Hellenism

Hellenism is the attempt to revive the worship of the ancient Greek gods. Historians think the old religion had died out by the ninth century. Its first advocate was the late Byzantine philosopher Georgios Gemistos Plethon, who taught in Mystras, in the Despotate of the Morea, and declared in a speech that the Greeks were Hellenes by race and culture.

In his last work, the Nomoi, or Book of Laws, Plethon rejected Christianity for the worship of the Olympian gods, mixed with the wisdom of Zoroaster and the Magi. Zeus stood at the head as the self-father of all things, with the other gods ranked in orders beneath him.

Plethon died in 1452 or 1454. In 1460 the Patriarch Gennadius II, once his pupil, burned the only copy, though Gennadius's letter summarising it survives.