I was reading something about Orphic cults, and they reminded me a bit of fanboys, and about the little idol statues Roman people had on their alter with family specific deities, which reminded me of action figures. So I started to wonder - we modern people take our fan obsessions about fiction and sports and celebrities pretty seriously ofttimes, but for the most part no one thinks they are actual supernatural phenomena. So historically, have all followers of religion, myth, and legends taken everything literally, or were some societies actually aware of the nature of things and just enjoying them on the level of fiction/celebrity/entertainment?
From what I’ve read about the ancient world (I’d provide a cite but it’s mostly books- Karen Armstrong’s are especially good) they seem to have had their fundamentalist class who truly did believe that [insert deity here] controlled rain and crops and the like, and they also had the more intellectual “myth as metaphor” class. The writings of Aristotle and Plato and many of the other ancient Greeks most definitely show a lack of fundamentalism and even a monotheistic tone (not the Judeo-Christian ‘God’ but more “the ultimate truth behind the tales of Olympos and its competitors”), but it’s also true people paid fortunes to oracles and for ritual sacrifices that they almost surely wouldn’t have done if they’d thought it was just symbolism.
In the late Hellenic and Roman world there were many henotheists who served a particular god/goddess or set of gods/goddesses but acknowledge the existence of others. The ancient Hebrews were more henotheistic than monotheistic as evidenced by their forever having to be reminded “We don’t sacrifice our kids to Moleck” or fashioning golden calves or “we don’t do sex rites in our religion”, etc…
What I’ve wondered and perhaps somebody can answer is how it was possible to worship one god/goddess/set of [etc.] and acknoweldge others when the mythologies and cosmologies contradicted each other. Did they believe the world had multiple creations?
There are definitely Hindus (a term much broader than Christians) who take the gods very seriously and others who see them as semiotic narratives and don’t really believe there’s an elephant headed or six armed deity out there watching over them. As with the ancient world and as with Christianity education and socioeconomic class seem to have some influence over how literally Hindus take their religion as well (though on the individual level all bets are off: in the southern U.S. I’ve known millionaire Pentecostals and completely broke and barely literate atheists).
So, in other words, it seems like people have always been pretty much all over the map in how seriously they took their myth and religion.
no idea.
but i love the concept of playing with my little god of war and have him attack my little god of the sea with a little help from one of my little household gods.
o! what pleasure it would bring.
Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!
I think the household items you’d find on a Roman lararium were more “very minor divine beings BUT because they’re very minor not so many people worship them thus they’re ours”- kind of like having a watchdog who’s all yours versus a police department who may or may not help you.
If you haven’t already you should watch the DVD version of the HBO series ROME for the feature called All Roads Lead to Rome. It’s like an academic version of Pop-Up video- a little textbox will come onto the screen and tell you about a particular ritual or deity (or other aspect of Roman life) being shown, and it’s EXTREMELY informative and well researched- so much so that I bought the DVDs strictly for that feature. It goes into religion a lot, particularly the lararium and the minor deities. (Example: in the later episodes Vorenus’s sister-in-law becomes an acolyte of Orbona, which is mentioned but if you’re like me and I suspect most people you don’t really know who Orbona was; the ARLTR feature tells you she was a very specialized fertility goddess- her specialty was giving new children to women who had borne children but lost them [not necessarily to death- slavery, separation, disowning, etc.]).
There were many highly specialized deities who most people had no need to worship- those invoked for a particular disease perhaps, or the god/dess/es of a particular river or type of tree that was important to you. Sometimes they were aspects of other gods- Athena for example being the aspect of the goddess Pallas as patroness of Athens (hence the name- other Greeks knew her as Pallas).
Some gods were created by men in written history but still worshipped. When Ptolemy founded (or rather took over and greatly expanded the power and prestige of) Alexandria in Egypt he essentially custom ordered a religion that created a new deity. In Egyptian mythology the god Osiris (or Osara) once took refuge in the body of a bull (Apis), and this incarnation (not in the reincarnation since- more possession) was known to Egyptian priests as ‘Osara-Apis’, and there was a cult/temple near Alexandria that worshipped this particular aspect of Osiris with rituals involving bulls and other commemorations of this part of his myth, which was called Osara-Apis and today is more often transliterated as Serapis (or Sarapis, or Osarapis- many different variants and no standard transliteration).
When Ptolemy “reconstructed” this deity he was no longer a bull-god but a human in form and he was merged with aspects of Zeus (Alexander- the city’s namesake and founder and patron- having been worshiped as an incarnation of Zeus), Poseidon (Alexandria being a sea port and needing lots of help there) and many other lesser deities both Egyptian and Greek. His worship still involved bulls, basically residual payments to Osiris, and his priests basically hooked into teh Osara-Apis rites and made them more Hellenic. Serapis’s temple, the Serapeum (so called for the same phonetic reasons the temple of the Muses was called the Mus-eum) included the royal palace (which was about a quarter of the city) and the Library of Alexandria and thus he was one of the most prestigious gods in the ancient world even though he’d been about 90% invented (or reinvented) by Ptolemy for political reasons.
For the most part, it seems like ancient people assumed that gods had specific areas of influence. For example, it’s said that Athena’s temple burned down only because she was away witnessing the birth of Alexander the Great. The Biblical stories in Daniel of the lion’s den and the fiery furnace were not remarkable because of the miracles (everyone’s god could do miracles) but because God could do those miracles outside of Israel and in the territory of another god. That was the impressive part.
I’m not exactly sure how they reconciled cosmologies or mythological history, but there was a lot of borrowing going on. It would be easy to say that another religion got the details wrong when yours had them right.
