X2 - Gods, Polytheism, pantheons, cults, epithets

DELFORGE, V.P. & PIRONTI, G. 2016 - Many vs One: the scholarly background

• THE term ‘polytheism’ has come down to us from the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, who used the Greek adjective polutheos and its cognates to describe a widespread vision of the divine that was different from that of his own religion

• In the context of its emergence, the Greek word was pejorative, in the same way that ‘paganism’ and ‘idolatry’ would soon be used in Latin Christianity. ‘Polytheism’ began to be used during the sixteenth century, to draw a contrast between truthful monotheism and the error of pagan religions (Schmidt 1987). Its context, for two centuries at least, would remain largely determined by Christian theology. - is our idea of polytheism inherently affected by our monotheistic perception

• Today, the use of the term ‘polytheism’ as an explanatory category is a clear indicator that gods are returning to the forefront of the study of ancient Greek religion (recently, Bremmer and Erskine 2010; Parker 2011: 64–102; Versnel 2011). Scholars are focusing on the ways in which Greek people performed rituals, not only to affirm social hierarchies in their local communities (the horizontal ‘embedded’ perspective), but also explicitly to honour their gods (the vertical perspective).

• THE FRENCH STRUCTURALIST APPROACH

• VERNANT -

  • Vernant (1965, 1974) was reacting against two trends in scholarship, first, a long-lasting ‘essentialization’ of the Greek gods, in which individual gods were characterized as ‘gods of’ a particular domain (as mentioned), and, second, an obsessive quest for the origin of the gods. He underlined the fact that Greek gods were divine powers and not persons, despite their literary and iconographical representations as anthropomorphic figures

  • Vernant emphasized the necessity of taking into consideration the connections between deities within a pantheon: divine powers were to be de ned in contrast to other powers and limited by them.

  • We can no longer fully subscribe to this model. One of its main limits is the fact that seeing the gods in opposition to each other runs the risk of underestimating the overlap in their elds of competence.

  • Moreover, a rigid application of the model can still lead to identifying each god with a distinctive and exclusive ‘mode of intervention’ (Dumézil 1974: 186–256). Indeed, it gives back to the gods an ‘essentializing’ unity that was the original point of contention (Detienne 1997: 61–2; cf. Parker 2005: 390). Nevertheless, the core of Vernant’s approach remains valid, when quali ed by a more complex analysis of how polytheism works.

  • In this perspective, a god can be seen as a complex network or cluster of powers. On the one hand, each god is de ned by his or her own powers, competences, attributes, and so on—its own network; on the other hand, it is characterized by relationships and associations with other gods belonging to the same pantheon —a ‘system’ whose components cannot be studied in isolation

  • Unity and plurality are closely related at each level of analysis: each god is conceived as many powers in a network whose core is the god’s name

DELFORGE, V.P. & PIRONTI, G. 2016 - Many vs One: how de combine unity and plurality

• Studies on polytheism challenge the ‘canonical’ vision of Greek gods as distinct personalities with a clear psychological profile, established once and for all in the mythological tradition

• In past decades, scholars still needed to insist that Greek deities were approached in ritual practice and conceived at different levels— the local, polis level, and the Panhellenic one, in sanctuaries as in narratives (Sourvinou-Inwood 1978).

• This assertion is obvious today, and the risk of ‘essentialization’ has been reduced enough to partially rehabilitate the word ‘personality’ or the expression ‘cult persona’ to refer to the gods.

• The tension between these components—single ‘personalities’ and interrelated powers within a pantheon —remains at the core of many discussions on how polytheism works and implies that there are different methodological options by which to address this question.

• VIEWING GODS ON THEIR OWN/INDIVIDUALLY/REGIONALLY VS PANHELLENICALLY

  • In a god-by-god analysis, one encounters the risk of being excessively focused on the chosen deity, drawing a static and unequivocal picture, and forgetting the relationships created by specific configurations (see BMCR 2011.01.14)

  • the regional option creates its own distortions. It conveniently marks out connections within a local system, but does not necessarily explain why we find, in so many places, a deity named Athena, or Zeus, or Demeter, Apollo, and so on, often with specific cult epithets.

  • Accordingly, one runs the risk of resorting to a superficial and ‘canonical’ description of these deities, by describing them at a Panhellenic level, without adequate acknowledgment of their local persona.

