please, help me out here. Please, just do the thing, OK ?”
“Shan’t. Kill me. KILL ME !”
“… Why are you doing this to me, bro ?”
“Cause I wanna die like Christ and also show people I’m not afraid to die.”
And that was really it. Today Christians like to portray themselves as unilateral victims of an intransigent, violent Roman state (and truth be told, that was the case some of the time, under some emperors) ; but the reality is that in many cases the Romans either didn’t really give a fuck either way or actively tried to give Christians a pass, but early Christians actively sought out public martyrdom as a way to proselitize, gain converts and show the world that their faith gave them humongous balls.
