The Vanished Gods: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, the Norse and Mesoamerica

Follows: The World's Religions, One Page Each and How Religion Began. Companion pieces: How the Sacred Texts Were Written, Ritual: Why Humans Can't Quit It, Indigenous and Folk Religions: The Oldest Faiths on Earth and A Brief History of Mexico.

On 24 August 394 CE, on the island of Philae in the Nile, a man named Esmet-Akhom carved a figure of the god Mandulis and a short text beside it on the wall of the temple of Isis. It is the last known inscription written in Egyptian hieroglyphs. The script had been used for something like three and a half thousand years. By the time Esmet-Akhom picked up his chisel, the Roman Empire had made Christianity its official religion, the great temples of Egypt were closing, and very few people alive could read what he wrote.

Philae's Isis kept her worshippers for more than a century after that. But eventually she, like Ra and Osiris, Marduk and Ishtar, Zeus and Athena, Jupiter and Vesta, Odin and Thor, Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc, lost the communities that fed, housed and praised them.

We call these "dead religions", or "mythology", a word that quietly turns other people's faith into stories. For their followers they were not stories. They were the order of the world, the reason the river rose and the sun returned, the source of law and kingship, and the hope of what came after death. Millions of people lived and died within them, often for far longer than any religion now practised has existed.

This long read visits six of those worlds: ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, the Norse and the Mesoamerican civilisations of the Aztecs (Mexica) and Maya. For each it asks the same questions. Who were the gods? What did people do, in temples and at home? What did they expect after death? How do we know, and how reliable are our sources? How did it end? And what remains, including the modern communities who honour these gods again.

A note on approach: this piece describes these religions as far as possible as their followers understood them, without ranking them against each other or against living faiths. Some practices, such as human sacrifice, are described plainly, along with the scholarly debates over how far hostile sources exaggerated them. Modern revivals are described in their own terms and in the terms of historians, who usually see them as reconstructions; both views are given. Where evidence is thin or contested, the piece says so.

In this long read

1. Egypt: the gods who kept the world in order (about 3000 BCE–6th century CE)
2. Mesopotamia: houses of the gods between the rivers (about 3500 BCE–1st century CE)
3. Greece: sacrifice, oracles and mysteries (Late Bronze Age–6th century CE)
4. Rome: a contract with the gods (about 8th century BCE–5th century CE)
5. The Norse: gods we know mostly through Christians (about 8th–11th centuries CE)
6. Mesoamerica I: the Mexica (Aztecs) (14th–16th centuries CE)
7. Mesoamerica II: the Maya, the sources and what survived (to the 16th century CE, and beyond)
8. How gods vanish, and how they come back

Part 1 — Egypt: the gods who kept the world in order (about 3000 BCE–6th century CE)

The gods and the order of things

Egyptian religion had hundreds of gods, and they changed over three thousand years, merged with each other and took on new roles. A few stand out. Ra, the sun god, sailed across the sky by day and through the underworld by night. Osiris, murdered by his brother Seth and restored to life by his wife Isis, became king of the dead. Their son Horus, the falcon god, avenged him and inherited the throne of the living, which is why every pharaoh was in a sense the living Horus. Amun of Thebes rose to become king of the gods, often fused with Ra as Amun-Ra. Anubis, jackal-headed, guarded embalming and the cemetery. Thoth, the ibis-headed god of writing and wisdom, recorded the judgement of the dead.

At the centre of it all stood an idea rather than a god: Ma'at, the right order of the cosmos, truth, justice and balance, opposed to isfet, chaos. Ma'at was also a goddess, shown with an ostrich feather on her head. The king's highest duty, through the priests who acted for him, was to sustain the gods with rituals and offerings so that Ma'at would hold and chaos would be kept back. The state poured vast resources into this. The pyramids, the temples of Karnak and Luxor, and the tombs of the Valley of the Kings were not luxuries. They were the machinery of keeping the world working.

Temples: the gods' houses

An Egyptian temple was not a place for congregations. It was the house of a god, whose image lived in the sanctuary, where priests, acting as intermediaries on the king's behalf, sustained the god with daily rituals and offerings. Ordinary people did not go into the inner rooms. They encountered the gods at the temple gate, in the outer courts, and above all at festivals, when the god's image was carried out in a portable boat-shrine (a barque) on the shoulders of priests. The procession could also serve as an oracle: people put questions to the god, and the movement of the barque gave the answer.

The afterlife and the weighing of the heart

Egypt is famous for its concern with death, but its texts are really about life continuing. Among the oldest religious texts in the world are the Pyramid Texts, carved inside the pyramid of King Unas, the last king of the Fifth Dynasty, around 2350 BCE: spells to help the dead king rise to join the gods. Over centuries such spells spread from kings to nobles and then to anyone who could pay a scribe. The collection we call the Book of the Dead, which Egyptians knew as spells for "coming forth by day", was in use from about 1550 BCE to about 50 BCE.

Its most famous scene appears in the Papyrus of Hunefer, from about 1275 BCE. The dead man's heart is weighed on a scale against the feather of Ma'at. Anubis checks the balance, Thoth writes down the result, and a monster called Ammit, part crocodile, part lion, part hippopotamus, waits to devour any heart heavy with wrongdoing. Before the weighing, the dead person declares innocence of a long list of wrongs, the so-called "negative confession" of chapter 125. In E. A. Wallis Budge's translation the lines include:

"I have not let any man hunger. I have made no one to weep. I have not committed murder ... I have not taken milk from the mouths of children." — Book of the Dead, chapter 125 (trans. Budge)

It is one of the oldest moral codes we have, and it is spoken by someone hoping to be found righteous.

Religion at home

The temples belonged to the state, but ordinary Egyptians had a rich religious life of their own. At Deir el-Medina, the village of the craftsmen who cut and painted the royal tombs, archaeologists have found household niches and altars, and around 5,000 ostraca, written fragments on pottery and stone, that illuminate everyday life, religion included. Families marked births and naming with rites, looked for meaning in dreams and put questions to the gods through oracles. Historians describe a growth of "personal piety" in the Middle and New Kingdoms, in which individuals addressed gods directly as personal protectors.

