Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy

Volume 61, 2018

Philosophy of Religion

Mito, religión y política en la Grecia Antigua
Myth, Religion and Politics in Ancient Greece

The Ancient Greek religion is a creation of the poets. Nevertheless, this literary construction is reproduced, interpreted and ‘re-construed’ discursively, in a socio-political-philosophical context, as Olympian religion (linked to the central demos of the polis), and as mystery religions (in peripheral dēmoi). Inasmuch as the ancient Greek religion has not generally been treated in an interdisciplinary way (in a socio-political context, for example), this paper aims to show an intimate and reciprocal influence between myth and politics based mainly on Attic synoecism, and how, through the propaganda needs of democracy, there arise mythifications of politics and ideologization of myth. These concerns are articulated in the following working hypothesis supported by the information from historical, epigraphic, and literary sources: the influence of Greek politics on the writing, reading and re-writing of the myths, from which the ritual practices of the mystery religions developed, and how these, in turn, served to confront and resolve, discursively and ‘liturgically’ (using grammars of exclusion/inclusion) the multiple challenges of the democratic politics of the central demos in the face of the economic and psychosocial needs of the peripheral dēmoi.