"We ought to learn by heart the hymns in honour of the gods—and many and beautiful they are, composed by men of old and of our own time—though indeed we ought to try to know also those which are being sung in the temples. For the greater number were bestowed on us by the gods themselves, in answer to prayer, though some few also were written by men, and were composed in honour of the gods by the aid of divine inspiration and a soul inaccessible to things evil.

All this, at least, we ought to study to do, and we ought also to pray often to the gods, both in private and in public, if possible three times a day, but if not so often, certainly at dawn and in the evening."

Emperor Julian, Letter to a Priest 302a-b

A very quick guide to getting started:

1. On a regular basis, wash your hands, make an offering, and pray. While washing your hands, ask for purity of body and mind. If you don’t currently have incense, wine, food, or other such things to offer, offer a hymn.
2. If you have no idea what to pray about, pray for understanding of the goodness of the Gods and that they may give to you what they know to be best.
3. Read and study the Golden Verses (they’re quite short), a chapter or two of The Handbook by Epictetus, or some other appropriate text. Both are available for free online.
4. Every night before you sleep, examine yourself and your day. Acknowledge as cold fact everything you did and didn’t do, the good and the bad. It is not about guilt, it is about becoming Godlike - but that requires radical self-honesty.

You will learn the rest as you go.

"Let not your feeble eyes expect to sleep
Until you have rehearsed each of the day's deeds three times:
'Where have I transgressed? what have I done? what duty not fulfilled?'
Beginning from the first go through them in detail, and then
Rebuke yourself for the mean things you have done, but delight in the good."

To honour the beings superior by nature according to their substantial rank; to accord parents and relatives the highest esteem; to welcome and befriend good men; to prevail over our bodily functions; to feel shame before oneself everywhere; to engage in justice; to know beforehand that our possessions and ephemeral lives are easily destroyed; to welcome our lot in life as assigned to us by divine judgement; to use prudent thought that is pleasing to god and to change one's thinking for the better; to practise the love of speaking, using real arguments; to be immune to deception and slavishness for the preservation of virtue; to use good counsel before we act, as a result of which our actions will be free from regret; to be pure of conceit; to pursue a life informed by knowledge; to reform the body and externals to make them cooperate with virtue. These are the prenoscriptions of the lawgiving intellect for souls. Our reflective power, after it has accepted these, becomes an untiring judge of itself, often saying to itself, 'Where have I transgressed? what have I done?', and undertaking to remember everything in orderly succession for the sake of virtue.

Hierocles, Commentary on the Golden Verses 19.3-4

The philosopher Hierocles explains how we can use the first half of the Golden Verses, which he neatly summarizes here, to examine ourselves nightly, using the standards suggested in the verses as the metric.

This technique of daily self-examination was widely practiced in antiquity, and it was important to the Pythagoreans and Stoics in particular. It is useful in our attempt to live according to the Delphic maxim Know Thyself.

[Pythagoras] ordered that libations should be made thrice, observing that Apollo delivered oracles from the tripod, the triad being the first number. Sacrifices to Venus were to be made on the sixth day, because this number is the first to partake of every number, and when divided in every possible way, receives the power of the numbers subtracted, and those that remain. Sacrifices to Hercules, however, should be made on the eighth day of the month, counting from the beginning, commemorating his birth in the seventh month.

He ordained that those who entered into a temple should be clothed in a clean garment, in which no one had slept; because sleep, just as black and brown, indicates sluggishness, while cleanliness is a sign of equality and justice in reasoning. ...

Libations were to be performed before the altar of Zeus the Savior, of Hercules, and the Dioscuri, thus celebrating Zeus as the presiding cause and leader of the meal, Hercules as the power of Nature, and the Dioscuri, as the symphony of all things. Libations should not be offered with closed eyes, as nothing beautiful should be undertaken with bashfulness and shame.

When it thundered, he said one ought to touch the earth, in remembrance of the generation of things.

Temples should be entered from places on the right hand, and exited from the left hand; for the right hand is the principle of what is called the odd number, and is divine; while the left hand is a symbol of the even number, and of dissolution.