  • In other words, a study focused only on a region encounters two different risks: either, on the one hand, ‘atomizing’ a single deity in its local manifestations; or, on the other hand, reducing deities to their generic description (‘god of . . .’, ‘goddess of . . .’), which is rather paradoxical in studies trying to understand polytheism at a local level. Another way of addressing the question of how polytheism works would be to study a particular domain of life (marriage, protection of children, war, politics, agriculture, seafaring, etc.) and observe how different divinities are involved in this context. An ideal position would be to integrate all of these approaches, but such an enterprise remains difficult to conduct, except in a large collaborative team.

• Gods cannot be conceived in static terms because cults and myths reconfigure and redefine them as personalities and, at the same time, as powers interrelated to each other.

• Under the same name, a deity is at once the cult persona worshipped in a particular place and the figure that is, for example, described in the Iliad as feasting on Mount Olympos or staged by Euripides in the theatre of Dionysos at Athens.

• The divine name has a central value because the god is not completely absorbed in and reduced to what is particular and temporary in its function or narrative construction (Pirenne-Delforge 1994: 10–12). A god is still more than the heterogeneous mosaic resulting from an arbitrary combination of epithets, images, and narratives (contra  Burkert 1985: 119, 218).

• To use once again the metaphor of the network, a sum would be static, while a network is dynamic, fluid, flexible. A god can be conceptualized like such a network: different activities or contexts, such as the telling of myths or practice of particular cults, let some segments and portions of the network appear (Pironti 2007: 285). The whole set of connections is not necessarily entirely activated in each context, whatever that may be, but remains potentially available.

• For instance, in a local cult, the god’s name with a cult epithet is one aspect of the deity seen in close-up, not the expression of a completely different deity. In this respect, myths and rituals are not unrelated bodies of evidence, but specific languages, which resonate inside the mental frame of poets who narrated tales, of painters who decorated Attic vases, and of worshippers who performed rituals.

DELFORGE, V.P. & PIRONTI, G. 2016 - Many vs One: different types of divinity, the moirai

• The first to be tackled are what scholarship misleadingly identifies as ‘minor deities’ or ‘personifications’, that is, the Moirai (Pirenne-Delforge and Pironti 2010).

• The second example refers to a deity belonging to the ‘highest level’ of the Greek pantheon: Hera, the wife of Zeus himself.

• The methodological approach of polytheism must be the same for both categories because both refer to divinities felt by worshippers to be powerful agents acting in their lives at one time or another.

• The name of the Moirai refers to the ‘portion’ or ‘share’ that every human—or divine—being receives. In this case, the powers of the goddesses are closely related to the notion conveyed by their name, just like their mother Themis (‘the divinely inspired order of things’) and many other ‘divine personifications’ worshipped by the Greeks. They are commonly understood to be ‘goddesses of fate’ and actually appear in mythic tales that mainly associate them with birth and death. As traditional spinners and weavers, these goddesses rule over everyone’s lifecycle and over the various patterns of the ‘life thread’. This is the traditional, Panhellenic image conveyed by tales from Homer to Pausanias and beyond.

• The label ‘goddesses of fate’ is not completely wrong, but is unsatisfactory, as are all such reductive kinds of labels concerning the gods. Moreover, it is built upon the unwarranted assumption of a universal notion of ‘fate’, common to the Greek world and our own (as Eidinow 2011 notes).

• We can identify the Moirai as powers whose speci c network encompasses distribution, reward, and regulation. On a mythical level, they interact with the stability warranted by Zeus’ authority (Hes. Theog. 901–6; cf. Pironti 2009). On the level of cult practices, the evidence related to them is neither numerous nor explicit about worshippers’ expectations.

• Their interventions in human lives and communities are various but they are closely related to both lifespan and lifecycle, in narratives as well as in cult practice. Other deities are concerned with the same fields of intervention, but the ‘set of notions’ related to the Moirai, including distribution, reward, regulation, is specific.

• Accordingly, the balance between good and evil at the very heart of the polis concerns a correct distribution of births and deaths within the community. The strict regulation made by the Moirai is one of the conditions of the survival of the entire community of the polis, as well as of the families composing it.

• Moreover, their close relationship to Zeus and the identity of their mother, Themis, are the best indications that they are not, as has been hypothesized, primeval goddesses of death and arbitrary dispensators of good and evil. Instead, they are regulators, even though human beings are often unable to grasp the cosmic dimension of this regulation and distribution, and complain about the arbitrariness of fate and the limits inherent in human life.

