Hellenistic Religions in a Modern World

A thought I had in the past was that Ancient Greek religion, or anything like that, would have a harder time standing up to a modern environment than the OTL current religions. There's less malleability in the face of science. It's more difficult, for example, when the rotation of the planets are discovered for the Hellenistic religions to make that work with the idea that Apollo pulls the sun with a chariot or that it's the Egyptian god Ra or whatever else.

So how would the Hellenistic Religions look in the modern world? How would they adapt to science and discovery?

I assume the same thing happens as happened with the Abrahamic faiths, or Hinduism. The myths are reinterpreted or seen as illustrative analogies. Some might believe literally, but even in ancient times not all pagans thought the myths were literally true.

I believe hellenistic theistic traditions will have no difficulty in adapting to a modern society. Just look at how similarly polytheistic Hinduism has survived. Most educated Hindu Indians of today while may not adhere strictly to the various stipulations of their faith they still practice the basics like Pujas and sacrifices or fasts, etc.

Hellenistic religion or any other classical polytheistic religion would survive modern times by mutating into something vaguely similar to the original while retaining some of the fundamental beliefs just like OTL Hinduism has.

I'm not sure what you mean by "Hellenistic religions". If you mean Greek paganism, that would be religion singular.

I would claim that a Hellenistic religion IS huge today - it's called Christianity. It's a VERY Hellenized take on Judaism.

Hellenistic religion was very similar to Hinduism in that a lot of people (at least philosophers and other educated people like that, I don't know about the commons) understood the various myths as symbolic or allegorical and believed in one godhead or divine force or something like that that the various gods were manifestations of, among a range of other philosophical and theological beliefs, so it certainly wasn't everyone just believing that Apollo pulled the sun and all of that.

Dathi THorfinnsson said:

I'm not sure what you mean by "Hellenistic religions". If you mean Greek paganism, that would be religion singular.

I would claim that a Hellenistic religion IS huge today - it's called Christianity. It's a VERY Hellenized take on Judaism.

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I wouldn't say there was any single hellenistic religion. You could claim there was a more or less single Hellenic religion before the Hellenistic era, but by the Hellenistic era you had various local and morphed and separate religions, and that only grew during the Roman Empire (I'm thinking Isis and Serapis, Antinuous, etc.)

Many would even say pagan faiths aren't even religions.
The Hellenistic faith was a lot more organised and developed than the Germanic faith but still it didn't really have one central guiding force behind it and people didn't much care if you worshipped the gods or not- you were just stupid for not doing so.

I've been interested in a no christianity world for years. It would be truly interesting to see how the native religions would develop.
I would imagine buddhism would eventually come in and have a heavy influence and the whole thing would be rather interesting, sort of like Japan.

I had forgotten about this thread. But I did wonder recently, without Abrahamic religions, if the West would develop philosophical systems and nontheistic religions similar to Taoism and Confuscianism and Buddhism. Christianity seems to have been the great hindrance to that; everything inside the Church and nothing outside or opposed to it.

Dathi THorfinnsson said:

I would claim that a Hellenistic religion IS huge today - it's called Christianity. It's a VERY Hellenized take on Judaism.

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That's a very different take on the subject. But not one that I entirely disagree with.

Tripledot said:

I assume the same thing happens as happened with the Abrahamic faiths, or Hinduism. The myths are reinterpreted or seen as illustrative analogies.

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That mode of thought was already pretty widespread by Late Antiquity. There's no reason to assume it wouldn't have continued into what were OTL's Middle Ages.

slydessertfox said:

I wouldn't say there was any single hellenistic religion.

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Yes and no. There were a lot of localized cults and variations, and prior to the Hellenistic period, you could easily argue that each city-state effectively had its own religion. That all changed with Alexander, whose empire unified the Greek world and whose successors imprinted the same Greco-Macedonian religion across their kingdoms. The Romans amalgamated things even further, unifying all of it under the umbrella of Roman traditional religion. There were a set of practices and mores that were endorsed by the Roman state, making a common template for religion practised across the Empire. And the myths, over time, also became more or less "canonized" in Hellenistic and Roman literature. I see little reason that these trends wouldn't continue, especially if we take the example of Emperor Julian, who tried to really organize Hellenistic religion to compete with Christianity.

Tyr said:

Many would even say pagan faiths aren't even religions.

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Then these many do not, to put it bluntly, have a clue what religion is.

The West did have Stoicism and philosophy in general, the latter inside and outside Christianity.

Emperor Norton I said:

I had forgotten about this thread. But I did wonder recently, without Abrahamic religions, if the West would develop philosophical systems and nontheistic religions similar to Taoism and Confuscianism and Buddhism. Christianity seems to have been the great hindrance to that; everything inside the Church and nothing outside or opposed to it.

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Sir Chaos said:

Then these many do not, to put it bluntly, have a clue what religion is.