Iamblichus, Life of Pythagoras 28

Greek religion might almost be called a religion without priests: there is no priestly caste as a closed group with fixed tradition, education, initiation, and hierarchy ... among the Greeks, sacrifice can be performed by anyone who is possessed of the desire and the means, including housewives and slaves.

... Priests are installed; as early as the Iliad it is said that the Trojans established Theano as priestess of Athena. As with other posts, the appointment is decided by the community, usually the political assembly. Sortition may be seen as an intimation of divine will.

... In Greece the priesthood is not a way of life, but a part time and honorary office; it may involve expense, but it brings great prestige. ... His hair is usually long and he wears a head-band, a garland, costly robes of white or purple, and a special waistband; he carries a staff in his hand. The priestess is often represented carrying the large key to the temple, kleidouchos. In the theatre, seats of honor are reserved for the priests. The priest is 'honored among the people as a god', as the Iliad says.

Walter Burkert, Greek Religion 2.6

No one shall have gods for himself, either new gods or alien gods, unless they have been recognized by the state. Privately they shall worship those gods that they have duly received from their ancestors. In cities they shall have shrines; in the country they shall have groves and places for the Lares. They shall preserve the rites of the family and their ancestors.

Cicero, On the Laws 2.19

There is a lot of paganism in Shakespeare.

It is important to promote awareness of facts like this, because it means that being pagan doesn't have to place you at odds with your heritage. In fact, so much of our heritage is pagan or was deeply influenced by paganism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_v6rocErK4

Only a very gifted man can come to know that for each thing there is some kind, a being itself by itself; but only a prodigy more remarkable still will discover that and be able to teach someone else who has sifted all these difficulties thoroughly and critically for himself. ... Yet, on the other hand, Socrates, said Parmenides, if someone, having an eye on all the difficulties we have just brought up and others of the same sort, won't allow that there are forms for things and won't mark off a form for each one, he won't have anywhere to turn his thought, since he doesn't allow that for each thing there is a character that is always the same. In this way he will destroy the power of dialectic entirely.

Plato, Parmenides 135b-c

Mind, which is the most penetrating of all the divine thoughts, has for its body fire, the most penetrating of all the elements. And since mind is the craftsman of all beings, it uses fire as an instrument in its craftwork. The mind of all is the craftsman of all beings; the human mind is the craftsman only of the things that exist on earth. Since it is stripped of fire, the mind in humans is powerless to craft divine things because it is human in its habitation. The human soul - not every soul, that is, but only the reverent - is in a sense demonic and divine. Such a soul becomes wholly mind after getting free of the body and fighting the fight of reverence. (Knowing the divine and doing wrong to no person is the fight of reverence.)

Corpus Hermeticum X 18-19

... Zeus, appears to have a very excellent name, but it is not easy to understand; for the name of Zeus is exactly like a sentence; we divide it into two parts, and some of us use one part, others the other; for some call him Zena (Ζῆνα), and others Dia (Δία); but the two in combination express the nature of the god, which is just what we said a name should be able to do. For certainly no one is so much the author of life (ζῆν) for us and all others as the ruler and king of all. Thus this god is correctly named, through whom (δι᾽ ὅν) all living beings have the gift of life (ζῆν). But, as I say, the name is divided, though it is one name, into the two parts, Dia and Zena. And it might seem, at first hearing, highly irreverent to call him the son of Cronus and reasonable to say that Zeus is the offspring of some great intellect; and so he is, for κόρος (for Κρόνος) signifies not child, but the purity (καθαρόν) and unblemished nature of his mind. And Cronus, according to tradition, is the son of Uranus; but the upward gaze is rightly called by the name urania (οὐρανία), looking at the things above (ὁρῶ τὰ ἄνω), and the astronomers say, Hermogenes, that from this looking people acquire a pure mind, and Uranus is correctly named.

