And the old becomes new again

Even more from The Brussels Journal:

The last significant revival of classical paganism in Hellenic lands came in the reign of Julian the Apostate. Now, it seems that there’s another underway. The South African Mail & Guardian reports that thousands of devotees of the Greek gods of antiquity are gathering in Athens to ape the half-remembered rites of millenia past. Unlike the prior revival, this one is not driven by any meaningful numbers of Hellenes, but by foreigners, most of whom hail from the secular West.

[Snip]

In the place of the authentic trappings of authentic faith, the new pagans must mimic the rites of a belief that is often demonstrably fake at best, and horribly consequential at worst. How long, for example, are the new Hellenic pagans going to refrain from re-creating the human sacrifice of Mycanaean times or the Dionysian rites? For all the ennobling mythos of Greek paganism, there’s a reason it was so readily abandoned for an alternative perceived as altogether more sensible, loving, and humane.

I confess this had gotten completely past me. Go and read the rest.