The American educational system acquaints most of us with Zeus, Apollo, and Aphrodite at some point in our schooling. The names on the page are abstractions, and the readings seem as ancient as the Bronze Age conflict that Homer recounts in The Iliad. But as some X (formerly Twitter) users may be aware, there are 21st-century practitioners of Greek polytheism for whom the Greek pantheon is very real and present.
Many modern-day practitioners come to ancient Greek religion through neo-paganism, which has been on the rise for decades, with followers numbering around 1.5 million in the U.S. at present. Although it is almost impossible to collect numbers on how many practitioners are active in the United States, anecdotally this subgroup represents a small portion of that 1.5 million.
“I do not have any demographic data, but in my experience worshippers of the Greek gods are fewer than neo-pagans worshiping in other traditions, such as the Celtic, Norse, and Egyptian,” said Bruce MacLennan—a practitioner of what he calls Hellenismos (a name for Greek polytheism) for 40 years—in an email. “I have often called Hellenismos a minority tradition in a minority religion. This has always perplexed me, for Greek mythology, philosophy, art, and literature are fundamental to Western culture and generally more familiar than these other pagan religious traditions. My impression, from books, workshops and talks at meetings, and online material, is that Hellenismos has been becoming more popular in recent years. This might be due in part to popular movies and books based on Greek mythology.”
Even as universities are shutting down their humanities and classics departments nationwide, there is something of a popular revival of interest in the classical world. As of this writing, Percy Jackson and the Olympians is in its 727th week on The New York Times’ list of Children and Young Adult Series’ Best Sellers. A TV adaptation debuted last year on both Disney+ and Hulu, and it was among the top five most-watched premieres on either streaming service for 2023. The book’s story is familiar: Supernatural denizens of a hitherto hidden world equip an obscure, down-on-his-luck adolescent for a Manichean showdown with an ancient evil. But it is not witches and wizards, or an intergalactic religious order who equip Percy, our Chosen One, but the Greek pantheon. A spinoff book, Percy Jackson’s Greek Gods, presents their ancient backstories anew for young readers, with irreverent, snarky asides and jokey slang. Hesiod it is not. But it is popular: Author Rick Riordan’s website boasts 190 million copies of his books in print globally. Whether it’s a YA series, social media memes about men who think about the Roman Empire every day, anime like Blood of Zeus, the Hades video games, or even the increased popularity of Christian classical education, the Greco-Roman past is suddenly hot, even in the world of religion.
Alongside these trends, a disparate spiritual movement has emerged in recent years that incorporates ancient, pre-Christian Greek religion into contemporary spirituality. In many cases, it is a reconstruction of ancient practices from centuries before, drawn from historical sources. For other practitioners, the Greek pantheon is part of other neo-pagan or occult practices.
As with many spiritual movements, defining the contours of their beliefs is difficult, but certain commonalities exist. The practitioners of ancient Greek religion with whom I spoke were interested less in rejecting a particular religious upbringing or background than in constructing meaning through their personal beliefs and practices by looking to the past.
There are in-person Greek polytheistic groups that get together. Nearly every practitioner I spoke to meets infrequently with other like-minded polytheists in an in-person group, but prefers to practice individually. “Modern Pagan practitioners, including Hellenic polytheists, run the gamut,” said Sabina Magliocco, a professor of anthropology and religion at the University of British Columbia. “Some practice as solitaries, joining with others only occasionally at national or international conferences or local festivals, while others meet regularly in groups. It really depends on the individual.”
“It is fair to say most of it exists online and small pockets of in-person communities or organizations,” said Angelo Nasios, who writes and podcasts about Hellenism, or Greek culture, and history. He is also one of a number of Americans of various ages and walks of life who are connecting with the Greek pantheon as part of their spirituality.
Nasios said that his own practice is fairly informal. He occasionally posts pictures of his home altars on X. “Usually, I try to do once a week some sort of like prayer offering,” he said, “I keep it very simple.” For him, the Greek gods are real beings, but, he said, “I don’t do literalism.” The myths are not gospel. Rather, he explained, the gods for him are best understood as universal principles and the laws that govern nature. “They maintain the order of the universe,” he said.
