The Ancient Greeks believed their Gods resided on Mount Olympus… but this seems an easily tested claim by climbing and exploring the mountain. Especially since they thought their Gods were up there, that must have given them plenty of motivation to try to climb it. How could such an easily falsifiable belief stand and become such an integral part of their society?
My research which included talking to a college professor of mythology has found that most Greeks (and the Romans) did not actually believe that their was a God names Zeus (or Jupiter) that “literally” threw the lightning they saw.
This surprised me a little because (and not to turn this into a religious discussion) I used to always tell my heavy religious friends that “5000 years from now, humans will look back upon your God(s) you used to explain the things you do not understand, with the same eye that now looks at Hades and Zeus”.
But if indeed my college professor was correct, most ancient civilizations did not literally translate their gods in that way.
Would love to read others thoughts.
It seems untrue because they built temples and huge monuments for those gods, major undertakings to please them and gain their favor. I doubt they would do that if they didn’t take their mythology that seriously.
You were saying?
I love touchdown Jesus the best.
They took their religion seriously, but the key word in the professor’s statement is “literally.” What he meant was that when they saw lightning, they didn’t believe that Zeus was up in the sky personally throwing the bolts. The ancients weren’t quite as simplistic in their beliefs as we sometimes think of them as being.
Your point? They build cathedrals and megachurches to worship, like the ancient greeks did. That was my point. That their building is evidence that they took their religion/mythology seriously.
I guess it is similar how members of today’s religions cherry pick what they like from their religion and conveniently don’t scrutinize the rest (that is utterly ridiculous and conflicting with their naive view of their religion).
sorry, that was more to chargerrich’s point.
It’s all sky fairies to me.
Surely you don’t think that Zues, Hera and company are going to just sit around waiting for uninvited mortals to drop in unannounced, do you?
Is it possible that the ancient Greeks could have believed that they lived up on Mt. Olympus but that mere mortals wouldn’t be able to perceive them (unless, of course, they wanted to be perceived)?
Zev Steinhardt
Or they believed that you could climb Mt Olympus to see if the gods really lived there, and when you did they would punish you for your hubris, as happened to Bellerophon. You don’t just march into Olympus without an invitation unless you’re immune to lightning bolts.
Given that the Greek stories generally have the gods operating in disguise, I don’t see what evidence someone could expect to find up there. It’s likely that the true believers would take lack of evidence as proof. “Aha! Only the gods could hide so well that you wouldn’t find *anyone *up there!”
Given how cranky, random, and mean spirited those gods were I’d bet the vast majority of people who took those stories even remotely seriously couldn’t have been paid enough to just drop in uninvited.
It wouldn’t have been that easy to falsify, as Mount Olympus has 52 peaks. Also, it’s not clear how many ancient Greeks literally believed their gods lived there.
Incidentally, it’s not at all clear when Mount Olympus was first climbed. Otzi the iceman was found at a higher altitude, so it wasn’t out of reach.
Look at all the “temples and huge monuments” we’ve built to Santa Claus. Why haven’t we ever traveled to the North Pole to see that there is no Santa Claus there?
And Christians built,and still build, huge cathedrals and the like, yet few of them were surprised when the first airplanes and hot air balloons failed to find, God, Jesus and angels up there sitting on clouds. Nevertheless, they still sometimes depicted them that way.
One doesn’t just walk into Olympus…
Barbara Tuchman in *A Distant Mirror *quotes a bishop from the 1300’s complaining that there were people who did not believe there was a god, that we live and die and that’s it, just like the donkeys and horses. It’s just that it’s not a particularly good point of view to speak loudly about in a society where heretics or dissenters are burned at the stake. The fact that some people were willing to tell that to a clergyman’s face suggests a number of people held that view in private. The same cynical view has probably been with us as long as religion.
Again, was there any “good book” of Olympian tales, or was it all oral tradition and such, how they impacted other stories like the Illiad, etc.? I haven’t heard there was an orthodoxy and fight over heresy, etc.
You’re defining ‘real’ through a twenty-first-century perspective, in which there’s only one way for things to be real. If it’s not real the same way your shoe is real, then it’s not real at all. Therefore, if I go up Mount Olympus and can’t see any gods, it necessarily follows that they’re not there!
The Ancient Greeks didn’t see the world that way at all. It was perfectly possible for something to be real and yet be visible and tangible only some of the time, or only to some people. For them, there were two different forms of reality: logos, which is the literal reality (the one you’re talking about), and mythos, which is mythic reality. For a lot of ancient civilisations, the two coexisted and were both necessary without being identical. The gods weren’t ‘real’ in the same way that your shoe is real - they were real in an entirely different and no less valid way. If you go up Mount Olympus and don’t see any gods, that absolutely proves that they’re not real in the logos sense, but you knew that anyway. It doesn’t tell you anything at all about whether or not they’re real in the mythos sense.
Link (I’m sure there are better ones, but just on a very fast Google): http://surge.ods.org/idle_religion/mythoslogos.htm
Plato has Socrates offering respect for the various gods throughout the dialogues. But it is also equally clear that Plato thought ultimate reality were his “forms” and didn’t really think the personifications of the gods had as much reality as the forms, and it is really just lip service about the gods.Socrates claimed to believe the gods, but one of the charges at his trial was that he didn’t really and taught that to his students. (His students included world class jerks like Alcibiades.)
Being an open atheist back in the day could get you killed. I suspect that there were just as many atheists, but that they were in the closet.
“I know real real from drug real…”
-Beef, Phantom of the Paradise