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The Role of Anthropomorphism in Greek Religion
Bridget Buchholz is a graduate student in the Department of Greek and Latin at The Ohio State University. She is currently writing her dissertation which deals with the interdependence of myth and cult within religion. Bridget's dissertation discusses the role of anthropomorphism within Greek Religion. The dissertation addresses not what is found in literature or even how it is portrayed there but instead seeks through an analysis of the texts, the what and how, to answer the larger cultural question of why the gods are portrayed in certain ways.
Her work engages with the problem of reconciling what are often treated as two separate, or at least separable, aspects of ancient Greek religion, myth and cult. Using interdisciplinary approaches, she demonstrates that the two are necessary components of the overall belief system of the ancient Greek worshipper. That is to say that practiced religion, including all forms of cult, sacrifice, dedications, and prayer, does not on its own create or sustain 'religion'. Religion requires some underlying conception of the divine which follows certain templates, even in differing cultures, as argued by Pascal Boyer in his book Religion Explained. In Greek religion these templates are created and sustained by myth and rely on ideas of anthropomorphism.
Bridget is focusing on a body of texts known as the Homeric Hymns. It is her thesis that the Hymns mediate the conflict created by these separate ideas of the divine, the literary anthropomorphic gods and the invisible absent gods of everyday cult. They do not show a shift from an old to a new paradigm, or a separation of what is true from false. Instead the mediation is necessary to make compatible within a single belief system two seemingly contradictory versions of the gods, specifically how mortals can interact and successfully communicate with those gods. This is not a conscious agenda of the poets; it is rather due to the nature of the texts, as both literary and cult objects, that they contain traces of how myth and cult were actually reconciled within the belief system.
