Orthopraxy: Doing things the proper way!

In Hellenic circles, it is often said that Hellenism is not an Orthodox religion, but an Orthopraxic one. What does this mean? It means that the ancient Greeks had cultural and ethnic commonalities that they lived by. Their culture demanded certain things from them, as all cultures do, and that these tended to be distinct among the different cities and countries of the ancient Greeks.

Orthopraxy comes into play in religious circles, and it is the idea that no matter where you came from in Greece, the proper performance of the rites, rituals, and other practices of your cult were expected of you. That the proper celebration and offering of cultus, not necessarily what you believed or what your particular culture demanded of you was what mattered in cult and religion.

Put simply, it isn’t what you think it’s what you do that matters.

Orthopraxy creates a system by which a populace can have common rites and rituals as dictated by tradition, yet the people themselves can have an almost infinite number of differences in cults and cultic priorities. A visitor from Athens at Ephesus would have found that the city’s cults were different from his own, and perhaps he would have found that the number of foreign cults there were much larger than at home, but he would have found that even here, the cults of the Greeks had something very familiar to them that he could draw comfort from, and it wasn’t necessarily the beliefs of the people, but the way the Gods were honored.

In modern times, the number of cults is fairly small. One could easily say that at this stage in the redevelopment of the religion there are no actual cults since most of them seem more like play acting than true traditional cults, but those traditions must establish themselves somewhere, and the beginning is now, which makes the cultic activity a bit awkward.

Set yourself up a basic set of rites and rituals, create them using the general guidelines of what we know to have been the Greek way, though that way was never universal, and then follow those rites with detail. Even if the prayers and beliefs you hold change over time, you keep the rituals the same, and this, in Hellenismos, is what will give you a sense of continuity.