ABSTRACT
Nowadays, scholars on Greek religion want to know how ritual and myth functioned in Greek society, how religion and institutions interacted, or how the single divinities defined each other in the pantheon of a city or in Panhellenic religion (if Panhellenic religion existed as a system and not just as a loose aggregate of myths and cults). This interest is relatively new, and it results from a radical paradigm shift that happened in the 1960s and 1970s. This shift in turn depended on two earlier paradigm changes in social anthropology and religious studies, from evolutionism to functionalism and from an interest in individuals and their thoughts to an interest in groups and their needs. Somehow connected with these earlier paradigms was an emphasis on origins: to understand a cultural phenomenon meant to find its origins; later developments only complicated, overlaid, and darkened the true original meaning. These paradigms had their root in historicism and evolutionism, the two approaches that dominated much of nineteenth-century thought but go much further back, to ancient interpretations of religion. In the case of Greek divinities with their multiple and often heterogeneous functions, this meant to find the original core out of which this confusing reality had developed: the historical divinities were seen as the result of manifold transformations, accretions, and sometimes incorporations of other divinities, in what was generally understood as early “syncretism.” Thus, in this approach, the logical operation of ordering a confusing and heterogeneous plurality was conceived as the reconstruction of its past history: heterogeneity, scholars thought, resulted from developments over time, and one had to go back step by step in order to reach the first and original core that was simple and coherent.
