FIRST, IN THE NINETEENTH century, European Hellenists saw Greece as the birthplace of reason, the heir to classical antiquity; they formed the notion of a self-governing Greek nation state, destined to rise from the ashes of Ottoman oppression and recreate appropriate institutions of free speech and democracy. These lovers of classical antiquity liked to see the traditions practised in the villages almost as an earthy rationality in contrast to Christianity, admiring, for example, the bleak realism of Greek death practices even though at times they were moved to condemn aspects of them as at best magical and at worst destructive. (2) From the folklore industry generated by this perspective, and from some fine historical and ethnographic studies too, (3) the notion grew up that the Greek villages, at any rate as they existed before the flight to the towns, were a repository of thinly-veiled pre-Christian or non-Christian ways of thought—a proof of their classical pedigree.

This way of looking at the religious imagination is associated with the modern period in the West, with its strong distinction between rational and magical thinking, where what is not explicitly reasoned is by definition illusory. Given impetus by the rationalizing tendencies of Protestantism, and later by proselytizing atheists, (4) this distinction continues to surface in some historical accounts as well, such as in those which continue to portray the peasantry of the European middle ages as ‘magical’ thinkers who used fragments of older thought forms on which the medieval Church is thought to have had little impact. (5)

With time though, European Hellenism has generated opposing evaluations, which point instead to the Byzantine and Ottoman inheritance of Greece, encapsulated in a term which resounds with subtle connotations of both—Romiosýne (Ρωμιοσύνη), the historical experience of the Romaíoi (Ρωμαίοι, sing. Ρωμιός), the former people of the Eastern Roman Empire. The associations of this term under the Ottomans—reflecting the way in which these people learned to cope with their subjection using a varied repertoire including secrecy, lies, braggadocio and trickery—have gained a new lease of life in a view that sees Greece as possessing not only the institutions of a modern European nation state, and the professional identities which go with them, but also often a contrary identity. This contrary identity is resistant to Europeanism and is kept secret among one’s own familiars, protected by lies, jokes, tricks, irony and plays upon words—a Romiosýne like that of Ottoman days which, coexisting uneasily with the European values that dominate public life, is deviously asserted in encounters with others, especially with strangers and with institutions. (6) In the villages this perspective has drawn particular attention to the individualistic and competitive behaviour of men, to such things as their blasphemy and their irreverence towards public organizations, their games with auguries and competitive stealing. (7)

This view of the Greek imagination has affinities with postmodern currents of thought in the West. From the 1930s onward, closer encounters with other cultures have been making the whole notion of magical thinking problematic and have encouraged an increasing openness to symbolic languages. Between the wars, social anthropologists working among the varied cultures of the British Empire had already found themselves at the limit of modernist assumptions, and they began to draw attention to other forms of rationality even in African ideas about witchcraft. (8) As a consequence, which was further stimulated in the last few decades by widespread cross-cultural encounters in cosmopolitan cities, a second way of seeing religion has emerged in reaction to modernism which recognizes a variety of alternative rationalities, and, correspondingly, a variety of alternative ways in which individuals may thread together a self-made identity. The individualism of this postmodern sense of identity is indeed perhaps its chief distinguishing mark. Individualism and competitive choice of lifestyles permeate the market for religious experience which goes under the name of the ‘new age’, just as they permeate the growing fashion for agnosticism. And the implication that both are a lifestyle choice undermines any sense of belonging to a greater whole.

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