When people learn that I’m a Hellenic polytheist, the first question they usually ask me how I got started. One of the most interesting things about being in the pagan community is how many different ways people have been brought to the practice.
I was raised in a Catholic family, but in my teens I became very disillusioned with religion and became a hardcore, Dawkins-thumping antitheist. I was so angry about how people could believe such nonsense and was firmly convinced that as soon as humanity cast away the shackles of religion we’d all be better off.
However, after suffering a number personal hardships in my early 20s, I started to reconsider my position on spirituality and research different religious philosophies: Buddhism, Gnosticism, Deism, and more. I began considering the different forms of paganism. As I am ethnically mostly Irish, I looked in Celtic paganism, but most of the Gods I had never even heard of before and they felt very foreign and distant to me.
I had been fascinated with Greek mythology since childhood and as I grew older I became very interested in Hellenic philosophy and history as well. I would frequently daydream what it would be like to travel back in time to classical Greece or Rome, surrounded by all that culture and majesty. More-so, I had always learned growing up that Western history was a sort of passing of the torch first from Greece to Rome and then eventually to Britain and the United States. The Founding Fathers consciously modeled America after Greco-Roman thought and the influence of both cultures is encountered in America on a daily basis. I must agree with Percy Shelley when he said of the Western civilization, “We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece.”
Religious converts of all paths frequently say that they did not so much choose their religion as become “called” to it, and for me that cliché certainly proved true. The change came over me so quickly that I can’t even quite recall how it happened. It wasn’t so much a conversion as it was a recognition that I had already worshipped the Gods of Olympus in my heart for quite some time.
That was over four years ago, and since then, deepening my connection with the Gods has enriched my life in many ways. The West is currently undergoing a spiritual crisis and I believe embracing our Greco-Roman heritage would go a long way toward fixing the isolation and hopelessness that plagues so many. I feel like I am still just beginning my journey with the Gods, but if you care to join me, hopefully we can help light one another’s way.
