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One of the minor issues facing our community is what we should call ourselves. This is a thoroughly modern problem, since for the ancients, religion was something deeply interwoven into a person's life, tied in with their participation with and identity as part of a broader community, be that family, civic, or ethnic. Religion was primarily conveyed through action - reciting prayers, offering sacrifices to the Gods, spirits of the land, and ancestors, participation in the lavish public processions, dances, and feasts, etc. It was not so much a matter of belief (although there were, of course, traditional notions which infused every action) or the recitation of a credal formula, and until the later Hellenistic and Roman times, religion as a matter of personal choice and conscious identification were completely unknown. Religion was simply what your family and community did; what their family and community had done; what their family and community had done before them, and so forth reaching back, presumably, to the beginning of time. As the Greeks came into contact with other cultures they recognized certain differences in the actions and beliefs of their neighbors, but this concerned them little, since those people were simply observing the traditional rites of their culture, honoring either their own native divinities, or the same Gods as the Greeks, simply known and honored through their own culturally-prescribed methods. It wasn't until the Jews and later the Christians came along that the notion of religion began to shift from something primarily cultural and familial to something individual, personal, and needing a label in order to distinguish it from the broader, surrounding religious practices and beliefs of the culture in which they found themselves, but which they felt alien and apart from. The Christians originally simply called themselves Hodoi or "Followers of the Way", and only later, at Antioch, came to identify themselves as Khristianoi or those who accepted the teachings of Jesus Christ. It was also the Christians who came up with the name of their enemies, Pagani from the Latin paganus referring to the rural districts outside of the Roman Urbs or city. This term had several connotations, most of them negative. Primarily, it meant someone who was not a member of the army, originally the Roman Army, but later the body of Christian militants. Such a person was not entitled to full citizenship rights, didn't have access to a complete education or participation in the cultural activity of the Roman world, and so was looked upon as backwards, slow, a country bumpkin. The Emperor Julian, conscious of the need for an apropriate self-identifying label in the Judaeo-Christian world, and desiring one divorced of the negative connotations of pagani adopted the word Hellenismos for his Neoplatonic revival of Greco-Roman worship, and refered to its adherants as Hellenes. Consequently, Christian Byzantine Greeks began referring to themselves as Romanoi or Citizens of the Holy Roman Empire, and today the Greek Orthodox Church still recites anathemas against the Hellenes, an ironic and sadly schizophrenic practice. However, many today view this word as too broad, since it suggests not simply the worship of the Olympian Gods, but rather the whole context of Greek cultural, religious, and ethnic identity. As such, it includes both ancient Pagan and modern Christian connotations, and is problematic for some since many who feel drawn to the ancient Gods are not ethnically Greek, or necessarily include all cultural elements in their worship. If this is not a suitable name, then to what should we turn? Obviously we could use some form of modifier with this word. Popular proposals have been Hellenic Paganism, Hellenic Polytheism, Hellenic Reconstructionism, Hellenisthai, and simply Hellenism. People have objected to this last one because it is already a word in common usage with a very different meaning, refering to those scholars who study ancient Greek history. Objections have also been lodged against Hellenic Paganism because of the original negative connotations of the word Pagan, because Pagan refers to something essentially rural while our religion has important civic aspects which compliment if not supercede its agrarian aspects, and because many desire to distance themselves from the broader Neopagan community, especially in its Wiccan form, with which they feel absolutely no kinship. Hellenic Polytheism has been objected to since it sounds too academic and philosophical, suggesting nothing of the devotion or cultural aspects of our religion, though it does emphasize the Gods. And Hellenic Reconstructionism, especially if it is coupled with the adjective Pagan, thus becoming Hellenic Pagan Reconstructionism, is just an unweildy and inelegant mouthful, and besides, Reconstructionism is a methodology, not a religion, and it is by no means one that is shared by all practioners of the religion. What, then, of ancient Greek religious terminology. The Greeks lacked any single word that suggested all of the connotations of our word 'religion'. A close parallel is the word eusebia, meaning piety or a proper and reverential awe before sacred things, but that is primarily an emotional response, and one that the ancient Greeks never would have used to describe themselves. If a man called himself eusebes it would have struck his contemporaries as boastfulness, and further, it suggests nothing of what was actually done within cult. Another word that the ancient Greeks had was threskia, meaning something like religious practice. This is a term that is being adopted by certain traditionalist factions within the community, however, others object that it has too narrow of an application and that it has been used for some time by a Thelemic group in Greece, and they do not wish for their beliefs and practices to be mistaken with those of another tradition. Some have suggested Olympianism or Dodekatheism for our religion, and while this does place a strong emphasis on the Gods as central to our religion, others have objected on the grounds that not all of the Gods that we revere dwell on Mount Olympos or were counted among the Twelve traditional Gods, for instance Pan, Hades, Hekate, Gaia, Asklepios among others would not be included. Additionally, our worship includes numerous divine beings such as the Nymphai, the Heroes, the Daimones, the Ancestors and other Khthonic spirits who are not generally considered to be Gods, but are no less important to us. Others, perhaps with an eye towards emphasizing the cultural and religious similarities between Greece and Rome, and the prominant place that our tradition has held within Western art, religion, and philosophy through the centuries - especially during the Renaissance and Romantic periods - have opted for the term Classical Paganism or Classicism. A very solid objection to this would be that there are many more differences between Greece and Rome than similarities, and both have thriving, reconstructed religious traditions independent of each other. Additionally, Classicism refers to the study of Classical literature, and is not an especially religious term. Similar objections could be applied to the term Greco-Roman, which many feel is particularly inapropriate considering the fact that Greek originally referred only to one particular tribe within Hellas, which just so happened to be the first group encountered by the Romans who adopted it as their way of designating all the peoples within the country. Some have felt that we should simply dispense with the notion of a unified religious community and adopt titles derived from the Gods that we worship. Thus, we would have Apollonians, Dionysians, Aphroditeans, Areans, Athenians, and so forth. The problem is, not everyone approaches the religion primarily through the God that they feel closest to, revering the traditional ethics and cult forms, and envisioning the religion in its totality, as a system or holistic way. Another problem arises for those who worship more than one God. Are they to be known as Apollonian-Dionysians, Herean-Panists, or Aphroditean-Demetran-Hermetic-Zeusers? How do we determine which God is more important, and thus should come first in our hyphenization? So, what then should we call ourselves? Whatever the hell you want to! Nobody is going to come up with a term that meets everyone's expectations and is impervious to criticism, because different people have different needs, emphasize different things in their worship, and because some people are critical assholes who will nitpick and scrutinize things down to the minutest detail in order to find fodder for their arguments, the attention from which they thrive upon. Most of these have wide enough currency that if you slip them into a conversation the average person is going to recognize what you mean, and if they don't, well, you'll have to spend a couple moments articulating what you mean. If you can't be bothered by that, and want a concise sound-bite label for your religion, then perhaps you should reconsider joining something a little more mainstream. |
