FDWLD 101

1. FDWLD 101 Greek Religion

2. Agenda, first half: Class business • Prayer • For next time • Quiz update • Questions?

3. Agenda, second half: What you may already know • Questions re: Greek Religion online presentation? • What similarities and differences can you detect? • Are there similarities to the cross-cultural temple pattern we have been studying? • How can we account for the differences?

4. Agenda, third half: Accounting for the differences "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” --Aristotle Do we have our own cultural blind spots? Compared to “our” tradition What is our tradition? Genesis 34 Genesis 38 Alma 7:10 Is Greek culture a part of our tradition? Should we be offended by these things? Studying them at BYUI Call it a vaccination program, if you will. Complexity of art What is an “anesthetic”? What, then, is “esthetics”? Close your right eye. Focus your left eye on red object. While remaining focused in this way, slowly move back and forth until the small cross disappears into a blind spot.

5. Accounting for the differences • Monotheism v. polytheism • One God, one code • Many gods, competing codes • What purpose could these "crazy stories” possibly serve? • GiambatistaVico: Pre-scientific/pre-philosophical explanations of the world around them • Sigmund Freud: forces of nature

7. Accounting for the differences • About fertility cults and rites • While we don’t tolerate or embrace and are likely disturbed by them, was there a reason for them? • Let’s begin with the assumption that there was. • State of nature was “nasty, brutish, short”—Thomas Hobbes • Living in this period, especially outside of or on the edge of civilization literally involved “living on the edge.” • Infant mortality was extremely high; childbirth was a gamble. • Agriculture was primitive and, as always, subject to the unpredictable elements. Harvests themselves were, accordingly, unpredictable. Pestilence and famine were always a possibility. These realities are characteristic of what is referred to as subsistence living. • These facts presented a “double whammy” if you were a peasant or a landholder or depended on either of these—and everyone was in one of these categories.

8. Accounting for the differences • About fertility cults and rites (continued) • In a pre-scientific, polytheistic society that personified forces of nature, enjoying a good harvest or being able to rear children who could help to bring in a good harvest depended on placating and propitiating the divinities who ruled over fertility of the womb and the earth. • Such placation involved rites and offerings peculiar to divinities associated with fertility. • Rituals, symbols, offerings and iconography associated with such cults were aimed at uneducated, even illiterate, audiences of primitive worshippers. • Consequently, the rituals, symbols, offerings, and iconography may, by our own post-Victorian standards, appear especially graphic, rude, crude, uncivilized, and even offensive. • They were not intended to be any of those things, but, rather, they were intended to convey messages about fertility and its associated “mysteries” to an audience on whom more subtle, refined messages would have easily been lost. • Where our presentation of such topics is subtly nuanced and mediated by millennia of highly evolved symbolic discourses, their presentation enjoyed few if any of our advantages.

9. Accounting for the differences • About fertility cults and rites (continued) • Fortuitously, philosophical and proto-scientific methods and explanations for natural phenomena grew out of the constructive dissatisfaction that could be expected from the frequently absurd explanations proffered by unsophisticated, ancient religious cults. • As civilizations and their technologies evolved, moreover, they moved from subsistence lifestyles to more sustainable ones. Doing so, however, did not necessarily mean that they abandoned ancient rituals and practices associated with subsistence any more than our own culture has “abandoned” religious practices associated with earlier, less scientific periods than the present day.

10. Accounting for the differences • About fertility cults and rites (continued) • Because religious practices are more pervasive and deeply seated in mystery, tradition, feeling, and emotion, they may persist and be found in various cultural manifestations, such as dramatic productions, long after their original function at their creation has been met or long after more scientific explanations for their corresponding phenomena have been advanced. • Hence, fertility cults and rites may have been present in cultures long after their “need” had been fulfilled, lending potency to the modern belief that the cults and rites were “nothing more” than venues for illicit sexual or orgiastic activity. • Similarly, such ritual behavior may make no more sense to us than, for example, the ritual “cannibalism” of eating the body and blood of Christ did to sophisticated non-Christian Romans before the 4th century. • Nothing in this explanation makes these most “other” of religious rites acceptable now to our Judeo-Christian sensibilities, but it may explain why it was accepted then among those “other” cultures into which we are trying to gain insight.