Suz Thackston has been practicing ancient Greek polytheism for around 20 years. Raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she did a stint as an unaffiliated religious “none,” before engaging with Wicca. It was through Wicca that she first encountered Greek polytheism. She became a member of Hellenion, a U.S.-based organization dedicated to reconstructing ancient Greek polytheism through organized study groups and congregations. She is no longer a member. These days, for the most part, she prefers to observe her spirituality privately. She meets up with other Greek polytheists in person only intermittently, she said, encountering them now primarily through her participation in a local chapter of the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans. “Connection with the gods was becoming more and more important,” she said of her decision to strike out on her own. “I think the more that you do that, the less that any sort of doctrine, even something as loose as Hellenic polytheism, is going to fit.” Today, she said her spirituality is focused more on ancestral and nature spirits.
It’s a good thing to know how the gods that we love were approached and worshiped in the past, because it gives us ideas for how to rebound that into newer and more wonderful ways for us to do it.
Thackston does still identify as a Demetrian priestess, however: someone with a particular devotion to the goddess Demeter. “I’m dedicated to all the gods of Greece, but in particular to Demeter and Persephone,” she said. “And so the ‘Homeric Hymn to Demeter’ is sort of my Bible.” (The Homeric Hymns are a collection of 34 poems dedicated to different gods, attributed commonly to Homer.)
Although Hellenion trains priests and priestesses, Thackston is not herself a trained priestess. She said she performs many of the public functions of a priestess, however: teaching classes, writing books, performing public rituals. “I keep the shrines,” she said, “I say the words when I’m supposed to. I’m doing all the work of a priestess.” She said this role was revealed to her once while performing a ritual, during which, she said, “the gods called me ‘priestess.’”
Thackston said the Greek pantheon speaks to her in various ways. She maintains a journal, which she returns to frequently to decipher any patterns in the way the gods may be acting in her life. She also consults with others who she feels may know the gods better. One example is her belief that Demeter speaks to her through songbirds. She calls the “Homeric Hymn to Demeter” her “grounding text,” but she acknowledges that she is unaware of any ancient text that describes Demeter communicating to devotees that way.
Although Thackston’s spirituality is primarily experiential in nature, she maintains a reverence for the authority of ancient texts dealing with the Greek gods. “Doing reconstruction is a really good idea for a while,” she said, “so that you do know how our spiritual ancestors did it.” For her, this knowledge is essential to developing an authentic personal practice. “I think it’s a good thing to know how the gods that we love were approached and worshiped in the past, because it gives us ideas for how to rebound that into newer and more wonderful ways for us to do it.”
Although Thackston mostly celebrates those coming to the Greek pantheon through pop culture and secondary sources right now—“I’m kind of tickled about it”—she said it can also be “exasperating.”
“They’re reading other people’s readings of [the original texts], which is, you know, a fun thing to do, because you want to hear different people’s experiences, but then taking that as gospel,” Thackston said. “And if it’s someone they like or admire, for example, they’re more likely to just glom onto their point of view, than go back to the original text and do their own research.”
A neophyte who reads a critical essay condemning what the author sees as the patriarchal nature of Homer’s “Hymn to Demeter,” for example, may lack the historical literacy to realize that virtually everything we know about ancient Greek religion comes from the stories, historical records, and artifacts of an inherently patriarchal society. They may also miss the cultural context.
Nasios is concerned about what he sees as an appropriation of Greek culture and ancient religion by non-Greeks who adopt Greek gods. Himself the son of a Greek immigrant father and a descendent of Greek Cypriots on his mother’s side, he dislikes the use of the descriptors Hellenismos and Hellenism for the paganism he incorporates the Greek pantheon into spirituality. “It’s not helpful to use phrases like Hellenism and Hellenismos for actual Greeks,” he said, “when practitioners who are not of Greek descent use those words, if they’re laboring under sort of a misunderstanding of those terms themselves.”
Baptized Greek Orthodox, but raised without Christianity as “a dominant force” in his upbringing, Nasios said he came to ancient Greek religion after getting into tarot in his adolescence. This interest led to a phase of religious exploration. “I read the Bible and history,” he said, “and kind of worked my way backward.” Arriving at ancient Greece as a stop on this spiritual odyssey, he said, “it really spoke to me when I really looked at it closer.” His Greek father had raised him with a respect for the classical world, taking pains to bring his son’s attention to this part of his cultural inheritance. Today, Nasios is deeply read in Greco-Roman and Byzantine history, with an M.A. in ancient history. He regularly engages with historians and academics on his podcast and blog, both named The Hearth of Hellenism.
