How the Greeks Worshipped Their Gods

We Know the Greek Deities Through Literature, but Who Were They in Ritual?

by Bestia Mortale

article

Of a mystery spell once cast like wine from naked hands in crimson skydrops on the sands as ancient seconds passed, the vagrant scent still lingers.

Although the myths of ancient Greece include some good stories, they've never appealed to me much spiritually: relentlessly patriarchal and curiously cynical, they present a parade of divinities who feud among themselves like city-states and treat their human devotees with capricious disdain. I've found them easier to understand as ancient soap opera than as inspirational archetypes.

A month in Greece not long ago changed my thinking, though.

Myth or literature? The Greek myths are stories, after all, not sacred texts. They were recorded in literary works, in Homeric epics and Hesiod's poetry, in classical Greek drama and by a multitude of later Greek and Roman writers. It was bards, philosophers and literati, not priests or mystics, who created, embellished and interpreted them from their earliest written appearance through adoption by the Romans and deathless acceptance into European culture.

In spite of how much these stories can tell us about ancient Greek religion, they aren't dogma; they don't define religious belief in the way, for instance, the New Testament does for Christians. On the contrary, from their earliest written expression in the Iliad, myths often take a satirical attitude towards the gods. Even in their naïve forms, the stories seem more speculative than doctrinal, as if their writers don't believe them literally.

Although the Greeks themselves criticized the pettiness of the gods revealed in these stories as far back as Homeric times, such criticism did not affect their worship. Walter Burkert noted in Greek Religion (1985):

... the most important Greek temples and the most sublime statues of the gods were created generations after Xenophanes [an early and vocal critic of the gods of myth]. People did continue to pray to these gods, Greek religion was practiced for 800 years after Xenophanes and disappeared only at the end of the ancient world under massive state pressure. Quite clearly that criticism had touched only the surface, not the roots.

I'm beginning to understand that the roots of ancient Greek religion are not to be found in sacred texts or teachings of a priestly class, but rather in deep local traditions of ritual. Local cult ceremonies and festivals, not written doctrine, created the context of personal spirituality. The importance of local cult was one of Jane Harrison's key insights in her remarkable Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903/1922). In cult were the roots that criticism did not touch.

The cover story

It seems to me that the literary Greek myths we know are one step removed from the spiritual symbolism that actually drove ancient worship: In this sense, the literary efforts are only stories that refer to myths. Their purpose as literature was primarily entertainment. They did have an additional political agenda: to raise an umbrella of unity over the diversity of ritual traditions in the Aegean world. Their writers aimed to create a single, coherent religious context, realigning older traditions with current politics and culture. In this sense, the literary myths can be seen as a form of cultural imperialism.

These stories, in effect, used spells of naming and genealogy to bind local traditions into the larger culture, sapping them of primacy and uniqueness. Patricia Storace, writing about contemporary Greek culture, notes "of course in this part of the world names are treated as magic" (from Dinner with Persephone -- an interesting perspective on modern Greece). Local deities not assigned an Olympian name could still be subordinated in the divine hierarchy by making them children or grandchildren of the Olympians. Thus, you have ancient Pan, the primal god of all, first demoted to being a helper of Zeus in battle against the Titans, then later made a son of Hermes and Zeus's grandson.

Herodotus, writing in the middle of the fifth century B. C., believed such god-forming to be a relatively recent phenomenon:

But it was only -- if I may so put it -- the day before yesterday that the Greeks came to know the origin and form of the various gods, and whether or not all of them had always existed; for Homer and Hesiod, the poets who composed our theogonies and described the gods for us, giving them all their appropriate titles, offices, and powers, lived... not more than four hundred years ago. [The Histories]

Following traditions from Asia Minor, the literary myths limited the Olympian pantheon to exactly 12 gods. Those chosen for the Parthenon frieze in Athens were Zeus, Poseidon, Apollo, Hermes, Dionysos, Hephaistos, Ares, Hera, Aphrodite, Athena, Demeter and Artemis. Important deities such as Hestia, Hecate, Pan, Eileithyia, Prometheus, Leto, Thetis, Leukothea and many others were relegated to lesser positions.

