“If you want a new idea, read an old book.”

— Ivan Pavlov

The imaginary line separating East from West is a lot closer to home than many realize. In the first part, we explored how Western thought divides reality into competing categories: reason and spirit, objective truth and subjective experience, external authority and interior transformation.

These binaries shape more than theology. They influence how we understand ourselves, determine what counts as knowledge, and respond to experiences we cannot easily categorize or control. We pick up looking at Western societies predecessors: the Greeks.

Much of Western society, particularly its intellectual and political self-image, has been borrowed from and developed through the Greeks (and, in a different but equally important conversation, Indigenous political systems). There is a great deal of respect and reverence for the Greeks, and for good reason.

Their philosophy, literature, politics, mathematics, and art helped shape what we now call Western civilization. The European Enlightenment of the 1600s and 1700s drew heavily on this classical inheritance. In fact, historians also use the term Greek Enlightenment to describe an earlier period of intellectual ferment in fifth-century BC Greece.

When the authority of the Roman Catholic Church and the inherited intellectual structures of medieval Europe began to fracture, European scholars and reformers returned to the sources available to them. Ad fontes, “back to the sources,” became a guiding impulse of Renaissance humanism and the Reformation. Martin Luther was one of many who looked again at the earliest available texts, languages, and sources of Christian teaching. Erasmus’s Greek New Testament, published in 1516, became one important expression of that recovery. This return to sources helped shape the Reformation and the intellectual world that followed, even as the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment each had their own histories and contributing forces.

These, however, were far from the first moments of human awakening. The Indus Valley civilization had developed complex urban centers, sophisticated infrastructure, systems of measurement, and far-reaching trade networks millennia before the European Enlightenment. There was printing long before Gutenberg, too: East Asian woodblock printing and movable type predate his press by centuries. Later, America would experience its own period of religious fervor and revival in what became known as the Second Great Awakening.

These examples are not identical events, and they do not all represent the same kind of enlightenment. But they point toward something that seems to run as far back as human society itself. The word Enlightenment implies seeing what was previously unseen, becoming aware of deeper truths, or watching old assumptions fall away as something more real comes into view. Human beings and civilizations have repeatedly experienced moments of discovery, reorientation, and transformation.

The Greeks had one, too. And interestingly, they also found sources and inspiration somewhere else. The word Enlightenment almost invites the question: if it was dark before, where did the light come from? Looking back more than two thousand years, we might imagine Greece as a refined, self-contained civilization, already possessing the qualities we admire in it. It was anything but. Greece had an origin, a beginning, a development, and an end. Its people were part of a much older and wider human story, one populated by civilizations that had come and gone long before Athens became the symbol of Western intellectual achievement.

What we explore today is the Greek genesis: its older sources, the ideas it inherited, and what Greek thinkers and religious communities did with them. Greek religion and philosophy developed through extensive engagement with older Eastern cultures. They borrowed, adapted, reinterpreted, and sometimes copied from them. Everyone was doing it, and still does—that’s part of the point. Cultural exchange was one of the ways civilizations became what they were.

“Philosophical discourse must be understood from the perspective of the way of life of which it is both the expression and the instrument. Philosophy in antiquity was an art of living, and the philosophical school was above all a community of practice, a place where a transformation of life was taught and lived.”

— Pierre Hadot, School as a Spiritual Retreat

The Archaic Horizon (~750–650 BC)

The popular idea of Greece as an isolated, self-generated miracle that later European rationality could copy ignores extensive archaeological and textual evidence of its “Orientalizing Period.” In Greek history, it underwent a season of importing ideas from other cultures, something it’d continue to do. 

During this era, Greece actively imported its alphabet, artistic expressions, building architecture, philosophical concepts, and religious rites, borrowing inspiration heavily from the older cultures of the Levant, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. Leading up to Alexander the Great, Greek city-states and kings would regularly import stories, myths, art, and more as a show of wealth and luxury, which would have influenced their own arts, sciences, and worldview. 

In the ancient world, the older the lineage, the greater the claim to legitimacy. A people’s ancient origins, ancestral customs, and inherited laws could establish their place in the world. Judaism presented Rome with a unique case. Jewish monotheism precluded participation in the worship of Rome’s gods and emperor, yet Jewish communities appealed to the antiquity of their traditions to defend their right to practice their religion. Roman authorities sometimes recognized those claims, permitting Jews to maintain ancestral customs that other communities were expected to set aside.

Specific Deities & Comparative Genealogies

Gods in the ancient world had lifespans and evolved with cultures and societies. This can seem foreign to us in modernity, but look back far enough through history and one can see the dance of religion, state, and culture extending up to the current. In ancient times, they could cycle as fast as the ruling family. One generation might be worshipping under Egyptian rule while the next under Persian. 