For Greeks, Nasios explains, Hellenism refers simply to Greekness. Recontextualizing it within a religious framework, he maintains, can cause confusion for outsiders, and untethers the tradition from its ethnic and historical origins. In a benign context, abstracting the gods away from their geographic and cultural origins is an explicit feature of the Percy Jackson books. “The gods move with the heart of the West,” the centaur Chiron explains to the American Percy, who wonders why the Greek gods live in the present-day U.S.
Transporting the gods from the heights of Mount Olympus to the prosaic triglyphs and metopes of a neoclassical building downtown may rob them of some of their enchantment and particularity, certainly. But perhaps the darkest consequence of this universalization of ancient Greek religion is that it has been picked up by white supremacists.
“Christ is dead. Zeus is king,” proclaims the pinned tweet of The Hellenist, an account dedicated to reviving ancient Greek religion. The Hellenist is also explicitly racist, claiming the ancient religion as the exclusive possession of a superior European civilization. A recent post on the Olympians’ “proven track record of delivering European dominance” is but a mild taste of the type of chauvinism on display. “Christianity is effeminate and Jewish,” reads another tweet. “Why would you be a member of an effeminate Jewish religion like Christianity when you could be a member of a masculine warrior religion like Hellenism?” It may be troll-bait, most likely, but it’s effective: The Hellenist has over 20,000 followers, which is a lot for an account dedicated to reviving worship of the Greek gods.
“The Hellenist is not a good representation,” said Nasios. “I feel like it’s just somebody who, you know, takes on an aesthetic, or wants to attach themselves to something for their own ideology. And it’s very harmful.”
The Hellenist is perhaps the extreme end of the so-called “Statue pfp” (profile picture) trend, where social media accounts feature sculptures of classical statues, and extol Western civilization’s ancient values. Like the alt-right online phenom Bronze Age Pervert (BAP), The Hellenist explicitly rejects what they see as the weakness of Christianity, and its softening effect on Western civilization. For them, liberalism’s concern for the rights of the marginalized is a design flaw. Both BAP and The Hellenist espouse a muscular, Nietzschean will-to-power, where Achilles’ martial prowess and concern for his own personal honor are preferable to Odysseus’ subtle intellect and loyalty to hearth and home.
When does Mount Olympus cease to be the home of the immortal Zeus and his ‘noos,’ or divine intellect, and become instead a blank canvas onto which anyone can project their own conceptions?
Atlantic writer Graeme Wood made this point last year in a lengthy profile of BAP. Of BAP’s overwhelmingly youthful male appeal, he wrote: “The ‘Bronze Age’ element of his perversion refers to the earliest days of ancient Greece—an era of virile pagan militarism before the moderns, and even some of the ancients, were beguiled into weakness.”
The antidote according to BAP, Wood wrote, is an “exhortation” to white people “to form military units with deep masculine bonds, and together annihilate lesser races or throw them under the yoke.”
But this far-right vitriol and explicit opposition to the Judeo-Christian West appears to be something of an outlier in the Greek polytheist landscape. “While some Hellenic polytheists are conservative,” Magliocco wrote in an email, “my sense is that in North America, this group, like other Pagan denominations, actually skews left. Again, one is likely to find a range of political views, from the libertarian and conservative to highly progressive.”
Many Greek polytheism practitioners, for example, are signatories of the Xenia Declaration (Xenia is the ancient Greek concept of hospitality, or guest-friendship). It is a diversity statement that declares signatories’ receptivity to LGBTQIA+ members, all gender identities, neurodivergent individuals and people with disabilities, and all ethnicities. Various online pagan and Greek polytheist groups, as well as in-person organizations, are signatories.
The universalization of the Greek pantheon allows people in every time and place—and of every political stripe—to benefit from their myths’ timeless wisdom and insights into human nature. But when does Mount Olympus cease to be the home of the immortal Zeus and his noos, or divine intellect, and become instead a blank canvas onto which anyone can project their own conceptions? When does something become so ubiquitous that it becomes generic? To Nasios’ point, Thackston describes herself as “the whitiest white person you ever saw,” and while she counts some who can speak Greek among her acquaintances, she doesn’t personally know many Greeks involved in Greek polytheistic spaces.
