Ancient culture was incomprehensibly different from our own. Here are a couple surprising ways the ancient's basic ideas about religion were not what you'd expect.

Polytheism was one religion. There wasn't a Jupiter religion and a Mithras religion and a Serapis religion. You could -- and people did -- pray to Serapis or Mithras in the Temple of Jupiter.

Doctrine didn't matter. Ancient religions were not institutionalized. Even the big national religions didn't have governing authorities to standardize theologies or oversee priesthoods and practices. Doctrine didn't matter. You could ask two priests about a God, and get two contradictory versions of a God's myth and rites -- at the same temple, on the same visit!

What that meant was, fluidity. Across the culture, from Spain and Britain to Egypt and the Galilee and on to India, there were hundreds of local versions of each God's faith. One God 's myth and ritual flowed into and mixed with the next's. No one cared. They saw it as all one religion anyway .

In school they taught us that ancient religion consisted of impossible myths about Zeus and Apollo and all the other sexing, sneaking, murdering, white trash Gods of Olympus. They were right -- partly. You'll be closer to right if you think of the ancient's myth as just folklore; and if you think of their religion as a mix of three things:
	Civic worship
	Mystery worship.
	Philosophy / religions

Here's an overview:
Civic & Family Worship The ancients' faith was stronger than ours: they believed the Gods were immediate, material and approachable.

They -- or their family or their city -- sacrificed to a God as a way of trading favors. A bull in exchange for a good harvest. A cake in exchange for business success.

The temples in the cities, where city priests sacrificed and prayed, were part of the civic religion. When you read about omens being read before battle, that's civic religion.

Civic worship did not deal much with ethics and morality, or even with afterlife. For us religion as all about morality and afterlife, so that's hard for us to understand. But it's true. Ancient culture was incomprehensibly different from our own. Get used to it!

Personal experience of the divine -- Mystery Worship
Pagans didn't just worship through the Civic Religions. Many also practiced a form of personal religion, depending on a private decision and aiming at some form of salvation through closeness to the divine.

The rites of this worship were called "Mysteries" (from the Greek word for "initiation"). Mystery initiates worshiped Gods of the Civic religions, but with private, personal ceremonies. There were Mysteries of Isis and Osiris, Mysteries of Dionysus, Mysteries of Eleusis, and so on.

The Mysteries answered the personal longing for closeness with the divine that the Civic Gods and abstract philosophers didn't.

They date from at least 1,500 BC. Modern scholarship calls the Mysteries of each God a "Mystery Religion," as if they were separate, isolated sects. That's an anachronism. The Mysteries were not separate religions. They did not worship jealous Gods. They were just another side of the ancient world's fluid polytheism. You could be -- and people were -- initiated in the Mysteries of Isis, and the Mysteries of Dionysus, and the Mysteries of Eleusis. And of course the Mysteries weren't exclusive -- you could sacrifice to Isis at the town's civic festival and also participate in Her mysteries.

Count 'em. What you're liable to read about nowadays are the big name mysteries, those of Eleusis, Isis and Osiris, Dionysus and a few others. That may make you think mystery religions were isolated, eccentric cults, something only a few people knew about. In fact the mysteries were mainstream religion. Effectively everyone in Athens (of course we don't have census statistics) was initiated into the great Mysteries of Eleusis. Joining mysteries was just part of the culture. And there were hundreds of mystery religions -- world class mainstream scholar Walter Burkert estimates 600. Mystery religions were simply integral to ancient Mediterranean culture.

Features The Gods of the Mystery religions had differing names and myths, but the faiths themselves had features in common:
	their Gods died and came back to life;
	they were personal religions entered into voluntarily via initiation ceremonies that reenacted the God's death and rebirth and were often described by ancient writers as giving rebirth and salvation (some Mysteries saw salvation as temporary and earthbound -- salvation from illness or shipwreck; but other Mysteries offered initiates the salvation of eternal life) and
	their Gods have miraculous power to heal illness;
	initiates took food and drink in ceremonies that reenacted a holy meal established by the God;
	they had secret teachings brought the faithful closer to an understanding of God.

As I said, the Mystery Religions are an established part of modern religious scholarship. We know that they existed, when and where, we know their Gods and their myths -- all from the pens the ancients themselves. For example, Pagan writers wrote about a Pagan Mystery God "incognito, disguised as a man"; Pagan Gods dying and being reborn with the meaning that "the God is saved, and we shall have salvation."; initiation ceremonies described as "a voluntary death"; sacred meals; ceremonial washing; Pagan miracles; the Pagan God who changed water into wine; the Pagan version of the great flood. And much more.