While upper leadership and government may have made decisions that set clear trajectories, trade, culture, and the belief systems of the base population were also interconnected. Along with goods, people traded and dialogued on ideas across what would become the Silk Road as well as Rome’s web of roads. Within Rome’s Ceasar’s alone, Apollo, Jupiter, Sol Invictus, and Christ all shared the title of the patron deity. 

Within Dionysus’ own literary corpus, a popular play refers to how he was first in Eastern regions, appearing by different names and in different forms.

In Greece, they recognized that their own ideas were not purely original creations. They had roots. In mythological studies, they discuss how myths and gods evolved like family trees. While we might only think of Zeus as a singular being, he would often exist in different forms, with different titles, simultaneously across geopolitical borders. Greece’s own scholars would go on ancient field trips to chase down the historical source of something, and often reported back on their findings.

Heracles, Melqart, & Samson

As a warm-up example of how ancient stories and ideas traded across borders, consider the age and origins of Heracles (or Hercules). He existed before Greek city-states (poleis), finding our oldest source in Homeric myth, about the time of the Mycenaeans or before.

However, that’s only what we can see. Rather than assuming the myth of Heracles was a native Greek hero, classical Greek historians investigated his foreign origins. Herodotus explicitly traveled abroad to trace the roots of the Greek pantheon around 440–425 BC. In his The Histories, he wrote,

“I heard it said that Heracles was one of the twelve gods of Egypt… And wishing to get clear information on this point from where it was available, I sailed also to Tyre in Phoenicia, hearing that there was there a holy temple of Heracles [Melqart]… So these investigations show clearly that Heracles is an ancient god.”

— Book II, Chapters 43–44

“Tyre in Phoenicia” was about 100 miles straight north of Jerusalem. The Phoenician deity Melqart of Tyre was the god of strength and heroes, called the dying-and-rising god. The Phoenicians are the Old Testament’s “Canaanites” and date before the ancient Kingdom of Israel.

Despite a realtively small kindgom, they were known for their naval trade routes around the Mediterranean Sea, and founding several cities around its coast. Settlers from Tyre founded Carthage, and, so, when Tyre fell to Alexander the Great (332 BC), many Tyrians fled to Carthage.

Herodotus, Arrian, and Strabo all noted the temple of Melqart, which they interpreted as Hercales, had magnificent pillars of gold and green stone that never weathered. Unfortunately, Tyre is now under the sea and difficult to excavate. So while the temple has never been excavated, Tyre made others.

Gades, on coast of southwestern Spain, over 2200 miles away, was founded by Tyrian colonists around the 12th century BC, and its the sanctuary of Melqart was famous. Both Julius Caesar and Hannibal visited it to offer sacrifices.

In the Ancient Near East, strongman myths were common. Genesis even refers to the common mythos of “heroes” in Genesis 6. Long before Heracles hoisted his club or Samson brought down the Philistine temple, the ancient Near East established the ultimate template for the mythic strongman and the tyrant-hero: Gilgamesh of Uruk.

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the king is famously described as two-thirds divine and one-third human—a cosmic imbalance that manifests as raw, unchecked earthly power. Ruling Uruk with absolute impunity, Gilgamesh embodies the archetype of the unchecked sovereign who exploits his subjects, demanding to sleep with brides on their wedding nights before their husbands.

When the citizens of Uruk cry out against Gilgamesh’s tyranny, the sky god Anu and the mother goddess Aruru intervene not by destroying the king, but by creating an equal counterforce: Enkidu. Enkidu is fashioned from clay in the wilderness, living among beasts, eating grass, and embodying unbridled natural strength. After a fierce battle, the two become close friends and go on adventures together. 

The Philistines, Samson’s main antagonists, were next door neighbors to the Phoenicians. Some scholars have speculated that the same kind of cultural transmission may have also occurred between ancient Jews and other cultures of the Near East. There are structural parallels between the biblical Samson narrative (Book of Judges) and the Greek Heracles tradition that reveal a shared Bronze Age, Levantine archetype.

While it’s an interesting example, it illustrates that cultural transmissions and myths do not sit isolated in containers, but evolved with the times of the people passing them on. The thesis here isn’t positing that Samson was either inspired by or the inspiration of Heracles. It simply shows how ancient ideas might have bumped into each other.

Aphrodite, Astarte, & Inanna

Aphrodite also was not a self-contained, isolated Hellenic invention, but the recipient of ancient Near Eastern fertility and sovereignty archetypes. Ancient sources record her arrival in the West, and even mark her exact landing point in Cyprus.The Sanctuary of Aphrodite built at Palaepaphos, Cyprus, dates to about 1200 BC, during the Late Bronze Age, and served as her primary cult site for 1,600 years.

Classical Greek poets tied Aphrodite’s arrival to maritime trade routes with Phoenician staging posts in the eastern Mediterranean, before transitioning into the Greek pantheon around the 8th century BC.

