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.

How to start living ethically.

I'm a little bit fried tonight. Pretty sure I've mentioned that I'm temping for the New Mexico Legislature as a legal proofreader again this year. The 2022 regular session starts Tuesday, so we've swung into session mode -- which is to say we're working seven days a week until it's all over on February 17th. It's fun and mostly interesting, but exhausting. I'm already tired, and the session hasn't even started yet.

So I was grateful when I checked the comments on last week's post on making the mundane sacred and discovered a great follow-up question: "But to start living ethically, does one need to articulate their morals clearly to themselves so they are aware of living intentionally?"

It sure looked like a blog post topic to me (thanks, Jo!), and I didn't have anything else teed up. (I did have a couple of ideas, but they're both Curmudgeon's Corner material and they could probably stand to ripen a little anyhow.) So here's my response:

If you believe it would be a good thing to live ethically and you would like to do so, then yes, you should spend some time working out your own moral code.

Teodoraturovic | Wikimedia Commons | CC 4.0

Notice I said your own moral code. Now, lots of people adopt the moral code they were taught as children. Maybe their parents taught it to them, or maybe they learned it in church, or maybe they soaked it up from TV or the kids around them or Western civilization in general. That's a moral code, certainly, and a lot of folks just stop there.

But many folks, as they mature, begin to question some of the tenets of this hand-me-down morality. I'm not talking about theosophical questions like the nature of deity or how many angels can dance on the head of a pin -- although people question those things, too. What I mean is things like whether abortion is wrong. Or whether gay marriage should continue to be legal. Or whether the poor deserve to be poor. Or how rich is too rich. That sort of thing.

It often comes to a point where folks with these questions decide their beliefs about these things differ profoundly from beliefs held by those around them. But then they experience cognitive dissonance: Should they stick with the religion they were brought up in because all of their friends and family still follow it? Or do they turn away? And if they do leave the church, how do they orient their personal moral compass? Where is their true north?

For some folks in this situation, joining a different church is enough. But some bail from monotheism entirely.

I'm of the opinion that you don't need to be religious to live a moral life. It's a truism, I think, that many atheists and agnostics live more ethically than a lot of religious people. The difference is that the folks who have broken away from the religious mindset have spent time thinking about where their moral true north is -- and with any luck, they're then able to orient their lives around it.

Pagans have a slightly different dilemma. We don't have the rich theosophical history that Christianity and Judaism do. And while pagan philosophers definitely existed, their full belief system might not be a great fit for modern humans. Sure, the Greeks were deep thinkers -- but they also thought slavery was okay. And Roman women -- even the ones who weren't slaves or prostitutes -- weren't allowed to vote or hold political office.

But modern-day Pagans can do the same kind of deep thinking about ethics and morality as anyone else, and we can develop our own moral code. Our gods may not have inspired a holy book, but they have their virtues, and we can choose to live up to them.

It was Socrates (according to Plato) who said an unexamined life is not worth living. If you want to live ethically, but on your own terms, that's a great place to start.

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These moments of deep, bloggy thinking have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Get vaxxed!

Making the mundane sacred.

I usually agree with John Beckett, the Druid priest who blogs over at Patheos Pagan. But I had a problem with today's post from the get-go.

His post is in response to a question he received on a post-class survey: "How can we learn to see mundane activities through a sacred lens?" His TL;DR response: we can't. Because as soon as we consider the mundane sacred, the sacred necessarily becomes mundane.

That's going to be news to the members of certain Native American tribes, not to mention monks of various religious orders. 

It's easy, I think, for most of us to see how Catholic monks would consider day-to-day activities as sacred. They've pledged their lives in service of their Lord, so anything they do that helps the community thrive becomes a sacred duty -- even peeling potatoes and scrubbing floors. While Buddhist monks don't pledge their lives to a deity, they do separate themselves from the world in order to achieve enlightenment. Buddhists employ various types of meditation to reach this state, and enlightenment can strike any time -- even, say, when doing the dishes. 

Quasarphotos | Deposit Photos

As for Native Americans, the first thing I thought of was the Navajo Beauty Way. For the Navajo, as I understand it, beauty isn't just superficial; it's a way of life. It's living in balance with the land, with other people (including non-human people), and with their spirits. If a Navajo has somehow fallen away from the Beauty Way, whether by their own actions or through no fault of their own, rituals may be done to set them on the right path again.

I am broadly generalizing here. But the common denominator, as I see it, is in the attitude you employ as you go about your day. You don't have to be a monk or a Navajo to attain this, either: If you have settled on what you consider to be your moral imperatives, and you build your life around them, then everything you do that gets you to the goal of living your truth could be considered sacred. In other words, it's not the stuff around you that's sacred, although depending on how you believe it all got here, it could be; the important thing is how you interact with it.

