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Excerpts from John Gould,
"On Making Sense of Greek Religion,"
from Greek Religion and Society, P.E. Easterling & J.V. Muir eds.
p. 2: I want to put forward a description of Greek religion which sees it as constituting a complex and quite subtle statement about what the world is like and a set of responses for dealing with that world, and in doing so I shall make use of one or two analogies and assumption which I had better being by making clear.
My first point is negative: it will not be helpful, I think, to start any enquiry into Greek religious ideas by drawing a distinction (whether implicit or explicit) between valid or correct ways of thinking about the world, on the one hand, and invalid ones, on the other; between 'mystical', 'magical', or 'superstitious' thinking (which is mistaken) and 'scientific' or 'common-sense' (which is true). By 'ways of thinking about the world', I mean the ways in which we approach such questions as questions of cause and effect ('Why /How do things happen?') and of effective action in and on the world around us ('How can we cause this or that to happen?'). I am suggesting that we should not simply rule out religious answers to such questions as 'unscientific,' proved wrong by observation and common-sense: the analogy wich approaches religion as a /p.3: sort of pseudo-science outmoded by the progress of true science is one that, in one form or another, has dogged and hampered the study of primitive [sic] religion....
/p. 4: For the truth is that systems of religious belief, in any culture in which they are living things, are not only self-justifying (and thus impossible to disprove by empirical observation...), but also all-pervasive within the culture, so that there is no corner of life that is not lived in their terms: it is not possible to be a member of the society and think in wholly different categories. If we want an analogy to help us understand religion, one that will direct our attention positively to what is important in religious systems, we should turn not to the concept of a pseudo-science and pseudo-technology but to language. Like language, religion is a cultural phenomenon, a phenomenon of the group (there are no 'private' religions, any more than there are 'private' languages, except by some metaphorical devaluation of the two terms), and like language, any religion is a system of signs enabling communication both between members of the group in interpreting and responding to experience of the external world and in the individual's inner discourse with himself as to his own behaviour, emotional and private....
/p. 5: If Greek religion, then, is among other things a way of representing and interpreting (even, at the limit, of constructing) the external world and man's experience of himself, we can best approach it as a mode of experience, a response to life as lived by ancient Greeks. In particular, as a system of responses to those aspects of experience which threatened to overturn the sense of an intelligible order in terms of which men lived....
Greek religion offered...both a framework of explanation for human experience and a system of responses to all that is wayward, uncanny and a threat to the perception of order in that experience --a language for dealing with the world....
p. 7: Greek religion is not 'revealed' as Christianity is; there is no sacred text claiming the status of the 'word of God', nor even of His prophets; no Ten Commandments, no creed, no doctrinal councils, no heresies, no wars of religion in which 'true believers' confront the 'infidel' or the heretic. Central terms of our religious experience such as 'grace', 'sin', and 'faith' cannot be rendered without disfigurement into the ancient Greek of the classical period: the Greek term, theous nomizein, means not 'believe in the gods', but 'acknowledge' them, that is, pray to them, sacrifice to them, build them temples, make them the object of cult and ritual. There is never an assumption of divine omnipotence, nor of a divine creation of the universe, except in philosophical 'theology', nor any consistent belief in divine omnipresence. There is no church, no organized body persisting through time comprising those with dogmatic authority, able to define divinity and rule on what is correct or incorrect in religious belief. Men of religion in ancient Greece are of two kinds, those with ritual functions (hiereis, meaning primarily 'sacrificers') and custodians of religious tradition and customary law on the other hand (that is men such as the Athenian exegetai and the hierophants of the Eleusinian mysteries), and, on the other, men with a god-given and peculiar closeness to divinity, with a special insight into or power to communicate with the divine, that is manteis, dream-interpreters and such figures as the Pythia (Apollo's prophetess) at Delphi. All these are indeed essential parts of the fabric of Greek religion..., but they do not constitute a church; there is no system of relationships joining them together and making them conscious of a common stance or a common ideology; there is no 'training for the priesthood'.
All this means that, for all its weight of tradition (not less evident in ancient Greek religion than in other religions), Greek religion remains fundamentally improvisatory. By which I mean /p. 8: that though the response to experience crystallizes, on the one hand as ritual, on the other as myth, and both involve repetition and transmission from generation to generation, there is always room for new improvisation, for the introduction of new cults and new observances: Greek religion is not theologically fixed and stable, and it has no tradition of exclusion or finality: it is an open, not a closed system. There are no true gods and false, merely powers known and acknowledged since time immemorial, and new powers, newly experienced as active among men and newly acknowledged in worship....
