*points aggressively at this while nodding* https://twitter.com/NeolithicSheep/status/1246408189937168386

One of the most difficult things about discussing ancient religion in a casual/non-scholarly way is that we bring SO MUCH of our modern understanding of what Religion means into it. And that word itself is very fraught.

Like, when certain ancient texts refer to Christianity as a school of philosophy, that's not "Ha ha, they misunderstood from the outside!", that's "The way Christians acted/practiced/believed mapped better to 'school of philosophy' than 'religion' in that time period."

A lot of the ancient use of the Latin word 'religio' and its derivatives (that we translate as 'religion') maps a bit nearer to 'taboo' than 'religion', in modern word usage.

And a lot of what they called 'philosophy', at least by the imperial Roman period, was a lot closer to what we'd call 'religion', at least when people considered themselves affiliated with it; cross-cultural belief-communities with practices derived from those beliefs.

...anyway, I am not an expert on this, I'm a classicist who focuses on very different stuff, but I've been lucky enough to take some /great/ classes with profs who /do/ know these things.

And in particular I'd recommend the book "Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities" ( https://muse.jhu.edu/book/47417 ) for an excellent introduction to the very specific fraught /words/ of ancient Greek & Latin, there.

(You too can learn how terrible Tertullian is!)

(In case you didn't know!)

(He makes Jerome look chill!)

I thank Prof. Sellew (now retired, but also teaching our Dionysos class via Zoom) and Prof. Ahearne-Kroll in particular for helping me see these things; errors in my tweets in this area are from my own imperfect understanding/recollection.