Llewellyn is a book publisher in the body, mind, and spirit genre. Its inventory is heavily focused on witchcraft, tarot, paganism, and astrology. Among the products its website lists under “coming soon” is a book on ancient Greek religion for pagans. Other newer titles on the site include books about Hades, on combining witchcraft and Greek deities, and the goddesses of the Hellenistic world. In his blog, Nasios often takes issue with their books on witchcraft and Greek polytheism, since he feels their works on contemporary pagan modalities and Greek gods tend to be anachronistic, or in some cases misunderstand the Greek mythological canon altogether.
In a review of a Llewellyn book titled Modern Witchcraft with the Greek Gods: History, Insights & Magickal Practice, Nasios points to the authors’ use of the story of Icarus, a figure they employ to illustrate what they see as the Greek gods’ tolerance for witchcraft. These deities punished hubris, they said, not practitioners of magic. “[Icarus’] wings weren’t magickal,” the authors write in the excerpt Nasios provides. “They were a technological invention. The fault lay in his thinking that he was immortal and as powerful as a god, a belief that most Witches do not adhere to.”
Nasios holds that this assertion is something of a non sequitur, since the gods didn’t kill Icarus—the heat from the sun melted his wings. He concedes that this indicates a lack of phronesis (common sense), perhaps, but hardly divine punishment. Moreover, he asks, where is the evidence that Icarus believed himself to be godlike in his faculties? “I cannot find this exegesis from primary sources I have read,” he writes.
“I find the whole process of appropriating Greek myth in this situation, as a scholar, interesting,” Nasios writes, “But as a Greek, it’s creepy.”
Thackston said something similar: “You’ve sort of got to have some kind of a connection to an ancient source in some way, some genuine way.”
“By now there are second- and even third-generation neo-pagans in the U.S. and other countries,” MacLennan said. As neo-paganism becomes slightly more mainstream than in previous decades, some of the same internal questions and challenges—familiar to followers of almost any mainstream religion—can arise. Who determines which practice is correct? How important are primary sources for the people seeking to reconstruct millennia-old rites? Protestant reformers were arguing with the Catholic establishment over the need to return ad fontes—to the fountain, or the original foundational texts of Christianity—in the 16th century. Greek polytheism in the United States is undertaking its own version of this debate.
Perhaps the darkest consequence of this universalization of ancient Greek religion is that it has been picked up by white supremacists.
Kaye Boesme writes the blog Kallisti, a chronicle of her own polytheism, which includes the Greek gods. A non-Greek who was raised in the modern paganism movement, she came to a realization about the importance of culture in the cultivation of a polytheism that includes the Greek pantheon. She originally joined an organized group in the mold of Hellenion, in part to establish what she called “a paper trail” if she ever encountered any religious discrimination, something she wrote that her family experienced growing up during the “satanic panic” era. “I now call myself a polytheist,” she said in an email, rather than a Hellenic polytheist, as she did formerly. In a 2022 blog post, Boesme explains why she moved away from the label. After an online firestorm over cultural appropriation and non-Greek polytheists’ use of the word “Hellenism” to describe their beliefs, her Jamaican American girlfriend observed that Boesme and her fellow practitioners were not, in fact, Greek. “‘You people are all as Greek as I am,’” Boesme recalls her girlfriend saying, “‘and the only reason you get away with it is because you’re white.’”
This comment got Boesme thinking about what it was that connected her to the Greek gods, if it was not culture. She moved away from organized historical reconstructionist groups and developed her own more personal practice.
“I find that to be a full and honest descriptor,” Boesme said. “Over the past few years, I’ve been working harder to acknowledge the sources in my own cultural background that have led to me being able to worship the Gods [sic], which has made my practice stronger. Looking back, one of the things that impacted how I shifted was being aware of conversations in the museums and archives profession, especially when it comes to repatriation and culturally aware exhibits.”
