By 1140, when the Italian monk Gratian compiled the first collection of ecclesiastical laws, the Corpus Juris Canonici, the last Olympic Games were 747 years in the past, held in the same year that the Oracle of Delphi delivered its last prophecy, a little more than a century before the Byzantine emperor Justinian I closed Plato’s Academy, in 529 CE. Ever since Rome became Christian, starting with its legalization by Constantine I in 313 and then its establishment as the religion of the empire by Theodosius 380, Europe had existed in the long dusk of its classical past, the ancient rites discarded or suppressed, the oracles made mute, the gods gone silent. Yet within Gratian’s compendium, with its stipulations for restitution and penitence, there is a curious section that mandates a “penance for forty days on bread and water” for those who have “observed Thursday in honor of Jupiter.” In another section, there is discussion of the punishment warranted for those caught worshipping Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt. If these penitentials reflect a reality in the twelfth century, are we then to imagine that in the age of Peter Abelard and Hildegard von Bingen and of the Cathedrals at Notre Dame and Westminster Abbey, that there were people still genuflecting before Jupiter?
Even though Gratian was drawing on older, possibly outdated sources, his rulings raise a question: When exactly did Jupiter cease throwing his thunder bolts, Apollo driving his chariot, Bacchus preparing his reveries? Because European Christianization was often a top-down affair, as when Theodosius declared the empire officially Christian, common sense would suggest that many, at least for a time, preserved the old ways. Any familiarity with this process in the first few centuries of the Common Era attests to the complexity of the transition, as pagan elites feuded with the Christian rabble, until the tables were turned and the believers in the classical gods came to be found only among a rusticated peasantry, such as with the ethnic minority of the Maniots of Laconia and Messenia who are said to have performed the ancient rites and tended to the sacred groves as late as the tenth century.
Unlike the Egyptian deities or the Babylonian gods hidden behind impenetrable hieroglyphics and cuneiform, the Greek and Roman pantheon endured by surviving as living memory among the descendants of those who once worshipped them, even if a full understanding of them was often occluded. That depaganization was a slipshod and erratic affair is well attested, from the endurance of the Norse gods in the names of days of week among Germanic-speaking peoples to the holiness of oak trees among the Celts, from the Finno-Ugric animism that was practiced by the so-called “barbarians” at Rome’s peripheries to the paganism of Lithuania which was astoundingly the official religion of that kingdom until the thirteenth century. “The transition from pagan to Christian is the point at which the ancient world still touches ours directly,” writes Robin Lane Fox in Pagans and Christians in the Mediterranean World from the Second Century AD to the Conversion of Constantine. “We are heirs to its conclusion.” But even while the Vatican is decorated with statues of Athena and Laocoon, or Renaissance paintings such as Michelangelo’s celebrated School of Athens, which includes depictions of Apollo and Minerva, we tend to ignore that Mediterranean paganism endured in the same way that Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavic polytheisms did.
Such is the influence of the heterodox Egyptologist Margaret Murray who in 1933 ventured her controversial hypothesis that a “Great Horned God” was surreptitiously worshiped by rural Europeans, and that the persecution of witches was a purging of that deity’s priestesses. According to Murray, during the Middle Ages Christianity “was the very thinnest veneer over an underlying Paganism,” but her enthusiasms hewed toward the overcast and cold rather than the sunny and temperate, the north instead of the south (though Diana remains ever-present). That is to say that in popular culture, we are used to the idea that some residual Druidic worshippers of the Gaelic god Esus exist in remote Scotland, as in the 1973 folk horror classic The Wicker Man, or that contemporary Swedes will prepare a blood eagle sacrifice to placate the Norse god Vidorr, as in the 2019 film Midsommar, but are more reluctant to assume there to be a secret contingent of Maenads in the Greek or Italian hills.
To paraphrase the title of the 1983 book by French philosopher Paul Veynes, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?, do we still believe in them? Paradoxically, the omnipresence of the Olympians explains why we seldom wonder where they have gone. Because we are so familiar with them as figures, we acknowledge their persistence even without believing them in any strict sense. Certainly, in the centuries after the conversion of the empire, when the members of the Greco-Roman pantheon were recast as demons rather than deities, they inspired a different kind of belief. The Church Father Justin Martyr writes in his second-century First Apology about “those who are called gods,” listing Dionysius, Apollo, Persephone, Aphrodite, and Asclepius as “spiritual forces of evil in heavenly places,” not gods but devils. A pagan convert to Christianity at a time when the old religion was still dominant, Martyr’s position was a theological mainstay into the Middle Ages, but the never-entirely-eclipsed presence of the Greek pantheon in European art and literature—if not worship—makes one question if Apollo and Dionysius were ever entirely reduced to the demonic.
During the long Middle Ages the educated would have still been familiar with Ovid’s Metamorphosis or Virgil’s Aeneid (the latter still being used for divination), while great literary works of the fourteenth century, from Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale” to the anonymous Middle English poem Sir Orfeo, a retelling of Orpheus, were replete with ancient myth. Literary reference does not imply belief, of course, and there is a massive gulf between poetic allusion and animal organ haruspicy or the offering of rites at the Altar of Hestia. But a reading of Sir Orfeo, for example, does not suggest that its author shared the view of Justin Martyr. The gods in such works endured as shadows, but they endured as deities all the same.
