Civic & Family Worship The ancients' faith was stronger than ours: they believed the Gods were immediate, material and approachable.

They—or their family or their city—sacrificed to a God as a way of trading favors. A bull in exchange for a good harvest. A cake in exchange for business success.

The temples in the cities, where city priests sacrificed and prayed, were part of the civic religion. When you read about omens being read before battle, that's civic religion.

Civic worship did not deal much with ethics and morality, or even with afterlife. For us religion as all about morality and afterlife, so that's hard for us to understand. But it's true. Ancient culture was incomprehensibly different from our own. Get used to it!

Good Books for this section

Myth and Mystery : An Introduction to Pagan Religions of the Biblical World
by Jack Finegan

An easy to read survey of pre-Christian Western religion by a mainstream scholar. Chapters on: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Zoroastrianism, the Canaanites, Greece, Rome, the Gnostics, Mandaeanism, and Manichaeism.

The power of this book is that it isn't aimed at proving a connection between paganism and Judeo-Christianity—so you're sure the author isn't skewing things to fit that argument. Yet you'll read about flood and creation myths paralleling Noah and Adam, about pre-Christian ideas of the immortality of the soul and life after death, and about lots and lots of Gods who die and are reborn.

Greek Religion
by Walter Burkert

Here's a surprise, a book by a world renown expert that's well organized and easy to read.
This book is organized by feature- of- religion: ritual, the Gods, Heroes, the dead, polytheism, the mysteries, and philosophy-religions. That gives you a compare and contrast look at, for e.g. baptism or, blood sacrifice across the culture. So the book complements the cult by cult organization of Finegan and Turcan.

The Cults of the Roman Empire
by Robert Turcan

Like Finegan's book the power of this book is that it isn't aimed at proving a connection between paganism and Judeo-Christianity—so you're sure the author isn't skewing things to fit that argument.
This book is more detailed than Finegan's—giving in depth details of the political history of the main ancient religions, and intricate details about the theology and ritual I've never seen anywhere else. Highly recommended.