Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [91]
Even so, a shared “public” religion played a central role in Greek life. The cult practices and deities among the different Greek communities had enough in common to be seen as one system. Herodotus later characterized this shared religion as “Greekness,” by which he referred to common temples and rituals. Chief among these rituals were various forms of sacrifice. (There is some evidence of human sacrifice in prehistoric Greece and on Crete, but the practice disappeared.) And a typical ritual was the “libation”—the pouring of water, wine, olive oil, milk, or honey—in honor of the gods, heroes, or the dead, usually before a meal.
With temples dedicated to the favorite patron god or goddess in every city-state, the Greeks believed that certain deities actively watched over them and directed daily events. Both priests and priestesses served in the temples to perform rituals. Families tried to please household deities with gifts and ceremonies that included animal sacrifice and offerings of food. Like Athens, which was protected by its namesake, Athena, each city-state honored one or more deities as the patron deity of the community, and held annual festivals in their honor.
Large crowds also gathered in ancient Greece for religious festivals that included feasts, colorful processions, and choral performances, which evolved into the first Greek drama. In Athens, for instance, there was a great civic festival called the Panathenea in late summer, during which there were sacrifices and a large procession by groups representing the different segments of Athenian society.* Every four years there was “greater Panathenea,” which included major athletic and musical competitions open to all Greece. Athletic festivals were also popular, and the Olympic games, the most famous of these festivals, involved all of the Greek city-states. Held in honor of Zeus, the first recorded Olympics took place in 776 BCE and continued every four years for more than a thousand years. Even wars were usually—but not always—halted during the Olympic festival.
The Greeks also believed that their deities could help them foresee the future, and people flocked to shrines called oracles to consult seers, both male and female, who played a central role in the lives of Greeks, whether highborn or common. One of these was Dodona, a sacred site where priests interpreted the sounds of the wind blowing through the leaves of a sacred oak tree. The most important shrine in ancient Greece was Delphi, home of the sacred oracle of the god Apollo, site of the omphalos, or sacred “navel stone,” believed to be the center of the world. A conical stone thought to be part of the Greek Creation myth (see below, How do you get Creation from castration?), the navel stone was the mystical connection to the navel of Mother Earth. The Greeks, like other ancient civilizations, were also devoted to the possibility of magic, and sacred objects, such as amulets and household idols, and spells and other magical rituals were all part of everyday Greek life.
But as classicist Barry Powell points out, “The Greek gods had personalities like those of humans and struggled with one another for position and power. They did not love humans (although some had favorites) and did not ask to be loved by them. They did not impose codes of behavior.”
Clearly that was starkly different from the state religions of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Israel, where