In her book * Mythology*, Edith Hamilton quotes one writer, circa 80 AD, who wrote to his wife about how believers had immortality in Father Zeus. Of course, she also quote Socrates as disbelieving in the myth of Boreas and Orithyia.
In one of his odes, Pindar wrote that no one should accuse the gods of cannibalistic practices, a reference to the myth that Tantalus fed human flesh to the gods and one of them ate it. I would say that indicated he believed.
I agree with the posters who say the majority believed at some level while there were skeptics like Ovid, Socrates, and Seneca.
I also think that some myths, like Perseus, were more entertainment than anything else.
Let’s just note that many of the sources being referenced here are seriously out of date.
Edward Gibbon, Edith Hamilton, Janyes, Barbara Tuchman… these are OLD books that made waves in their time, and still have some good points. But scholarship has seriously moved on. Modern understanding is different in many ways. Many new facts and connections have come to light, old misunderstandings have been corrected, new insights and approaches have been adopted.
Don’t imagine that fields like ancient and medieval history are static. They are rapidly moving. Public understanding is decades behind. And movies and TV are in some strange fantasy world of their own.
If you want a more current book on the topic, I’d recommend James J. O’Donnell’s “Pagans:The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity”.
The basic flaw in the bicameral mind claim is a simple one - what was there in human biology that suddenly everyone across several continents suddenly about the same time flipped the same switch and became conscious? You can pick assorted other traits such as vocal chords and the mental capability to formulate language and say they evolved in one place and spread across the world because those who possessed them “out-survived” those who did not. But by 1000BC or 5000BC, the diverse genetic diaspora was already set. Any such change would have to be “flipping a switch” in existing populations, not evolutionary displacement. That former option makes no sense, unless there were some evolutionary pressure that hit all societies in all environments around the same time, which is equally wild a hypothesis.
A state religion is as much a set of social behaviour guidelines as it is an explanation for how things are. It thunders and rains because the god in charge is hammering those clouds… but also - the largest source of strife in most of society is men fighting, typically over women. Any state religion is going to dictate social behaviours for peace, order and good government, and support the status quo. So it goes hand in hand with a requirement for obeying the rules of social order - with the threat that even if you get away with something, you’ll pay in the next life.
Another point to make - despite what we heard in Sunday School, Christians were not widely persecuted 24-7 every month of every year. It started with using them as convenient scapegoats for disasters. As they encroached on the territory of the state religion in bigger numbers, it drew even more hostility each time the rulers needed a distraction and someone to blame for a problem. After all, Jews were also spread across the empire and nobody harassed them for not worshipping the emperor - but then, they were not vocally trying to lure other people away from the worship of Jupiter.
It is important to note, however, that the way people believed in their religions in the past (or, hell, in other places today) was not the same as what you might be used to. Today most people in a majority Christian country will view belief in God in terms of the Abrahamic tradition. Christians, as well as Jews and Muslims and a number of other faiths, have a belief in an omnipotent and largely invisible God who is master of everything in and outside our universe, falling along largely similar lines.
Romans, to use them as my example, did not identify with their gods the same way. Their spiritual life was really, really different. They absolutely were religious - REALLY religious - but not in the same way. Roman spiritual life saw gods the way you or I might think of “spirits” or “angels,” supernatural beings of great power whose influence varies from place to place, situation to situation; every home might have a shrine to a different god. Gods ruled over different places. You likely recall the story of the centurion who comes to Christ and begs for healing for his servant; why would a Roman ask Jesus for help? Well, to a Roman in Israel at that time, it was perfectly logical to assume that the God of the Jews was the god you had to appeal to when you were in that particular place. Had that same centurion been in Egypt he might have sought the power of Isis or Sehkmet. The number of cults and subcults and gods and other subdivisions of Roman religion was far too long to list here.
Furthermore, Roman spiritual life was what we would call “superstitious” to an extent essentially no one today in the Western world engages in; omens, augurs, everything was perceived as being a sign from the gods. If you angrily put a curse on someone, they would take that REALLY seriously. It was as real and as threatening as punching someone.
Romans were, in terms of the time and effort they expended on religion, FAR more religious than people in the Western world today. Religion was not separate from any aspect of life. It was a fundamental part of politics and state policy and of every home.
An example of this : the process of inauguration. The word, of course, remains to this day - it’s the first day of office for an elected official, and by extension the whole ceremony that surrounds it. Well it used to be an actual test, the “entrance augury”. An augury is a divination ritual by which a priest (the augur) looks for signs of the future or the will of the gods in the flight of birds - their direction, number, cries and so on. The Romans took this stuff so seriously that during the Republic period if the birds didn’t fly right on the day a new magistrate was appointed, he was immediately shown the door and a new election would be called. Augurs were also taken whenever a new law was proposed, before the debate started (the Senate had a little window for that purpose) - and again, if the birds were all weird that day it meant the proposed law was DOA.
