Religious Syncretism

newnature

Alexander the Great also used what is called ‘religious syncretism,’ Alexander took this tendency of syncretism, of mixing together different religious traditions from different places, and he used it as a self-conscious propaganda technique. Alexander even started claiming divine status for himself. Alexander went around passing out rumors that his mother had actually been impregnated by the god Apollo, when he appeared as a snake in her bed. So, Alexander is putting himself forward as divine. Why? This is not a Greek tradition, but it’s very much a tradition in the East for kings to be considered by their people to be gods. Alexander says, “Well, if they can be gods, I can be a god.” So Alexander starts spreading rumors that he is divine himself. Alexander probably even believed it; and so he had a god father, he had a human mother, and so then he would identify himself with whoever was a god in the different places. So Alexander would identify himself as a Greek god with a Persian god. Alexander would identify the goddess Isis with some Greek goddess; and so all the time these different gods from different places were basically all said to be simply different cultural representations, different names, for what were generally the same gods all over the place. Also, though, what they would do is sometimes they wouldn’t try to simply say these gods are the same. What they would just do is add on more gods. They’d get to Syria, “Look at all these god that the Syrians worship. Well, we’ll just add those into our pantheon of gods too.” And this is part of what ancient religion was like, is that people were not exclusive. You didn’t have to worry. Just because you worshiped one god, doesn’t mean you couldn’t worship another god or several gods or five gods or a hundred gods. Gods knew who everybody was-they weren’t particularly jealous, in that sense. So this is the way people did it. But what Alexander and his successors did, was they made sort of a conscious, propagandistic decision to use religious syncretism to bind together their kingdoms.

http://thatlifeyahwehhas.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2011-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2012-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=12

CasedOut

cool story bro

(seriously though what are you wanting to discuss? the merits of syncretism? or something else?)

Podly

When the first sentence of an introductory paragraph contains the word "also", it probably isn't going to make much sense.

surrealitycheck

Good point

he needs to add the word being with varying capitalisation to make the meaning crystallise

Ego

Out of four posts, at least two of yours have been new threads that just happen to end with your blog at the bottom.