myth

[mellowtigger]

As it turns out, foeclan had a copy of "The End of Faith" in his room.  He's loaned it to me, and I've been reading it today.

How utterly depressing.  I thought I was already upset about Jesusites and other religious terrorists, but it gets worse when someone views it more objectively than I did and writes rebukes more succinctly than I did.  *sigh*  I hope this book offers some optimism later on.  It does have me wondering, though...

How is it that the Greeks let their gods fade into myth without giving them up altogether?  By what social process did the demands of religion transform into the insights of theater?

I want to know.  Maybe we can still duplicate their good fortune.

Comments

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

what makes you say "fade"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_ancient_Greece

[mellowtigger]

There were true believers (Socrates and Pythagoras in particular), yes. Although it occurs too late in the timeline to support my claim, the wiki article on neopythagoreanism mentions the attempt to restore religious faith to "what had come to be regarded as an arid formalism." Perhaps I'm overestimating the influence of Zeno's stoicism and Pyrrho's skepticism in classic Greece? (I'm not finding clues in Aristotelian ethics either.)

I'm certain, though, that I have read more than one account of how theatric drama came to displace religious ritual for many people even before the fall of the Greek city-states to Rome. *sigh* I donated the majority of my religious books to the local pagan library several years ago. I don't see any titles on my shelves that would be relevant now. Guess I'll have to leave it for "proof supplied at a later time". :(

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

I suppose this begs the question "what is a religious event / place / object". The temples continued to be built, kept up, and used for ritual purposes through the Archaic and Classical periods (which is what we're talking about?) but they also served numerous other purposes like education, public debate, theatre, etc that we are accustomed to thinking of as not religious; however it seems that some Greeks DID think of these as religious uses. As usual you can't just use local standards of what is religious, what constitutes a religion, what signifies membership in a religion, to talk about anything other than (maybe) that one religion.

I wonder if what you're actually getting at is a culture that encourages public debate?

[mellowtigger]

Pythagoras encouraged the use of human intellect even as he encouraged greater devotion to the gods. But that's not the point that I originally intended to make. I'm sure I've read an account of how dramatic theater replaced religious ritual in pre-Roman Greek culture. (The Greeks invented everything first, even the corrupting influence of television! *LAUGH*)

In my vague recollection, it has something to do with replacing literal gods with figurative archetypes, where the stories stop being historical accounts and instead become instructive parables. Something akin to the process today that happens as we "give up" on Santa Claus. We still observe the ritual and sing the songs; we practice the faith and hope to gain comfort from it even though we actively disbelieve. I'm sure I've read accounts of how this came to pass an classic Greece, and somehow the theater played a central role in this transformation.

If only I could find proper references to it now. :/