Tag: Greece

Why is Saturn/Cronus in Saturnalia?

On By Chas S. Clifton3 Comments

At this time of year, when the popular press runs articles on Christmas customs, a few rhetorical bases are always touched. The Christmas tree is a “Pagan survival,” that sort of thing. And that Christmas bears some relationship to the Roman celebration of Saturnalia.

At Religion Nerd, Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr., goes more deeply into the origins of Saturnalia in a post titled, “A Further Note on Cronus and Chronos.”

Greek and Roman religions were religions without canonical scriptures; their mythology is notoriously complex and, to modern eyes, often contradictory.  It is important to add that this does not mean that there was no religious writing in the ancient world; just the opposite, in fact. There was an excess of religious writing.  And of religious images, as well. There is so much writing from the ancient world about the gods, in fact, spanning so many centuries, that it is well-nigh impossible to make systematic sense of it all.

I came away thinking that a lot of what we think we know came from a couple of well-known Roman writers, such as Virgil. As usual, first came the  festival and then came the religio-literary explanation of what it all meant.

On the Necessity of the Iliad for Modern Polytheism

On By Chas S. Clifton8 Comments

In this week’s New Yorker, Daniel Mendelsohn reviews a new, compressed translation of the Iliad by Stephen Mitchell. (The whole article is behind the paywall—the link is to an abstract.)

Discussing other recent translations, he describes Stanley Lombardo’s as having “a tight-lipped soldierly toughness.” I own that one — I saw its cover while walking through the book exhibits at the 2005 American Academy of Religion annual meeting and almost wept —  it was such an emotionally powerful design.

Mendelsohn, meanwhile, strikes gold at the end of his review:

The Iliad doesn’t need to be modernized, because the question it raises is a modern — indeed, existentialist — one: how do we fill our short lives with meaning? The August 22nd issue of Time featured, on its “Briefing” page, a quote from a grieving mother about her dead son. The mother’s name is Jan Brown, and her son, Kevin Houston, a Navy SEAL, was one of thirty-seven soldiers killed in a rocket attack in Afghanistan this past summer. What she said about him might shock some people, but will sound oddly familiar to anyone who has read the Iliad:

He was born to do this job. If he could do it all over again and have a chance to have it happen the way it did or work at McDonald’s and live to be 104? He’d do it all over again.

Whoever Homer was and however he made his poem, the song that he sings still goes on.

That is the polytheistic view of life. The world is a mess. The world is beautiful. The gods are eternal (or as good as). The gods work at cross-purposes, and sometimes humans are caught between them.

If you try to change the world in the name of some grand, sweeping, utopian vision, you will just make it worse. The most you can do is to give Achilles and  Kevin Houston a good cause.

Don’t Teach My Kid Greek Mythology

On By Chas S. Clifton5 Comments

From a report on the school-board meeting from our county’s weekly newspaper:

Sheri Shreve was upset that fourth graders were learning Greek mythology and seeing pictures she felt were inappropriate for children.

Yes, your fourth-grader might end up at a liberal arts college like Bryn Mawr and join the Pagan Club.

Are Epiphany Dreams Found only in the Past?

On By Chas S. Clifton3 Comments

The Bryn Mawr Classical Review’s book-review feed recently served up a review of William V. Harris’s Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity
 The reviewer writes,

Some combination of [cultural expectations, generic demands, and the imperatives of performance and publication.], Harris argues …  accounts for the relative frequency in antiquity of the epiphany dream, in which an authoritative figure visits the dreamer and makes a significant statement, and for its rarity in the post-Enlightenment West.

He goes on to argue that if readers say that they too have epiphany dreams, it don’t prove nuthin’:

No doubt some reader of this review is now saying, “But I had an epiphany dream just the other night!”  That is the problem with studying dreams:  one must work hard to free oneself from dependence on anecdote and from the powerful attraction that dreams have for those who dream them.  Appealing to concepts of “selfhood” or “personality” will only reinforce these tendencies by compelling the question, “What does this dream tell us about you?”  Harris chooses instead to concentrate on ancient descriptions of dreams and reports of actions based on them.  This is a book about dreaming, not about dreams; that is, about behavior and experience in antiquity, not about the ancient self.

If I tell it, it’s only an “anecdote,” but if someone back then wrote it, it’s a “description” and thus useful? But if you act upon the advice of the dream, does that count?

“Epiphany dreams” are not common, but when you have one, you know it.

My example (oops, an ancedote!) was a dream that — at a time when I was not consciously thinking about it — told me to quit my job and go to graduate school in religious studies.

