There’s a lot of information about the Greek and roman gods themselves, but I’m having difficulty finding out when they were worshipped; I realize that the Greek gods are a bit older but I suspect there’s a fair amount of overlap timeline-wise.
The only thing at all relative to this that I’ve found so far states that the body of mythology was fully developed by 700 B.C. and mentioned three works of writing about the gods from then. I assume this isn’t close to the beginning of either culture’s worship of those gods given that’s when literature about them dates back to - the gods must have been well known by that point. Were people like Euripides, Sophocles and Homer writing from the perspective of “about our Gods” or “Gods we used to believe in”?
Anyway, does anyone know (approximately) when the Greek gods were widely worshipped and about when they stopped being worshipped? Was the end before or after Christianity?
I would quarrel with this last statement, but from a more neutral perspective let’s just say that authorities differ on (1) how authenitic the original data so alleging was and (2) the interpretation of that data.
In more general terms, both the Greek and Roman gods are, for the most part, continuities of deities that can be reconstructed for the common Indo-European religious system (some parts of which survive, albeit in a dramatically different evolved form, as Hinduism). So they go back, in one form or another, to about 4000 BCE if not earlier.
These were polytheistic systems without a single central religious authority (for Greece and for early Rome, anyway), so there was undoubtedly a variety of practices. I can recommend books on the subject though I’m afraid I don’t know any good websites. Try Ken Dowden’s Religion and the Romans and Walter Burkert’s Greek Religion.
As far as survivals, it is generally agreed that many pagan practices survived into Christianity. Whether they were understood as pre- or non-Christian by practitioners is one really sticky point; whether we should now analytically understand them as non-Christian is another sticking point. The institution of Pope has its origins in the pre-Christian Roman pontifex maximus, the top flamen of Rome; does that mean the Pope is Pagan?
The old gods continued to be important to Christian writers and artists right up until modern times, usually as allegorical figures, but there is evidence that at least some of the pagan philosophers also saw them this way. It certainly didn’t survive as an independent religious system in Greece or Rome much beyond the fourth or fifth century, though there may have been pockets in rural areas as late as the sixth. Related Indo-European pagan systems lasted much longer in northern and eastern Europe.
There is a contemporary religion, Neo-Paganism (to use the broadest term), for whom it is very important to believe that they are engaged in a revival of ancient practices which did survive, albeit tenuously, as folklore and secret practices in the keeping of European women. The claim is unlikely but unprovable, and personally I’d like it to be true. But this means that the OP’s question is just as fraught in some quarters as the evolution / creation question is in heartland America these days, and you should be prepared to “scrutinize with an intense scrute” the claims of all sides. My own bias is as a mythologist who studies the traditions from an academic perspective.
Remembering bits and pieces here, so I can’t be as thorough as I’d like.
Classical paganism had long been in a decline by the time Constantine took power. Christianity spread like wildfire, especially in the East, and while the devout will say it was because of the miraculous promises of its message, it was more likely due to the fact that the old religion seemed to have lost its way. Many other cults circulated around the empire, the most notable being Mithraism.
Theodosius outlawed the classical religion around 390, although pockets of adherents to the old faith remained here and there: when Benedict the Great arrived at Monte Cassino to found the Benedictine order, in the mid 6th century, he found the villagers all turned out for a festival of Apollo. This makes sense since the very word ‘pagan’ comes from pagani, or ‘rural people’.
As for pockets of paganism persiting to the 18th century, I think here it would be impossible to distinguish between authentic adherents, and those doing it just for shock value, or as part of a secret society ritual.
People still say, “By Jove”. The Christian festival of Easter is oddly near the spring equinox. The Christian festival of Christmas is oddly near the midwinter solstice. Are there similar parallels in Islam and other modern faiths?
Incidentally, not all or even most Neo-Pagans believe that we’re practising traditions that have descended in an unbroken line. Many are quite content to reconstruct traditions that have passed away, or work out traditions for ourselves that suit modern life.
Ovid, at least, seemed to regard the gods as interesting fictional characters, the same way we might regard Superman or Luke Skywalker. His great collection of myths, the Metamorphoses, begins with the line “I prate of ancient poets’ monstrous lies”.
I’d wager that *most *of us, in fact, will be very glad to admit that we’re not practicing in an unbroken line if asked outright. But our *mythology *is often that we’re practicing “The Old Religion”. It has spiritual and psychological significance, not historical accuracy. It’s pretty similar to Christians who are not Biblical literalists, but hold the Bible holy nonetheless. It’s one of those things which doesn’t make sense if you’re not a part of it, and makes perfect sense if you are.
I have had a couple of people insist to me that they really are following the traditions of their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmothers, passed down in secret oral tradition. My response is usually an outward “Oh, how nice…” and an inward :rolleyes: and then I go find someone not crazy to talk to instead.
No, it doesn’t. The first line of Metamorphoses is:
That line (or one similiar to it) is burried in the third book of Amores (the chapter called “The Flooded River”):
A lover is attempting to go to his girl, but is stopped by a flooded river for which there is no crossing. He laments that he doesn’t have Perseus’s winged sandals or Ceres’s chariot, then laments further that neither ever existed. Of course, directly following that, he tries to persuade the river to return to its normal depth for a lover’s sake, citing mythological precedents for when rivers did just that.
