INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1 identified the focus on the polis and its socio-political institutions as a paradigm in current scholarship on ancient Greek religion and offered a critical appreciation of this approach. I argued that the neglect of religion as a personal experience and as a matter of thought is one of the unfortunate side effects of the polis-religion model on scholarship in the field, which frequently favours religious agency. This chapter explores a dimension of ancient Greek religion that takes the individual believer – and the student of ancient Greek religion – well beyond the boundaries of the polis and its socio-political institutions, both physically and intellectually. The goal is to demonstrate the benefit of a perspective that is not focused primarily on religious agency, control and power as mediated and overseen by the polis. Instead, I investigate the modes of thinking that informed ancient Greek religion as well as some of the concepts that underlay it: what we might want to call the ‘cognitive dimension’ of ancient Greek religion.