One thing that you immediately notice when you set out to study the cultures that flourished around the Mediterranean a couple…

“One thing that you immediately notice when you set out to study the cultures that flourished around the Mediterranean a couple thousand years ago is that none of them – not the Egyptians, not the Greeks, not the Etruscans and none of their neighbors either – had a word in any of those languages for what we today consider religion. They had a very rich religious vocabulary, but it would have been incomprehensible to them if a person had said, “I am a ___.” Religion was merely part of a broader spectrum of culture and concerned primarily with what a person did not who they were or what they believed, a fact which is reflected in their vocabulary. To use the Greeks as an example, the word that is most often suggested as an analogue for our “religion” was eusebeia. Literally this means “good or proper reverence; piety, loyalty” or as one ancient Greek commentator remarked, “that portion of justice which is concerned with divine matters and giving to the gods their due.” Another commonly found term was threskeia which means “conducting religious ceremonies, worship.” Other words are therapon “divine tendance or service”, proskynesis “inclining towards; bowing, intense respect or devotion” and by extension any dedicated act expressing powerful religious sentiment, nomos “custom, tradition, law” and so on and so forth. A related concept was deisidaimonia “fear of spirits”, which had largely negative connotations suggesting superstitious, extravagant or foreign types of worship. All of these, as you can see, were primarily concerned with actions.”

–Sannion (viatheheadlesshashasheen)