Let's say you're a lawyer. What they teach you in law school is that everybody -- and I mean everybody -- is entitled to representation before the law. If that's your moral imperative, then you theoretically would have no qualms about representing a defendant who has admitted to killing multiple people in the most gruesome manner possible. Sure, your client is a horrible human being, but they deserve -- they must have -- a lawyer who will advocate for them before a judge and jury, and even plead for mercy.

That's one sort of moral imperative. But what if you're a lawyer whose moral imperative is that killing is wrong? Or what if you've been okay with representing killers for a while now, but something has changed? Maybe your latest client shot up a school, and you have kids who are the same age as the victims. (Full disclosure: I soured on being a news reporter when I had to cover a story about a scumbag who killed his three-year-old stepson because he wouldn't eat Thanksgiving dinner. He buried the boy's body in a truck toolbox in the Great Dismal Swamp. My daughters were toddlers at the time.) Now you have a moral dilemma. How do you resolve it? Do you move into another field? Or do you keep doing your job, even as you feel yourself falling farther and farther away from what the Navajo call the Beauty Way?

In The Pipe Woman Chronicles, Naomi Witherspoon resolves a similar dilemma by becoming a mediator. And then she meets a Lakota goddess and a hot Ute shapeshifter, but I digress. 

And I guess I've digressed pretty far from the point of this post, which is this: I believe that if you're working toward living an ethical life -- in other words, living up to your own standards of morality -- then every step you take toward that goal can be considered sacred. Even doing the dishes.

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These moments of moral blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Do the right thing: Mask up, maintain your social distance, and above all, get vaxxed!

It's full of stars.

yabadene belkacem | CC0 | Pixabay

I'm in taking an online course related to Paganism. It's being taught by John Beckett, a Druid priest who blogs on the Patheos Pagan channel. The class is called "Building a New Myth: Scientific, Animist, and Polytheist Foundations for the Future."

Come back here! It's not as weird as it sounds!

Did you notice the word "scientific" in there? You may be surprised to learn that unlike followers of certain other religions, Pagans have no trouble with science. Paganism is, after all, a nature religion (broadly speaking), and science defines -- or attempts to define -- things that happen in the natural world. We're good with that. Honest.

What we don't have, unlike those other religions, is a book of mythology that everyone adheres to. And here I'm using mythology not in the popular sense of myths being lies, but in the formal sense of myths being stories that underpin a religious or cultural tradition. Pagans don't have a shared mythology. Celtic Reconstructionists have Irish myths and the Mabinogion, Asatruar have the Eddas, and so on -- but we don't have one single book that tells us how to live. So the intent of the course I'm taking is to help each of us develop our own personal mythos, which we can then use as a touchstone for ethical behavior.

With me so far? Okay. So last week's module was about astronomy, among other things. For homework, we were encouraged to find an app that uses a phone's camera to pick out stars in the sky, even if they're not visible, and then go outside, observe the sky for a little while, and write our impressions of the experience. I really liked what I wrote, so I'm sharing an edited version with you.

La Casa Cantwell is in a very urban area. (Feel free to refer to my Facebook post earlier today of photos of our neighborhood.) Light pollution here is so bad that we regularly play the "Is that a star or an airplane?" game. About the only heavenly body we can reliably see is the moon. So the phone app was a revelation -- all those stars we can't see from here! No wonder modern humans tend to think of ourselves as the only thing that matters in the universe; we look up and see a vast blankness where the ancients saw billions of stars.

Although maybe it's not just modern folks. People in Galileo's time didn't have any problem believing themselves the center of the universe either, despite their lack of light pollution. Of course, they didn't know -- or didn't believe, or couldn't imagine -- that each star they saw was a sun, maybe with orbiting planets that were home to other forms of life.

Which brings me back to our modern world, in which we can imagine such a thing, but still we have trouble wrapping our brains around the vastness of space. Science posits that the universe began in a Big Bang, and we are still rushing away from that explosion. But what was before the Big Bang? Where did the matter that exploded -- the stuff in that infinitely dense point -- come from? What if the matter that makes up our universe has always existed?

"What's at the edge of our galaxy?" is a similar question. Does our galaxy have an edge? What is it like? Is it impenetrable or permeable? And if there is in fact an edge or boundary, what's on the other side? More galaxy? ("Moar galaxieeeee!") Or maybe -- shudder -- nothing at all? Or maybe -- bigger shudder -- it has always been here and will always be here.