The same absence of finality is characteristic of Greek myth. If there is one reason beyond all others why we have no tradition of religious myth in our culture, it is that the Christian 'myth' of the Old and New Testament is once for all an unchanging and unchangeable revelation of divine truth in its entirety; all that is left for improvisation in the face of new experience is hagiography and martyrology, the creation of new intermediaries, new saints and new martyrs in the Christian tradition. By contrast, Greek-myth is open-ended; a traditional story can be re-told, told with new meanings, new incidents, new persons, even with a formal reversal of old meanings.... The improvisatory character of Greek myth is not just a literary fact, not only the source of its perennial vitality in literature, but also the guarantee of its centrality in Greek religion. It is not bound to forms hardened and stiffened by canonical authority, but mobile, fluent and free to respond to a changing experience of the world.
Ritual and myth, I am arguing, are both modes of religious response to experience in a world in which 'chaos', the threat posed /p. 9: by events which seem to be unintelligible or which outrage moral feeling, is always close....
/p. 14: In the first book of the Iliad, the priest of Apollo, Chryses, turns to this god in order to seek revenge for the public humiliation inflicted on him by Agamemnon before the whole Greek army. This is a private speech but it is (seemingly) uttered alound and it /p.15: observes the formalities of a public and collective address to divinity:
| 'Hear me, lord of the silver bow who set your power above Chryse and Killa the sacrsanct, who are lord in strength over Tenedos, Smintheus, if ever it pleased your heart that I built your temple, if ever it pleased you that I burnt all the rich thigh pieces of bull, of goats, then bring to pass this wish I pray for: let your arrows make the Danaans pay for my tears shed.' -Homer, Iliad, 1.36-42 trs. Lattimore |
Two assumptions underlie this prayer, and the language of Greek prayer at large: one is that a divinity must be addressed with precision and courtesy, by formal titles and by rehearsal of his powers and attributes (otherwise he may not hear the prayer); the second is that he who utters the prayer must establish and point to ties, bonds of obligation that exist (or will exist) between god and worshipper. Behind the second lies a more fundamental assumption still, one that is central to ancient Greek culture: the assumption of reciprocity.... The assumption is that any action will be met by a matching and balancing reaction (good for good, evil for evil), and therefore the implication that divinity will respond in kind and reciprocate human action, for good or ill, is one that locates the divine powers squarely within the conceptual framework by means of which ancient Greeks understood the ordering of their world: the divine powers are not anomalous....
[Many of the works of art that have come down to us from Greek art were votive offerings. They were thus intended for the same reciprocal exchange between god and mortal. A good example is presented by the so-called Mantiklos Apollo from the early seventh century. On the thighs of the figure is written the following dedication: "Mantiklos offers me as a tithe to Apollo of the silver bow; do you, Phoibos, give some pleasing favor in return."]
/ p. 16: The central ritual of Greek religion...is the offering to the god, and its most characteristic form animal sacrifice. The different forms of animal sacrifice are complex, with significant variations dependent on the god or gods who are to receive the sacrifice....
The animal victim, which will be a domesticated animal, goat, /p. 17: sheep or ox, is festively prepared for the ritual slaughter; if the occasion is grand enough, its horns may be gilded and the whole animal will be groomed for the ritual. It must seem to go willingly and joyfully to its death....The place of slaughter is ritually marked out as sacred by the carrying round in procession of the sacred basket and by the sprinkling of water over the participants and the victim; the basket contains barley grain, which is thrown at the victim by all the participants, and the sacrificial knife is kept out of sight of the grain. The sprinkling of the water and the casting of the grain is the 'beginning' of the ritual, and these are followed by a further step in this 'beginning', by the priest cutting a few hairs from the animal's forehead. Its head is then pulled back and raised towards the sky and its throat cut. Up to this point tbe participants have mainted a ritual silence; now at the moment of slaughter the women present must scream the ololyge. What follows is not less strange. The animal is skinned and butchered; the entrails (heart, lungs, liver and kidneys- the splancha) are removed, skewered and roasted separately, while the remainder the tail, gall-bladder and above all the thigh-bones are wrapped in fat and burnt on the altar of the god, and the lean meat roasted and distributed among the participants so that the sacrifice ends in feasting. Before the roast meat is eaten, the splanchna are passed round and all taste: in metaphor the splanchna are the source and seat of feeling, of love, hatred, anger, anxiety....
