Ancient paganism in a land of orthodoxy.

Athena and Poseidon fight to be Athens's patron deity.
Lynne Cantwell | Athens, May 2026

I'm back from my refreshing two-week break. Folks who follow me on Facebook already know that I spent most of it gallivanting on a ten-day bus tour of Greece (although "land tour via motor coach" sounds classier). Unlike the European river cruises I've been on, this one was sparse on churches, partly because the country is mostly Greek Orthodox (their churches don't seem to feature the ostentatious wealth of European cathedrals that Americans like to goggle at) and partly because the country is rife with ancient pre-Christian ruins.

We toured a lot of those ancient ruins. Like, a lot of them. It seems like you can't dig anywhere in Greece without hitting the remains of an old Greek temple or Roman villa or something from an even older culture. But at every site we visited, there has been an effort to save at least a semblance of a temple to a god or goddess. Clearly the gods were important to the ancient Greeks.

Which is why I was shocked when our guide at Olympia, the site of the original Olympics, baldly stated that nobody in ancient Greece ever believed in the Greek gods. She said that the gods embodied the virtues that each person was supposed to aspire to, but people didn't actually believe they existed.

Seriously? Then why go to the trouble of building all this?

The Parthenon in Athens, dedicated to Athena. Other temples on the 
Acropolis are dedicated to other gods.
Lynne Cantwell | May 2026

The temple of Hera at Olympia.
Lynne Cantwell | May 2026

The temple of Zeus at Olympia. Hera's temple was built first.
Lynne Cantwell | May 2026

Info about the temple of Athena at Sparta. There's not much of the temple left.
Lynne Cantwell | May 2026

Temple of Apollo at Corinth, one of two structures the Romans didn't destroy.
Lynne Cantwell | May 2026

These people went to so much trouble to carve, shift and stack thousands upon thousands of tons of limestone and marble to honor beings they didn't think were real? Are you crazy?

At first I thought maybe what our guide was implying was that the ancients were misguided and only the Christian god is real. But now I think she was coming from a Christian-centric view not of the gods' existence, but of the nature of religion.

John Beckett has said many times that in its broadest sense, religion is about what you do, who you are, and whose you are. Christians have their Bible, Jews their Hebrew bible, Muslims their Koran; those books lay out the official tenets of their religions. The ancient Greeks didn't have anything like that. For them, moral authority came not from a religious text but from artworks, stories, and plays about their gods. 

The photo at the top of this post is of a sculpture that once adorned the Parthenon. It tells the story of how Athens got its patron: Athena, the goddess of wisdom, strategy, and crafts, and Poseidon, the god of the sea, storms, and earthquakes, vied for the job. Poseidon brought up a spring of salt water, which the citizens deemed useless -- it wasn't like they could drink it. Then Athena caused to grow an olive tree. The citizens were thrilled -- they could eat the olives, use their oil for all manner of things, and use the wood for homes and tools -- so they adopted Athena as their goddess and named their city Athens. Using John's definition of religion, residents of the city were Athenians (who they are). Athena was their patron deity (whose they are), and so they honored her (what they do). They didn't need a bible to lay all that out; instead, they had things like this sculpture on the Parthenon. 

And they had theater. Although of the 1,000 or so plays written by Greek and Roman authors, only 83 survive, 46 of them Greek. Some we know about only because another author mentions them. 

Modern Pagans don't have a bible, either. What we have is what's left of the ancients' stories and plays about whichever gods and goddesses we follow. Like the ancient Greeks, we're not obsessed with what we need to do to get to heaven; instead, we're focused on doing the best we can in this world, right now.

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I am a Pagan polytheist and animist. I follow and honor gods and goddesses from several pantheons: Mokosh, the Slavic goddess of the earth and of weaving and spinning; Brigid, the Irish goddess of weaving, smithcraft and poetry; Lugh, the Irish god of light; Morrigan, the Irish goddess of sovereignty and war; Perun, the Slavic god of thunder and justice; Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and strategy; and Luna, the Roman goddess of the moon. 

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The only Greek god I follow is Athena. But I poured a little offering of water at each temple we visited anyway. It felt like the right thing to do. And I think the gods appreciated knowing that some folks still honor them.

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Three observations before I wrap up: 

1) I found it interesting that Athens, the ancient city-state that prized democracy and the arts, is now a metropolis of three million people, while Sparta, the ancient city-state that prized military order, has a population of only about 20,000 people today. The modern city is built atop the old one, and what remains of ancient Sparta is not well preserved; the Bronze Age site of Messene is better developed, and extensive excavations only began there in 2007. It almost seemed to me like the Greeks don't care to emphasize Sparta's violent past.

2) While touring all these ancient sites and seeing so many big chunks of temples in pieces, I thought of all the home-improvement TV shows in which some guy screws something to something else and says, "That's not going anywhere." I could almost hear the ancient Greek stone masons, echoing down the ages, saying the same thing. (In the case of the Acropolis, it didn't help matters that the occupying Ottomans were using the place to store gunpowder; the attacking Venetians lobbed a mortar shell into the building in 1687, blowing out pillars on one side and destroying the structures inside.)

3) The Acropolis Museum in Athens is worth a stop on its own. Of course, the topic of the Elgin marbles came up during our tour. In the early 1800s, the seventh Earl of Elgin "acquired" from the occupying Ottomans a bunch of statuary from Greece, including a haul from the Parthenon. He eventually sold everything to the British government, which put it on display in the British Museum. Our guide in Athens was confident that the marbles would eventually be returned. Negotiations over an elaborate swap of the marbles for other Greek antiquities have been ongoing since 2021, but the sticking point is that the Brits say they were legally acquired, while the Greeks say they were looted. Personally, I think the Brits are stalling.

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These moments of opinionated Greek tourism have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. C'mon, England, give that stuff back to Greece already.