In the Late Period, from the 26th Dynasty (7th century BCE) onwards, the cult of sacred animals boomed. Worshippers paid priests to mummify an animal of the species sacred to a god, such as a cat or a bird, as an offering. Millions of these animal mummies were buried at temples.

One great break: Akhenaten

Around the mid-14th century BCE, the pharaoh Akhenaten did something without parallel in Egyptian history. He elevated one god, the Aten, the disc of the sun, above all others, and built a new capital for the god at Akhetaten (Amarna). Scholars still argue whether this was true monotheism, a royal cult of the sun with the king as its interpreter, or something else. It did not outlast him long: the Atenist religion was effectively finished by about 1319 BCE, and Egypt returned to its many gods.

How it ended

Egyptian religion survived conquest by Persians, Alexander the Great, the Greek Ptolemies and the Romans, foreign rulers who often took the role of pharaoh and built or decorated temples to Egyptian gods. What it did not survive was the Christianisation of the Roman Empire. Imperial laws of the late 4th century banned sacrifice and closed temples. Esmet-Akhom's inscription of 394 marked the end of hieroglyphic writing.

Philae lasted longer, partly for political reasons: the Roman state had agreed by treaty, in 452, that peoples from south of the frontier, who still worshipped Isis, could visit her temple. The historian Procopius says the temple was closed by the general Narses on the orders of the emperor Justinian, around 537. Modern scholars such as Jitse Dijkstra argue that the organised cult had already faded by then, and that the "closure" was more symbolic than real. Either way, by the 6th century the last community of Egyptian temple religion was gone.

Legacy and revival

The Coptic language, the last stage of Egyptian, has no native speakers today, but it remains in daily use as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox and Coptic Catholic churches.

In the 20th century, people began to worship the Egyptian gods again, under the broad name Kemetism, from Kemet, an ancient Egyptian name for Egypt. Kemetic Orthodoxy was founded in 1988 by Tamara Siuda and is based at a temple in Joliet, Illinois; its practice centres on living by Ma'at, belief in Netjer (the divine), veneration of the ancestors (akhu) and worship at personal shrines, and members recognise Siuda by the ancient title of Nisut. The Ausar Auset Society, founded in Brooklyn in 1973 by Ra Un Nefer Amen, draws Egyptian religion into an African-centred spiritual system. The Fellowship of Isis, founded in Ireland, honours Isis and other goddesses. Historians note that no unbroken line of practice links these groups to ancient Egypt; the groups themselves present their work as restoring a tradition rather than inheriting one intact.

Part 2 — Mesopotamia: houses of the gods between the rivers (about 3500 BCE–1st century CE)

Gods of cities

Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates in what is now Iraq and parts of Syria and Turkey, is where writing was invented and where the oldest cities grew. Its religion was shared, with variations, by Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians and Assyrians over more than three thousand years.

Each city belonged to a god. Enlil, lord of wind and authority, lived at Nippur. Enki (in Akkadian, Ea), god of fresh water, wisdom and craft, lived at Eridu. Nanna (Sin), the moon god, lived at Ur. Utu (Shamash), the sun, was god of justice. Inanna (Ishtar), goddess of love, sex and war, was worshipped at Uruk and everywhere. As Babylon rose, its god Marduk became king of the gods; in Assyria, the national god was Ashur, who shared his name with his city. How Religion Began in this series describes how this pattern, a god for each city and a king as the god's steward, marked a new stage in religious history.

The temple household

A Mesopotamian temple was the literal house of the god, and it was run like a great household, with priests to care for the god's statue. The temple owned land, herds and workshops, and employed farmers, weavers, brewers, musicians and scribes. A cult statue was not seen as a mere image: through rituals known as "mouth-washing" and "mouth-opening" (in Akkadian mīs pî and pīt pî), the made object became a living presence of the god.

The most famous religious figure from Mesopotamia is a priestess. Enheduanna, who flourished around 2300 BCE, was the daughter of Sargon of Akkad, the king who united Mesopotamia, and served as high priestess (entu) of the moon god Nanna at Ur. Hymns to Inanna and to temples across the land are attributed to her, which would make her the earliest known named author in history. Scholars debate how much of that attribution is literal, since the copies we have were made centuries later; some, like William Hallo and Åke Sjöberg, have accepted it, while others, including Miguel Civil and Jeremy Black, are more sceptical.

Omens, demons and personal gods

Mesopotamians lived in a world full of signs. Diviners read the future in the entrails of sacrificed animals (extispicy), in oil dropped on water, in the flight of birds, in dreams and in the movements of the stars and planets, laying some of the foundations of astronomy. The world was also full of demons. Lamashtu, a terrifying female demon, preyed on unborn and newborn babies and on pregnant women. Another demon, Pazuzu, served as a protector of the household, and his image was used against her.

Alongside the great gods, individuals honoured a personal god. In the third millennium BCE some rulers regarded particular gods as their personal protectors; by the second millennium, ordinary people too had a close relationship with a personal god, maintained through prayer.

A bleak afterlife

The Mesopotamian underworld, sometimes called Irkalla, was not a place of reward or punishment. Almost everyone went there, and it was grim. The poem known as the Descent of Ishtar describes it as "the house of darkness ... the place where dust is their nourishment and their food mud" (trans. Mackenzie). The dead depended on the living to bring them food and water offerings; neglected ghosts could become restless and dangerous.

That bleakness gives the region's greatest literary work its power. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the king, shattered by the death of his friend Enkidu, searches for immortality. In the Old Babylonian version, a tavern-keeper (called Sabitum in an early translation, Siduri in later ones) tells him:

"The life that thou seekest, thou wilt not find. When the gods created mankind, Death they imposed on mankind." — Gilgamesh, Old Babylonian version (trans. Jastrow and Clay, 1920)

Her advice is to fill his belly, make merry, wear clean clothes, and let his wife rejoice in his embrace: to love the life he has.

