Which religion or spiritual path or Gods did the Spartans truly believe in their times?

Would anyone care to do a extensive research for me to help my fantasy roleplaying game?

Thank you for your wisdom and knowledge in the matter

MSU SPARTANS LANSING MICHIGAN I THINK MOSTLY CHRISTIAN...............GO MSU

You are probably right about that.

I talk about the Spartans in Greece

It is Greek Mythology what I am talking about, but I like someone to really do a intensive search or study on the Spartans philosophy on the matter.

Sparta was a unique town at its time.

greek mythology

n Greek mythology, Lakedaimon was a son of Zeus by the nymph Taygete. He married Sparta the daughter of Eurotas, by whom he became the father of Amyclas, Eurydice, and Asine. He was king of the country which he named after himself, naming the capital after his wife. He was believed to have built the sanctuary of the Charites, which stood between Sparta and Amyclae, and to have given to those divinities the names of Cleta and Phaenna. A shrine was erected to him in the neighborhood of Therapne.

Lacedaemon is now the name of a province in the modern Greek prefecture of Laconia.


don't know how helpful that will be...but there is little mention of Ares that I could find in spartan history..despite the penchant for military although some minor references to the greek gods are made

http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/GREECE/SPARTA.HTM

try this site brief insightful

SO IS LANSING MICHIGAN.......

very helpful indeed. Thank you for offering some time for this cause

The Spartans were pagan of course and Polytheistic. The Hyacinthia, the second most important Spartan festival, was celebrated in summer at Amyclae. It honored Hyacinthus, the mythical young prince of Sparta and beloved of Apollo. The festivities continued for three days, with the first mourning the death of Hyacinthus and the last two celebrating his rebirth and the majesty of Apollo. It has been suggested that the cycle symbolizes the development of a youth in such relationships, in which he dies as a child in order to be reborn as an adult.

Homoeroticisms were also taken VERY seriously in the culture of ancient Sparta. This applied to both males and females. Women, being more independent than in other Greek societies, were able to negotiate with their husbands to bring their lovers into their homes. According to Plutarch in his Life of Lycurgus, men both allowed and encouraged their wives to bear the children of other men, because of the general communal ethos which made it more important to bear many progeny for the good of the city, than to be jealously concerned with one's own family unit. However, some historians argue that this 'wife sharing' was only reserved for elder males who had not yet produced an heir.

Many women played a significant role in the history of Sparta. Queen Gorgo, heiress to the throne and the wife of Leonidas I, was an influential and well-documented figure. Herodotus records that as a small girl she advised her father Cleomenes to resist a bribe. She was later said to be responsible for decoding a warning that the Persian forces were about to invade Greece; after Spartan generals could not decode a wooden tablet covered in wax, she ordered them to clear the wax, revealing the warning. Plutarch's Moralia contains a collection of "Sayings of Spartan Women", including a laconic quip attributed to Gorgo: when asked by a woman from Attica why Spartan women were the only women in the world who could rule men, she replied "Because we are the only women who are mothers of men".

Krimsa, your post hinted at a very important aspect of Spartan belief, which is that what the men believed and what the women believed were very different. The driving force behind the "religion" of the Spartans was the women.They were the ones who held the festivals and put names to diety. For the men, War was their religion, and Death their diety, and the way of life for Spartan men was specifically designed to perpetuate that.

The real Spartans are the Christian soldiers!The movie probably got it's idea from this bible story.

Judges 7:7: The Lord said to Gideon, “With the three hundred men that lapped I will save you and give the Midianites into your hands” (NIV).

The Midianite army of 135,000 badly outnumbered the Israelites, who only had 32,000 men ready for battle. But even that was too many. God instructed Gideon to reduce his army to only 300 men! Before the battle, Gideon worshipped God and then divided his men into three companies. Their weapons were only trumpets and empty jars with torches inside them!

God wanted Israel to know that victory does not depend on strength or numbers, but on obedience and commitment to Him. As proof, the Midianite army fell before them without the Israelites drawing a single sword.

