I began to become consciously aware of the problem of self-consistency in one’s position of faith after practicing Greek religion for a period of time. Through sustained practice and long-term engagement with scholarly reading, I found myself repeatedly having to clarify a fundamental question: from what position, exactly, am I entering into a relationship with this religious system?
Can a person living in Taiwan practice a religion originating in the ancient Greek world without negating their own cultural background and concrete lived conditions?
For me, this is not an emotional question, but a structural one.
I have never sought to become a pseudo-Greek or what is sometimes called a “spiritual Greek,” nor do I believe that practicing Greek religion entails identifying with or imitating ancient Greek cultural identity. To be frank, ancient Greek culture itself does not evoke in me a sense of “being at home.” By comparison, engagement with Daoism and broader Sinitic cultural traditions more readily produces a feeling of cultural familiarity. And yet, when I stand before my altar, read archaeological reports and historical studies of Greek religion, I experience an unprecedented sense of clarity and stability. This experience does not arise from cultural belonging, but from understanding the internal coherence of the religious system itself—a system that enables me to observe more clearly the workings of the cosmos, fate, and the ordering of all things.
From a historical perspective, ancient Greek religion was not structured around bloodline or ethnicity as prerequisites for participation. It was a form of religion centered on the polis, ritual practice, and correct performance (orthopraxy). Whether one properly honored the gods depended on the appropriateness of one’s actions, not on one’s place of origin. The Greek world existed for long periods within dense networks of cross-cultural exchange. Foreign deities such as Isis from Egypt or Cybele from Asia Minor were incorporated into Greek religious frameworks, and this incorporation is supported by concrete literary and archaeological evidence. From the standpoint of religious structure, therefore, Greek religion neither required practitioners to abandon their original cultures nor treated cultural “purity” as a criterion for religious legitimacy.
For this reason, as someone living in Taiwan, I have never attempted to become an ancient Greek. Instead, I consciously maintain the operation of different layers. On the social level, I abide by Taiwan’s laws, language, and civic responsibilities. On the religious level, I practice according to the internal logic, ritual structures, and human–divine relationships specific to Greek religion. On the personal level, I hold myself accountable for my own discipline—whether I am being lax, or allowing boundaries to become blurred. Self-consistency does not arise from cultural fusion, but from clearly knowing which system is being engaged at any given moment, and from refusing to allow any one of them to subsume or replace the others.
It is within this context that certain individuals have deliberately questioned the legitimacy of my practicing and sharing Greek religion in Taiwan. When such challenges come from people who themselves practice Western witchcraft locally in Taiwan, and who even emphasize their own status as inheritors of rare “authentic” Western traditions, the contradiction becomes frankly absurd. If cultural or geographic location alone were sufficient to invalidate religious practice, then such a standard would collapse under its own logic.
To go further, I have never believed that being Taiwanese requires one to simulate some imagined notion of what a “Taiwanese person ought to be,” nor to force oneself into such a mold—as though a Taiwanese witch must necessarily wear blue-and-white plastic sandals, burn joss paper at street intersections, chant spells in fluent Taiwanese, and work exclusively with local deities. Put plainly, this kind of stereotyping directly erases the internal diversity of Taiwanese culture. And if that were truly my goal, I could simply choose to immerse myself fully in indigenous religious systems instead.
For me, practicing Greek religion is not about acquiring a new identity label. It is a long-term and disciplined choice, one that requires accountability on two fronts: responsibility toward the gods I honor, and responsibility toward the reality in which I live. When both are clearly recognized and properly situated, self-consistency ceases to be a problem that demands constant justification, and instead becomes a way of life that can be continuously practiced.