Humans are linear thinkers, and our science demands a beginning point and an end point. Some of those other religions also require a beginning point and an end point. I'm thinking of one in particular, where God begins the world two different ways in Genesis (look it up) and ends it with an apocalypse in Revelations.

Modern Pagans haven't bothered with developing creation myths like the ones in Genesis. I think that's because our concept of time is different. We think of it as not linear, but as a wheel that keeps turning. We're okay with believing that the stuff of our universe was always here.

But back to science: It ain't perfect. Let's face it, the scientific method is useless for determining how the universe began. We cannot create an experiment to replicate the Big Bang -- we simply don't know enough about the variables that existed then. And what if the Big Bang is followed by a Big Squish, in which the universe snaps back like a rubber band to that singular point?

We don't know. Nobody knows. We're all just guessing.

So we make up stories about how it all went down. Or we write a poem. Or we create a myth. When faced with unanswerable questions, it's the best we can do.

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These moments of bloggy wonder have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

A Pagan perspective on splitting up migrant families.

I'm trying really, really hard not to turn this into a political post. Really hard. Because I said I wouldn't write about politics on this blog, and so far I haven't.  I've skated close to the edge a few times, but I haven't done it.

So let's talk about morality. Specifically, Pagan morality, and how it relates to what's going on at the borders of the United States right now.

I'm not going to talk much about Christianity in this post, tempting as it is to do so, what with U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions mentioning a Bible verse this past week as justification for coming down hard on undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers. First, I'm not Christian, or not anymore, and I don't feel comfortable lecturing followers of other religions on whether they're doing it right. Second, over the past few days, I've read plenty of criticism of Sessions' comments by people much better versed in the Bible than I. So a Pagan spin on things it is.

First, a quick primer on Pagan morality. Basically, we have two...let's call them "words to the wise," shall we? Pagans aren't really into rules, and anyway these are more along the lines of "do this and karma will bite you in the ass."

1. The Wiccan Rede, which is best known in its pseudo-medieval phrasing: An it harm none, do as ye will. Translated into normal English, it means you may do whatever you want, unless your actions hurt someone.

2. The Rule of Three, also known as the Threefold Law, which states that whatever energy you put out into the world will come back to you threefold. Put out positive energy, and all will be sweetness and light. Put out negative energy, and see karma mentioned above.

With that in mind, here's a quick recap of recent events: The US government has begun implementing a zero-tolerance policy for undocumented immigrants, particularly those from Central and South America. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents seem to be using this as an excuse to act like the Gestapo, boarding buses far from any border and demanding that passengers prove they're in the country legally. But that's not all. In one recent case, ICE picked up a Mexican man who has been in America legally for 50 years because of a 2001 misdemeanor conviction whose sentence he had successfully completed.

Immigrants who apply for asylum are the latest football. Immigration attorneys say asylum seekers are being subjected to delay after delay, and in some cases the government is losing the background documentation that supports their claim.

Most recently, Border Patrol has begun splitting up families. Undocumented immigrants and those applying for asylum are being detained -- put in jail, in other words -- and their children are being housed elsewhere. Often in another state. The children are sometimes taken under false pretenses -- the parent is told the child is being taken away to have a bath -- and hours later, the parent discovers the child is gone. I've seen one estimate that the government is holding two thousand migrant children whose parents have been detained.

Anyone with an ounce of humanity would agree that this is inhumane. And a whole bunch of people -- me included -- have said this is not what America stands for. We're better than this, aren't we? After all, we've never incarcerated people based on their race before, have we?

Oh, wait. There was that time during World War II when we put Japanese-Americans in concentration camps.

But we've never split up families this way before, have we? Taken children away from their parents so callously?

Um, well, yeah, we have. I'm sure you've heard of slavery. And then there was the practice of stealing Native American children away from their families so they could be sent to boarding school and have the Indian "educated" out of them, one way or another.

What all these horrific actions have in common is the belief that the "other" is not quite human. White Americans believed Indians were savages and slaves were stupid. Japanese-Americans were suspected of being spies. And now, a lot of people believe that Hispanics are rapists and murderers and members of MS-13, or here to steal our jobs, or all of the above.

For Pagans, this is inconceivable. Many of us are animists, who believe everything has a spirit, including trees and rocks. And if those can have spirits, surely all humans do, too -- no matter the color of their skin. All beings have innate dignity. All deserve to live without harm.

As for those who are participating in this ongoing atrocity -- from those who are incarerating children to those who are defending the government's actions, as well as those who could stop it but aren't, for the sake of political expediency? If they won't listen to their own religious teachings, they might consider heeding the Rede and the Threefold Law. Because people are being harmed by their actions, and the energy they're sending out is clearly negative. And karma's a bitch.

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These moments of karmic blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.