What in your life seems too hard to conquer? “Midianites” sometimes come in the form of parenting challenges when we feel outnumbered and overwhelmed. Whatever you’re facing, remember that the battle is God’s. Don’t let fear overcome your faith. But like Gideon, remember that we are never prepared to do battle until we bow in worship to God.

Make your choice for faith and trust that God will fight for you.

Well I dont know that for certain. I think the men were just as deeply religious as the women. Its just that our modern day cultural anthropologists and historians have in the past tended to place more emphases on battles and militarism and angry male deities. Many cultures that were previously regarded as being male dominated and obsessed with warfare were either not always that way or misrepresented. Some of these ancient civilizations were in fact matriarchal. If you don’t believe it, do a search for "Minoan Crete." However most historical accounts that I have been able to find online depict the Spartans as bi-sexual. That was indeed a significant part of their culture and religion.

I understand the point about anthropologists, but the anthropological evidence actually tends to support my viewpoint. The evidence shows that the Spartans were NOT male dominated. Most of the sources we have to draw on show that Spartan diety and worship was female in nature. The "angry male dieties" were NOT a major portion of the religion. From the accounts I have seen and read, the Spartan women had near absolute control of the home life, while the men's word was law when it came to military matters. In essence, for the men, the army was their primary, almost their sole, province. Any religious practice they had was akin to the modern "I go to such-and-such church because that's where mom always took us as kids." The widespread practice of bisexuality is telling, in that it shows that NEITHER sex was overly dominant in society, but that each had their own areas of society in which they were supreme.

And Thomas, the movie got it's idea from a graphic novel (a comic book), which in turn was based off of an account of the Battle of Thermopolae written, if I remember correctly, by the Roman historian Herodotus. The "300" was merely the number of Spartans involved in holding the pass, there were roughly an additional 1000 to 5000 other Greeks involved. Also, the actual number of Persians involved in the fighting was probably between 10,000 and 50,000. Furthermore, the Battle of Thermopolae is fairly well documented, happened at a completely different time than the battle of which you speak, and in a well known location several THOUSAND miles from Israel with two TOTALLY different groups of people. If you choose to believe that the book of Judges is correct and accurate, that's fine, but please try and refrain from attributing verified historical incidents to a book that has no supporting historical evidence when posting about a topic which involves history, rather than religion. I'd be more than happy to discuss the relative merits of the Bible with you in a thread designed for that purpose.

Scott

Wow, an enlightened male. I’m impressed. That’s probably true Scott. I didn’t want to start a lot of arguing on the thread however. Actually the OP deactivated anyway. Smiless always deactivates and then he returns later. From my studies, what I have been able to gather is that ALL of these cultures in their initial formations were matrifocal and Goddess/earth centered in their spirituality. Even the Greeks, who we think of as totally male dominated, were not in the very beginnings. Homer actually wrote about their subsequent invasions that would cause a shift in their pantheon. The concept of "Gaia" or Earth Mother originates with the Greeks. The Greeks were invaded by what was referred to as the "Achaeans" or Indo Europeans between the 14th and 12 centuries. As par for the course, the female was symbolically included into male god myths, but as reduced and conquered. Here the patriarchal gods marry instead of exterminate the goddesses indiginous to the land they conquered. This is where we see the introduction of Zeus and all that.

Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.. Now that's a real man (or woman).

Well, maybe not enlightened, but at least educated. :) I've studied a LOT regarding world religion, both modern and ancient. It's actually really interesting to look at everything, and see the parallels between other cultures' myths and those of the Sumerians, even though there is NO link between Sumerian and any known language. I made reference to that in my post in the "Challenge to the nonbelievers" thread, with the connection between the ressurection of Jesus and the descent of Inanna into the underworld. In case you hadn't noticed, religion is one of my favorite topics of discussion. :)

Scott

If you are interested at all in the Sumerians you will probably enjoy this. Look at this comparison between the "Tree of Knowledge" story and one of their ancient myths found on a stone tablet.

