Religious Beliefs and Rituals in Ancient Greece

Although the Greek beliefs appear to us outwardly to be somewhat harmonious and dominated by one rhythm and one rhythm, the references of this religion and its different roots make us look at it from different angles, in addition to the different scenes of these beliefs make it seem as if they contain more than one worship.


Map of Homeric Greece \| Created by Pinpin (2007) \| Licensed under GNU FDL 1.2+ - CC BY-SA 3.0 \| Free to share-modify with attribution.

agricultural worship

This type of worship in Greek beliefs is perhaps the oldest of all, and agricultural worship almost represents the ancient Greeks before the coming of the Greeks, it is deeply rooted in prehistoric times and the beginning of the Bronze Age.
In fact, agricultural worship is an extension of the worship of the mother goddess that accompanied the emergence of agriculture in most regions of the ancient world. It is a female cult that celebrates the goddesses of land and agriculture, and they are respectively:

Gia
Rhea
Cybele
Dimeter
Dione

What unites these gods is their association with the earth, fertility and agriculture, and this worship began to fade away as the male air gods ascended, and this worship even became the source of the secret cults that some of them celebrated.
In its esoteric path, this cult would attract a male deity as its lover or murdered son, such as Dionysus, Orpheus, and Attis. The rituals of these cults were different, but they all sought fertility and the eventual multiplication of crops.
(Non-bloody offerings were made to this goddess (Demeter) of fruits, grapes, honeycombs, and freshly sheared sheep's wool, all of which were gathered on the altar, all of this was collected on the altar to pour olive oil on it)
The agricultural worship included various sexual rituals, whether for gods or humans, and reproduction was one of its goals, and therefore the process of higher moral values weakened in it and was characterized by sensuality and utilitarianism, although the secret cults tried to give the agricultural rituals emotional meanings, especially the ideas of salvation, immortality and others.

For more about Dionysus and his worship

Dionysus (Bacchus): The God of Wine and Fertility in Greek Mythology

For more about Ancient Greek Cults
Ancient Greek Cults: Eleusinian Mysteries and the Underworld

Magical worship

Magical worship may have origins that extend back to the ancient stone ages. It is based on the perception of the existence of a force in things and the universe that can be dealt with and controlled.

Fetishism
Animism
Magical
Totemism

These tendencies are intertwined with each other, and it is difficult to separate one from the other. Fetishism is embodied in the reverence of some objects that are believed to have great power capable of affecting the environment, such as a tree, a piece of wood or a stone, and perhaps rivers, springs and mountains, and this tendency is the origin of idol worship, "In Orchomenos, sacred stones are claimed to have fallen from heaven one day,
and there was a particularly worshiped stone in Delphi, where oil was poured on it daily and covered with fresh wool on festivals.
Many of these important local fetishes were later associated
with statues of generic Greek gods, without losing their primitive form.
Animism emerged from the Greeks' belief in an invisible force that controlled everything and breathed life into everything. They called it Mana.
Magical rituals appear in religious rituals, especially those that deal with the forces of darkness, disease, and the underworld. Totemism spread to the Greek cults, especially
when they attributed many of the gods to animal and plant origins or symbolize them, before and after the emergence of anthropomorphism. The Totemism of Zeus, for example, was the eagle and the Totemism of Hera was the cow.
These tendencies in Greek religion are the remnants of ancient cults that dissolved and took the form of symbols, shapes, and ideas in a new religious apparatus that is dominated by the image of harmony.

For more about: Creation of the Universe and Birth of the Gods

Worship of the dead

The need to venerate the dead and the belief in their immortality in the afterlife was a reason to worship them in some form. The worship of the dead, which was primarily the responsibility of the relatives and successors of the deceased, formed a tangible part of the ritual family religion of the Greeks.
The Greeks believed that the dead should be buried, and only the Ionians believed in the ritual of cremation, so the horror of not burying the dead and exposing the body in the open to the depredations of animals.
The Greeks believed that the soul of the deceased went to the kingdom of Hades and lived an empty life there, and there was a more established and widespread conviction that the fate of the souls was linked to the performance of the living to perform the ritual duties imposed over the body of the deceased.
The epic of the Iliad and the Greek tragedies are filled with many scenes indicative of the sanctification and worship of the dead, where the firm belief in the need of the dead for food and drink that is placed or poured at the grave in order for the life of the dead to continue as the life of the living. In addition to tribal and dynastic traditions, the cult of the family flame also remained strong among the Greeks.
The sacred domestic flame was personified in the form of the goddess Hestia. The feminine personification of the flame is a phenomenon that characterizes the religions of many peoples as a remnant of the Amulet Age. The dead did not have a god-like status in worship, but they were revered in one way or another.

Giustiniani Hestia | Roman copy (2nd century CE) of a Greek original (c. 460 BCE) | Parian marble, height: 199 cm | Museo Torlonia, Rome | Public domain.