DELFORGE, V.P. & PIRONTI, G. 2016 - Many vs One: different types of divinity, Hera

• Across the whole Greek tradition, she is the wife of the father and king of the gods. In Homer, she is depicted, at least at first sight, as a shrew, always getting angry at Zeus (Hom. Il. 1.517–21; 8.407–8). The same image appears in those tales where she persecutes the illegitimate children of her fickle husband (Hom. Il. 15.24–30; Hes. Theog. 313–35; Ap. Rhod. 1.996–7).

• Taken at face value, mythical narratives give the goddess an image that is incompatible with her cult persona, for example, in Argos or in Samos. However, if we carefully read the many tales or many vases depicting Hera, and scrutinize the aetiologies of some of her cults, important insights emerge, giving us some clues that can be used to test the validity of a ‘Hera network’.

• In this case, marriage, legitimacy, power, and sovereignty are essential aspects for determining at least a part of a definitional structure of the goddess, which is largely rooted in the relationship between Hera and her husband and brother, the king of the gods

• Regarding the cult persona of Hera in Argos, the aetiological evidence is scanty. Nevertheless, we can reconstruct a mythic cycle in which the main focus is the relationship of the goddess with Zeus: she is a parthenos, ‘unmarried girl, maiden’, then, gets married, leaves her husband, becomes a parthenos again, and the cycle starts again (Paus. 2.38.2–3; cf. 8.22.2–3).

• In Argos, as well as in Plataia, the theogonic references present in the goddess’s sanctuary are indications of the strong connections, on the one hand, between Hera and Zeus as children of Kronos, and, on the other hand, between the matrimonial relationship and divine sovereignty.

• A last element can be provided to support the view that Hera at Argos is closely related to Zeus on both the mythical and ritual levels. Two months of the calendar of Argos refer to marriage. The first is named Gamos, ‘Marriage’, and echoes the Athenian month Gamelion, ‘of the Marriages’, sacred to Hera. The second, Telos, ‘Achievement’, which is another way to express ‘Marriage’, is known in Argos and Epidauros, but nowhere else. Scholars who have studied this calendar agree that Telos must refer to the cult epithet Teleios-Teleia, supporting the hypothesis that the local goddess is ritually conceived of as the wife of Zeus

• At Samos, Hera was honoured from the early Archaic period at least, in an extra-urban sanctuary as impressive as that at Argos (Kyrieleis 1993). The main difference between the two places is the extent of cult attendance: regional at Argos, Aegean, or even largely East Mediterranean, at Samos (see further, in this volume, Constantakopolou, Chapter 19).

• Some scholars consider that the Hera of Samos is a completely different deity from the Hera of Argos, on the grounds that identity is de ned by place and that the local level constructs a cult persona without relation to the Panhellenic level (Versnel 2011: 115, 143). However, returning to the network imagery above, although the ties and nodes forming a ‘deity network’ may expand or contract, there is still a core, signified in particular by the name of the divinity. We can illustrate this by a comparison between the mythical and ritual cycle for Hera at Argos and the evidence concerning the cult persona of Hera at Samos

• Hera is said to be born at Samos and her parthenia, ‘virginal time’, is closely connected with the local river Imbrasos, also called Parthenos. A fragment of Varro preserved by Lactantius (Div. inst. 1.17, 8) mentions a range of interesting elements: the island itself was called Parthenia, because Hera grew up there and married Zeus; her temple was very ancient and the goddess was represented as a bride; some of the rituals in her honour were celebrated as a wedding anniversary.

• Hera, viewed as a parthenos and then a bride, refers to the first two steps of the cycle mentioned at the beginning of this section. In Varro’s fragment, the theme of Hera’s separation from Zeus is missing, that is the third part of the cycle, which in turn leads to a new cycle, as we perceived in the ritual ‘turnover’ at Argos and elsewhere. Nevertheless, we can find some trace of the ritual separation between Hera and her husband in the aetiology and performance of the main festival of Samos, called alternatively Tonaia or Heraia, in which the temple statue was carried to the shore and purified (Avagianou 1991: 46–73).

• In Argos and in Samos, Hera is not independent from Zeus, and the Hera of Argos is not as different from the Samian goddess as is sometimes supposed.