The personalities and roles of the Olympian 12 are generally simpler than the gods of local worship. The Greek gods always seemed almost cardboard to me, but after reading Robert Graves' Greek Myths (1955), or Karl Kerényi's wonderful Gods of the Greeks (1951), I realize how often these familiar Olympian names were overlaid on deities with different, more complicated aspects than the ones I thought I knew.

The Egyptian connection

Anyone seriously interested in ancient Greece cannot ignore Martin Bernal's recent earth-shaking re-examination of the Egyptian and Near-Eastern origins of Greek culture. The two volumes of Black Athena that have appeared so far (1987 and 1996) provide the best point of entry currently available into Greek prehistory, as well as painting an all-too-sorry picture of academic Eurocentric classicism in recent centuries. His work has served to restore the reputation of classical writers such as Herodotus, who took it for granted that Greek religion derived directly from that of the Egyptians.

In particular, for example, he links the early cult of Athena in Boeotia to that of the Egyptian goddess Neit, and Athena's struggles with Poseidon with those between Neit and Seth. He also argues convincingly that Min, a bull-god closely associated with Amon, regarded by the ancients as the Egyptian Pan, was the focus and origin of the Cretan bull cult.

Bernal intends to devote Volumes 3 and 4 of his remarkable work specifically to mythology and religion, and judging from the first two volumes, we can expect over the next decade to be given a much richer understanding of the roots of Greek religion, in traditions that went back thousands of years before Greek history began.

Even without tracing the origins of the Greek gods, however, we can better understand the religious traditions that kept them alive by looking at the archetypes they represented.

Archetypes behind gods

Local worship in Greece, as elsewhere, generally focused on one or two archetypes, not the Olympian 12. Kerényi, for example, finds pervasive evidence of a primal threefold moon goddess, with aspects such as waxing/full/waning, maiden/mother/crone, birth/life/death and sky/earth/sea. He observes that divisions of time were often personified as deities; examples would be the 13 (or later 12) months of the year, the 49 or 50 months of the festal Olympiad (as in the case of the 50 Nereids), the 7 planetary days of the week and perhaps at an earlier period the 28 days of the lunar month.

With respect to the male gods, James Frazer in the 14 volumes of The Golden Bough documented myths from all over the world and every period of history that told of the death and rebirth of a vegetative god/king. Following Frazer's lead, Robert Graves could generalize about Greece:

Early Greek mythology is concerned, above all else, with the changing relations between the queen and her lovers, which begin with their yearly, or twice-yearly sacrifices; and end, at the time when the Iliad was composed... with her eclipse by an unlimited male monarchy. Numerous African analogues illustrate the progressive stages of this change. [The Greek Myths, 1955, Volume 1]

In this kind of discussion of common mythic themes, gaps in our knowledge of one culture can be filled by extrapolating from others. Graves, for example, could suggest, based on the African model, that the king sacrifice in prehistoric Greece may well have taken the form of castration, as reflected in the myth of Ouranos' castration by Cronos, and by association Aphrodite Ourania in her castrating bee-goddess form. This Aphrodite in turn is likely to have derived from the Phrygian Great Mother Cybele and her castrated lover Attis, as well as to the Egyptian Isis and her castrated Osiris.

Joseph Campbell too was much concerned with the common elements of myths of this sort. Following Italian scholars, he posited that many of the early Greek myths originated in a "Mediterranean culture complex" that extended eastward to the Indus river in the second millenium B. C.:

My own view is that the two mythologies [of the Aegean and of northern India] are clearly extensions of a single system, of which the matrix was the nuclear Near East. [The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology, 1964]

It isn't hard to see general archetypes in what we know of the actual cults to which the Olympian names apply, but when you do so, the clear distinctions between the gods fade and they tend to run together.