Her mythological birth emerging from the sea foam near the island of Cyprus reflects the role of ancient trade and the island’s historical role as a primary Phoenician trading post, sanctuary nexus, and cultural bridgehead connecting the Levant directly to the Aegean.

The relationship between Aphrodite and Near Eastern goddesses is substantial. Aphrodite’s epithet Aphrodite Ourania (“Heavenly Aphrodite”) resembles the ancient Semitic title “Queen of Heavens,” which was historically influenced by the Phoenician Astarte and the Sumerian-Akkadian Inanna/Ishtar deities (cf. Jeremiah 7:18; 44:17–19, 25). Aphrodite was far from the only female god of love, and she was molded and melded throughout different Greco-Roman times.

And, still, well before the name Aphrodite was attached to the island, indigenous Europeans were carving stone fertility, mother-goddess figures before written language existed, during the Chalcolithic Period (c. 3900–2500 BC). The archetype might change names and forms, but not spirit.

Dionysus, Osiris, & Ecstatic Traditions

Dionysus shares parallels with Osiris, the Egyptian god who was dismembered and resurrected. The Dionysian cult incorporated ecstatic dance, wild instrumentation, ritual frenzy, and mountain-wandering (oreibasia) that trace back to ancient Anatolian and Bactrian trade networks.

Herodotus, in The Histories again, argued that the Greeks did not invent the rites of Dionysus independently. Rather, early Greeks imported the core story of Osiris and adapted it to Hellenic culture. He recorded the historical movement of Dionysian mysteries from Egypt and the Near East through people like Melampus and Cadmus of Tyre. 

“For the Egyptians say that Osiris is Dionysus; and it was Melampus who taught the Greeks the name of Dionysus, his sacrifice, and the procession of the phallus.”

— Herodotus, The Histories, Book II, 49–50

Hundreds of years later around 100 AD, Plutarch, writing to a priestess of Apollo at the famous temple of Delphi, which operated for over a thousand years, “That Osiris is the same as Dionysus, who should know better than you, Clea, who are the leader of the Thyiades at Delphi, and were consecrated by your father and mother to the Osirian rites?” (Moralia: On Isis and Osiris).

As mentioned, the Greeks recorded directly into their myths about Dionysus that he originated in the east, under different names. The earliest historical footprint of Dionysus does not appear in Classical Athens, but in Bronze Age Linear B administrative tablets from Pylos and Khania (where his name is recorded as di-wo-nu-so), showing he was anchored in the Greek-speaking world centuries before its classical era (c. 1250–1200 BC).

Greco-Roman Importation of Egyptian & Eastern Cults

As the Mediterranean unified under Hellenistic and later Roman rule, cultural exchange deepened into massive empire assimilation. Greeks and Romans did not merely tolerate foreign religions; they aggressively imported them, retrofitting Egyptian and Near Eastern deities into their own religious infrastructure.

Following Alexander the Great’s conquest of Egypt, the Ptolemaic dynasty formally fused Osiris and Apis (Osiris-Apis) with the Greek attributes of Dionysus and Hades to create Serapis—a hybrid state deity designed to unify Greek and Egyptian worshippers under a single iconography (c. 305–283 BC).

Originating in Egypt, the worship of Isis swept across the Greek world and became a dominant mystery religion throughout the Roman Empire. Its initiation rites, sacred robes, and promise of personal regeneration closely mirrored older Osirian resurrection motifs.

Two thousand years ago, there was no clear line between East and West. And, if there was, Israel sat almost dead center on it, almost as if by design. There is no contradiction between East and West when one goes deep enough into the root of reality. The division is a creation of energy-starved, conceptual, dualistic thinking that mistakes its own maps for the territory. When we touch the ground of being, the boundary lines dissolve.

The Exchange Network: Socrates, the Gymnosophists, & Eastern Borrowings

History records cross-pollination between East and West not as an accidental byproduct of Alexander’s conquests alone, but as an ongoing, ancient reality recognized and practiced by antiquity. Well before Hellenistic armies pushed into the Indus Valley, intellectual and spiritual frameworks were bleeding across borders through merchants, diplomats, and wandering ascetics.

The exchange of philosophical ideas is captured in an early fragment preserved by Aristoxenus, a direct pupil of Aristotle. In his historical recollections, Aristoxenus records an encounter between Socrates and an Indian sage (a gymnosophist) visiting Athens:

“One of these men met Socrates at Athens, and asked him what was the scope of his philosophy. ‘An inquiry into human phenomena,’ replied Socrates. At this the Indian burst out laughing. ‘How can a man inquire into human phenomena,’ he said, ‘when he is ignorant of divine ones?'”