/p. 24: [The Gods] are imagined as comprising an extended family of anthropomorphic beings, with Zeus 'the father of gods and men' as head and master of the company. Conceived as a metaphor of human experience this is a brilliant stroke; the model of the family /p. 25: provides a framework within which we can intuitively understand both unity and conflict as the working out of a complex web of loyalties, interests, and obligations --conflict (inevitably) of ties , passions and personalities both within and outside the group, but also an ultimate unity, contained within the solidarity of the group and guaranteed in the person of Zeus the Father whose authority embodies the demand for an underlying unity, not chaos, in experience. The Homeric image of divinity is an image of marvellous and compelling adequacy; it underwrites and explains the human sense of contradiction within a more fundamental order. It enables divinity to be understood as the source of disorder in the world, and, in the extreme case, mirrored in the myth of war between gods and giants, as the ultimate defence of order agains brute chaos, as well as being the unconquerable barrier to human excess and the potentially destructive violence of human self-assertion....
The Hesiodic succession myth from Ouranos to Kronos, and from Kronos to Zeus, whatever it owes to Near Eastern precedent, confirms our sense that there is more to experience than the Homeric model, in its simplest form, can account for. It asserts that the world has not always been under the control of the Olympians, and that even now, since divinity is indestructible, older and more primitive powers are in and of the world. It speaks of progress (progress whereby dark, anonymous, largely female collectivities-- the Moirai, Furies, Gorgons, Graiai, Phorkydes-- have given way to /p. 26: the bright splendor of the Olympian gods), but also of the irrepressibility of the these more primitive powers: the mindless violence of volcanic eruption is still a fact of human experience; the Fates and Furies have not left us; on the edge of thiungs there are darker powers yet than the company of Zeus.
Excerpts from
Robert Parker, "Greek Religion,"
The Oxford History of the Classical World, John Boardman et al.
p. 254: Greek religion belongs to the class of ancient polytheisms: one can in very general terms compare the religions of Rome, of Egypt, of the ancient Indo-Iranians, and most the religions of the ancient Near East. The gods of such a polytheism have each a defined sphere of influence. The balanced worshipper does not pick and choose between them but pays some respect to them all. To neglect one god (Aphrodite, for instance) is to reject an area of human experience. Individual Greek communities paid special honour to particular gods..., but not to the exclusion of others....
The number of principal gods was always quite restricted. Homer shows ten important gods in action (Zeus, Hera, Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Poseidon, Aphrodite, Hermes, Hephaestus, and Ares) and these, together with Demeter and Dionysus, made up the 'twelve gods,' the conventional total recognized from the fifth century onwards. Alongside them, there were innumerable lesser figures, some quite obscure, but others, such as Pan and the Nymphs, just as important in cult as the junior partners among thetwelve, Hephaestus and Ares. Genealogies varied, but the twelve were all often said to be either siblings or children of Zeus, 'the father of gods and men.' Most of them could be conceived as living, a sprawling family, in Zeus' palace on the heavenly mountain Olympus. (At other times they were imagined as dwelling in their favoured cities.) They were thus the Olympians. Contrasted to them was a less clearly defined group of chthonians (from chiton, earth), gods of the earth and the underworld, grouped around Hades, the god of death, and his luckless spouse Persephone. Since crops spring from the earth, the chthonians were not merely a negative counterpoise to the gods of heaven, and even the lord of the Olympians had also, as 'Zeus under the earth', a chthonic aspect.
/p. 255: This restricted cast of principal gods could be made to play an almost infinite number of roles in cult practice by the addition of specifying epiphets. A single cult calendar from Attica prescribes offerings on different days for Zeus as 'Zeus of the city', 'kindly Zeus', 'Zeus who looks over men', 'Zeus of fulfilment', 'Zeus of boundaries', and 'Zeus of mountain tops'. He had in fact several hundred such epithets. The epithet sometimes indicated the power in virtue of which the worshipper was appealing to the god: Zeus 'the general' evidently did not have in his gift the same benefits as Zeus 'of property'. Sometimes it seems that the epithet's main function was merely to introduce local discriminations within the pantheon common to all Greece. Villagers no doubt took pleasure in knowing that their Zeus or Athena was not quite the same as the one worshipped in the next village over the hill.
