The religious systems of the ancient world were based on ritual and not on dogma, and thus differed from many modern religions.
Before the arrival of book religions, the search for god, whether state organized and official or individual and private, took place in rituals deeply rooted in myth. Invisible to the uninitiated, foreigners or those unsuited for other reasons, the outer appearance would always be the cult in which authorities interpreted the relations between the gods and human beings.
Indigenous cults therefore were links through which the identity of a community was shaped rather than platforms to convert disbelievers. A multiplicity of approaches to the divine stood in clear opposition to dogma, although, indeed, personal beliefs often contradicted religious practice. The separation into religion (Latin religio) and irrational submission to the gods (superstitio) never created an insurmountable barrier when addressing the divine (Scheid 2003: 22-3). In fact, both approaches were complementary in a way that shaped civic theology, offering a macroscopic answer to the overwhelming pantheons of the ancient world (Scheid 2003: 174-5). The ancient Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro (116-27 bc) in distinguishing between three different religious discourses described the poets' approaches to gods as ‘rubbish' and the philosophers' explanations as unsuitable to city states because they included superfluous doctrines, harmful to people to know (Varro, Divine Antiquities, fr. 7). His third category, however, which he defines as mythological, is the only defendable one because it firmly rests on the traditions and religious institutions of civic communities.
More on the topic The religious systems of the ancient world were based on ritual and not on dogma, and thus differed from many modern religions.:
-
Conflictology -
Ecology -
Economy -
Finance -
History -
Law -
Medicine -
Philosophy -
Religious studies -