Aphormai
αφορμαι - a jumping-off point, a place to start
Greek aphormé: a jumping-off point, a place to start. These aphormai are not lecture notes, review notes or a ‘cheat-sheet’, but a simple and brief checklist of some of the names, terms and concepts that come under the main topics of Greek religion - keyed to the relevant chapters of Robert Graves, MacKendrick’s Greek Stones Speak and the Sources book, as well as Peter Levi’s Atlas of the Greek World.
Primary sources are listed at appropriate points: texts on the reading schedule are printed in bold, other texts for additional reading in plain type. Make extensive use, too, of the indices to the two volumes of Pausanias.
Use the aphormai as their name suggests - as jumping-off points or prompts into your own notes, and into other texts for further study.
The six topic-groups
There are, in all, six sets of aphormai. The first three cover the ground up to the mid-point of a course of study; the last three carry it through to the end.
- 1. The gods and the divine world - Olympians and their spheres; epithets and local cults; Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter, Apollo, Artemis, Athena, Aphrodite, Hermes, Dionysus; daimones, heroes and the dead.
- 2. Sanctuary and sacrifice - temenos, altar and temple; the mechanics of animal sacrifice (thusia); offerings, libations, first-fruits; priesthoods and sacred laws (see Lycosura).
- 3. The religious calendar - the Athenian months and the major festivals: Panathenaea, Anthesteria, Thesmophoria, the Eleusinian Mysteries.
- 4. Oracles and divination - Delphi and the Pythia; Dodona; dreams, omens, and the casting of lots; the many forms of reading the divine will.
- 5. Mystery and the afterlife - initiation; Eleusis and Demeter’s search; Dionysiac and Orphic currents; the fate of the soul.
- 6. Myth, art and the city - how myth encodes cult; religion and politics; herms and boundaries (see Herms); the religion of the Greek city and its tensions.