The threefold goddess Threefold goddesses, for example, appeared in many trinities outside the Olympian 12: as the Moirai (the three fates), the Graiai (the gray old women of the sea), the Erinyes (the Furies), the Harpies, the Gorgons, the Graces, the Charities, the Hesperides, the Sirens and of course as Hecate. But Hecate's identity extends directly and indirectly among the Olympians themselves. Apollo and Artemis, for example, were alternately known as Hekatos and Hekate. Kerényi notes in Gods of the Greeks:

It will be remembered that one of the names of the Great Mother of the Gods in Asia Minor (a goddess who besides being a mother also had strong hermaphroditic characteristics) was Great Artemis.

Other Olympian goddesses also showed clear vestiges of a threefold nature. Demeter and Kore/Persephone formed alternatively a crone/maiden/mother trinity or a mother-maid duality to which Rhea or Hecate played the crone. Both Hera and Athena also had cult roles in which they revealed three aspects. Hera's three surnames were Pais, "the Maiden," Teleia, "the Fulfilled," as the patroness of married love, and "Chera" the Solitary. Devotees saluted Athena not only as Parthenos, "Virgin," but as Meter, "Mother," and secret tradition said she bore a son to Hephaistos. In her crone aspect, she was Gorgopis, the "Gorgon-faced," for the Gorgon she wore on her breast.

Aphrodite in particular was always more than a love-goddess. The Athenians considered her to be the oldest Moira, a crone role. On the Attic coast, she was worshiped as Aphrodite Genetyllis, goddess of childbirth. She also had a dark aspect, in which she was known as Melaina or Skotia, the "black" or "dark" one, or Androphonos, "killer of men," Anosia, "the unholy," or Tymborychos, "the gravedigger." In some cases, her cult representation was almost indistinguishable from that of Hecate.

Aphrodite was certainly an old goddess; she brought to Greece the traditions of Inanna, through Astarte and Ashtaroth. She was also known as Dione, the feminine form of "Zeus," suggesting her role as the supreme hermaphroditic mother. Later, she was made the daughter of an unspecified Dione's union with Zeus, but it's worth keeping in mind the earlier story of her birth: not from love, but from the union of her castrated father Ouranos' genitalia and the sea, well before her nephew Zeus was born.

Fathers, lovers, sons

The male gods can also be folded together into primal archetypes. The ithyphallic (sporting a hard-on) lover god is represented by Pan among goat-herding people, bull-foot Dionysos among cow-herders and Hermes among shepherds. Poseidon and Zeus can easily be conflated as earth/sea and sky versions of a supreme god. Since Zeus and Dionysos were sometimes also viewed as two aspects of the same god, you can find in them a father/lover/son counterpart to the threefold goddess. Zeus and his mother, Rhea, were said to couple in the guise of snakes, and Rhea was Dionysos's chief protector in babyhood. Kerényi writes:

We must here recognize a basic scheme in which either a female or a male trinity predominates.... Records exist of the worship of a trinity in which [Poseidon] is not included, a cult of Zeus as "Heavenly God" (Hypsistos), as God of the Underworld (Chthonios), and, under a third aspect, without a name.

It is interesting in this context to consider the male-child archetypes expressed in Eros, Pan, Dionysos and Hephaistos, and their close ties both to ithyphallic male sexuality and to sacrificial death. Eros, in the Orphic tradition, was the first god, born when Nyx (" Night"), the great dark bird-mother, conceived by the Wind and bore the silver egg of the world. Most beautiful of the gods, he was clearly connected with phallicism, but at the same time was often represented as a child with a clear connection to darkness. Even in his role of inspiring the first primal union of earth and sky, he is sometimes represented as descending into the underworld to accomplish it.

Both Pan and Hephaistos were such ugly newborns that the mother goddess abandoned them. This is in itself a theme -- consider how many gods were abandoned as infants for one reason or another, then found and cared for by shepherds or animals. The practice of exposing unwanted children clearly carried a heavy cost in sadness that found expression in such stories. Pan was explicitly an ithyphallic god, while Hephaistos was principally the divine artisan, misshapen, dwarfish and sometimes explicitly chthonic. At the same time, however, many aspects of Hephaistos's role hearken back to the earlier Daktyloi, the phallic child-consorts of the great mother Rhea.

