Holidays, the temples for prayer, rituals...some priests and priestesses performing charitable work, e.g. the temple of Diana in Ephesus took in orphans. To the masses this might be all they would ever know of the Other Side, sort of what the average Christian thinks religion is about and in the early Christian communities, this was the "children's" or beginners level...but those members knew they should progress beyond that.
"Philosophia" was the attempt to explain creation, the nature of spiritual beings, how man came about, etc. It often focussed on the values a human existence should aspire to. In Jesus's parables and in Paul, we find many levels of the Other Side and the different rulers are given human occupations(since they're in parable with earth as the setting), e.g. Father, owner, master, judge, jailer, etc. Paul calls this the adult level. This is virtually lost to most Christians today.
Antiquity also offered several mystery religions, such as for mithras which was a community and the primary alternative to Christianity. The Eleuthran mystery seems to have been a singular mystical experience of actually contacting or witnessing the spirit world...hard to know since it was kept secret for several centuries. Paul claims a mystery aspect to his religion and I find some evidence. The words that Paul says Jesus used at the last supper are almost verbatim to the sacrament ritual for Mithras. When Jesus casts demons into pigs who jump into water, that would be an image that almost everyone in the ancient world would recognize since that was a public part of the Eleuthran mystery.
Bottom line: There was a lot to the ancients' spiritual practices! BTW, the Hebrew scriptures portray more than one god. In Christianity, the athropomorphic God is for explanation only. The correct image used is light (energy)
For both God and the soul.
= new reply since forum marked as read