Oh, well, thank you. I must admit, I just thought this was standard fare.

If you're looking for more in-depth responses with works cited, like your initial post, I suggest asking over at /r/AskHistorians . It can take a while to get a response because they will take time to ensure the answer is supported by scholarly research / arguments. Great question and much more detailed than the type normally posted here.

Almost everything written here is wrong Sunni Muslims tend to have as much deviant sects as shia Muslims do

• the word assassin doesn't come from shias lol, it comes from Ismailis in the castle of Alamut.
• which historians lie about Seljuks?

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Cool. The Titans were only disempowered, not gone unless they were imprisoned in Tartarus for offenses against Zeus and his divine order. Prometheus, for instance, was a very important culture deity who was said to deliver a variety of useful technologies to humanity, in addition to the fancier stories about the gift of fire and the instructions for how to gift meat to the gods while still having a nice feast for humanity without offending Zeus by giving him the crummier portion. There was nothing at all unsavory about asking him, or, say Rhea, the Titan queen of childbirth, from attending to your problems alongside the Olympians who might be bothered to show up (they were probably too busy receiving awesome sacrifices somewhere, though). Titans and Olympians who didn't have a beef with each other cooperated on shared domains, but also sometimes competed over them. Zeus procreated with many Titans.

Now appealing to Hecate could be a bit unsavory because she was an underworld goddess not contained within Zeus' pantheon the way Persephone was, but she was also seen as an earthly household deity. Her cult was widespread, often worshipped as an aspect of Artemis (earth)/Selene (sky)/Hecate (underworld). There is no single, definitive version because the very international Hellenistic culture of the Mediterranean of the second half of the 1st millennium BCE had a lot of different local traditions that are incompletely and unevenly preserved. Depending on the region where you wanted to focus, you might have totally different stories representing probably their own ritual practices loosely affiliated with other Hecate cults by Panhellenic stories.

Sorry I can't muster more than that. I'm pretty tired.

I'm sure there are some texts on knowledge about intentional practices, like herbaria, and maybe more esoteric practices, but I don't know those off the top of my head.

My wallet right now feels like Elf shot the food

Nice, they were chasing Bowser and the Koopas

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Someone's going to inevitably mention silphium and it going extinct because of people using it as contraceptive, which is a misunderstood concept, but it does have some basis in reality in that a lot of herbs and such were used in a variety of way to help with contraceptive. Some of these things were taken orally, with the belief that it might help (silphium was mainly used as an herb for food, so if it did have these properties there would be a lot of missing babies throughout the Mediterranean). Others would be made into a paste and put inside the woman to essentially collect the sperm within that paste, or it could be dried and placed inside to have the same effect but a bit less messy -- well at least I'd imagine so.

You also had methods we wouldn't recommend in the modern day, when far safer options exist, but in antiquity are not bad, like the pull-out method. Using this method greatly reduces the risk (though still not completely, and you're stuck with hoping the person does this properly).

the study is biased, they should of used for control brains of taxi drivers that were just starting out versus veteran drivers. All the study is saying is taxi drivers have larger hippocampus you can't use this to say it grew. It's like saying basketball players grew tall because they play basketball

Indeed. The presence of the impure could act like a gateway of sorts and the vengeful spirits/demons could enter the world and cause all sorts of problems. I think it’s supporting evidence of the belief that normal people in general were capable of derailing magic by their mere presence.

Much like someone who has the power of invisibility, but it only works when no one is looking. Which I think is what Palaephatus is getting at.

There's a lecture by Cicero, on the mystery of a loud noise heard near Athens- ( A bit later, clearly, but in the same vein ; might be helpful in charting the evolution of the skeptical method to the Romans...)

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Your mistake is that you are looking for magic where the authors entire intention is to disprove that it exists. Every single one of these examples are saying one thing together: "There is no magic, there are no gods, people are just using colloquialisms and poetic language to describe ordinary events and everyone is foolishly taking it literally."

THAT is what is being said here in these examples. The authors are not trying to explain catapsi or any other magical ability. They are saying that these stories are falsely invoking magic and gods to explain people stupidly ruining their own lives in various ways.

That's all. That is what the words clearly, blatantly, obviously say. If you see anything else in those words, it is because you are coming to them with the desperate hope that you have found something about thaumaturgy in the writings and not seeing them clearly for what they actually mean.

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I have heard similar things happening in the ancient mysteries. Don't quote me, but I think it was Alcibiades who was accused of being part of a conspiracy of exposing the Eleusinian Mysteries.

I have heard (but don't quote me) that a big part of the Greek idea of thrēskeia (θρησκεία) was the idea of ritual purity, and the avoidance of ritual pollution or stain, or miasma (μίασμα). What what I have heard, if you screwed up a ritual, or if an unclean person were to enter in the presence of something considered especially sacred or attuned to the divine, is that there might be an outbreak of some spiritual pollution, that would attract alastores (ἀλάστορες), or vengeful spirits.

I understand. I also should have chosen better words than "going in the wrong direction". Study whatever fascinates you. I believe we would have had more recorded words of "realists" if Socrates set a precedent to write things down, and it says alot about the culture where others didn't feel they could write these down without "blaspheming" essentially. Forgive me I'm not an expert but it reminds me about a Greek philosopher I heard about recently on a podcast about this very subject (if the Greeks believed the myths were literal). Aristarches maybe erasthones maybe? Can't remember ATM, would have to look it up. Supposedly he was writing and spreading the idea that they weren't literal, until the very moment he came down with a deadly disease. He then retracted everything he said and went to offer a sacrifice to some God looking to be healed after he continued to get worse. Sorry for the vagueness.

How did the old societies deal with/avoid unwanted pregnancies? More specifically prostitutes

First, I can assure you, my intent to forge any sort of personal mythology or cosmos. Rather, my intent was to investigate any debates that ancient Greeks had regarding the reality, or unreality, of various extraordinary or supra-mundane phenomena.

Thank you very much for pointing out the distinction between the Gods, vs. Hecate. I was wondering, IYO, was there a kind of dualism going on in the cosmology of many Greeks? For example, did various people who were engaged in, shall we say, "unorthdox" practices call upon deities or forces that were considered unsavory, such as Hecate or the Titans?

Thank you very much for the references.

Oh, I know. I guess I was just wondering if there were any surviving documents or debates surrounding how to interpret various paradoxa. I know that in ancient Greece there was wide debate regarding the hermeneutics and exegesis of various texts like the Iliad and the Odyssey, and that these various exegetical techniques are still being used today, such as in the interpretation of the Christian scriptures, and elsewhere.

What I was wondering is if there were any members of the "realist" school (as in, people who thought that the various extraordinary elements of the texts and various tales actually happened and how they would explain why such events were less likely today. Thank you.

The gaze was always linked to powerful things in myths and legends, so why not?