Ellinais, or the Sacred Society of Greek Ancient Religionists, has begun holding prayers to Athena (ancient Greek goddess of knowledge) and is protesting the Greek governments moving of statues from the Acropolis to modern museums. The ancient Greek religion was apparently made illegal in the fourth century, however police did not prevent the practitioners from holding their prayers.
The practitioners even claimed some divine evidence of their ceremony:
“Is it a coincidence that rain started falling when the ceremony started and ended at the same time as the ceremony? I think not,”
However, one could just as easily claim that the Christian God was pissed after being upstaged some 1700 years later.
The ceremony featured some 200 practitioners. It appears the atheists can no longer use the “no one believes in Zeus anymore” argument.
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I am still waiting for Asatru to make it big. If we must have Gods, why not have Gods like Loki, Thor and Woden?
Welcome to neopaganism — there is a whole subculture of neopagans, ranging from those who try to follow some old-time religion fairly closely (the Reconstructionists) to those who more or less make it up as they go along. And much of neopaganism, especially Wicca, does seem to be a modern invention.
It can be hard to tell what neopagans’ beliefs are, since neopagans are typically more focused on experience and practice rather than explicit belief. And neopaganism might reasonably be called a subset of New Age belief and practice.
It is also hard to estimate how many neopagans there are, because like New Agers, neopagans are only loosely organized and have no well-defined shared beliefs or practices. For the US, I’ve seen estimates like 300 thousand – 1 million, and for the UK, 250 thousand.
This hurts my head. Neopaganism sounds so willy-nilly, wish-washy, and vacuous. Arg.
Now come on, Athena is so cool, and her sisters also: Aphrodite and Artemis.
And Dionysos! Wine and orgies for everybody.
And Hephaistos, not many gods building robots out there, isn’t it?
That’s a very nice collection of gods coming along with Zeus.
Disclosure: I’m greek
For the particular case, of the Olympians, you may add an exacerbated nationalism and centuries old hate induced by massacres, by early Christians.
They have a nicely presented belief system, based on Plato’s mythology: immortal soul, heaven and paradise and purgatory and revival etc.