Dionysos, of course, explicitly combined all these aspects: at once the ecstatic ithyphallic god of orgy, the divine infant Iakchos and the sacrificial god who was torn to pieces to be resurrected.

From this kind of archetypal perspective, the names and roles we know from literary mythology appear contradictory and confusing. As Burkert observed:

In cult, divine names seem almost interchangeable. Conversely, the same name may cover very different cults. Myths, too, are like formulae with variables for which different names may be substituted.

However, while analysis of archetypes is useful for understanding mythic symbols, it does tend to promote the same kind of cultural generalization that occupied the literary mythologists, perpetuating the fiction that Greek civilization was somehow singular and coherent. In fact, it's worth keeping in mind how broad a chronological and geographical area we're really talking about.

The span of Greece

More than 2000 years passed between the rise of Minoan civilization and the end of the Classical period. During this vast period, countless ethnic, cultural, economic and technological changes came and went in the Aegean as the region's prosperity fluctuated under migrations, war, invasions and natural disasters. Approaching the second Christian millenium, we ourselves can appreciate how sparsely the developments of 2000 years can be generalized.

Nor was ancient Greece a coherent geographic unit. Its people were dispersed on the numerous islands scattered across the wine-dark sea and in valleys set amid rugged mountains in the Peloponnese, Macedonia, Thrace and beyond. Trade and military contacts with other peoples around the Mediterranean's shores were followed by colonies in the Near East, Africa, Italy and France. Even today, traveling around Greece by plane, car and ferry, the many centers of Greek civilization seem dauntingly remote from one another.

The population of ancient Greeks, whether Egyptian, Cretan, Pelasgian, Ionian, Doric or other, had enough in common to justify viewing them as a "culture complex," but it was a culture that abounded with local variations. We know a fair amount about the differences between Sparta and Athens in historical times, for example, but we can only guess at thousands of years of divergence among other communities scattered across the mountains and islands, which encompassed different ethnic groups, different cultural elements, different intellectual development and different political experiences.

Local spirituality To understand the underlying spirituality that actually drove Greek religion, I believe you must look beyond both literary and archetypal generalities to specific forms of local worship. Unfortunately, information about these forms is conspicuously incomplete, in part because many were regarded as sacred secrets. For example, Herodotus often alludes in The Histories to cults such as the Samothracian mysteries of the Kabeiroi of which he was an initiate, but he is careful to avoid revealing forbidden details. He makes a curious statement:

To explain the reason... [why all wild animals are sacred in Egypt], I should have to enter into a discussion of religious principles, which is a subject I particularly wish to avoid -- any slight mention I have already made of such matters having been forced upon me by the needs of my story.

If it's necessary to understand the vanished specific forms that ancient worship took to make spiritual sense of Greek religion, we pagans have an advantage over classical scholars -- scholars have to stop where the evidence runs out, while we are free to wander on into realms of the imagination.

Root and branch

What can we say about these lost roots of Greek spirituality?

For one thing, we can theorize, because the rites were local and traditional, that they were constantly shifting, even if their central themes were stable. Unlike the major religions of Asia Minor, there were no written rules -- none are indicated in contemporary literature, and none have survived. Furthermore, since priesthood was usually a role, not a job, the people leading rituals had no institutional stake in consistency. Because the principal goal, as in many pagan communities today, was effective and satisfying ritual, I suspect innovation was not only tolerated but expected. Old symbols, original significance long worn away, were re-interpreted, re-carved, re-invented. New festivals came in, introduced by influential travelers or immigrants from Greater Greece and beyond.

Look at the burgeoning creativity of surviving Greek drama, music and poetry, all of which emerged from ritual roots. It makes sense that the same artistic creativity flourished within the lost rituals themselves, generating protean, changeable, ever-new forms.

