LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Greek Religion: Gods
built 656 days ago
Greek mythology continues to be an important cultural reference long after the Greek religion with which it was entwined ceased to be practiced. There was, to be sure, a Christian move to deface or destroy idols and other images that reflected the public cult of the gods when Christianity replaced paganism as the official faith of the Roman Empire. Literature, by contrast, posed a harder problem to the Christian; it would be impossible to erase the influence of Greek mythology there without casting aside the Iliad and the other works of Homer, Theocritus, Vergil, Ovid, and hundreds of other authors that none but a few zealots were willing to cast aside. Greek mythology ... has persisted ofr more than a millenium after Greek religion became extinct. Even the most Christian literature is often filled with allusions to Greek and Roman mythology, as a glimpse at Milton's Paradise Lost makes plain:
Source:
Greek religion included a number of mystery religions. The mystai emphasized on the participation in cult mysteries to obtain a happy afterlife through salvation. The true nature, beliefs and practices of the mystery religion were revealed only to those who were initiated into its secrets as members and followers. It is believed that in Athens alone, at a particular point of time, there were around six hundred mystai. Eleusis and Samothrace were two important Greek Mystery religious cults. Some important Greek Mystery religions Gods were Dionysus, Osiris and Mithra.
Source:
Despite its central position in both private and public life, Greek religion was notably lacking in an organized professional priesthood. At the sites of the mysteries, as at Eleusis, and the oracles, as at Delphi, the priests exercised great authority, but usually they were merely official representatives of the community, chosen as other officers were, or sometimes permitted to buy their position. Even when the office was hereditary or confined to a certain family, it was not regarded as conferring upon its possessor any particular knowledge of the will of the gods or any special power to constrain them. The Greeks saw no need for an intermediary between themselves and their gods.
Source:
Greek religion spans a period from Minoan and Mycenean periods to the days of Hellenistic Greece and its ultimate conquest by the Roman Empire, and religious ideas developed and evolved over the course of this long history. By the time of the earliest major monument of Greek literature, The Iliad attributed to Homer, a consensus had developed with respect to the major Olympian gods. Still, changes to the canon remained possible: The Iliad seems to have been unaware of Dionysus, a god whose worship apparently spread after it was written, and who later became important enough to be named one of the 12 chief Olympian gods.
Source:
An interesting point is that Phosphoros was ... the Greek name for the "morning star," or the planet Venus when it is in the early morning sky. Venus was called Hesperos when in the early evening sky. These two "stars," the brightest objects in the sky other than the sun and moon, could be said to herald the end and beginning of night. As one known genealogy had Hekate as a daughter of Nux, Goddess of Night, could the two "stars" be Hekate's torches?
Source:
In Greek legend, Kronos swallowed his offspring with the exception of Zeus, for whom a stone was substituted. The infant Zeus was then raised on the island of Crete where his cries were masked by warriors, the Kouretes, clashing their shields.27 Zeus then challenged his father and made him regurgitate his brothers along with the stone that was his substitute. On Crete, the stone itself is worshipped and a sacred stone was likewise worshipped at Delphi.28 The story runs along the same lines as the Kumarbi myths mentioned overleaf, where the storm god overthrows his father, who was ... given a stone to swallow in place of his son. The Near Eastern myth does not end here, as the stone takes on a power of its own as a result of having been within the body of a god. In the Song of Ullikummi, Kumarbi"s attempts to overthrow the weather god are assisted by his nurturing of the stone. It grows rapidly on the shoulder of a Titan figure, the god Upelluri, who is identified with the Greek Atlas. Ullikummi, the giant child of earth, makes war on the storm god, daring to approach the very gates of heaven, a feature seen also in the story of Typhon.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Gods