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Well, depends on whether you think (non-modern) cults are the same things as religions, and where you draw the line- for example, Koreans who consider themselves Buddhists, Christian, or even atheist visit shamans, Europeans of the nineteenth century held seances, etc. I suppose the difference is between transactional religion and devotional religion (the Abrahamic faiths being the latter*). Yeah, God/Yaweh/Allah may provide some sort of punishment for not following Him, or vice versa, but God isn't seen as a being that is to be appeased- though I suppose that never really fell out of practice in folk religion, just replacing local gods with saints or shamans with witches.

Of course, people accustomed to transactional religion ("Practical religion?") would say that devotional religion isn't "really" religion- why worship a god that can't do you good reliably?

*Not counting Prosperity Theology.

The Hellenistic world had things which were similar to Buddhism and Confucianism. Confucianism is a social philosophy, and nobody can say that the Greek world didn`t have that. As for something like Buddhism, there were hundreds of Gnostic sects. Similar to India around the time when Buddhism and Jainism arose, just none of the Hellenistic ones became dominant.

I´m positive that Hellenistic and lots of other European polytheisms could have adapted to modern society. I never worked it out explicitly for Hellenistic cult, but I`ve given some thought to a possible modernised Roman religion. Some of the things I suppose could develop longevity and adaptability:
- the lares and similar animistic stuff: Catholic and Orthodox Christians have similar practices in modern societies, too (you light a candle somewhere or perform a specific gesture in some places, saying some predefined words, and expecting that something good will follow...)
- generally, I expect private cult to be more deep-rooted than public cult; people might still let a symbolic fire burn (there are Christian adaptations again) in some corner of their houses even if the government isn`t asking the haruspices anymore before bringing a law before parliament)
- as many have said, the stories about the gods were already turning into something interpreted rather symbolically
- festivities are always a good thing and very adaptable to modern society, and indeed we`re still celebrating some predominantly pagan festivities (Halloween, New Year`s Eve, summer solstice in Scandinavia) and have incorporated pagan traits into Christian festivities (Jesus` death on the cross and resurrection have nothing to do with eggs, and neither do trees and exchanges of gifts have anything to do with his birth); from the Roman religion I expect major festivities like the Parentalia and the Saturnalia could be quite popular with us modern people. As for Hellenism, I know less, but didn`t sports and theatre have some religious dimension there? That seems very modern or even postmodern to me. Sports is treated by lots of people today like something cultic, and the same applies to a lesser degree to entertaining, narrative performances or displays (think of the role your favourite TV shows play in your life)...

Well, I can imagine that Ptolomean Astronomy, Euclidean Geometry, Platonism, and maybe even some ideas from Pythagoreanism will be very important on this. So, isn't Francmasonry vaguely based on Hellenistic memes?

A bit offtopic, but I've never really understood how or why monotheistic religions are/were so successful at usurping polytheistic religions. Anyone got a cliffnotes on the why?

EMT said:

A bit offtopic, but I've never really understood how or why monotheistic religions are/were so successful at usurping polytheistic religions. Anyone got a cliffnotes on the why?

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Constantine and pointy objects.

EMT said:

A bit offtopic, but I've never really understood how or why monotheistic religions are/were so successful at usurping polytheistic religions. Anyone got a cliffnotes on the why?

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I suppose you could attribute it to many things- dissatisfaction with increasing inequality, with people going from being independent freeholders to menial workers in cities, or worse, slaves. People increasingly turn to the idea of a just god, rather than cupidinous, greedy gods. One could say in part it was due to the hegemonic nature of the Roman Empire- local sects start to matter less as people start to adopt a pan-national identity- what it means to be "Roman" changed from being the inhabitants of Rome, to being inhabitants of Italy, to being anyone in the Roman Empire. Of course, this doesn't explain why Germanic tribesmen adopted Christianity, or any number of other nomadic societies converting to Islam.

EMT said:

A bit offtopic, but I've never really understood how or why monotheistic religions are/were so successful at usurping polytheistic religions. Anyone got a cliffnotes on the why?

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If anything? Crisis of the Third Century. When the economic apocalypse and resulting civil war occurred, the people of the Roman Empire looked for anything that offered hope. Christianity wasn't alone in this, but it was unique in being rather strongly organized. And after Constantine, it had the backing of the Roman government, which went a long way in increasing its wealth and reach and political security.

Would it be fair to say that after the fall of Rome, the Catholic church was the last remnant of Roman government left?

Emperor Norton I said:

I had forgotten about this thread. But I did wonder recently, without Abrahamic religions, if the West would develop philosophical systems and nontheistic religions similar to Taoism and Confuscianism and Buddhism. Christianity seems to have been the great hindrance to that; everything inside the Church and nothing outside or opposed to it.

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I would love to see a timeline where Pythagoreanism or Neopythagoreanism becomes dominant in the West, overlapping pagan beliefs the same way that Taoism and Buddhism not only coexisted but comingled with pre-existing Chinese folk beliefs, to the extent that arhats and boddhisatvas are worshipped as dieties and shrines to Mazu, Caishen, and the city gods are regarded by many Chinese as aspects of Taoism. Considering that folk beliefs in house spirits like kobolds, nisse, brownies, domovoi, and monaciello perservered in post-Christian Europe as late as the 19th Century, it seems highly likely.