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The Canon · No. 020

Ancient Greek Religion

Hellenism; Olympian religion

c.1600 BCE – c.500 CE · Classical Mediterranean · Revived / Reconstructed · Greece, Aegean, Anatolia, Magna Graecia

III. THE AXIAL AGE — c.900 – 200 BCE

How many

Extinct as a state religion. Modern Hellenism (Hellenic Ethnic Religion) was legally recognised in Greece in 2017 and has perhaps 2,000 formal and up to 100,000 sympathetic adherents.

Who began it

No founder, no scripture, no creed, no church. Greek religion was orthopraxy without orthodoxy: what mattered was performing the rites, not what you privately believed. There was no word for religion and no professional priesthood in the modern sense; priesthoods were civic offices, sometimes sold.

What it is for

To maintain reciprocity with powerful, capricious beings who could ruin a harvest, a voyage or a city. Greek piety is fundamentally an exchange: do ut des, I give so that you may give.

What it worships

The Twelve Olympians — Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter, Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Ares, Aphrodite, Hephaestus, Hermes, and Dionysus or Hestia. Plus Hades, chthonic powers, heroes (dead humans receiving cult at their tombs), nymphs, rivers, and the Fates, to whom even Zeus is subject.

What it holds

The gods are immortal, powerful, beautiful and not morally exemplary — they lie, rape, cheat and take sides in wars. Greek religion does not ask you to imitate them; it asks you not to provoke them. Hubris, overreaching one's mortal station, is the cardinal offence, answered by nemesis. Fate stands above the gods. Miasma, ritual pollution from bloodshed, birth or death, is contagious and must be cleansed regardless of intent — which is why Oedipus is ruined for acts he did not know he was committing.

What it does

Sacrifice at an open-air altar, with the thigh bones and fat burned for the gods and the meat eaten by the community, so that a sacrifice was also the main occasion on which ordinary Greeks ate meat. Libation. Votive offerings. Oracles, above all Delphi, where the Pythia answered on Apollo's behalf. Mystery cults at Eleusis, offering a better lot after death in exchange for initiation and silence. Festivals: Panathenaia, City Dionysia (from which theatre emerges as a religious act), and the Olympic Games, held for Zeus every four years from 776 BCE.

After death

Grim by default and improved by initiation. Homer's Hades is a witless twilight where the shades gibber; Achilles tells Odysseus he would rather be a hired labourer among the living than king of all the dead. There are three special destinations: Elysium for a handful of heroes, Tartarus for a handful of exceptional offenders (Tantalus, Sisyphus, Ixion), and the ordinary grey remainder for everyone else. The soul crosses the Styx with Charon and must be paid, which is why the dead were buried with a coin. The mystery religions — Eleusinian, Orphic, Dionysiac — sold the alternative, and their popularity is the measure of how bleak the default was.

Its texts

No scripture. The nearest equivalents are Homer (Iliad, Odyssey), Hesiod (Theogony, Works and Days), the Homeric Hymns, and the tragedians, whose plays were performed as part of the cult of Dionysus.

Its branches

Civic cult; Orphism; Pythagoreanism; the Eleusinian, Dionysiac and Samothracian mysteries; philosophical theology (Stoic, Platonic, Epicurean); later Neoplatonism.

Of note

Greek religion supplies the vocabulary of Western literature and psychology, and almost none of its theology. What survived was the stories, not the cult.

Its timeline

  1. c.1600–1100 BCE Mycenaean religion; Linear B tablets already name Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Dionysus and Athena.
  2. c.800–700 BCE Homer and Hesiod. Herodotus later says these two gave the Greeks their gods' genealogies, forms and functions.
  3. 776 BCE Traditional first Olympiad.
  4. c.600 BCE Eleusinian Mysteries absorbed into the Athenian state calendar.
  5. 399 BCE Socrates executed on charges including impiety and introducing new gods.
  6. 415 BCE The mutilation of the herms and the profanation of the Mysteries — a religious scandal that helps wreck the Sicilian expedition.
  7. c.300 BCE Philosophical schools (Stoic, Epicurean) increasingly displace civic religion among the educated.
  8. 393 CE Theodosius I abolishes the Olympic Games and bans public pagan sacrifice.
  9. 529 CE Justinian closes the Neoplatonic Academy in Athens — a symbolic terminus, though the school's activity had already dwindled.
  10. 2017 CE Greece grants Hellenism legal recognition as a known religion.

Sources

Not yet checked against named sources. This entry is the house's reading; until it is checked, treat each claim as unverified. Correct it, with a source.

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