Survey for Hellenic Polytheists
I am an Ancient Greek historian – which you very likely know if you are here. I study people who have been dead for a very long time, and so I haven’t had a lot of experience with studying people who are alive. And yet, here we are. I have just opened a survey, after going through the ethics approval process and everything that entails, and now I have launched my survey and I am very excited.
The survey, and the resulting study, will examine the ways that Hellenic Polytheists who worship Persephone and Hades engage with ancient material culture and literature. I want to see how practising Hellenists engage with ancient sources, how much they know (or care) about the context of those, and how they practice an ancient religion in the modern world. I also want to see the ways that they relate to three specific pieces of ancient evidence – not to see how near their interpretation is to scholarly consensus (actually I don’t care much about this at all), but to see the way that they weave the different aspects of Persephone and Hades into their modern worship. I also want to think about how we – as scholars of ancient religion – might better serve Hellenic Polytheists as a community. They are a well-known large ‘second market’ to books about ancient religion, but I really feel like we should be thinking about their needs rather than just shoving the verbiage into book proposals and then ignoring it. Hopefully, I will be able to say more about what this might mean after the study is complete.
For now, here is the recruitment verbiage and a link to the survey – I would be very grateful to anyone who shares this with communities they might be aware of. Participants can be from anywhere in the world!
Are you a Hellenic polytheist who worships Persephone and/or Hades? If so, I’d like to invite you to participate in a research project that will look at how Hellenic Polytheists engage with ancient evidence. Participation will be via an online survey that will take 15-30 minutes and include a series of questions about your interests and your religious practice and ask you to undertake three interpretation tasks. Participation in voluntary, and you can contact me for more information at ellie.mackinroberts@bristol.ac.uk.
Why am I doing this study?
I’m doing this study to try and understand how modern Hellenic Polytheists interpret and engage with ancient source material, and how their understanding of the ancient contexts adds to this interpretation. My hope is to draw some conclusions about how professional ancient historians may be able to assist in the informed research of Hellenic polytheists.