Festival: Akitu

The great New Year festival, the Akitu, renewed the bond between the gods, the king and the land. In Babylon, priests of Marduk's temple, the Esagila, prayed for the god's forgiveness and protection of his city, and creation stories were told while the people sang and danced. In one remarkable ritual the high priest stripped the king of his royal insignia and struck him on the cheek; if the blow brought tears, it was a good omen, a sign that Marduk was pleased. The king's power came from the god and could be humbled before him.

How we know

Unlike the Norse or the Aztecs, Mesopotamians speak to us mostly in their own words, because they wrote on clay, which survives fire. The library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, from the 7th century BCE, held more than 30,000 tablets and fragments. Archaeologists, including Austen Henry Layard and Hormuzd Rassam, began recovering them from 1849. In 1872 George Smith, an assistant in the British Museum's Assyriology department, deciphered one of them and found a story of a great flood. Like Noah, its hero Utnapishtim was forewarned, built a boat to preserve living things, and afterwards sent out birds to look for dry land. When he presented it on 3 December 1872, with Prime Minister William Gladstone in the audience, it caused a sensation because of its parallels with the story of Noah.

How it ended

There was no single end. Mesopotamian religion faded slowly under Persian, Greek and Parthian rule, as Aramaic replaced Akkadian and old temples lost their patrons. The last datable cuneiform tablet is an astronomical almanac from Uruk from 79/80 CE. Some old Mesopotamian traditions lingered much longer: the city of Harran, in what is now southern Turkey, remained a centre of a pagan religion, with deep roots in the old Semitic gods and strong Greek philosophical elements, into the early Islamic period. Its followers, known as Sabians, included the 9th-century astronomer and mathematician Thabit ibn Qurra.

Legacy and revival

Mesopotamian stories left traces in the Hebrew Bible, most famously in the parallels between the Babylonian flood stories and Genesis, which scholars generally explain through shared regional traditions rather than simple copying. Base-60 counting, which originated with the Sumerians in the third millennium BCE, survives in a modified form in the way we measure time and angles: sixty minutes, sixty seconds.

Today, Assyrian Christians, many of whom see themselves as descendants of the ancient Assyrians, celebrate Akitu (also called Kha b-Nisan) on 1 April as a cultural and national new year. It was revived as a celebration in the 1960s and held publicly from the 1990s. It is a festival of identity, not of the old gods; most celebrants are Christians. Small modern groups also attempt to reconstruct Mesopotamian polytheism, but they are very few.

Part 3 — Greece: sacrifice, oracles and mysteries (Late Bronze Age–6th century CE)

Old gods, new gods

Greek religion did not have a founder, a creed or a single holy book. It was a web of local cults, shared myths and common rituals, spread across hundreds of independent cities. Some of its gods were very old. Clay tablets in the Linear B script from the Mycenaean palaces of the Late Bronze Age already name Poseidon (po-se-da-o), Zeus and Dionysus (di-wo-nu-so). Others, such as Apollo and Aphrodite, do not appear in those records, suggesting they joined or rose to prominence later.

By the time of Homer and Hesiod (around the 8th–7th centuries BCE), the familiar family of Olympian gods was in place: Zeus, king of gods and guardian of oaths and hospitality; Hera, his wife, goddess of marriage; Athena, wisdom and war; Apollo, prophecy, music and healing; Artemis, the hunt and wild things; Demeter, grain; Poseidon, the sea; Hermes, messenger and guide of souls; Dionysus, wine, ecstasy and theatre; Hestia, the hearth.

Sacrifice: sharing a meal with the gods

The core ritual was animal sacrifice, with hymn and prayer, at an altar that stood outside the temple, never inside it. Most of the flesh was eaten by the worshippers, and the parts burned for the gods went up as smoke; libations of wine were poured as well. Hesiod's Theogony explains this unequal division with a myth: at a place called Mecone, the trickster Prometheus fooled Zeus into choosing the bones hidden under glistening fat, leaving the meat for humans,

"and because of this the tribes of men upon earth burn white bones to the deathless gods upon fragrant altars." — Hesiod, Theogony (trans. Evelyn-White)

There were no revealed scriptures and no creed. Authority came from tradition, and Greeks generally considered what one did far more important than what one believed. Priests were mostly drawn from the local elite, and religion was bound up with civic life.

Oracles

People consulted the gods directly through oracles. The most famous was at Delphi, where the Pythia, a priestess of Apollo, gave answers to cities and individuals asking whether to go to war, found a colony or marry. Many ancient authors mention her, from Herodotus to Plato, but details of how she actually operated are scarce. One of our best inside witnesses is the philosopher and biographer Plutarch, who served as a priest at Delphi around the late 1st and early 2nd centuries CE.

Death and the mysteries

For most Greeks the afterlife looked much like Mesopotamia's: a shadowy existence in the house of Hades. In the Odyssey, when Odysseus visits the dead and praises the great hero Achilles, Achilles replies:

"I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man's house and be above ground than king of kings among the dead." — Homer, Odyssey, Book 11 (trans. Samuel Butler)

But Greek religion also offered something more hopeful to those who sought it. The mysteries, initiations that revealed secret rites, promised a better fate. The most famous, at Eleusis near Athens, honoured Demeter and her daughter Persephone, "the two goddesses". Initiates were sworn to secrecy, and kept it so well that we still do not know exactly what happened inside the great hall of initiation, the Telesterion. The Roman statesman Cicero, himself an initiate, wrote that from the mysteries we learn not only to live with joy but to "die with a better hope" (On the Laws 2.36).

Some Greeks followed Orphic and Dionysian teachings. Some initiates were buried with small inscribed gold tablets, dating from about 450 BCE to 250 CE, which scholars call Totenpässe, "passports for the dead": instructions for the soul's journey in the underworld.