Consider, what traces would a future historian find of today's pagan rituals? I can just imagine the dry certainty of a 31st-century academic writing, "No evidence whatsoever supports the romantic notion that pagans inhabited the barbaric Northwest as early as the 20th century... even the interesting Widdershins fragment from the 'cafe-temple' site in Seattle can be shown by internal analysis to be a 24th-century forgery."

Greek sacrifice and sex

Some details of Greek worship we do know. Rites often featured animal sacrifice, at least in part because it made a good feast. Also, of course, primal fears of blood and death raise a lot of energy.

How about human sacrifice? How about, for example, the literal castration of year-kings or their surrogates? It seems likely to me that at some time(s) and place(s) in prehistoric Greece, men were ritually castrated. Powerful as such ritual might be, though, it isn't the kind of thing likely to persist for long without state support. It would almost certainly have become, over time, more disturbing than uplifting, popular neither with the men involved nor with the women.

At the same time, the image of ritual castration clearly has a lot of psycho-sexual power. It's easy to see how it could be perpetuated in the symbology of the entire region, however briefly, far away and long ago it was actually practiced.

Human sacrifice in other forms, unfortunately, was apparently an occasional but well-known practice even in classical times. Particularly where its victims were homeless scapegoat pharmakoi or captive slaves, it must have satisfied the bloody impulses of human nature without eliciting too much revulsion. All the same, I doubt it left people feeling good about themselves or their community.

Sex is always a popular element of ritual, and certainly seems to have been practiced in Greece. In spite of the damper put on it by patriarchal prudery, matter-of-fact enjoyment of orgiastic ecstasies seems to have persisted through classical times. Until recently, classicists have been uncomfortable with this idea; Jane Harrison, for example, is much less disturbed by the idea of human sacrifice than by the possibility (which she disputes) that actual, er, copulation occurred in sacred marriages.

To illustrate the ancient Greek attitudes pro and con ritual sex, we might consider one of Herodotus' slightly oblique religious passages:

It was the Egyptians who first made it an offence against piety to have intercourse with women in temples, or to enter temples after intercourse without having previously washed. Hardly any nation except the Egyptians and Greeks has any such scruple, but nearly all consider men and women to be, in this respect, no different from animals, which, whether they are beasts or birds, they constantly see coupling in temples and sacred places -- and if the god concerned had any objection to this, he would not allow it to occur.

We know other details. Athens is the Greek city-state whose history is most visible; we know its ritual calendar from Solon's laws and later codes. We know of the stately procession of the Panathenaia, wherein the women of Athens presented Athena with her new robe in a ritual Burkert describes as "free from all the curious, nocturnal, unsettling or ludicrous aspects of the preceding festivals" -- and we know as well of other festivals, curious, nocturnal, ludicrous and unsettling, such as the Dionysos' feasts and the rites before the New Year recalling the sacred king.

We don't know, however, what pious Greeks thought of these rituals. We don't know how the feasts intersected with Greek spiritual life, whether they were outer forms while the most important rites were personal, or whether the forms worked to give the Greeks spiritual release. The mystery cults, of which we have only glimpses, obviously played an important part in initiates' religious lives. Doubtlessly the Greeks relied on some combination of all these to make a spiritual connection with their world -- but how?

The whole picture

Almost certainly, the cult deities were defined very personally by the celebrants. Among their archetypes were no doubt the threefold moon goddess, the horned god, parents, bringers of food, fertility and prosperity, protectors on the sea, controllers of the weather. Yet in the expression of the archetypes, there was no doubt just as much variation as in pagan festivals today (probably more, since there were fewer constraints).

In short, I suspect that although the sacrificial forms no longer have the same appeal, and the literary mythology seems to us quite foreign, in ritual the ancient Greeks were more like us than they appear. Their creativity manifest in ceremony produced rites of countless forms, of countless local variations -- Burkert notes "virtually as many (ritual) calendars as there are cities and tribes." In these rituals, deities we know in the cardboard forms of literature came alive, moved and spoke and transformed their worshippers. Of the content of these rituals, we have only an inkling. History and literature can take us only so far; our imaginations must do the rest.

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