• On a ritual as well as an imaginative level, marriage, legitimacy, power, and sovereignty are constitutive elements of Hera’s figure.

• Accordingly, her spasmodic anger in myths not only constructs the gure of a shrew overburdening her husband with jealousy: above all, this is her way of caring about the legitimacy of his children and, in the end, of ensuring the safeguard of his royal and cosmic power. As a daughter of Kronos as well as wife of Zeus, she is deeply concerned by sovereignty.

• The two case studies presented here have focused on the first aspect, what we have called the ‘deity network’. However, the Moirai are closely connected with other deities such as, for example, Zeus, Eileithyia, or Aphrodite, and these mythical and ritual interactions emphasize, each time, one or another aspects of the ‘Moirai network’. And, as we saw concerning Hera, her own network of powers cannot be easily reconstructed without any reference to Zeus, even in cult places where he seems, at first sight, to be absent. As these case studies demonstrate, if we are to understand and describe ancient Greek polytheism, and its multifarious potentialities, the unity and plurality of the gods must be conceptualized together at every level.

Parker, R., 2011: On Greek Religion - ch.3 Analysing Greek Gods: “The gods” as Anonymous Collective; named gods; gods with epithets

• Gods are mortals without their limitations. And such they are for the most part in myth too.

• But when gods are spoken of other than in tellings of myth, the perfect clarity of the sculptural image tends to dissolve, even if we set aside as an eccentric minority opinion the view of those who denied that they had human form at all.

• On the one hand, just as no mortal ever in fact saw Apollo’s unshorn locks tossing on his shoulders, so too it was rare in ordinary speech to speak of individual named gods, except in expressions such as “by Zeus.” An orator addressing the Athenian assembly would assure his audience of the favor of “the gods” to Athens; he would not tell them of the particular attitude of Zeus or Athena. So too juries were warned of the danger of offending “the gods” by an unjust verdict.

• It is in oratory that the preference for this anonymous form of expression is most obvious. But we have every reason to think that oratory is here merely reflecting the norms of everyday speech.

• Tragedy is full of named gods, but they mostly appear in contexts such as choral odes which are furthest removed from the representation of ordinary language. In the more realistic portions, anonymous “gods” again predominate.

• In the most mimetic of all genres, the New Comedy of Menander, individual gods are indeed named frequently, but almost without exception in oaths or curses or prayers or with reference to their sanctuaries or cult acts addressed to them; they are not ad duced by characters as an explanation for events in the human world. There is in fact no kind of Greek writing in which “the gods” are not often spoken of as a nameless collective

• The distinction between the named gods of myth and the anonymous gods of daily discourse derives, it may be objected, not from a different belief about the nature of the gods but from the limitations of human perception.

• Mortals may believe in named deities, but they have no way of identifying their individual interventions in the world of experience; the issue is not one of ontology but of epistemology.

• In “reality” only oracles directly inspired by the gods, or poets claiming the inspiration of the Muses, can draw back the veil to reveal the divine agents behind events. Thus, in Herodotus, it is through oracles that we learn of Apollo’s negotiations with the Moirai over the destiny of Croesus, of Athena’s urgent supplications to Zeus at the time of the Persian invasion

• And though in daily speech mortals are chary of claims about the wishes of individual gods, once they turn to cult activity it is always to them that they address themselves. One prays and makes dedications to Athena or Artemis, not “the gods.” In sleep too one may see individual gods, because in sleep every individual becomes a kind of seer.

• The objection is well made. But another linguistic phenomenon may seem to relate more truly to the very nature of the gods. In many authors, gener alizing references to “the gods” alternate with references to “god” or “the god” or “the divine.” A detailed study has shown that in a majority of cases singular and plural are interchangeable.

• One of the central controversies in the study of Greek religion in the nineteenth century concerned polytheism and monotheism: some held that an original monotheism had been corrupted into the polytheism that we know, others saw monotheism struggling to emerge from the polytheistic mire. But no development in either direction in fact occurs.

• The culture is always polytheistic—it was well said long ago that Greeks typically prayed not to individual gods but to “chords of gods”5—but always one in which references to a singular god are entirely normal

• there was always a sense in which the gods were not a collectivity of individu als with individual wills, but rather the uncontrollable and inevitable element shaping and constraining human life and human lives.7 This element could be spoken of indifferently as “the gods,” “god,” “the god,” “the divine,” “the godlike” (daimonion), “Zeus,” and “fate.”

