How long did it take for Greco-Roman polytheism to fully go extinct? Where there any holdout practitioners who believed and sacrificed to the Olympians into the Middle Ages or even Modern times?
I still believe, anon.
>>2708422
The older, 19th century view is that paganism lasted a LONG time, and that large numbers of Western European pagans were peasants up until the Reformation and the enforcement of strict, orthodoxy Christianity across Europe.
However, that view was heavily coloured by romanticism (its most famous proponent believed witches were followers of an ancient pre-Aryan fertility cult) and anti-Catholicism. A few modern scholars suggest that paganism was dead amongst the ruling classes after a century of Christianity's official introduction.
>>2708422
I don't know about modern times but:
- Boniface in 742 was complaining about pagan rituals still being carried out in Rome. Not necessarily pagan in spirit but in fashion
- We know of people binding prayers to trees up until the tenth century at least
- Some land in the south greece during the tenth century reverted to paganism, apparently.
>>2708422
Read The Final Pagan Generation by Edward Watts
>>2708422
There were still people practicing Greco-Roman polytheism in parts of the Peloponnese as late as the 10th century AD.
Other forms of religion like that of the old ancient Egyptian polytheism survived as long as that in places like the Sudanese coast.