Plato, Cratylus 395e-396b

Propositions that are true and evident must necessarily be used even by those who contradict them; and just about the strongest proof that one could offer of a proposition being evident is the fact that even one who contradicts it finds himself having to make use of it. If someone should contradict the proposition, for instance, that 'one universal statement is true', it is clear that he would be obliged to assert the contrary and say, 'There is no universal statement that is true.' Slave, that isn't true either. For what else does the assertion come down to than this, 'If a statement is universal, it is false'? Again, if someone should come forward and say, 'You should know that nothing can be known, but everything is uncertain,' or someone declared, 'Believe me, and it will be to your benefit, when I say: one shouldn't believe anyone whatever,' or a third, 'Learn from me, man, that it is impossible to learn anything; I am the one who is telling you, and I will prove it to you if you so wish.' Now what difference is there between these people and (who shall I say?) those who call themselves Academics [Skeptics]. 'Men, give your assent,' they say, 'to the proposition that no one should give his assent; believe us when we say that no one can believe anyone.'

Epictetus, Discourses 2.20.1-5

... Honor the gods of the underworld next after those of Olympus, the patron-gods of the state; the former should be allotted such secondary honors as the Even and the Left, while the latter should receive superior and contrasting honors like the Odd. That's the best way a man can hit his target, piety. After these gods, a sensible man will worship the spirits, and after them the heroes. Next in priority will be rites celebrated according to law at private shrines dedicated to ancestral gods. Last come honors paid to living parents.

Plato, Laws 717a-b

Honor first the immortal gods, as established by law,
And respect the oath; then revere the glorious heroes
And the earth-dwelling daemons, performing lawful offerings.
Honor your parents also and your nearest kin.

The Golden Verses 1-4

To the celestial Gods sacrifice an odd number, but to the infernal, an even.

Pythagorean Symbols or Maxims 43 (quoted from Guthrie, Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library)

Sin should be abstained from, not through fear, but for the sake of the becoming.

The Golden Sentences of Democrates 7

"But that complete happiness is some contemplative activity will also be evident from the following considerations. The gods, in fact, we suppose to be the most blessed and happy of all. But what sorts of actions should we assign to them? Just ones? Won't they appear ridiculous if they engage in transactions, return deposits, and so on? Courageous ones, then, enduring what is frightening and facing danger because it is a noble thing to do? Or generous ones? To whom will they give? It will be a strange thing, if they actually have money or anything like that. And their temperate actions, what would they be? Or isn't the praise vulgar, since they do not have base appetites? If we were to go through them all, it would be evident that everything to do with actions is petty and unworthy of gods. Nonetheless, everyone supposes them to be living, at least, and hence in activity, since surely they are not sleeping like Endymion. If, then, living has doing actions taken away from it and still more so producing, what is left except contemplating? So the activity of a god, superior as it is in blessedness, will be contemplative. And so the activity of humans, then, that is most akin to this will most bear the stamp of happiness."

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1178b7-23

Our bodies also change. What we have been,
What we now are, we shall not be tomorrow.
There was a time when we were only seed,
Only the hope of men, housed in the womb,
Where Nature shaped us, brought us forth, exposed us
To the void air, and there in light we lay,
Feeble and infant, and were quadrupeds
Before too long, and after a little wobbled
And pulled ourselves upright, holding a chair,
The side of the crib, and strength grew into us,
And swiftness; youth and middle age went swiftly
Down the long hill toward age, and all our vigor
Came to decline, so Milon, the old wrestler,
Weeps when he sees his arms whose bulging muscles
Were once like Hercules', and Helen weeps
To see her wrinkles in the looking glass:
Could this old woman ever have been ravished,
Taken twice over? Time devours all things
With envious Age, together. The slow gnawing
Consumes all things, and very, very slowly.

Ovid, Metamorphoses 15.217-235

An interesting and thought provoking article exploring some of the post-Christian pagan spiritual heritage of Europe.

"It is even a bit of a misnomer to claim that 'Christianity' is the historical religion of the West, when you start looking at how the sausage of our common religion was actually manufactured, and what sorts of beast were slaughtered to fill its skin."

https://corvuscato.wordpress.com/2020/10/19/continuity/