• In this sense, the Apollo of the Olympia pediment represents, within a spectrum of ways of envisaging deity, an extreme point of individualization and precision.

• ON CULT EPITHETS - Athena Hippia, of horses, is one aspect of Athena seen in close-up, not the expression of a different conception of deity. But the system created de facto a certain frag mentation of the divine figure. It was common in oaths for a single god to be several times invoked under different epithets; oracles would very regularly advise cities to add a cult of a god under a new epithet to their existing set of cults of that god; and in a famous episode Xenophon, regular worshipper of Zeus Basileus, was told by a seer that his financial problems were caused by his neglect of Zeus Meilichios.9 Even if in one perspective Zeus Meilichios was simply one aspect of Zeus, in another he had to be treated as an indepen dent figure. He was often portrayed differently too, as a gigantic snake.

• Some other applications of the system of the cultic double name may seem to stretch the unity of the god almost to breaking point. Herodotus (and other Greeks too) worked on the assumption that the difference between, say, “Zeus” and “Amoun” was no different from that between the Greek and Egyptian words for “bread”; the god, like the bread, is the same everywhere, and Amoun is not a different god from Zeus but simply the Egyptian word for him.

• At the level of cult practice these assimilations were commonly ac complished via the cultic double name: the two names could be juxtaposed, as with the Carian Zeus Osogo, or the foreign god could simply be given a Greek name plus an epithet, whether local as with Zeus Thebaieus (Zeus of Egyptian Thebes, the god we call Amun-Re), or descriptive as with “Heav enly” Aphrodite (generally supposed to represent eastern goddesses such as Astarte).

• At this point, the cultic double name has ceased, as viewed from outside, to be a way of picking out particular aspects of a single god, and has become an umbrella under which different gods shelter.

• Extreme cases exist even among figures we commonly think of as Greek. Zeus Meilichios is commonly represented on votive reliefs as an enormous snake (though depictions with the standard iconography of Zeus also exist) and received sacrifice of distinctive form;12 it was probably this singularity that encour aged Xenophon’s seer in the incident mentioned above to treat him as a wholly distinct figure. Ephesian Artemis too had the distinctive iconography that has made her famous (wrongly—the objects shown lack nipples) as “many-breasted.”

• The cultic double name allowed juxtapositions not just between a Greek and a non-Greek god’s name but also between a major Greek god and a lesser: Apollo Paion, Artemis Eileithyia, Athena Nike. How the Greeks understood such compounds is not always clear, but it is plausible that in many cases the second element was taken as an epithet of the first: Artemis Eileithyia is Artemis in her relation to childbirth as Athena Hippia is Athena in her relation to horses. Yet in some parts of the Greek world Eileithyia is certainly treated as a freestanding goddess.

• In literature from the fifth century onward the idea occasionally surfaces that the dividing lines between gods apparently drawn by distinct names may not reflect reality: in Prometheus Vinctus (209–10) the hero speaks of his mother as “Gaia and Themis, one form with many names (pollon onomaton morphe mia)

• A parallel case in a slightly different way is that of Zeus Chthonios, Zeus of the earth and of the underworld. Is Zeus Chthonios to be understood as “Zeus in his aspect as god of the earth and the underworld,” or is he rather “the underworld equivalent to Zeus”? In itself, the use of the epithet suggests the former, but in Aeschylus we hear of “another Zeus” (Zeus allos) who judges human offenses under the earth. Even to pose the question is perhaps to seek a precision that the Greeks knew to be unattainable.

• In Pausanias we sometimes encounter the phenomenon of cult addressed to a power whose identity is uncertain even to those who honor it. He regis ters no fewer than seven opinions as to who or what the Horse-Disturber, Taraxippos, honored at Olympia might be; he notes uncertainty among the Phigaleians whether Eurynome, possessor of a venerable shrine in their territory, is an epithet of Artemis or a daughter of Ocean. The uncertainty can extend to the class of divine being (major god? minor god? hero?) to which the honorand belonged.

Parker, R., 2011: On Greek Religion - ch.3 Analysing Greek Gods: The limited diversity of local Pantheons

• There is, then, the argument thus far has shown, something illusory about the stability of a cultic calendar with its listing of clearly distinct gods.

