Olivia Strittmatter - Ancient Greek/Roman Paganism and Ecology

 Blog Post 6 - Topic of My Choosing 2

Week 6

        For this blog post I’m going to be writing my second post about the topic of my choosing, which is: comparing how different religions interact with nature and the ecology that surrounds that followers of each religion. The religion that I’m writing about this week is paganism, and I chose this because in class on Thursday (Feb 25) Dr. Redick talked about ancient pagans in the context of nature.

        I think it’s particularly interesting how this ancient paganism differs from modern neo-paganism. I will be writing a blog post about a modern neo-pagan religion in a later blog post, and I will compare and contrast that religion with this one.

        There is also more background information about Greek creation myths in my third blog post, as well as a link to further reading.

        In class Dr. Redick talked about how ancient pagans, like the Greeks and Romans, didn’t define nature the way we do today. The Greek word for “nature” was “phusis” which translates to “the self arising”. This is not how modern humans view nature. Modern humanity views nature as anything that is natural and non-human. The ancient pagans though, are considered to be “nature worshipers” but in reality they didn’t have this word “nature” and didn’t worship it as if it was a separate entity from themselves. 

        The Greek and Roman Pantheons had 12 major gods, but there were many many more “lesser” gods. All of the gods acted like humans, and had vices and virtues as any human does. The gods represented different aspects of life and existence. The practicing pagans believed that by sacrificing animals to particular gods and participating in certain rituals that favorable things would happen, such as a bountiful crop harvest. This is what we would currently describe as “nature worship” even though they weren’t worshipping the environment directly, they were worshipping the environment by worshipping the gods. The people had not yet begun to abstract the differences between man and “nature”.

        Last blog I wrote about Jainism and the Jain’s relationship with the environment. One major similarity that I noticed between the Jains and the Greek/Roman pagans was that both religions viewed all things as living. A difference to this though was that the Greeks (and Romans) had gods for time and space, while the Jains view those as non-living. Another difference that I noticed was that the Greek/Roman pagans performed ritual sacrifices to their gods, but that the Jains refuse to even cook vegetables because they don’t want to be responsible for the death of another living creature. Another similarity between paganism and Jainism is that I think they would have similar levels of respect for the ecosystems around them. I think that they would be similar in this aspect because the Jains are very eco-conscious and don’t want to harm any of the other living things of this world. I think the pagans would be afraid of disrespecting and angering their gods so they would avoid doing too much damage to the environment if possible, and if they had to do damage that they would make up for it in some way.