In carrying out this self-examination, Boesme has arrived filtering her engagement with Greek deities through a recognition of what she calls “cultural reception.” She points out that Greek gods have been appropriated and transformed by other cultures in earlier millennia: Herakles (who the Romans adopted and named Hercules) is well-known as an early figure in Buddhism, having been brought there by Alexander the Great. “All of us outside of Greek culture and the Greek diaspora are the recipients of a cultural transmission from Greece that is concentrated in several waves,” she wrote, citing the antiquity, Renaissance, and the 19th century. A bit like the early Protestant Reformers, Boesme is less interested in a structured hierarchy that emphasizes “lex orandi, lex credendi” (how you pray is how you believe) than a more reciprocal interplay between belief and ritual. Like Thackston—or indeed, John Calvin—she believes that the grounding in original historical texts is crucial to developing a more authentic individual practice, wherein personal connection to the divine assumes primacy.
In terms of the practices she has observed among Greek polytheists in the United States, Boesme said, “It’s an assortment of people with a wide array of backgrounds, ranging from former atheists to people raised pagan to those from Western occultism to those leaving Christianity, with individuals from across the political and ideological spectra and of all races and cultural backgrounds.” This diversity “takes a lot of interpersonal and cultural awareness to navigate,” she said, noting that the forms that each individual’s practice takes is just as diverse. Some do reconstructed rituals from 2,500 years ago, “others do bhakti-like practices,” a devotional practice drawn from Hinduism, “and many blend historical practices with what they have seen in pagan religious spaces and on social media. There’s also a bit of influence from occulture.”
For Boesme and those in her circle, she said, “We tend to do text contemplation and various meditative practices in addition to prayers with incense and libations.” For this, she draws from the writings of Plato, who founded a philosophical school, the Academy, in which she said in a blog post on the subject last year, “a balanced mix of ritual, lecture, and communal activity designed to produce an awakening in the soul of the serious students entering” likely occurred.
“In our cultural reception in the USA, we’ve been taught that we’re the successors (supersessionistic, yes) of Ancient Greece and Rome, with upper-class white people being one of the driving forces of this identification in recent centuries,” Boesme wrote at the conclusion of her 2022 blog post, titled “Why I No Longer Call Myself a Hellenic Polytheist.” Noting that many of the Greek gods to whom she has a devotion ultimately found their way via syncretization through Rome, ultimately to Gaul, from which her paternal ancestors hailed, she has arrived at the conclusion that “outsiders” like herself can worship other cultures’ deities according to their conscience, with knowledge and sensitivity.
“Like ancient polytheists, most neo-pagans view different pantheons as differing cultural manifestations of universal gods and goddesses,” said MacLennan. “Therefore, they are tolerant of other pagan religious traditions, and generally happy to celebrate each other’s rituals and festivals. Also, like ancient pagans, they might adopt a deity from another pantheon into their own, if they feel a special affinity or called by the deity. Thus, a Hellenic neo-pagan might worship Isis or Cybele in addition to the Greek gods.”
The anecdotal modern witchcraft-to-Greek polytheism pipeline supports MacLennan’s assertion that everything ancient is new again, with different polytheistic modalities borrowing from each other’s pantheons.
“Wicca seems to be the gateway drug for just about everybody” into Greek polytheism, said Thackston. In her own experience, the people coming to ancient Greek polytheism in particular are doing so less as a repudiation of a previous belief system than as an adoption of something new. “They’re just like, oh my god, I’m so lucky,” she said, “I met these wonderful gods, and I’m excited to learn more about them, not racing there in response to a trauma.”
In that sense, they are not so different from the disaffected young men drawn to BAP’s so-called “Bronze Age Mindset,” which frequently draws on ancient Greek history, beliefs, and values. Wood quotes a Republican Party operative telling him that “’BAPism essentially involves reenchanting the world and giving purpose to these young guys.”
As fewer people in the U.S. are raised religious themselves, individuals with less cultural baggage around denomination and dogma are coming into the fold of polytheism. Unbound by institutional frameworks, they may feel more comfortable mixing and matching deities.
Does it matter if the people coming to Greek polytheism are operating primarily with ideas they’ve gleaned from anime and YA novels? Nasios might say yes. Thackston might even be inclined to agree, at least in the sense that she wishes they would read the original source material for themselves. But on the whole, she doesn’t think the pop culture versions of the gods need conflict with the real thing.
“Most of the people who are sort of excited about Greek gods now are excited about how horny Zeus is, how big Aphrodite’s boobs are, and that sort of thing,” said Thackston. “Most people won’t go past that, and that’s fine. But if that filter captures some people who are open to having an experience with one of the gods of Greece, then I hope it’s something that happens. I think it’s overall a good thing.”