• But at the level of cult practice Greeks accepted that illusion, and doubtless did not worry overmuch about the reality lying behind every name.

• we know a certain amount about the cult systems of a large number of Greek communities, but a great deal only about very few, and everything about none at all.

• As a working hypothesis it can be proposed (but not uncontroversially, and certainly not demonstrably) that almost all Greek communities from about 700 onward, and in most cases very likely from much earlier, honored Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Apollo, Artemis, Dionysus, Hermes, Aphrodite, Demeter (probably associated with Persephone/Kore), Heracles, and at a domestic level Hestia. But their prominence, titles, and functions will have varied notably from place to place.

• From the late sixth century, cults dedicated to “the twelve gods” as a group begin to be attested.

• Such cults had no broader effect on the religious calendar of cities or sacred sites that had them; they continued to worship other gods outside the twelve (an arbitrary number doubtless suggested by the twelve months).

• listings of the twelve varied from city to city and even within a single city. But the concept confirms that the Greeks had an implicit notion of a distinction between major and minor gods (not their terms however—they spoke just of “the twelve gods”), and reached a tally of major gods roughly comparable to one that we might operate with.

• At a slightly lower level we can set, as figures by the fifth century very widely though perhaps not universally honored, the Dioscuri, Eileithyia, Hecate, and Mother; many regions too, perhaps all regions, paid cult to their local rivers, nymphs, and heroes.

• Asclepius and Pan rise in the fifth and fourth centuries from very humble beginnings to become honored in most of Greece.

• Some gods well-known from mythology, by contrast (Leto, Hep haestus, Kronos, Ares, Rhea), receive cult only here and there (Ares probably most widely, but always on a small scale).

• In a few localities, figures unknown to myth have, in the early period, an importance in cult normally only avail able to major gods: Aphaia, and Mnia and Auxesia, on Aegina; Ortheia at Sparta (if we assume that it is as a secondary development that she becomes “Artemis Ortheia”); Damie and Auxesie in Epidaurus; Alea in Tegea (if originally distinct from “Athena Alea”); Enodia in Thessaly; the Hyperborean Maidens on Delos. But with the exception of Aphaia (and Ortheia), they struggle to survive as independent figures beyond the fifth century

• Some figures on the god/hero borderline too (Erechtheus at Athens; Hyacinthus, and Helen and Menelaus, at Sparta) are major powers locally.

• The gods of Mysteries, finally, are often distinctive and localized: the Kabeiroi of Thebes, the “Great Gods” of Samothrace, “Despoina” of Lycosura in Arcadia, the “Great Gods” or “Great Goddesses” of Andania in Messenia.

• Important regional differences therefore there were. But we should not conclude that radically divergent local pantheons have been brought into partial and superficial conformity by the superimposition of Panhellenic gods and heroes; or, if they have, the superimposition has been extraordinarily successful.

• As far as we can tell, in every community (with the possible exception of Aegina) the Panhellenic figures prevail over the local.

• The distinctive character of each pantheon lies more in the specific weightings and roles assigned to the Panhellenic figures than in exclusively local figures.

• But a doubt arises. The names of the Panhellenic deities, it can be agreed, were widely diffused from an early time, but it need not follow that the essence underlying the name was the same in every case.

• The skeptical position has two forms:

  • LOCAL DIVERGENCE: the “same” god, that is, one bearing the same name, may have developed in notably different ways in different localities in response to the differing needs of the local worshipping group (in the Dark Ages, in particular, there were no Panhellenic sanctuaries and perhaps no universally circulating epic poetry to create a pressure toward conformity.)

    • The question with local divergences is not whether they occurred, as they certainly did, but how often and on what scale

  • FOREIGN/ARCHAIC SUBSTRATE: the familiar names will sometimes have been imposed on unfamiliar natures, natures which will not, however, have sur rendered their individuality, or not totally, merely through acquiring a new name. The unfamiliar nature might be that of an indigenous deity (in the colonial situation), of a foreign god whose worship entered the Greek world, of a perhaps anonymous local deity, or of an archaic type of deity (typically, the goddess of very wide powers) not recognized within the standard Pan hellenic model.