If you're interested in discovering more about the Mysteries from the writings of the ancients themselves, The Ancient Mysteries; A Sourcebook of Sacred Texts is a good place to start

Philosophy -- religion without revelation
For us, religion and revelation are inseparable. Christianity, Islam, Bahai'-ism, Mormonism are "revealed" religions, based on the God's direct revelation through his Son or Prophet -- Jesus, Mohamed, Bahaulla, Joseph Smith. The ancients didn't have "revealed" religions. And because the Civic Gods didn't address ethics and afterlife, the ancients had to work out their ideas of meaning and divinity without a solid, revealed, starting place.

People who thought about meaning and divinity were called "philosophers." We use the same word today, but we mean something way different. It's a mistake for us to think of ancient philosophers as tweed jacket theorists. They were theologians.

The best way to define the ancients' word "philosophy" to us -- limited as we are to equating deity and revelation -- is "religion without revelation." In a world without revealed religion, the ancient philosophers tried to figure out, What is God? Amazing.

If you're interested in how ancient philosopher/theologians understood God, Cicero's book, The Nature of the Gods, is a great read. I like the translation in the Penguin Classics edition.

"God dwells in the universe as its ruler and governor, and rules the stars in their courses, and the changing seasons, and all the varying sequences of nature, looking down on earth and sea, and protecting the life and goods of men."[Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, Book 1] Quote note

And, "The divine power is to be found in a principle of reason which pervades the whole of nature." [Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, Book 1]

Plato founded Platonism in fourth century BC. His followers adapted his philosophy into middle-Platonism and eventually into neo-Platonism. Remember Hypatia, the philosopherette murdered by Christian officials in Egypt in 415 AD? She was a neo-Platonist.
Drunk straight, the ancient philosophies can be dull, dull, dull. On the other hand, mixed with the perspective that a lot of modern Christian theology comes from them, the philosophies can be pretty interesting. Unfortunately at POCM we don't time to go into details. OK, I just lied. Fortunately, at POCM we don't time to go into details.

We do have time to say that the philosophy/religions understood the archaic myths to be what they were -- village fables.

Listen to Cicero describe the old myths

"the poisonous honey of the poets, who present us with Gods afire with rage, or mad with lust, and make us the spectators of their wars, their battles, their violence and wounds....To these fictions of the poets we may add the wonders of the magicians and the similar extravagances of the Egyptians....Anyone who considers how rash and foolish are these beliefs ought to admire Epicurus [the philosopher]" [Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, Book 1]

And. says Cicero, Zeno, the guy who founded Stoicism

"ignores all our natural or acquired beliefs about the Gods and banishes Jupiter, Juno and Vesta, and all these persons, from the company of the Gods, arguing these were merely names given symbolically to mute and inanimate forces." [Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, Book 1]

And Listen to the ancient Pagan Heraclitus, comment on the silliness of idol worship

Not a unique opinion, says Origen, for it is shared by the Persians and Stoics. [Origen, Against Celsus Book 1, 5]

"Those who draw near to lifeless images as if they were Gods, act in a similar manner to those who would enter into conversation with houses." [Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, Book 1]

And

"Antisthenes too,...[says] that although popular religion recognizes many Gods, there is only one God" [Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, Book 1]

And

"There was Alcmaeon of Croton, who attributed divinity to the sun, moon and stars...not realizing he was attributing immortality to mortal things." [Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, Book 1]

Good Books for this section

Myth and Mystery : An Introduction to Pagan Religions of the Biblical World
by Jack Finegan

An easy to read survey of pre-Christian Western religion by a mainstream scholar. Chapters on: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Zoroastrianism, the Canaanites, Greece, Rome, the Gnostics, Mandaeanism, and Manichaeism.

The power of this book is that it isn't aimed at proving a connection between paganism and Judeo-Christianity -- so you're sure the author isn't skewing things to fit that argument. Yet you'll read about flood and creation myths paralleling Noah and Adam, about pre-Christian ideas of the immortality of the soul and life after death, and about lots and lots of Gods who die and are reborn.

Greek Religion
by Walter Burkert

Here's a surprise, a book by a world renown expert that's well organized and easy to read.
This book is organized by feature- of- religion: ritual, the Gods, Heroes, the dead, polytheism, the mysteries, and philosophy-religions. That gives you a compare and contrast look at, for e.g. baptism or, blood sacrifice across the culture. So the book complements the cult by cult organization of Finegan and Turcan.

The Cults of the Roman Empire
by Robert Turcan

Like Finegan's book the power of this book is that it isn't aimed at proving a connection between paganism and Judeo-Christianity -- so you're sure the author isn't skewing things to fit that argument.
This book is more detailed than Finegan's -- giving in depth details of the political history of the main ancient religions, and intricate details about the theology and ritual I've never seen anywhere else. Highly recommended.