The more cynical among us (and among them !) did note that those rituals gave the priests enormous control over civic life.
In Athens, the Greeks would similarly consult Zeus Moiragetes (the aspect of Zeus dealing with fate and knowledge of the future) by scrutinizing the rustling of the branches & leaves of sacred oak trees.
Hey, you can laugh, but you lot could have used an augur vetoing Trump because “signs point to oh *hell *no”.
The actual ancient Roman religion, before the Greek influence which identified Jupiter with Zeus and so on, was pantheistic (I think that’s the right term). Everything had a spirit associated with it. There was a spirit of doorways, but there was also a spirit of the particular doorway between the dining room and the kitchen at your mother-in-law’s house. A mountain had a spirit, but so did every little clod of earth. The spirits of particularly large or important things were likewise more important, and could be called “gods”, but they were all qualitatively the same sort of thing.
Nor were these spirits necessarily anthropomorphic. Zeus looks like a buff bearded man holding a lightning bolt, but Jupiter looks like a lightning bolt.
And of course you want to stay on the good side of all of the spirits you interact with. A Roman walking through a doorway might say a quick prayer to the god of doorways, the god of that particular doorway, the god of wood, and the god of the specific tree the wood came from.
More like “animistic” - animism is the idea that everything is inhabited by a spirit, pantheism is the idea that a monistic divinity manifests in everything (“All is God”, basically)
This theory looks as far-fetched as the bicameral mind hypothesis to me. Even assuming a systematic high rate of infanticide in all ancient societies, I’m not sure how you go from there to the survivors being “dissociated”.
The very premise of this question while very logical from the Abrahamic / western view on religion, is not valid for Hinduism or many other Eastern “religions” or “belief systems”.
The fundamentals of Hinduism are towards a seeking system versus a “belief system”. Agnosticism in Hinduism is old, like really old - documented in Rig Veda from 1500 BC (or depending on the source 1100 BC - 1900 BC).
In this journey of seeking some settle for **Belief **, some other settle for **Agnosticism ** some others for **Atheism ** etc. etc. They are all valid conclusions for the ***seeker *** - no one path to spiritualism is better than the other. The ultimate state for the seeker is enlightenment or Nirvana where the seeker has attained “ultimate knowledge”.
Some people have created and actively believe in God / Gods / Goddesses. Not just Hindus but people from all around the globe - their journey of life or seeking has brought them there. Some see God in a Bosons, some in stones, some in other people, some in fire , etc. etc. Its an observer created universe - and they are all correct in their own universe. This sense of “universal truth” is again a western (maybe Greek) construct.
I think you saw what you wanted to see. There are Hindus who believe in God, Gods and Goddesses but it is not all of Hinduism.
To continue on this fun diversion, the signs themselves were called “auspicium.” It is from that we get the word “auspicious” (well, and “inauspicious.”)
Romans perceived auspicium in everything, not just birds. Thunder and lightning was a big one; you really did not want to conduct business after a thunderstorm.
There was a guy, the pullarius, who typically travelled with an army, whose job it was to keep some special… chickens, to tell the future. The chickens were just for this purpose, and they’d let them out of their cage and see how they walked around and ate; from this, the favor of the gods was determined. I swear this is true, and I know it sounds silly, but no one then thought it was silly at all.
This is not the first time, nor the second, that I’ve observed something at SDMB. Those who are most strident in condemning an out-of-fashion hypothesis are generally people who never read, or perhaps remember only very badly, the relevant book.
Those who adhere to the syllogism
(1) Something Jaynes wrote was wrong;
(2) Therefore Everything Jaynes wrote is wrong …
should find Jaynes’ book to offer a wealth of material. If every sentence can be trusted to be wrong, the book is a treasure trove! Opening the book at random I read that Tiglath-Pileser I was the most powerful King of the middle Assyria period. Yippee! Now we know Tiglath-Pileser I was NOT the most powerful King of that period.
But some of you may not accept that syllogism. I recommended the book to OP because it offers good insight into the development of early religions. For those willing to read it with an open mind.
This seems like a valid objection … to a claim Jaynes never made. Sure, the Fertile Crescent region was already tightly connected by the Bronze Age so breakdown could be coincident. But he describes ancient civilizations of the Americas going through cycles: build-up of civilization with the associated “bicameral mind;” followed by breakdown of religion and civilization; followed eventually by another build-up. At least two thousand years after The Odyssey, the Incas still had bicameral mentality; Jaynes argues this is what made them easy prey to a vastly inferior armed force.