/p. 261: "Recognizing the gods" was principally a matter of observing their cult. Piety was expressed in behaviour, in acts of respect towards the gods. (A sociologist would be liable to say that the Greeks valued 'orthopraxy', right doing, rather than 'orthodoxy'.)... But piety (eusebeia) was literally a matter of 'respect', not love, and even the warmest relationship would quickly have turned sour without observance of the cult. Religion was never personal in the sense of a means for the individual to express his unique identity. No Greek would ever have thought of keeping a spiritual diary. Indeed many classes of person had much of their religion done for them by others: the father sacrificed and besought blessings 'on behalf of' the household, while the magistrates and priests did the same for 'the people' ('and its wives and children', the Athenians eventually added). In all of this religion reflected and supported the general ethos of Greek culture. It discouraged individualism, a preoccupation with inner states and the belief that intentions matter more than actions; it emphasized the sense of belonging to a community and the need for due observance of social forms.
What, then, of right conduct? To those used to Christianity Greek religion often seems a strangely amoral affair. Man was not for Greeks a sinful being in need of redemption; piety was not a matter of perpetual moral endeavour under the watchful guidance of conscience....
But even these easy-going rulers insisted (Zeus in particular) on certain standards of behaviour without which life would have dissolved into barbarism. They punished offences against parents, guests/hosts, suppliants, and the dead. They /p. 262: particularly abhorred oath-breakers, destroying them 'with their whole stock'; such a man might seem to have escaped, but never did --his children would suffer, or he himself in the Underworld. Since oaths accompanied almost all of life's most important transactions (contracts, marriages, and peace-treaties, for instance), Zeus of Oaths was also inevitably a guardian of social morality....
All this, however, was a prerequisite for winning favour by ritual, not a substitute for it. Formal cult remained essential. Its most important form was the sacrifice. The typical victim was an animal, but there were also 'bloodless' or 'pure' sacrifices of corn, cakes, fruit, and the like, sometimes offered in addition to animals and sometimes in place of them. A Greek religious calendar was a list of sacrifices; several such survive, indicating what god or hero was to receive what offering on what day. In the commonest form, the thigh-bones of the /p. 263 slaughtered animal, wrapped in fat, were burnt on a raised altar for the gods; the meat was then cooked and eaten by the human participants. Such a sacrifice was a 'gift of the gods'....
p. 264: Ritual was accompanied by prayer. It was unusual to pray seriously without making an offering of some kind (a sacrifice, a dedication, or at least a libation) or promising to make one should the prayer be fulfilled. By his gift the worshipper established a claim to the counter-gift that he requested, according to the notorious principle 'do ut des', 'I give so that you will give.' In their prayers Greeks often alluded explicitly to this nexus of mutual benefit and obligation between man and god....
The gods were thus brought within a comprehensible pattern of social relations. As an old tag said, "Gifts persuade the gods, gifts reverend kings'; gift-giving was /p. 265: perhaps the most important mechanism of social relationships in Homeric society....
Economic historians have found that the modern notion of an autonomous 'economy' is inapplicable to ancient societies, where economic activity was influenced by innumerable social constraints. To describe ancient conditions they have developed the concept of the 'embedded' economy. We need for the Greeks a similar concept of embedded religion. It was a social, practical, everyday thing. Every formal social grouping was also a religious grouping, from the smallest to the largest: a household was a set of people who worshipped (in the Athenian case) at the same shrine of Zeus of the Courtyard, while the Greeks as a nation were those who honored the same gods at the Panhellenic sanctuaries and /p. 266: festivals. To belong to a group was to 'share in the lustral waters' (used for purifications before sacrifice). The Panhellenic sanctuaries were the great meeting-places, where one could swagger before an audience from all Greece. Perhaps the most important was Delphi, perched above a majestic valley on the slopes of Mount Parnassus in central Greece; it owed its original fame to the oracular shrine of Apollo, alreadyy mentioned by Homer, but also became the site of a great athletic festival. Its rival in importance, Olympia in the territory of Elis in the Peloponnese, sacred to Zeus, was home of the original and always most prestigious games, the Olympics.
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