Then, of course, there is the Renaissance, which signaled, among other rebirths, that of the defeated gods. Raphael’s 1513 The Triumph of Galatea depicts the titular nymph on her nautical sojourns, sailing on a clam shell and attended by both dolphins and Poseidon. Peter Paul Reubens’ sublime The Fall of Phaeton, painted in 1604, presents Apollo riding his sun-chariot across the starry firmament. And most famous is Sandro Botticelli’s incandescent The Birth of Venus from 1484, with the blonde and milk-complexioned Aphrodite arising fully formed from the seafoam upon a massive mollusk shell, her hair blown by personified Aurelian winds. Again, the use of the Greco-Roman inheritance, even as rediscovered and redeployed in the Renaissance, need not be interpreted as indicating renewed belief, but it clearly represented a softening of the patristic teachings. Moreover, the fact that Botticelli would destroy many of his own paintings after his conversion at the hands of the theocratic Dominican friar Savonarola, suggests that at one point the artist’s Olympian interests were not just of the head but also the heart.
Whether Botticelli’s depiction of Venus is as much genuflection as artistic exercise is impossible to answer, but there were Quattrocento philosophers for whom the old gods provided new answers. Neo-Platonists such as Marsilio Ficino and Giovani Pico della Mirandola were content to raid the archives of the classical past, while occultists were engaged in resuscitating ancient Hermetic magic. Such thinkers saw the e gods as ambiguously liminal figures,, but the philosopher Plethon took them to be very real. Born Georgios Gemistos, Plethon came to believe that the new learning of humanism required bolstering through a return to the ancient faith. A Byzantine representative to the Council of Florence (1431–1449) aimed, without success, at reestablishing ecclesiastical connections between the Latin West and the Greek East, Plethon was outwardly Orthodox but extravagantly pagan within.
His days were spent on the finer points of disagreement between the Orthodox and Catholics regarding the Filioque Clause of the Nicene Creed (stipulating that the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Son as well as the Father), but Plethon’s esoteric writings enthused about Apollo and Dionysius. “Let us sing of the creator of mortal nature, king Cronos, son of Jupiter,” wrote Plethon, “Let’s sing also of Aphrodite, the holy wife of Cronos, and Pan who presides over animals, Hestia over plants, and Persephone over our mortal nature, and finally all the others.” A subtle thinker, Plethon attempted a pagan theology every bit as intellectually sophisticated as Christian philosophy. Doing so, he emulated the ambition of Julian the Apostate, a Roman emperor who, a millennium earlier, had sought to reestablish classical paganism. Plethon hoped to construct a new civic paganism, even as he labored to suture the divide between the two great Christian churches of the age. During a break in Florence, Plethon told his colleague George of Trebizond that only one faith would endure. When asked if it would be based on the teachings of Christ or those of Muhammad, Plethon replied that it would be neither. Instead, he declared, it would be pagan. “I hated him ever after,” wrote Trebizond.
Still, Plethon was a baptized Christian, as were his parents and his grandparents. A vogue for the pagan in Botticelli and Michelangelo, or shared by Ficino and Mirandola, is not the same as an unbroken thread to the ancient world. Contemporary neo-pagans make claims to a venerable patrimony, but despite a handful of cultural practices which mimic Dionysian rites in places as distant from each other as Abruzi and Morocco, the pagan light seems mostly to have gone out. Yet that there are pagans in the world, with all that is inexact, imperfect, and ethnocentric about such a term, remains undeniable. For the Sami of Lapland, a form of Turkic animism is still practiced across the Nordic tundra, while in the Russian federated oblast of Mari El there are thousands of believers who pray to their ancestors’ deity Kugu Jumo by the banks of the Volga. Many Kurds are adherents of the venerable Yazidi faith, with its teachings about the malevolent peacock deity, Melek Taus. For all that, the worship of Jupiter seems to have gone out centuries, if not millennia, ago. Christians have long since interpreted a tale from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which the Peloponnese rings out with the valedictory rumble that “the Great God Pan is dead,” as a literal statement of the Nazarene’s victory.
That reverberating echo dulls a bit in a verdant valley thousands of miles to the east of Greece. Beyond the blistering and sunbaked environs of the most remote regions of northeastern Afghanistan, in the Nuristan Province that was once called Kafiristan (“Land of the Infidels”), the Kalasha tribe have retained their old rituals Claiming to be the descendants of Alexander’s troops who marched across the Hindu Kush some twenty-five centuries ago, the Kalasha number only a few thousand, living among groves of pear trees and mulberry bushes, practicing their indigenous faith in defiance of what either Christian or Muslim colonizers have demanded. Once here, Alexander shaped a syncretic civilization blending East and West, the domain of the Greco-Bactrian kingdoms where adherents of both Apollo and the Buddha prayed; where, indeed, the characteristic chiton-wearing representation of the Buddha derived its appearance from Hellenistic antecedents. The Kalasha were the mysterious tribe that Rudyard Kipling made the centerpiece of his fantastical novella, The Man Who Would be King, in which two British colonial officers briefly install themselves as the rulers of Kafiristan through duplicity and a heavy reliance on Masonic ritual. Beyond Kipling’s imagination, the genetic evidence concerning the Kalashas’ origins is ambiguous, and most historians today interpret their polytheism as a form of archaic Hinduism (though both Greek mythology and Indian religion have common Indo-European roots). Still, to this day the Kalasha offer rites to their main god, Dezao, whose name derives from that of Zeus. “The wheel of the world swings through the same phases,” Kipling writes, “again and again.”