Religion at home and in the street

Most Greek religion happened far from great temples. Each household had its hearth, sacred to Hestia. Square stone pillars topped with a carved head, most often of Hermes, called herms, stood in public places, and travellers added stones to sacred heaps at crossroads and boundaries. People made vows and left offerings at local shrines, asked healing gods like Asclepius for cures, and sometimes, less respectably, paid for curse tablets: thin sheets of lead inscribed with spells to bind a rival in love, law or sport, often buried in graves or thrown into wells.

How it ended

Greek religion survived Roman conquest and merged with Roman religion. It ended with the Christianisation of the empire. Under Emperor Theodosius I, laws in the early 390s banned sacrifice and pagan worship. According to the historian Eunapius, the Eleusinian Mysteries came to an end around 392, and the Goths of Alaric sacked Eleusis in 396. The ancient Olympic Games, held in honour of Zeus, are traditionally said to have been held for the last time in 393. Philosophical paganism lasted longer: the Neoplatonic school in Athens continued to teach until 529, when the emperor Justinian closed it.

Legacy and revival

Greek myths never stopped being told; they shaped European art, literature and psychology. But the worship of the Greek gods also returned. Hellenism (sometimes called Hellenic polytheism or Hellenismos) is practised by groups in Greece and elsewhere. The Supreme Council of Ethnikoi Hellenes (YSEE), founded in 1997, estimated its own following at around 2,000. In 2017 Greece recognised Hellenism as a "known religion", a legal status that allows, for example, its own places of worship and weddings. Many Hellenists see their faith as the native religion of Greece, suppressed but never entirely extinguished. Most historians see it as a modern reconstruction drawing on ancient texts and archaeology. The two views are not wholly opposed: Hellenists themselves often describe their work as restoration.

Part 4 — Rome: a contract with the gods (about 8th century BCE–5th century CE)

"I give so that you may give"

Roman religion had a reputation, even in antiquity, for being practical. It was based on the principle of do ut des, "I give so that you may give". The Romans offered the gods sacrifice, prayer and correct ritual; the gods in return protected the city, its harvests and its armies. What mattered was not inner belief or doctrine but doing the right thing, in the right way, at the right time. Keeping the "peace of the gods" (pax deorum) was a central responsibility of the state, and later of the emperors.

The great gods of the state were the triad of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, worshipped on the Capitoline Hill, along with Mars, god of war and father of Romulus, and many others. As Rome expanded it absorbed Greek gods, identifying Jupiter with Zeus and Venus with Aphrodite, and welcomed foreign gods into the city: Cybele from Asia Minor, Isis from Egypt, Mithras with eastern origins.

Priests and Vestals

Rome had priesthoods, but they were usually held by members of the elite alongside political careers; priests married, raised families and led active public lives. Julius Caesar became pontifex maximus, the chief priest, before he was elected consul, and in the imperial era the emperor held the title. Augurs read the will of the gods in signs such as the flight of birds.

The most famous Roman priestesses were the six Vestal Virgins, who tended the sacred fire of Vesta, goddess of the hearth, in her round temple in the Forum. The fire symbolised Rome's survival; if it went out, disaster threatened. Vestals vowed to serve for at least thirty years and to remain chaste throughout.

The religion of the household

For ordinary Romans, the centre of religion was the home. Every household had its Lares, guardian spirits, and its domestic Penates, often honoured at a small shrine called a lararium. The family made offerings at meals and important family events: grain, honey cakes, wine, incense. Lares also protected neighbourhoods: crossroad shrines were a focus of local life, and their cult officials included freedmen and enslaved people who were otherwise excluded from public office.

Rome's religious marketplace also included mystery cults offering personal salvation. The cult of Mithras, whose initiates met in underground temples built to resemble caves, drew especially on soldiers, merchants, customs officials and minor bureaucrats.

Persecution, toleration and reversal

Romans tolerated most gods, but expected loyalty to the gods of the state. Christians, who refused to sacrifice to them, were viewed with suspicion. Under Emperor Decius in 250, every inhabitant of the empire was required to sacrifice and obtain a certificate proving it. The "Great Persecution" under Diocletian began in 303. In 311 Galerius issued an edict of toleration, and in February 313 Constantine and Licinius agreed the policy known as the Edict of Milan, granting freedom of worship to Christians and all others.

Then the direction reversed. In the Edict of Thessalonica of 27 February 380, Theodosius I declared Nicene Christianity the religion that all subjects should follow. Laws of 391 and 392 banned pagan sacrifice and temple visits; historians debate how strictly they were enforced, and many temples continued in use for decades. The last pagan holders of the consulship, the highest honorary office, served in 391.

The Altar of Victory: the last great argument

The most moving document of the end is a debate. In 382 Emperor Gratian removed the Altar of Victory from the Senate house in Rome, where senators had burned incense before it for centuries, and confiscated the revenues of the Vestals. In 384 the senator Quintus Aurelius Symmachus appealed to the young emperor Valentinian II to restore them. His argument is a plea for religious pluralism: the gods had protected Rome for a thousand years, and the truth is too great to be reached by one path alone. His opponent, Ambrose, bishop of Milan, quoted him and replied, in a letter to the emperor:

"By one road, says he, one cannot attain to so great a secret. What you know not, that we know by the voice of God." — Ambrose of Milan, Letter 18.8, quoting and answering Symmachus

Ambrose won. The altar was not restored, despite later appeals.

How it ended, and what lingered

Official Roman religion was largely dismantled by the early 5th century, though rural practices and household rites persisted. Unofficial worship of the Lares, for example, seems to have continued into the early 5th century.

Legacy and revival

Roman religion lives on in the names of the planets, in religious vocabulary (religio itself, see How Religion Began), and in a small modern revival. Roman polytheist groups, including the international Nova Roma organisation, celebrate festivals such as the Natale di Roma, the birthday of Rome, with ceremonies that in recent years have been held at the Circus Maximus. Like other revivals, these are modern reconstructions; their followers would add that they honour gods who never died.

