G.K. Chesterton said that, “when people stop believing in God, it’s not that they believe in nothing, but that they start believing in everything.” The pioneers of the Enlightenment thought that when educated in the new sciences and subjected to the new models of the universe that needed no god to keep the mechanism going, the vast majority of people in the developed world would renounce belief in the supernatural within a century. As we all know, religious faith has proven a tad more resilient than that.

The need to believe seems hard wired into most of us. And it is a need that political ideologies and other secular belief systems are ill equipped to fulfil. So it should come as no surprise that, as the Christian churches have lost their monopoly on faith in the Western world, even the old pagan gods are staging a comeback.

In defiance of a government ban, the ancient Greek god Zeus has been the object of pagan worship at an ancient temple in the heart of Athens.

It was first known ceremony of its kind at the 1,800-year-old temple of Olympian Zeus since the ancient Greek religion was outlawed by the Roman empire in the late 4th century.

Following Emperor Constantine’s support of the Christian faith and his deathbed conversion, the new God soon swept away the old gods of Greece. The Emperor Theodosius wiped out the last vestiges of the Olympian gods when he abolished the Olympic Games in A.D. 394, in many ways putting an end to classical antiquity.

In all the years since, even during the Muslim Ottoman rule of Greece, the Orthodox Church has held a firm grasp on the country. Which is why they have reacted to the ceremony by the neo-pagan Ellinais group with a fury fuelled by their impotence, in a free society, to put a stop to it.

[…] the one-hour ceremony has achieved the near-impossible task of unnerving Greece’s powerful Orthodox church. Since Peppa’s performance 10 days ago, hierarchs have redirected the venom they usually reserve for homosexuals, Catholics, Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, masons and the “barbaric” Turks at the “miserable resuscitators” of the degenerate dead religion. In fire-and-brimstone sermons priests have slammed the “satanic” New Ageists and fulminated against their idols.

For years, Orthodox clerics believed that they had defeated Greeks wishing to embrace the customs and beliefs of the ancient past. But increasingly the church, a bastion of conservatism and traditionalism, has been confronted by the spectre of polytheists making a comeback in the land of the gods. Last year, Peppa’s group, Ellinais, succeeded in gaining legal recognition as a cultural association in a country where all non-Christian religions, bar Islam and Judaism, are prohibited. As a result of the ruling, which devotees say paves the way for the Greek gods to be worshipped openly, the organisation hopes to win government approval for a temple in Athens where pagan baptisms, marriages and funerals could be performed. Taking the battle to archaeological sites deemed to be “sacred” is also part of an increasingly vociferous campaign.

Armed only with a lawyer to stave off the guards (the members of the Ellinais group are mainly academics, lawyers and other professionals), the 20 participants in the ceremony, and curious onlookers, made their way to the Sanctuary of Olympian Zeus, in defiance of a ban by the Culture Ministry, which declared the site off limits to any kind of organised activity to protect the monument.”We are Greeks and we demand from the government the right to use our temples,” said high priestess Doreta Peppa.

“This is a universal wish for the peaceful hosting of the Olympics,” chanted group leader Doreta Peppa, dressed as a red-robed priestess. “We worship nature and honor the ancient Greek gods,” she later told reporters. “Some 3 percent of Greeks share our views, but they’re afraid to speak out.”

The Ellinais group follows a calendar marking time from the first ancient Olympics of 776 BC.

It also wants to rebuild all ancient temples and make ancient Greek the official language of the country.

One question that springs to mind is why the ancient pagan religion is making a comeback in Greece, while few Italians have shown much inclination to revive the rites of Jupiter and Vesta. One explanation could be that no one would make much of it. Unlike Greece, where the Orthodox church until recently, and in some ways still, has been a very real and, for some, repressive presence in personal matters of faith, it’s been a while since the Catholic church had that sort of sway in Italy. Besides, the Italians have the secular tradition from the Renaissance, as well as the Roman Empire, to look back to as a golden age. And the Roman pantheon was after all a bit of a cheap knock-off of the Olympian deities.

One can see a similar effect other places where the traditional faith has been repressive or intrusive, but has lost the power to mete out punishment for apostasy. In Norway evangelical Christianity held sway in the south-west of the country following a wave of revivalism in the 19th century, while the central east of the country remained largely untouched.

It’s probably no coincidence that when a well publicised spate of church burnings (and even murders), orchestrated by a motley crew of neo-pagans, Satanists and Lord of the Rings fantasists made headlines in the 80s and early 90s, its roots were mainly in that part of the country.

Notwithstanding the bad publicity of such aberrations as the Norwegian Black Metal community, the allure of neo-paganism today, aside from the sheer exotic thrill, is in fact that many find their message of man as part of nature, and non-dogmatic theology, more in tune with modern sensibilities.

“We do not believe in dogmas and decrees, as the other religions do. We believe in freedom of thought,” Kostas Stathopoulos, one of three “high priests” overseeing the event, told reporters.

Source: Bits of News

This entry was posted on Friday, February 2nd, 2007 at 3:43 pm and is filed under World, Lifestyles, Spirituality, Cultural. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.