Mythology is a collection of stories about gods and heroes. The Greek people, divided into many tribes, described their deities in different ways. In every country, in every village and in each community, there were completely different versions, which the poets also very carefully processed and changed. So over the centuries, an extremely rich and diverse material has been gathered, from which we select only the most common legends, occupying individual details from the best and most interesting options.
Mythology is not quite a religion. Religion relies more on a cult, on rituals that, unlike myths, change easily, do not succumb to the influence of time and preserve very old forms of beliefs. Thanks to the perseverance of the cult, we can outline in general terms the most ancient Greek beliefs and even determine what the peoples who inhabited Hellas before the appearance of the Hellenes introduced into them.
One of the primitive forms of religion is fetishism, that is, the deification of inanimate objects, which were considered the dwelling of a certain evil or good spirit. A Greek peasant, passing a stone at a crossroads, knelt before him and watered him with olive. Meteorites were credited with divine power as they fell from heaven. It was believed that a madman, sitting on such a stone, regained his mind, and the criminal was cleansed of guilt. The usual unprocessed rock fragments were often called the names of the gods and kept in temples.
The same respect was given to the trees and roughly hewn decks. On the island of Ikaria, an uncouth tree trunk had the name Artemis. The inhabitants of the Boeotian Heronea had the largest shrine in a wooden stick, which was called a spear: it seems to have fallen from the sky and it was found in the ground along with a lot of gold. The priest, who was chosen every year, kept that stick in a separate drop, offered sacrifices to her, setting a table in front of her with fish and fried meat. Primitive idols, which had the shape of a cone, pillar or board, were decorated with ribbons, and at times they were dressed in long clothes, giving a human look.
Very often very old or especially beautiful trees became a common shrine, such as the oak in Dodon - the dwelling place and, to a certain extent, the image of Zeus himself. In general, all Indo-European peoples dedicated the oak to the highest deity. The tree cult existed for a long time, about which in the first century of our era, already during the period of high civilization, the naturalist Pliny wrote:
“According to an ancient tradition, a simple peasant still devotes the best tree to God, and we also readily honor silent traffic cops, more than the shining images of gold and ivory. "
Primitive man not only does not consider animals to be creatures below himself but often puts them higher, appreciating their strength and cunning. Modern wild tribes sometimes call a particular animal their ancestor, the founder of the genus. Such views could have been in the ancient Greeks. In Thebes, the weasel was especially revered; in Thessaly, ants (Thessaly Myrmidonians insisted that they were descended from ants), on the island of Samovtsy, in Delphi-wolf. The gods were given the image of an animal. Dionysus was a bull, and all the earthly gods were depicted as snakes. In Arcadia, a very old depiction of Demeter was known - a woman in black clothes and with a horse's head. With the development of civilization, these gods increasingly lost their animal traits, and only a few of their signs remained. River deities, which were first portrayed as bulls, preserved horns on the human head. Satires from real stakes turned into young men with sharp ears and small, seemingly rudimentary, ponytails. In other cases, memories of the animal likeness of a deity were preserved in legends that told about the unusual transformations of this very god, depicted next to him as an inseparable companion: an owl near Athena, a snake near Asclepius' legs.
These ancient beliefs were most often incomprehensible to the Greeks of the period of higher civilization. Greek writers, falling on the remnants of the cult of trees, animals or stones, tried to interpret them using various legends.