Part 5 — The Norse: gods we know mostly through Christians (about 8th–11th centuries CE)

The gods

The Norse gods belonged to two families, the Æsir and the Vanir, who in myth fought a war and then made peace. Odin, god of wisdom, poetry, magic and the battle-dead, whose reconstructed ancient name may mean "lord of frenzy", was widely revered across the Germanic world. Thor, with his hammer, defended gods and humans against giants and was the most popular god among farmers and sailors. Freyr and his sister Freyja, from the Vanir, governed fertility, wealth and love; Freyja was also linked to magic. Frigg was Odin's wife; Loki, the trickster, was both helper and betrayer, and in the end an enemy of the gods.

Norse myth imagined a world that would end: at Ragnarök a great battle would see many gods perish, the world would burn and sink beneath the water, and then rise again, cleansed and fertile, to be repopulated by two human survivors.

The source problem

No religion in this piece is harder to know honestly. The Norse peoples wrote little about their religion before they became Christian. Runic inscriptions are short. Almost everything we know about the myths comes from texts written down in Christian Iceland in the 13th century, two centuries or more after conversion.

• The Prose Edda was written around 1220 by Snorri Sturluson, an Icelandic chieftain, poet and historian. It is our richest source for Norse myth, but Snorri was a Christian, writing partly as a handbook for poets. His prologue explains the gods as human kings of the ancient past who came to be worshipped, a common Christian way of treating pagan gods.
• The Poetic Edda survives mainly in a single manuscript, the Codex Regius, written in the 1270s. It was rediscovered in 1643 by Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson, sent to Denmark in 1662, and returned to Iceland only on 21 April 1971, a national event.
• Outsiders' accounts are vivid but biased. In the 11th century the German cleric Adam of Bremen described a great temple at Uppsala in Sweden, with statues of Thor at the centre flanked by Wodan (Odin) and Fricco (probably Freyr), and a festival every nine years at which nine males of every kind of creature, including humans, were sacrificed and hung in a sacred grove. He relied on an informant (who he said was 72 years old) and wrote as a missionary churchman. Archaeologists have not found a temple of the size he described, and many scholars treat his account with caution.
• In 921 the Arab traveller Ahmad ibn Fadlan left Baghdad on an embassy to the Volga Bulgars. Much of his account describes the Rus, Scandinavian traders on the Volga, including in great detail the funeral of one of their chieftains: a ship burial involving human sacrifice. It is one of the most detailed eyewitness accounts we have, though written by an outsider who found the Rus disgusting and said so.

Almost everything we know about the Norse gods was written down by Christians, foreigners, or the descendants of converts. That does not make it false. It does mean every page needs a second look.

Ritual and the household

The core ritual was blót, sacrifice, usually of animals, followed by a communal feast. It was led not by a professional priesthood but by chieftains and heads of households; in Iceland, the chieftain-priests were called goðar (singular goði). Some rites were private. The poet Sigvatr Þórðarson, travelling in Sweden in the early 11th century, was turned away from a farm because the household was holding an álfablót, a sacrifice to the elves, and a housewife told him to leave.

Magic was part of religious life. Seiðr, a form of sorcery and divination, was associated in myth with Freyja and Odin; the sagas describe women seers (völur) practising it. Archaeology adds what the texts leave out: burials with ships, weapons, horses and household goods. The Oseberg ship in Norway, buried in or after 834 with two women and rich goods, is the most spectacular.

The afterlife

Different texts describe several destinations. Warriors chosen by Odin's valkyries feasted in Valhalla, the hall of the slain, preparing for Ragnarök. Hel, ruled by a being of the same name, received others. Other traditions spoke of the dead living on in burial mounds or in mountains. The variety suggests there was no single official doctrine, which fits a religion without scriptures or a central priesthood.

How it ended

Christianisation came over two centuries, sometimes peacefully through trade and marriage, sometimes by force. Olaf Tryggvason, king of Norway from 995 to 1000, pressed conversion within his kingdom forcibly, and put pressure on Iceland too.

Iceland's conversion is one of the most remarkable stories in religious history. Around the year 1000 (some sources say 999), with the country divided between Christians and pagans and on the edge of civil war, the dispute went to the Althing, the island's assembly. Both sides agreed to let the lawspeaker, Thorgeir Thorkelsson, a pagan goði, decide. According to the sagas he lay under a fur cloak for a day and a night, then announced that all Icelanders should be baptised and accept Christianity, under one law, to keep the peace. There were concessions: for a time, people could still expose unwanted infants, eat horse meat, and sacrifice in private. A popular story that Thorgeir then threw his idols into the waterfall Goðafoss is a much later legend, from the 19th century.

Legacy and revival

The old Germanic gods live on in the English days of the week: Wednesday is Woden's (Odin's) day, Thursday is the day of Thunor (Thor), and Friday is named for the Anglo-Saxon goddess Frīg, counterpart of Frigg. They also live on in modern fantasy and film. They also have living worshippers.

In 1972, on the first day of summer, a group met at the Hótel Borg in Reykjavík and founded the Ásatrúarfélagið, the Æsir Faith Fellowship, led for its first two decades by the poet and farmer Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson. Iceland recognised it as an official religious organisation in 1973. It has grown remarkably: according to Statistics Iceland it had 280 members in 1998, 1,402 in 2010, 4,640 in 2020, and 6,158 at the start of 2026, about 1.56 percent of the population. Members typically see their faith as Iceland's ancient heritage, reawakened. Most historians would describe it as a modern religion inspired by medieval texts. Many members would accept both descriptions.

Elsewhere, Norse-inspired religion is called Heathenry, Ásatrú or Odinism, and is a diverse international movement. It is divided by a sharp argument over who may belong. Universalist or inclusive groups, such as The Troth (founded in 1987), welcome anyone who wishes to honour the gods. Folkish groups hold that the religion belongs to people of northern European descent, and often combine it with far-right and white-supremacist views. A larger proportion of Heathens take the universalist view, and a 2015 survey of Heathens found more subscribing to universalist ideas than folkish ones. Some Heathen groups explicitly denounce any link between their religion and racial identity.