Enki and Ninhursag’ is perhaps one of the most difficult Mesopotamian myth for Judeo-Christian Westerners to understand, because it stands as the opposite of the myth of Adam and Eve in Paradise found in the Old Testament Bible.

Indeed, the literature created by the Sumerians left its deep imprint on the Hebrews, and one of the thrilling aspects of reconstructing and translating Sumerian belles-lettres consists in tracing resemblances and parallels between Sumerian and Biblical motifs.

To be sure, Sumerians could not have influenced the Hebrews directly, for they had ceased to exist long before the Hebrew people came into existence. But there is little doubt that the Sumerians deeply influenced the Canaanites, who preceded the Hebrews in the land later known as Palestine.

Some comparisons with the Bible paradise story: 1) the idea of a divine paradise, the garden of gods, is of Sumerian origin, and it was Dilmun, the land of immortals situated in southwestern Persia. It is the same Dilmun that, later, the Babylonians, the Semitic people who conquered the Sumerians, located their home of the immortals. There is a good indication that the Biblical paradise, which is described as a garden planted eastward in Eden, from whose waters flow the four world rivers including the Tigris and the Euphrates, may have been originally identical with Dilmun;

2) the watering of Dilmun by Enki and the Sun god Utu with fresh water brought up from the earth is suggestive of the Biblical ‘ But there went up a mist from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground’ (Genesis 2:6);

3) the birth of goddesses without pain or travail illuminates the background of the curse against Eve that it shall be her lot to conceive and bear children in sorrow;

4) Enki’s greed to eat the eight sacred plants which gave birth to the Vegetal World resonates the eating of the Forbidden Fruit by Adam and Eve, and

5) most remarkably, this myth provides an explanation for one of the most puzzling motifs in the Biblical paradise story - the famous passage describing the fashioning of Eve, the mother of all living, from the rib of Adam. Why a rib instead of another organ to fashion the woman whose name Eve means according to the Bible, ‘she who makes live’? If we look at the Sumerian myth, we see that when Enki gets ill, cursed by Ninhursag, one of his body parts that start dying is the rib. The Sumerian word for rib is ‘ti’ . To heal each of Enki’s dying body parts, Ninhursag gives birth to eight goddesses. The goddess created for the healing of Enki’s rib is called ‘Nin-ti’, ‘the lady of the rib’. But the Sumerian word ‘ti’ also means ‘to make live’. The name ‘Nin-ti’ may therefore mean ‘the lady who makes live’ as well as ‘the lady of the rib’. Thus, a very ancient literary pun was carried over and perpetuated in the Bible, but without its original meaning, because the Hebrew word for ‘rib’ and that for ‘who makes live’ have nothing in common. Moreover, it is Ninhursag who gives her life essence to heal Enki, who is then reborn from her.

It is generally believed that much of the OT was written after the return from Babylon, which is why many of the OT stories are similar if not word for word of other ancient texts. In fact, does not Jeremiah complain about the priests "finding" the Torah hidden in the Temple upon the return and reading it to the King in one hour and funny how it gave so much power to said priests. Clearly, there is no heaven/hell in Jewish thought and much of Xianity is based on Pagan thought, esp. judgement after death, etc.

The Sumerian civilization (which was non-Semitic) lasted from the first settlement of Eridu in the Ubaid period (late 6th millennium BC) through the Uruk period (4th millennium BC) and the Dynastic periods (3rd millennium BC) until the rise of Babylon in the early 2nd millennium BC.

The Book of Genesis was written most historians seem to feel while the Jews were doing all that wandering in the desert. (1450 - 1410 B.C.)

The Sumerians were to be sacked by the Akkadians. The Akkadians were a Semitic people, that is, they spoke a Semitic language related to languages such as Hebrew and Arabic. When the two peoples clashed, the Sumerians gradually lost control over the city-states. This is how these stories would eventually fall into the hands of the Hebrews.

HUH HELLO?< They were "Greeks" right?

Yes. Please follow along. We have been discussing several cultures. Thanks.