M. Aemilius Mercurialis

Heavily truncated version of how I got to polytheism:

Grew up Mormon but felt very dissatisfied by it, left before I was a teenager. Spent the next twenty years as a convinced atheist until I had a transformative mystical experience, a theophany of the god Asclepius, which healed me and left me with religious feelings. My path has included Buddhism, Druidry, Gaulish Polytheism, Hellenic Polytheism and now I consider myself a Roman Polytheist.

Felices Kalendas Augustas!

Recently a post was made in r/Ancientgreece on a topic that is familiar to anyone who is interested in Antiquity, mythology or polytheism: did ancient people actually believe in their myths? The OP said they had spoken to some helpols who insisted that ancient people had an incredibly nuanced view and that they didn't really believe them the way people usually mean. After all, don't we have quotes from philosophers over the span of a thousand years attesting to the fact that it was more complicated than simply believing it's literally true? I would like to put forward the argument that this entire conversation is a figment of our own historical subjectivity and says way more about us than it does about anyone living back then.

We mostly see their beliefs as a problem to be solved because we learn from a very young age to see the ancient Greeks and Romans as versions of ourselves. We often forget that we are viewing them through very specific ideological lenses, those of Christianity and modern Materialist Rationalism/Scientific Reductionism. Christianity taught us that a person's "goodness" is determined by how closely their beliefs align with the official doctrines of the church and Materialism teaches us that people are only to be taken seriously if they accept whatever the current scientific consensus is; when we evaluate people from the past through those lenses this creates a problem because they believed things that we are taught from a very young age to know are patently false and ridiculous. I mean obviously Hercules didn't exist, anyone who thinks he did would have to be an idiot, so surely good and smart people who were just like us must not have really believed! After all, didn't many philosophers have contempt for Homer and Hesiod for creating a false idea of the gods? Wasn't the entire Greco-Roman philosophic tradition concerned with a more abstract and enlightened view of the divine?

Yes, that's all true, but that doesn't mean that most people didn't also believe in the myths. People were raised to see evidence of the myths all around them; it was in their names, in their language and in the surrounding landscape. They could point to a nearby island and say "that's where Perseus washed ashore and was rescued by the fisherman Dictys." A person could say, because every member of their family had told them from the time they could understand words, that they were descended from a mythological god or hero. Belief in these stories didn't operate the same way as it does today. To me it makes no difference in my life whether I think Hercules slew the hydra, but to an ancient person a rejection of myth might also be a rejection of their own identity and social relations.

Philosophical speculations about the nature of the divine were usually the purview of literate elites who gained social capital through distinguishing themselves from their peers. The view that mythology was only esoterically true or outright false was a niche view among a very specific set of intellectuals and nobles, we can't mistake that for a society-wide rejection of mythic literalism, as uncomfortable as that makes some of us today.

Hail Divine Julian, who heard the call of the gods

You who bravely tried to save what was being destroyed

Know that your efforts were not in vain

Your mission lives within our hearts

The worship of the gods has returned after a short delay

Io Mercuralia!

May 15th, the Ides of May, is the date of Mercuralia, the Roman festival celebrating Mercury in his aspect as the god of merchants and trade. On Mercuralia merchants would annoint themselves with water from Mercury's sacred well near Porta Capena, an entrance gate of the city of Rome.