Ancient Greek vs Norse Religion

Welcome everyone! By the time the Greek and North peoples migrated and evolved, they developed two separate belief systems. This video and series will take us on a journey through the most famous sites from ancient Greece to discover the similarities and differences, with the main goal of filling in the blanks that we have in the sources in order for us to understand what ancient people actually practiced and believed. So the first and most important similarity between Norse and Greek paganism is, you know, the one that I'm going to like best, the symbolism. The symbolism in the gods and their representation of various aspects of nature, the universe and everything we see and feel around us, even intangible things. And this is the part where the cringe pagans get upset and don't want to believe it, even though the evidence is right in front of our eyes, literally. Look at where we are right now. This is the island of Rhodos, Greece, which is said to be Rhoda, literally a goddess, who is the personification of this island. The goddess Rhoda, who was a wife of the sun god Helios. What is the god Helios a personification of? I don't know. The same thing as his name means in ancient Greek, the sun, he's a personification of the sun, just like the god Kronos is a personification of time, just like the god Aegir in the Norse mythology is the ocean, Thor's mother, Yul means earth, and so many more. So many of the gods names are actually very easy to translate and see what they actually represented and what they were symbolic of. But some of them are of course a lot more complicated and it's impossible to tell completely. But all of them are personifications of something. Does that make us atheists and do we not believe in the gods because the gods are just personifications of things in nature? No, of course not. This makes us animists. Speaking about animism, animism is simply the belief that everything has some sort of Humans, animals, trees, planets, even rocks and other things that we today might label as inanimate. In the world's most ancient belief systems, there were no such things as inanimate objects. Everything was animate and had some sort of spiritual energy to it. This brings us to our next similarity between the Greek and the Norse religion, the statues and the idols. These were absolutely believed to possess some of the spiritual energy of the gods and other spiritual entities from the mythology. These statues that I'm showing you here are from two or even three thousand years ago from the archaeological museums of Ildos and Athens. These are manifestations of the gods that were used for worship, used to give offerings to and used in ritual to bring benefits to whatever people were using them. Exactly the same as was done in the statues of the gods in the Old Norse religion. But important to note, these statues were not meant to act as gods as many early Christians accused the pagans of doing, worshipping idols like these. As the great Roman pagan historian Cicero explains, it is not the statue of the god that is being worshipped, it is the statue that is constructed in image of what they think the god could be in hopes that the divine energy of that relevant god will be attracted and even reside in that statue from time to time. So although we don't have quite as many written records or archaeological finds showing statues and temples in the Norse world, there were absolutely some examples found in Scandinavia and some written records making it clear that the Norse had the same perception, belief and use for these statues of the gods that the ancient Greeks did. Perhaps the primary use for these statues and idols of the gods was it was a location that sacrifices and offerings to the gods would be given and that brings us to our next similarity. The next similarity between Greek and Norse paganism is the sacrifices which would have been done at a temple just like this. This is a temple of Athena in the Acropolis in Lindos, Greece. Sacrifices were incredibly similar in nature and purpose in both the Norse and Greek world. There were some key differences however, for example, in the Greek world, sacrifices were very often burned and libations were poured out on altars. This is kind of similar to the sacrifices that you will see these New Age pagans and Wiccans practicing, but these acts are nowhere to be found in any of the Norse sources where sacrifices were basically left out in nature for the elements to absorb. There are many, many more similarities and differences between sacrifices, but it's far too big a topic to cover here, but a video will be coming soon in the next couple weeks where we will go in full depth look at that. But at the end of the day, as I mentioned, there were far more similarities than differences in the sacrifices of those two traditions. The next and very important similarity between Norse and Greek paganism is the prophecies. So this is Delphi where the all-powerful Sibyl would have given her prophecies and that would be a parallel of the Norse Völva. So here the only difference is she would have been sitting here and people from all over the world would have flocked to her. The Völva and the Norse beliefs would have done the same exact type of thing, except they were traveling around to different kingdoms and tribes and things like that. This type of thing was also done in the Norse world. We just don't have as many detailed records of it in the sources or places of it that we had knowledge that they did these things at in Scandinavia. It's not that there was necessarily a sacred Norse temple where an almighty Seeress lived like there was in ancient Greece, but as I mentioned, in the Norse world, these Seeresses would have been like traveling specialists, really, professionals going from town to town getting hired for their services. But just like the Oracle at Delphi and the other lesser-known oracles and regional Sibyls, they were highly regarded in ancient Greece for their ability to give prophecy and wisdom. In the Norse world, it was the exact same thing. The Völva and the Norse beliefs and their ritual of Seidr would have been almost, if not completely the same as the ancient Greek Seeresses. It would have been women whose profession it was to work themselves up into a trance-like state, into a frenzy, believed to be possessed by a god, where she would then speak to the customer, giving advice, guidance, and predictions for the future. Finally, the last similarity that I will speak about in this video is the perception of the afterlife. The Norse and the Greeks both had a complex belief of the afterlife. The main afterlife, where most people would go after they died, was an underworld named after the deity who actually watched over this realm. It was called Hades in the Greek beliefs and Hel in the Norse beliefs. One of the places was believed to be cold and gloomy and the other with fire and heat, that's one difference. But there are many other similarities. For example, all of the dead must cross over a river to get there. In Greek mythology it was the river Styx and in the Norse mythology it's the river Gjöll. There were different levels of this afterlife reserved for the good versus the wicked. Another similarity is that the dead who resided there were believed to be in a confused state, wandering until it was time to move on. Another common belief between the two religions is that the dead could be contacted by the living through ritual and sacrifice, as was done in the Odyssey by Greek writer Homer. There was also a more heavenly realm in the afterlife, it was called Elysium in the Greek mythology and this is a parallel to our Valhöll or Folkvanget in Norse mythology, which descriptions that we have of it show striking similarities. And finally the most important, as with all other Indo-European religions if we go back far enough, the belief in reincarnation was present in the Norse and Greek religions. There are multiple sources for this, exactly how widespread this belief was, it's not clear. The sources do seem a bit conflicting at times, but we can say for certain that groups of people, cults, and belief systems, they all incorporated a deep understanding of rebirth in their religions and time periods. Both in the Greek and the Norse. So that's about all I have time to cover for today, this is just an intro, I will be doing a full in-depth look at all of these points and go over the most famous sources of the Greek and Norse religion. These sources are crucial for filling in the blanks that we don't have so we can understand how humans believed back then and how we today can incorporate this into our practices so we can have as complete of a spirituality as possible. But that's all for today, we'll see you next time.