Part 6 — Mesoamerica I: the Mexica (Aztecs) (14th–16th centuries CE)

Mesoamerica, the region stretching from central Mexico through Guatemala and Belize to parts of Honduras and El Salvador, developed its religions entirely independently of Europe, Asia and Africa. Its civilisations, from the Maya and Zapotecs to Teotihuacan and the Mexica (Aztecs), shared a family of ideas: a 260-day sacred calendar, gods of rain, maize and sun, temple pyramids, and the central place of blood in relations between gods and humans. A Brief History of Mexico in this library's nations series tells the political story.

The Mexica (Aztec) gods

The Mexica, who founded Tenochtitlan in the 14th century, worshipped a large and shifting pantheon. Their own patron was Huitzilopochtli, god of the sun and war, who according to one origin story was born on Coatepec, "Serpent Hill", to defend his mother Coatlicue against his sister Coyolxauhqui and her four hundred brothers. Tlaloc was the ancient god of rain and fertility. Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, was a god of wind and knowledge; Tezcatlipoca, "Lord of the Smoking Mirror", associated with the jaguar, was a trickster and the patron god of the ruling class.

At the heart of Tenochtitlan stood the Templo Mayor, a pyramid with twin shrines on top: on the left (facing it) the shrine of Tlaloc, on the right that of Huitzilopochtli, embodying the two pillars of Mexica life, water for crops and war for tribute. The first temple there was built, by tradition, in 1325, and it was enlarged in seven major building phases. On 21 February 1978 electricity workers digging in central Mexico City hit a huge carved stone disc showing the dismembered Coyolxauhqui, which led to the excavation of the temple. Archaeologists have since recovered more than 7,000 objects, mostly offerings.

Calendars and time

Mesoamerican religion was organised around time. Two calendars ran side by side: a 260-day ritual count (the tonalpohualli in Nahuatl; the tzolk'in among the Maya), made of 20 day-signs combined with numbers 1 to 13, and a 365-day solar year. The two cycles return to the same starting combination every 18,980 days, which is exactly 52 years of 365 days. At the end of each 52-year cycle the Mexica performed the New Fire ceremony, the "binding of the years": every fire was put out, a new fire was kindled on the chest of a sacrificed captive, and it was carried all over the city.

Sacrifice, honestly

The Mexica practised human sacrifice, most famously by removing the heart of a victim on the temple summit. Many victims were war captives. Children were offered to Tlaloc, without whose sacrifices, it was believed, the rain would not come; archaeologists have found the remains of at least 42 children sacrificed to him at the Templo Mayor. Some victims were impersonators: during the month of Toxcatl, a young man who had lived for a year dressed as Tezcatlipoca and treated as his living incarnation was sacrificed. Blood held a central place in Mesoamerican cultures. The Florentine Codex records a creation myth in which Quetzalcoatl gave blood from his own body to bring humanity to life, and other Nahua myths tell of gods offering their blood for humankind. What sacrifice meant is debated; many scholars argue that, in Mexica understanding, it helped the gods sustain the cosmos, and offerings to Tlaloc were believed necessary for the rain to come. Limited self-sacrifice was common too: people offered maguey thorns stained with their own blood, drawn from the tongue, ear lobes or genitals.

How many people died is one of the most argued questions in the field, because many of the highest figures come from Spanish conquerors and chroniclers who had every reason to make Mexica religion look monstrous, and from Mexica sources that may have inflated numbers to project power. For the rededication of the Templo Mayor in 1487, one chronicle tradition gives 80,400 victims; the historian Ross Hassig has given a range of 10,000 to 80,400 for that event, while many scholars doubt the upper figure. Scholarly estimates for the empire as a whole range from about 1,000 to around 20,000 a year; an older estimate of 250,000 a year is widely rejected.

Archaeology has settled one thing. From 2015, archaeologists working near the Templo Mayor excavated part of the Huei Tzompantli, the great rack where skulls of the sacrificed were displayed, described by the Spanish conquistador Andrés de Tapia. They found more than 670 skulls, including those of women and children, which showed that the victims were not only adult male warriors. Most were men, but not all. The scale of sacrifice was real, even if the most extreme numbers are not.

Archaeology has confirmed that Aztec sacrifice was real. The arguments now are about how many, who, and what it meant to the people who performed it.

The afterlife

Where you went after death depended mainly on how you died, not how you lived. Most of the dead journeyed for four years through the nine levels of Mictlan, the underworld, helped by a dog, before reaching rest. Warriors who died in battle or on the sacrificial stone accompanied the sun through the eastern sky. Women who died in childbirth, honoured like warriors, accompanied the sun in the west. Those who died by drowning or other water-related deaths went to Tlalocan, the realm of Tlaloc.

Part 7 — Mesoamerica II: the Maya, the sources and what survived (to the 16th century CE, and beyond)

The Maya

The Maya, whose cities flourished in the Classic period (roughly 200–900 CE) and continued afterwards in the north and in the highlands, shared many of these ideas. Kings presented themselves as sacred lords who performed bloodletting to communicate with gods and ancestors. The Maya used the 260-day and 365-day calendars together, and in addition a "Long Count" to record dates over many centuries.

Their best-known sacred narrative, the Popol Vuh of the K'iche' Maya of Guatemala, contains the Maya creation myth, a chronicle of the K'iche' people, and the adventures of the Hero Twins, Hunahpú and Xbalanqué, who defeated the lords of the underworld, Xibalba. It was written down in the K'iche' language in Latin letters around 1550, and survives in a copy made by the Dominican friar Francisco Ximénez around 1701 in Chichicastenango.

How we know, and the problem of the sources

Mesoamerican peoples wrote their own books, painted on bark paper or deerskin. Most were destroyed. On 12 July 1562, at Maní in Yucatán, the Franciscan friar Diego de Landa held an auto de fe in which he burned Maya books and thousands of religious images; by his own account, they contained nothing "in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil", and the Maya "regretted to an amazing degree" their loss. Only four pre-conquest Maya books are known to survive, including the Dresden Codex.

