Greek Gods And Goddesses Research Paper

When I hear about the Greek Gods and Goddesses, I associate their stories with the modern-day representations of them and really never studied the history behind them. In my Western Civilization class, I read a lot about the foundation of the Orthodox Church and was able to relate to my own upbringing in the Greek Orthodox Church. However, one piece of lacking information that I want to find out about is how the Greek culture of a polytheistic religion eventually became monotheistic. I decided to take a tour of the antiquities of the Gods and Goddesses to search for evidence of their existence as more than a cultural element or if there is any relation to the monotheistic religion that grew out of Greece.

First I needed to have a clear understanding of the terms monotheism and polytheism. The terms are Greek in origin with “mono” meaning one and “poly” meaning many. The second half, theism, comes from the Greek word for God or Theos. In Orthodoxy, not only does Theos mean God, but Theotokus is another term for the Mother of God or the Virgin Mary.

So how does a culture go from being polytheistic to monotheistic? To answer this question, I needed to find out more about the Gods and Goddesses that the ancient Greeks worshipped. I visited www.talesbeyondbelief.com to study their genealogy. There were three levels of Gods – the

From the Western Civilization course, I learned that Orthodox Christianity began in the 11th century after the “Great Schism” between Eastern and Western Christianity. As Christianity spread, the teachings of St. Paul were the foundation for the conversion of the Greeks to Eastern Orthodoxy. In convincing the Greeks to convert to Christianity, St. Paul obtained their “buy in” by including ritualistic elements (Eastern Orthodox