Quite right. To matt_mcl, WhyNot, and other Neo-Pagans on the board, I’m sorry if my post was glib, and I meant no disrespect. It was too hastily written. My experience agrees with what the two of you have posted. Some do believe in the unbroken tradition, but these days most (though not all) people I have met accept it as mythologically important but not literally true.
You’ll find Greeks and Romans from every period that believe in th gods and all their legends, side by side with those who think them merely symbolic of a more austere supernatural world, and with those who are atheistic. Just like today, in fact. Plato was pretty damned skeptical, but that didn’t stop him from asking for a sacrifice to Asclepius at his death (although that was probably a clever bit of snark) The rites of the various gods were celebrated from antiquity through the Roman Empire and beyond. Anthropologists were recording traditional practices that probably went back to Roman times as recently as the 19th century. (See Chadwick Hansen’s book “Witchcraft at Salem” for some cites)
If you asked an ancient Roman or Greek which religion they practiced, what would they say? “The Old Religion” wasn’t old then. Certainly they knew of other religious systems What were the names for the state religions of Greece and Rome?
By the way, besides Neo-Pagans living in other parts of the world, there’s currently, in Greece, an attempt to revive the ancient Greek religion, out of a sense of being the heirs thereof. This is controversial both because the Greek state tightly controls religion (and has a distinct preference for the Greek Orthodoxy practised by 99% of the population) and because they would like to use ancient sites such as temples.
A short time ago, a small group of followers went to a temple site and performed a ritual there. The action was apparently technically illegal, but nobody got in trouble.
Precisely because saying “By Jehovah” is considered blasphemous. IOW it’s done precisely because nobody believes in Jove. People use “Crikey” or “Jiminy Cricket” and “Gordon Bennet” for exactly the same purposes, ie they sound like Christian blasphemies but actually aren’t.
Nothing odd about it, it is the result of a series of deliberate choice on the part of either Gods or men depending on your viewpoint. Passover coincided with the equiniox as a deliberate slap for the Egyptian sun god, IOW killing the Egyptian firstborn on the holiest day of Ra was a deliberate chow to prove how powerless they were, and that remains true whether the event atcually happened or not.
Jesus’ execution coincided with passover for complicated reasons including sticking it to the Jewish orthodoxy and making it clear that Christainaity was the success to to Judaism, and once agin that is true whether the events are real or not.
IOW easter coincides with the solstice not because of coincidence but because of a deliberate usurping of bronze age Egyptian solstice events. A deliberate effort at all stages to say “We have usurped the Pagan gods”.
Of course Easter by name and by the rituals we now associate with it is just a retouched verison of a pagan ritual devoted to the godess Oestre, but that hasnothing to do with the timming of Jesus’ death or the date of passover which were set thousands of years earlier.
That at least is because Christmas was a deliberate attempt to co-opt the Pagan midwinter rituals.
Wouldn’t Pantheons have largely been formed out of the regional “patron saint” gods of the important cities of a region? (That’s a question not an answer.)
For the ancient Greek, the question would be difficult to phrase, since there was no equivalent term for “religion” as a set of beliefs about the supernatural. Generally, the worship of Greek divinities was a cultural validation; praying to Athena meant praying for the fortunes of Athens, her city.
Superstition developed as a way to offer people some control over the forces of nature. Thus, along with the traditional gods, you often hear of people praying to abstractions like Chance or Victory. This likewise made divination a major component of religious practice–hence the existence of places like the Oracle of Delphi–but it seems the more educated Greeks took a dim view of this practice (e.g. Thucydides’ well-known account of the plague of Athens is especially hard on fools who put their trust in oracles).
Finally, there were many religious groups we would characterize as cults, usually built around some hero-figure (the myth of Dionysus is an example) or a collection of secret/exotic knowledge (the Eleusian mysteries). These may be closer to what we think of a religion today: They offered a communal experience, mysticism, and in many cases promised something very specific about the afterlife.
In Rome, the same elements are present up to the time of the empire, with perhaps a greater emphasis on supersition/augury; it is on these latter grounds alone that most of the priestly offices were instituted. For example, you constantly read in Livy’s early history about some portent that somene observed (a sudden collapse of a building, a stroke of lightning), followed by a consultation with the priests and some ritual act of purification (e.g. the appointment of a dictator for a sdingle day to drive a nail into the wall of a temple). This sense of religion is clearly not much more than organized superstition.
However, there was one key difference in that the Romans practiced ancestor worship, usually organized by the families/tribes of the old Roman society (ancestor worship existed in Greece as well, but not to the same extent). By the time of the empire, ancestor worship gave birth to the cult of the imperial family, and this perhaps is close to what we would consider a state religion today. It was this test–making public sacrifice to the cult of the emperor–which the younger Pliny used to test the Christians in his province, and though the penalty for refusing this was probably death, even here he gave them plenty of chances to get it right.
I’d quibble with this only very slightly - as late as the reign of Justinian, Athens was still “the intellectual factory of late paganism.” The Neoplatonist Academy there was officially shut down in 529, but pagan philosophers were apparently still lecturing in Alexandria until the opening of the seventh century. So there was some, very limited urban survival that late. But the general trend that it was a largely rural holdover is quite correct.
Again pretty much correct, but it is worth pointing out that as above that the very late Neoplatonist movement, reacting to Christianity, did produce a somewhat more regularized creed of sorts.