Hero worship

The cult of heroes appeared after the cult of the dead and with the emergence of aristocratic families in Greece at the end of the Bronze Age, the history of the Greeks has two eras of heroism. The first before the events of the Trojan War
and the second in the events of the Trojan War, and the heroes in the two eras appear to be semi-deified, as they were later seen as the souls of the protectors of a particular clan line, the first ancestors of the heads of their clans also separate The separation of aristocratic dynasties, the heads of their clans also began to separate to become a special object of worship. The heroes and ancestors of the most famous and mighty dynasties were greatly exalted above all others, and their circle of worshippers expanded to an unimaginable degree.
The most famous Greek heroes of the first heroic age were descended from Zeus or other gods who had intermarried with human women: Pelias, Neleus, Amphion, Castor, Pollux, Perseus and Heraclius.

For more about the mythical exploits of Heracles

cult of cities

The cult of the classical Greeks was linked to the urban system of government, specifically the city state, for which he put a goddess who protects this city and preserves its privacy.
The city declares its affiliation with these gods, considering their worship as its basic system and as the title and guarantee of its social covenant. Thus, Athens is the city of the goddess Athena, who is worshiped as such and is called for that (Athena Polyeas), but Athena herself is also worshiped as Athena Argani (worker), Nike (victory), and Hygeia (health).
The worship of the god or goddess of the city required respect and reverence and the presentation of the calm of the god or this goddess over others, and it was not possible to neglect the implementation of the mandatory rituals in honor of the protector god of the city, and showing disrespect towards him was prohibited, and the most severe types of punishment awaited those who violated this law. An example in this field is the judgment and execution of Socrates in (390 BC) after he met with horrors on the pretext of not venerating the gods worshipped by the city. The official accusation was that he had introduced new gods and goddesses into the city.
But Socrates' accusation was a flimsy argument. In addition to worshipping all the Greek gods, Athens also worshipped foreign gods, and Socrates had nothing to do with it. Because of the port of beer to which sailors, merchants and travelers from all countries came, Athens was forced to go too far in leniency. In the first instance, it allowed the establishment of private societies whose members worshipped foreign gods, such as the Thracian Bendis, the Egyptian Isis, and the Syrian Adonis and Astarte.
From the very beginning, some of the conformists joined. Without concealment or censure, some citizens joined the ranks of resident and non-resident foreigners in these societies, and Athens subsequently recognized the entry of the greater number of these gods into the official worship.
The worship of heroes was reconciled with the worship of the gods of the city in the form of finding a lineage between these heroes and the gods and formulating legends emphasizing this, and the name of the hero usually suggests a derivation from the name of the protector god of the city.
This combination of the names of local heroes with the great gods reflected the tendency of these cities or places to unite spiritually, culturally and politically, while adhering to the god of the city meant protecting the city against another city, as well as adhering to the general Greek god as a reason to stand against external enemies of the whole country of Greece or the Greeks.
Thus, the worship of the god of the city could be a kind of political worship in most of its manifestations, especially at a time when the Greek city-state flourished in the classical era.

The cult of beauty

Hegel used to describe Greek worship, especially in its classical era, as (the cult of beauty), and it seems that the essence of this idea goes back to the way the Greeks understood the gods, as they were the most people who made the gods according to the size of man, as they differed from the Semites, for example, who made the gods different for man, enlarging him in size, strength and survival in an unimaginable way, so that this closeness between gods and humans,
that led to the presence of the immortals constantly among mortals, explains no doubt, the intervention of the gods in every Greek poem. There is no festival that is not dedicated to the gods, but to gods who are always present.
Every theatrical performance begins, for example, with a sacrifice where the god is offered something that attracts his attention to be physically present. Poetry, both praise and tragedy, is under the patronage of the god, not that this god cannot be mocked, as Aristophanes did in his play (The Frogs), where Dionysus, in whose honor the feast is celebrated, plays the role of a poor character.
Thus, the gods became human-like, but in other words, they were striving to be the perfect human being, the best, the finest, the strongest, the most beautiful. They are the embodiment of the human tendency towards the heights.
Artists, poets, dramatists and sculptors contributed to the creation of the idealized image of beauty for these gods. For example, sculptors depicted the gods with symmetrical bodies, beautiful faces and graceful movements
that suggest that these gods are (beauty) itself. The statues of Aphrodite were the ideal of female beauty and the statues of Apollon were the ideal of male beauty, as well as the statues of other gods bearing their qualities.
The cult of beauty may have found its support in the theory that the gods were only human beings, but they became gods after their death, so they became an example of everything and their biography was modified to fit this example image, and this theory was said by (Euhemerus) who lived shortly after Alexander the Great, and Zeus in his opinion was only an ancient king in Crete who rebelled against his father and deposed him from the throne, and so other gods.

Thus, the cult of beauty is related to the cult of heroes to some extent, but the cult of beauty is associated with an obsession with transcendence. The common people, or what we can call (popular worship), relegated the gods to the popular level that makes them ordinary in everything, but the reaction formed by tragic poets and sculptors elevated the gods and made them especially transcend their ordinary human image. The poet Pindar, for example, was obsessed with the greatness of the gods and disliked their lowly qualities.
The image of beauty is what made the religion of the Greeks an artistic cult, akin to the religion of poetry, the religion of theater or the religion of sculpture, while the shortcomings and disadvantages of the gods were considered an invention of the common people.