    • , it has doubtless been too often appealed to in colonial situations where no independent evidence exists for the indigenous cults that would supposedly have exerted pressure on the Greek… Nonetheless, it is a recognized truth that Greeks imposed familiar names on unfamiliar gods: Artemis Ephesia and Zeus Thebaieus were mentioned above, and innumerable Zeuses and Apollos and Areses of the interior of Asia Minor in the Hellenistic and Roman period are shown by their iconography to differ from the ordinary Olympians. Every postulate of a substrate must be assessed with great skepticism, but the possibility cannot be imperiously denied.

Parker, R., 2011: On Greek Religion - ch.3 Analysing Greek Gods: Natural forces and Deified Abstractions

• The comparative mythologists of the second half of the nineteenth century expended extraordinary energy and learn ing on the attempt to reduce, or, as they thought, elevate, the Greek gods to natural forces or phenomena: Zeus was the sky, Hermes the winds, Athena the rosy bloom of the sky before dawn, and so on.

• Early man worshipped nature, they thought, because the majesty of nature brought him closer than anything else to an experience of the absolute. We smile now at their efforts, and have done ever since L. R. Farnell observed that they reduced Greek mythology to “highly figurative conversation about the weather.”

• But it is in fact the case that Greeks paid cult to such natural forces as rivers and winds, not heavily disguised as mythological deities but under their own names.

• The easier case is that of the winds. Aristophanes mentions sacrificing a black lamb when a typhoon is brewing. Pausanias expresses his amazement at the method used by the men of Methana against the wind Lips when it blows from the Saronic Gulf and withers their vines.

• The Athenians built a shrine to the North Wind because in 480 he answered their prayer and wrecked the Persian fleet when anchored off Thermopylae. Regular annual rites, where attested, are likely to have been performed at times of year when destructive winds were a particular threat (or in commemoration of a saving intervention such as that of 480).

• The cult of the winds represents a rare case of religion operating in the way that J. G. Frazer supposed primitive religion always to operate, as a mechanism intended to control the environment.

• Rivers are quite different. It may be that no river received a major state cult, but lesser honors are quite widely attested, and Zeus’s oracle at Dodona often advised consultants to make offerings to Achelous, the great stream of northwest Greece that came to be treated as the river and river god par excellence.

• Some rivers had precincts with altars and even small temples, but offerings could also be thrown direct into their waters; in a single rite on Mykonos Acheloos received three lambs on the altar and three “in the stream.”

• what rivers embodied for the Greeks in cultic terms was the fructifying power of moisture, the source of life itself. In myth rivers often sired human offspring; in cult, one prayed to rivers for offspring and named the child born in answer to the prayer as a “gift” of the river in question

• Earth, too, was worshipped, on a modest scale, as the place of growth (she typically received pregnant victims as sacrificial offerings) and as a “nurturer of children” (kourotrophos).

• nymphs are depicted simply as young women, with nothing liquid about them, and “nymph” is the ordinary Greek word for “bride”; a shrine of “Nymph” (singular—a rarity) below the acropolis in Athens has yielded a richer collection of offerings associated with marriage than has any other. There is, it is true, a symbolic link between springs and marriage through the much-stressed ritual of the bridal bath, as also through the fructifying and child-nurturing force of water mentioned earlier. But nymphs escape narrow confinement within particular physical spheres in many other ways, in their regular association in cult with “Apollo leader of the Nymphs,” for instance.

• Like the nymphs, many major gods could be manifested through and as natural forces, though not as them alone. “Zeus rains,” “the god rains,” and “it rains” are interchangeable forms of expression, and Zeus both hurls and is the thunderbolt, “Thundering Zeus” or “Zeus Thunderbolt” or “Zeus who comes down” (Zeus Kataibates)33 (and many other such titles); as “the cloud gatherer” he perches on the peak of most major Greek mountains. The line between the god as the cause of a natural phenomenon and as the natural phenomenon itself is a fine one doubtless not worth agonizing over.

• Other gods have a non-personal substratum of different type: when the sophist Prodicus announced that Demeter was grain and Dionysus wine,34 he was only giving one-sided expression to a general perception (but Demeter was also identified with earth), while several terms in common use for sexual intercourse derive directly from the name Aphrodite. On the other hand, the association of Apollo and Artemis with natural phenomena is secondary (if we disallow their early roles as senders of, respectively, plague and death in childbed), and Hermes, Athena, and Hera have none. The identifications of Apollo with the sun and Artemis with the moon that begin in the fifth cen tury can be taken, at most, as indicating a potentiality inherent in the Greek conception of deity, a shape into which a god could be molded. Conversely, sun and moon received no significant worship in early Greece

• Greek art and literature (starting with Hesiod’s Theogony) is full, not just of rivers and sea nymphs and so on, but also of groups such as Graces and Seasons and Destinies and individuals such as Love (Eros), Persuasion, Fair Fame, Peace, Strife, Fear, Blind Mad ness, Rumor, and many others.