The richest source for Mexica religion is the Florentine Codex, compiled between about 1545 and 1590 by the Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagún and his Nahua collaborators, including students trained at the college of Tlatelolco and elderly informants who remembered life before the conquest. Its twelve books, around 2,500 pages with more than 2,000 illustrations, in Nahuatl and Spanish, are now in the Laurentian Library in Florence and on UNESCO's Memory of the World register. It is an extraordinary record. But Sahagún's goal was to help evangelise the Nahua; he described the work as an account of "divine, or rather idolatrous, human, and natural things". His Indigenous collaborators, writing a generation after the conquest, also had their own perspectives and pressures. Every page is valuable, and every page is a negotiation.

Much of what we know about Mesoamerican religion was written down by the friars who were trying to end it, with the help of the Indigenous scholars who were trying to remember it.

Then there are stories we now doubt. The famous account that Moctezuma believed Hernán Cortés to be the returning god Quetzalcoatl appears only in documents shaped by post-conquest Spanish influence, and many ethno-historians now think it was largely a later invention.

How it ended, and what did not

The Spanish conquest, the fall of Tenochtitlan in 1521, and the epidemics that killed millions brought public Mexica religion to an end. Temples were razed and churches built in their place; Mexico City's Metropolitan Cathedral stands on top of the former Aztec sacred precinct, near the excavated Templo Mayor. But Mesoamerican religion did not simply vanish. It blended, persisted and adapted.

• In Guatemala, traditional daykeepers in the highlands still treat the 20 named days of the 260-day count as living, divine presences, and the Calendar Round remains in use among many highland communities. Across the Maya region, diviners and curers remain active in private religious life.
• In Mexico, the cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe, said to have appeared in December 1531 to Juan Diego, an Indigenous convert, on the hill of Tepeyac, became the central symbol of Mexican Catholicism. The site's associations with earlier devotion and the history of the apparition account are debated, a subject this library covers in its Spanish-language piece La Virgen de Guadalupe: historia, fe y debate.
• The Day of the Dead (Día de Muertos), recognised by UNESCO in 2008 as part of the intangible heritage of humanity, is often described as an Aztec survival. Its origins are debated: some scholars trace it to Mexica festivals for the dead, others to the Catholic feasts of All Saints and All Souls brought from Spain, and many to a blend of both. El Día de Muertos: lo que realmente es, in this library's Spanish section, sets out the arguments.

Modern revival

In the 20th century, a movement called Mexicayotl ("Mexican-ness") arose in Mexico City in the 1950s, around figures such as Rodolfo Nieva López, seeking to restore the religion, language and identity of the Mexica. A related tradition, the Concheros dance, which emerged shortly after the conquest, is performed today in places such as Mexico City's Zócalo; its rituals include calling down the spirits of the ancestors. For some practitioners this is a recovery of what was taken; for others it is a cultural and spiritual expression rather than a religion in the full sense. Many Indigenous communities, meanwhile, never stopped honouring mountains, rain and ancestors alongside Christian saints, and would not describe what they do as a revival at all.

Part 8 — How gods vanish, and how they come back

How they ended

Looking across the six worlds, a pattern emerges. These religions were not usually defeated by argument. They lost the institutions that held them up.

Three lessons stand out.

First, religions die when the people who feed them die or stop. State temples needed kings, money, land and trained priests. When Roman emperors cut temple funding, or Spanish conquerors destroyed Tenochtitlan's priesthood, the public religion collapsed quickly. Household and local religion, which needed only families and a sense of place, lasted much longer.

Second, many of our sources come from the winners. Christian Icelanders wrote down the Norse myths; Christian bishops recorded the arguments of the last Roman pagans; Spanish friars recorded Mexica religion in order to replace it. Historians do not throw these sources away. They read them carefully, alongside archaeology and the religion's own surviving words, asking who wrote, for whom and why.

Third, few things vanish completely. The Egyptian language survives in Coptic liturgy, Mesopotamian counting in our clocks, Greek myths in our art, Roman gods in our calendars, Norse gods in the days of the week, and the Mesoamerican calendar in Guatemalan villages.

These religions did not die because their followers stopped believing. Mostly, the followers kept believing until the temples were shut, the priests were gone and the children were raised in a new faith.

The revivals: continuity, reconstruction, or both?

Every one of these traditions now has modern followers, in numbers ranging from a few dozen to thousands. The debate about them has two sides worth stating fairly.

The historian's view. Historians usually describe these movements as reconstructions or new religious movements. Ancient practice was interrupted, often for many centuries. What we know comes from texts and archaeology that are fragmentary, and modern followers necessarily fill gaps with their own creativity and with the values of their own times. Modern Heathens, for example, generally do not practise animal sacrifice on the scale described in old sources; modern Hellenists rarely consult an oracle that once guided whole cities.

The practitioner's view. Many followers reply that every religion changes, and that Christianity or Judaism today would also be unrecognisable to their first followers. The gods, they say, did not die when their temples closed; people simply stopped listening. Reconstruction, done with scholarly care, is a way of hearing them again. Some also see their faith as a recovery of ancestral or national heritage taken by force, which is especially strong in Iceland, Greece and among some Mexican and Indigenous groups.

Both views can be true at once. A religion can be newly organised and deeply old in its gods, stories and sense of the sacred. What matters to most practitioners is not whether they are continuous with the past but whether their worship is meaningful and honest about its sources. The best-known groups usually are.

What the vanished gods teach

For anyone thinking about religion today, the vanished gods offer three questions.

• What does it feel like to be inside a religion that seems obviously true to everyone around you? For an Egyptian in 1300 BCE or a Roman in 100 CE, the gods were as real and as normal as the sun. That helps explain why religion is so rarely a matter of private argument and so often a matter of community and practice.
• What survives when an empire falls? Again and again, it is the household and the local: the hearth, the shrine at the crossroads, the offering at the grave.
• Who gets to tell a religion's story? The answer is rarely its last followers, which is a reason to read every account of a "dead" religion with humility.