When I awoke with the dream-voice echoing in my ears, I knew that “some god or daemon” had spoken. I immediately started researching university programs, thinking without irony that now I knew what was meant in those biblical accounts of “the Lord spake unto Abraham” or whomever.

Someone or something sure enough spake unto me, and I knew I had to follow the instructions. Or else.

Anyone else had a real epiphany dream? Show of hands? Yes, I thought so.

As to the academic study, there is, I have learned, an almost-complete disconnect between the academic study of ancient Paganism and the study of contemporary polytheism, Paganism, etc.

The former people are mostly in Classics and history, they have an academic heritage a couple of centuries old, and they publish in their own journals, attend their own conferences, and so on.

The latter field only began to take shape in the 1990s.

Some study of ancient Pagan religion does sneak into the Society of Biblical Literature, and when the SBL goes back to having its annual meeting together with the American Academy of Religion’s meeting in 2011, maybe, just maybe, there might some crossover.

Dancing Homer

On By Chas S. Clifton

Via Sannion, links to a site of choreographers who attempt to reconstruct ancient Greek choral dance. (Scroll down for videos.)

Here dancers and drummers perform while a rhapsode declaims the Catalog of Ships from the Iliad.

I suppose it’s one of those interesting ideas that goes into the “But we’ll never know for sure” file. (Or does it smell too much of the lamp?)

Gallimaufry with Confusion

On By Chas S. Clifton

• The latest weird search query to bring a visitor to this blog: “Is New Mexico a polytheistic, monotheistic, or animistic religion?” Hello? New Mexico is a state. No wonder that for years New Mexico Magazine has had a standing column on geographical confusion called “One of Our 50 is Missing.”

• Annyikha locates a series of podcast lectures on ancient Mediterranean Paganism.

• Christian apologist John Morehead interviews film scholar Carrol L. Fry, author of Cinema of the Occult: New Age, Satanism, Wicca, and Spiritualism in Film. An excerpt:

TheoFantastique [Morehead] : Cinema has also changed in its depiction of the witch. Are fairytale depictions as in Harry Potter, as well as those which depict the empowerment of the feminine perhaps the most common modes of expression in contemporary film?

Carrol Fry: Yes, the empowerment of the feminine is the most popular adaptation, whether the film is supportive of critical. I’m sure this has to do with attracting an audience for the film. But Pagans might well feel that Hollywood slights their spiritual paths by concentrating nearly exclusively on feminist Wicca, and then just on the most sensational elements. By the way, there’s a strong subtext of feminist Wicca in
that no one much notices, most obviously in Sophie’s (named for Sophia from the Gnostic tradition) blunders into a Wiccan ceremony in which her grandfather is “drawing down the moon” as a coven ceremony. There are a few other witch films that are not part of the culture wars, romantic films such as I Married a Witch
 and Bell, Book and Candle that are neither the silly version of witches (that have nothing to do with Neo-Paganism[sic]) such as the Harry Potter novels and films nor adaptations of Wicca.

Seeing the World with Greek Eyes

On By Chas S. Clifton

“I am a Greek born 2,381 years after my ancestors built and dedicated the Parthenon . . . . I am telling Greek history outside the conventional Christian worldview,” writes Eaggelos G. Vallianatos, author of The Passion of the Greeks: Christianity and the Rape of the Hellenes

Born in a Greek village, Vallianatos came to the United States as a young man and earned a doctorate in history at Wisconsin. He has written three other books on globalization and agriculture.

A little bit like Prudence Jones and Nigel Pennick’s A History Of Pagan Europe, his book moves from a general discussion of Greek religion through the conquest of a disunited Greece by imperial Rome to the fall of the empire as seen by Greek historians, lingering on the late Christian emperors’ persecution of the Pagan “Hellenes,” those who saw Greek literature, culture, and religion as intertwined.

One appendix discusses and rates works by many noted classicists. Vallianatos likes Robin Lane Fox and Ramsay MacMullen, who “[makes] some difference to our understanding of the dreadful record of Christianity in the Mediterranean,” but has no use for Polymnia Athanassiadi: “Her Christian bias shines through in everything she says about Julian.” And so on.

As its title suggests, the book is passionate. I have read only as far as Chapter 4, “The Treason of Christianity,” because I can take it only in small doses. But I will continue all the way to the end, believe me.

The Theoi Project

On By Chas S. Clifton

The Theoi Project is a site for “exploring Greek mythology and the gods in classical literature and art. The aim of the project is to provide a comprehensive, free reference guide to the gods (theoi), spirits (daimones), fabulous creatures (theres) and heroes of ancient Greek mythology and religion.”

Want a family tree of the gods? It’s here. And here is the cultus page for Hekate.