• Substantial numbers of these figures acquired some role in cult, if usually in a small way, and though positive (Health, Peace, Concord) or neutral (Persuasion) qualities were normally chosen, the admiral of Philip V who established altars to Impiety and Lawlessness wherever he landed was working within the idiom; the list of such cults that can be es tablished for Sparta, apparently a special case, includes Death, Laughter, and Hunger.

• A few quotations may help to illuminate the world of thought. Hesiod writes that “no rumor ever perishes that many men speak; she too is a god dess”; Themistocles sought to extort money from the Andrians, backed by what he called “two great gods, Persuasion and Compulsion,” but was told that, since two useless gods never left their island, Poverty and Helplessness, they could not pay; while expressions such as “to recognize one’s friends is a god” or “[if you are moved by shame], you will achieve nothing: that goddess is ineffectual” are quite common in tragedy.

• All the forces that are powerful within human life are in a sense divine; in Wilamowitz’s famous formula, “god” is a predicate, a special power recognized in certain phenomena.

• Nobody denies that Greeks paid cult to rivers, winds, and Love. The ten dency, however, is to acknowledge such phenomena rather briefly, and pass on to the major Olympians. But any attempt to analyze Greek conceptions of deity must take serious account of them.
  

Parker, R., 2011: On Greek Religion - ch.3 Analysing Greek Gods: Olympians and Cthonians

• On one view the distinction between Olympians, gods of the bright sky, and chthonians, gods of the earth, constitutes a central division within the pantheon, expressed and made vivid above all by the different sacrificial rituals applied to the two groups. Individual gods straddle the divide, it is allowed, without diminishing its importance.

• On the other view, the distinction is simply one among several that Greeks draw from time to time within the pantheon, and the various di vergences from standard sacrificial procedure that exist should not be brought together within a single class of “chthonian sacrifice.” (On either view, the division is an unequal one, Olympians far outnumbering chthonians.)

• The orator Isocrates draws a distinction between “the gods called Olympian,” whom we approach in search of blessings, and “gods who bear less attractive names,” who are honored only in order to turn them away.

• Iso crates, no one denies, exaggerates to make a particular rhetorical point that has nothing to do with religion (he is urging mildness on King Philip); Greek religion was not dualist, and all gods were potentially sources of harm as well as of benefit, of benefit as well as of harm.

• Some categories of divine being were certainly treated with more elaborate displays of nervous respect than others. The chorus in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus speak of the Eumenides as the goddesses whom “we tremble to name and we pass by without looking, without utterance, without words.” That is very different from the chorus in Euripides’ Ion hailing Ath ena as “my goddess.”42 But are the Eumenides as represented by Sophocles representative of a broader class of “chthonians”?

• The adjective chthonios, of the earth. Applied to:

  • (1) the ordinary dead

  • (2) the powerful dead, the heroes

  • (3) gods associated with the underworld such as Persephone, Hades/Plouton, Hecate, Hermes, and groups such as the Erinyes/Eumenides/Semnai

  • (4) the gods of agriculture, Earth, Demeter, and (in one of his aspects) Zeus. (When applied to Demeter and Zeus, the epithet “earthy” may primarily indicate not a place of residence but a sphere of activity, agriculture)

• the fact that, Olympians though they are (so too is Hermes), they can receive the chthonian epithet, proves that the division between the two classes is not an absolute one. Even on a strong view of the importance of the divide, the divine world does not fall apart into two unconnected halves; Persephone, queen of the underworld, is daughter of the king of heaven (her husband is his brother), and according to the myth she commutes between the two spheres.

• One context where certain chthonians come vividly into view is that of curse tablets…the powers invoked…are broadly those of group (3) above, Hermes and Persephone above all; those of group (4) are absent, with the unsurprising exception of Earth herself. In this context, then, groups (3) and (4) split apart from one another. There is nonethe less a conceptual link between groups (1) to (3) and group (4) in that the dead and the underworld powers have influence over agricultural growth.