Key dates

The takeaway

The religions of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, the Norse and Mesoamerica were not quaint myths but complete ways of life, each lasting centuries or millennia, each with its own gods, rituals, ethics and hopes. Egypt sought to keep the world in balance through Ma'at; Mesopotamia served gods who owned its cities; Greece and Rome bound gods and citizens through sacrifice and civic ritual; the Norse traded gifts with gods who would one day die; Mesoamerica fed gods who had given their own blood for the world. We know them through their own texts where they survive, through archaeology, and often through the writings of those who replaced them, which must be read carefully. They ended mostly when their institutions were removed, by Christian emperors, Christian kings, and Spanish conquerors, while household and local practice lingered long after. Today each has modern followers, whom historians usually call reconstructionists and who often call themselves restorers; both can be partly right.

Try this: look at a calendar. Find the Roman god in this month's name, the Norse god in today's name if it is Wednesday through Friday, the Mesopotamian base-60 in the minutes on your clock. Then ask yourself which of the ideas you take for granted might, two thousand years from now, be called someone's "mythology".

Sources & Further Reading

Sources
- Egypt: Wikipedia articles "Ancient Egyptian religion", "Pyramid Texts", "Book of the Dead", "Deir el-Medina", "Atenism", "Philae", "Graffito of Esmet-Akhom", "Kemetism" and "Kemetic Orthodoxy" (leads, with their cited scholarship, including Dijkstra on Philae); The Book of the Dead, trans. E. A. Wallis Budge, Project Gutenberg #7145, chapter 125.
- Mesopotamia: Wikipedia articles "Ancient Mesopotamian religion", "Enheduanna", "Lamashtu", "Pazuzu", "Akitu", "Library of Ashurbanipal", "George Smith (Assyriologist)", "Cuneiform" and "Sabians" (leads); The Epic of Gilgamesh, Old Babylonian version, trans. M. Jastrow and A. T. Clay (1920), Project Gutenberg #11000; D. A. Mackenzie, Myths of Babylonia and Assyria (1915), Project Gutenberg #16653, for the Descent of Ishtar; Sumerian King List, Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (University of Oxford).
- Greece: Hesiod, Theogony, trans. H. G. Evelyn-White, Project Gutenberg #348; Homer, Odyssey, trans. S. Butler, Project Gutenberg #1727; Cicero, On the Laws 2.36; Wikipedia articles "Ancient Greek religion", "Mycenaean religion", "Pythia", "Eleusinian Mysteries", "Totenpass", "Hestia", "Herma", "Curse tablet", "Ancient Olympic Games", "Neoplatonic Academy", "Hellenism (modern religion)" and "Supreme Council of Ethnikoi Hellenes" (leads).
- Rome: Ambrose, Letter 18, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 2, vol. 10 (New Advent); Wikipedia articles "Religion in ancient Rome", "Vestal Virgin", "Lares", "Lararium", "Mithraism", "Decian persecution", "Diocletianic persecution", "Edict of Milan", "Edict of Thessalonica", "Altar of Victory", "Symmachus", "Gratian", "Persecution of pagans in the late Roman Empire" and "Roman polytheistic reconstructionism" (leads).
- Norse: Wikipedia articles "Old Norse religion", "Prose Edda", "Snorri Sturluson", "Codex Regius", "Temple at Uppsala", "Ahmad ibn Fadlan", "Oseberg ship", "Blót", "Seiðr", "Valhalla", "Hel (location)", "Olaf Tryggvason", "Christianisation of Iceland", "Thorgeir Thorkelsson", "Ásatrúarfélagið", "Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson", "Heathenry (new religious movement)" and "The Troth" (leads); Statistics Iceland, table MAN10001, "Populations by religious and life stance organizations" (membership figures 1998–2026).
- Mesoamerica: BBC News, "Aztec tower of human skulls uncovered in Mexico City" (2 July 2017); Wikipedia articles "Aztec religion", "Templo Mayor", "Huey tzompantli", "Human sacrifice in Aztec culture", "Mictlan", "Tonalpohualli", "New Fire Ceremony", "Tlaloc", "Quetzalcoatl", "Maya religion", "Maya calendar", "Maya codices", "Popol Vuh", "Diego de Landa", "Florentine Codex", "Bernardino de Sahagún", "Our Lady of Guadalupe", "Day of the Dead", "Mexicayotl" and "Concheros" (leads, with their cited scholarship, including Hassig on sacrifice numbers). The 52-year cycle was computed (the least common multiple of 260 and 365 is 18,980 days).
- Cross-references in this library: A History of Mexico (Histories of Nations), El Día de Muertos: lo que realmente es and La Virgen de Guadalupe: historia, fe y debate (Spanish section).

Go deeper
- 📘 The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt — Richard H. Wilkinson (a clear, illustrated guide to who was who and how they were worshipped)
- 📘 Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia — Jeremy Black and Anthony Green (an accessible illustrated dictionary of Mesopotamian religion)
- 📘 Greek Religion — Walter Burkert (the classic scholarly survey; demanding but unsurpassed)
- 📘 Religions of Rome — Mary Beard, John North and Simon Price (the standard modern history, in two volumes, with a sourcebook)
- 📘 Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings — Neil Price (an archaeologist's history of the Viking world that gives belief, ritual and magic their full weight)
- 📘 The Aztecs — Richard F. Townsend (a well-illustrated introduction to Mexica society and religion), and Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate — Elizabeth Hill Boone (on the painted divinatory books and their calendars)
- 📘 Popol Vuh — trans. Dennis Tedlock (a widely read English translation of the K'iche' Maya sacred narrative)
- 🌐 Companion pieces in this library: How Religion Began, How the Sacred Texts Were Written, Ritual: Why Humans Can't Quit It, Indigenous and Folk Religions and A History of Mexico