Couldn’t a lot of this be explained by social norms? I know a lot of people who spend $40 a year to cut down a fir tree for the gods even though they don’t believe in anything.
Or people who spend $60,000 for a fancy logo on a car that would otherwise cost $20,000. I’m sure we can all come up with our own favorite example of conspicious consumption, and I’m sure one could in any society.
Well, there were also those tricks God pulled off in Egypt - I’d say that they constitute even more prominent examples.
I’ve wondered about this and I’ve thought about starting a thread on it. I remember being a bit dubious when I heard about Cloacina, Roman goddess of the sewer. Did people really believe there was a goddess of the sewer, or was she something more akin to a mascot? I was thinking that perhaps future archaeologists or historians might write articles about Mr. Clean, the Kitchen Floor God.
I think Sampiro’s answers are thoughtful and track my understanding of history. There is an episode described by Thucydides where some hooligans have gone through Athens and damaged all the Hermes statues. (The implication being that they removed the penii of these fertility idols). The old wags are furious. Yet the description of the furiousity, even though it comes through as how could people be so stupidly disrespectful, deeply implies that the idols themselves are foolish but removing the phalluses has a humorous element.
Upshot, Alcibiades gets the blame. Socrates gets the blame for Alcibiades being one of his famous students. Alcibiades generally gets the short end of the stick in Thucydides reports. Plato’s usage of Weird Al as a character in The Symposium comes off slightly more flattering.
Julian Jaynes’ book offers a very comprehensive and enlightening treatment of this. Plato lived long after the “Breakdown” period, when gods’ literalness declined. (Jaynes’ views are so extreme and iconoclastic that his book has been unfortunately ignored.)
A question I have related to this topic concerns modern Buddhists and the stories about the new-born Buddha walking, with lotus leaves arising in his footsteps. Many Christians believe virgin birth, etc. Do educated Buddhists believe in the lotus leaves?
Oh my god, I just read a story by Merritt where the Buddha footprints were actually a plot aspect!
I really don’t have an answer, but I honestly don’t understand how people can believe things like that. I was under the impression that the original Buddha [Siddhartha Gautama?] was a mundane prince that got enlightened, he wasn’t born enlightened … or do I have even that wrong?
I think most religions end up getting observed on several different levels.
The first would be a folk-level. This is where your family gods and roadside shrines come in to play. Honestly, I think that often stuff on this level is not entirely believed in. It’s more like how we’ll throw a penny in a wishing well for good luck or pray for our favorite sports teams to win. We know on some level God isn’t going to favor your team just because you asked. But really, believing or disbelieving on this level is besides the point. Most of this stuff is just stuff you do because humans seem to have a need for ritual. We find this around the world.
Then things become slightly more organized. Shamans or priests get involved. Religious orders begin. You start having regular meetings and a power structure. This is where people start believing in stuff. This is the level where
fundamentalism starts to make sense to people. Monotheism seems particularly well suited to this level.
Finally, things become highly organized and esoteric, really delving into the concept of what it means to exist. Ironically, I believe that actual belief levels off at this point, as serious scholars of religion often eventually come to recognize the metaphorical aspects of religion. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if most of the highest religious authorities do not actually believe much of their religions. This is the level where religion and philosophy merge, and we start talking about stuff so trippy that nobody really can get a full handle on it. We start getting people who can alter their brain chemistry through trance states. Stuff get weird, and ultimately too weird for literal belief.
People can exist on all three levels of this religion at the same time, or can skip some steps. For example, I think most of Hinduism is concentrated on the first and third levels. It is a collection of folk practices as well as an extremely cerebral and esoteric look into the meaning of existence. Buddhism would be the same, with an emphasis on the third level. Monotheistic religions have an affinity for the second level, perhaps because monotheism is so well suited for social controls.
Doubtful. Buddhists in general are pretty aware of the metaphorical nature of religion.
The Romans also talked about the goddess “Roma”, the personification of the city, and the army had ceremonies worshipping Discipline. I am of the opinion that this was more along the lines of our reverence for Liberty. An allegorical figure, rather than a literal deity. On the other hand, if you grow up watching ceremonies about the allegorical figures, the line might become blurred.
Some books I have read suggest that the Romans may have believed in the household gods more than in the state gods. They grew up watching their parents make offerings to the lares and penates. Jupiter, Minerva, etc, were more of an abstraction, a set of household gods for the State.
There’s not really a biblical-literalist tradition in Judaism today. There are Jews who read the Bible literally, called Karaites, but they are a tiny minority. Most mainstream Jews don’t have a problem with the idea that parts of our Bible are to be read allegorically, not literally.
You’ve never had to deal with a sewer backup, have you? I have, and I would have welcomed a Sewer Goddess to pray to if I thought that would have helped.
One problem here is that there’s not just one kind of Buddhists that all believe the same thing and think of Buddha in the same way. There are Buddhists who think of Buddha as a person who became enlightened. Then there are other Buddhists who think of Buddha as something more like an incarnation of a god.
Well, yeah, until there are lightning bolts flying everywhere, the house is full of vengeful waves, and your cute little household god is disembowling the paper boy.
I’m impressed and pleased that Jaynes got mentioned.
I wouldn’t call him “extreme.” It’s a whole different understanding, and a compelling one. It explains so much, really, that never made sense to me otherwise. I count that in the handful of most important books I ever read.
Hah! This reminds me of the Fear Demon from that Buffy episode.
Illustration in book of fear demon caption: “Actual size”