Marie

Growing up as an American who went to public school, my classmates and I were always taught the "peer pressure" and "social pressure" are overt. It's someone at a party holding a red solo cup saying "you're not cool unless you drink like the rest of us" or someone behind the bleachers with a join saying "you're a looser if you don't smoke weed".

And yeah, I'm sure this does happen sometimes, but in my experience peer pressure and social pressure is so much more subliminal, and in that way so much more insidious.

(I'm going to circle back around to spirituality, just lemme cook for a minute)

In college no one ever told me I should smoke cigarettes, but my roommate and friends always made time to take smoke breaks together and socialize. If I wanted to be as close to those friends, I either needed to smoke with them or to tag along on their smoke breaks - and if I tagged along, it was pretty noticeable that I was the only one not smoking or vaping.

No one ever told me I should smoke, no one ever told me that I couldn't hang out with them if I wasn't smoking, and no one ever pressured me to smoke in any way. In fact, when/if someone would occasionally offering me a cigarette, whenever I said no it was immediately respected and no one pressured me to say yes.

But all of this can still be seen as, however unintentional, peer pressure!

Because the smoking was so prevalent, so normalized, and also an activity shared by 90% of my social group at the time - it would've been very easy (and honestly very understandable) if I had started smoking.

Thankfully I have, to this day, never smoked a cigarette - and have only ever vaped a singular time with a non-nicotine cartridge. How did I manage this? I decided, long before I went to college, that I would never put nicotine in my body (how I got this strong conviction is a long story for another time).

BUT THE POINT IS (circling back to spirituality) - that no one has to outright tell you "You should do XYZ" or "your relationship with your gods should look like XYZ" for you to be surrounded and affected by subliminal peer pressure. If you're in a social space (whether digital or IRL) where 90% of the people around you are doing or saying the same thing, you're going to feel some kind of pressure to follow suit; even if you never actually do.

So with the internet soup that we are all swimming in, when something is popular or trendy or visible - that peer pressure is going to be there, even if no one is directly trying to influence you.

However - something that is so so important, is to remember how many pagans and witches don't post online - or don't even regularly use social media. What we see online is a very limited view of the wider community and culture that exists for pagans and witches.

I used to have a t-shirt as a kid that read "why fit in when you were born to stand out" - and honestly I think internalizing that sentiment can be pretty useful. At the end of the day you don't have to be like everybody else; you can appreciate the beauty of another person's practice without needing to change your own.

In pre-Solon Athens, families could literally bury their dead on their property, while in Sparta, the dead were sometimes laid to rest by temples¹. Chthonic Gods, of the dirt and underworld, like Hekate and Zeus Ktesios were worshipped inside the home, or at the threshold. By the 2nd Century, it was not unheard of for ancient Greeks to visit Oracles of the Dead to get guidance from heroes or their ancestors.

Yes, the ancients did believe that calling Hades' name would invite him into their homes so they called him Pluton or Zeus-Chthonios.

To say that one should never worship a god, namely Hades and Ares, because of their "miasmic" properties is confusing when you remember that Athena and Zeus are both war gods too, blood and the killing of animals were involved in most ancient offerings, and there are like a hundred and one different ways to cleanse miasma.

MOST of the historical references you will read will be Athenian from a later time period in Greek History.

Guess what varied by town and region and time? The religion we are reconstructing. If the Gods cared that much, way more random Greek citizens would be getting struck by lightning during prayer in historical accounts.

How were they perceived?

The difference between ancient Greek religion and the Abrahamic traditions is that Greeks had authoritative religious/cultural traditions but no authoritative scripture. The "authority" was τα πάτρια, aka, "the ancestral customs", and sometimes cults, oracles, and temples where the clergy could give some direction and knowledge.

The texts you mention occupied different positions, and none of them functioned like the Bible or the Qur'an. Long before anyone wrote the Theogony or the Homeric Hymns, stories about the gods were already circulating orally. So the written works themselves were not revelations, but records of pre-existing traditions. A Greek hearing Hesiod would not think: "This is true because Hesiod wrote it." but "Hesiod is telling the stories of our gods."

Of course, each work had a different purpose. For example, the Homeric epics where teaching/didactic. They could teach the people about the personalities of the gods, heroic ideals, religious customs, and moral examples. That doesn't mean Greeks believed Homer was infallible or the only source for information about the gods. But it is one of the most informative texts for the Greeks about the gods to this day.

Hesiod's Theogony, on the other hand, attempted an organized genealogy of the gods. It's also a good text to rely on because it's a more systematic source. However, this was not supposed to stop other Greek poets and ordinary people from writing down the versions of the genealogy they knew from their own region and traditions.

The Homeric Hymns were not "scripture" either. They were a response to the existing knowledge about the gods. Like our hymns today, they were a way to worship the gods and also pass down the knowledge of the people about the gods and their stories. They were sacred literature, not sacred law.

Apollodorus' Library is a very late work (probably 1st–2nd century CE) by an unknown author, conventionally called Pseudo-Apollodorus. Its purpose was that of a handbook, as it summarizes myths from many earlier sources. Ancient scholars valued it because it collected traditions, not because it carried divine authority.

Nonnus' Dionysiaca is an even later (5th century CE) and it's certainly not considered "religious scripture". We have the advantage that we can learn traditions and stories through the epic, however it didn't mandate how one **should** see Dionysus.

If a certain written work described a myth differently from your city's tradition, your city just kept doing what it had always done. For example, one city might insist a god was born there, while another claimed the same honor. Both traditions could coexist without needing to decide which was "correct." That's why contradictions were accepted. Thus, a hero might have different parents, adventures and deaths depending on who told the story. People rarely felt compelled to eliminate every inconsistency because they just followed their local customs.