— Aristoxenus, quoted in Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica, XI.3

Greek thought was engaging with Eastern challenges before Jesus was swaddled in a manger. It also encapsulates a fundamental critique Eastern traditions held against early Greek rationalism: Eastern thought viewed Western mindsets as too human-centric in their logic while ignoring the vertical, divine ground of being (ontology). An ego-centric world produced ego-centric people.

While Platonic thought is often heralded as a singular, immaculate Western achievement, it was operating within a Mediterranean conversation already saturated by Eastern philosophy. From the cross-pollinations of the Greco-Buddhist kingdoms of Bactria to the intellectual trajectory of Augustine—who spent nearly a decade as a Manichaean before his Christian synthesis via Milanese Neoplatonism—Western philosophy has continually returned to draw from Eastern wells. The myth of intellectual isolation isn’t just historically lazy; it is a defense mechanism for a culture terrified of realizing it never built anything entirely on its own.

The Early Church Fathers on Greek Borrowing

Crucially, early Christian apologists and scholars were aware of this intellectual debt. Rather than viewing Greek philosophy as an isolated, immaculate miracle of pure reason, thinkers like Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria argued that the greatest Greek philosophers had simply stolen their best insights from Moses and the Eastern “barbarians”.

Clement of Alexandria, writing in his Stromata (Miscellanies), systematically documented how Greece’s legendary sages sat at the feet of Near Eastern and Egyptian teachers:

“And Plato does not deny that he procured all that is most excellent in philosophy from the barbarians; and he admits that he came into Egypt… Pythagoras is reported to have been a disciple of Sonches the Egyptian arch-prophet; and Plato, of Sechnuphis of Heliopolis… [The Greeks] have no learning that is hoary with age.”

— Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, Book I, Chapters 15 & 21

A philosopher, Numenius of Apamea, summarized this ancient secret with a phrase later popularized by the Church Fathers: “For what is Plato but Moses speaking Attic Greek?” (quoted in Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, Book 1).

The myth of an isolated, self-generated Western rationality collapses under the weight of this evidence. Greek philosophy, Roman civic religion, and post-Enlightenment systems were built on a foundation of borrowed Eastern scripts, imported mystery rites, and cross-cultural appropriation long before European institutions attempted to sanitize their origins into a clean, West-versus-East binary.

Following Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Indus Valley, Greek thinkers directly encountered Indian ascetics, When Alexander the Great pushed his military campaign past the Persian Empire into Taxila and the Punjab region, he brought an entire retinue of historians, scientists, court philosophers, and geographic observers. Among them was Pyrrho of Elis, a painter turned philosopher who studied under Anaxarchus and traveled alongside him as part of Alexander’s inner intellectual circle and fonded Pyrrhonian Skepticism.

Writing in the 3rd century AD, Diogenes Laertius documents how Pyrrho’s encounter with these Indian philosophers destroyed his attachment to Greek dogmatism:

“He [Pyrrho] attended the lectures of Anaxarchus, whom he accompanied everywhere, even as far as the Indian Gymnosophists and the Magi. This led him to adopt a most noble philosophy… taking the form of agnostia [unknowing] and epeche [suspension of judgment]; for he withdrew from the world and lived in solitude… holding that nothing is honorable or base, or just or unjust; and similarly that nothing exists in truth, but that men do all things by custom and habit.”

Before Christianity was concieved in the person of Jesus, Western and Eastern concepts were already moving back and forth for over a thousand years. And it would continue to.

The Coming Imperial Swap

By the time Christianity had a name, it was an Eastern intruder that would later be adopted by the very government that once tried to stamp it out. That is where our next leg picks up.

(For those interested in the deep-dive mechanics of how this happened, I’ve detailed a fuller historical transition in my Academia paper, The Conversion of Christ into Caesar)

The premise is straightforward: the Roman government did not abandon its ancient playbook of administrative assimilation; it simply evolved alongside Christianity. Imperial patronage, political consolidation, theological disputes, and ecclesiastical institutionalization converged over time. Christianity became increasingly entangled with imperial authority, and that relationship transformed both the Church and its political environment. The transformation was gradual, contested, and not a simple one-for-one replacement of old Roman religions.

However, in essence, Rome traded out its old state-sanctioned mystery religions for a new one it could legislate and control. They did not eliminate mystery, awakening, or transcendent experience—they co-opted and stripped them of their unmediated interiority, then retrofitted them into a top-down institutional narrative that was easier to police (after a considerable amount of bloodshed, of course).

It is only a hop, skip, and a jump from that imperial swap to our modern, hyper-rationalized era, where we find ourselves careening right back to where we started. Modern society has pushed the West’s obsession with sterile categorization and externalized compliance so far that the pendulum has swung all the way back East. People are starving for deep truth, genuine spirituality, and authentic interiority.

“The choice of a way of life was not located at the end of the process of philosophical activity, like a kind of accessory or appendix. On the contrary, it stood at the beginning…”

— Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life