Mystery religion refers to any of the various secret cults of the Greco-Roman world that offered individuals religious experiences not provided by the official public religions. They originated in tribal ceremonies performed by primitive peoples in many parts of the world and are classified as the untold history of the gods.
While in these tribal communities almost all members of the clan or village were initiated, initiation in Greece became a matter of personal choice. Mystery religions reached their peak of popularity in the first three centuries of our era. Their origin, however, dates back to the early centuries of Greek history.
Etymology
Etymologically, the word mystery derives from the Greek verb myein (“to close”), which refers to the lips and eyes. Mysteries were always secret cults in which a person had to be “initiated” (welcomed).
The initiate was called mystÄ“s, the person introducing them mystagÅgos (leader of the mystÄ“s). The leaders of the cults included the hierophantÄ“s (“revealer of sacred things”) and the dadouchos (“torchbearers”). The defining features of a mystery society were communal meals, dances, and ceremonies, especially initiation rites. These shared experiences strengthened the bonds within each cult.
Communities of mysterious lay people
A society of initiates could abandon its religious connections and become a mere social club. But because secrecy, common meals, and common drinking were implicit, the Greeks and Romans regarded such clubs as mystery societies; they did not differentiate between religious associations and private clubs.
The role of aristocratic clubs in Athenian politics was very important. In 415 BC, the famous mystery scandal occurred. Several aristocratic societies conspired to overthrow Athenian democracy. In order to compromise all members, a common crime was committed in which each member had to participate.
One night, members of the social clubs took hammers and removed the genitals of the many statues of Hermes in the city. Anyone who deserted the common political cause would be denounced by their former friends for having committed a crime against religion, and they would have many witnesses against him.
Secular mystery clubs continued throughout Greek and Roman history, and it was often difficult to distinguish them from religious associations. The Romans were particularly suspicious of secret societies, which fit perfectly into the mystery religion.
Orphic
In addition to community initiations, there were ceremonies for individuals with a greater religious longing. Such people were called Orphics in honor of Orpheus, the Greek hero with superhuman musical abilities who was supposedly the author of sacred writings; these writings were called Orphic rhapsodies and dealt with topics such as purification and life after death. It is possible to reconstruct a common pattern for these initiations of individuals, although there was never an Orphic “church,” and the doctrines of the many small communities of individualists varied widely.
Pythagoreans
The Orphic creeds were the basis of the Pythagorean brotherhood, which flourished in southern Italy from the sixth century BC. The Pythagoreans were aristocratic fraternities that sometimes had political reach. Their main achievements, however, were in the fields of music, geometry, and astronomy.
They discovered that these subjects could be explained by numbers and proportions. Combining Orphic eschatology (the study of last things, especially death and the afterlife) with their discoveries, they imbued music, geometry, and astronomy with religious values.
Platonists
The philosophy of Plato (c. 428-348 or 347 BC) did not in any way result from connections with a mystery cult. However, Plato drew many ideas from earlier Greek religion, especially from the Pythagorean brotherhood and the Eleusinian communities, and he often described his philosophy in terms derived from the mysteries or mystery religion, as it was called by some.
The Hellenistic period
When Alexander the Great conquered the Asian kingdoms as far as the Indus River, the Greek world expanded immensely. However, religious ideas in Greece itself and in the western part of the Alexandrian Empire changed very slowly, because the Greeks, now masters of the world, felt no need to change.
The important development of mystery religion rites during the Hellenistic period took place in the Greek East, where elements of Greek and Eastern religions mixed. Contact with Greek civilization completely changed life in the East, where knowledge of writing had been confined to a few priests and scribes.
Society disintegrated after Alexander’s conquest and then developed along new lines. Changes in religion were inevitable, and the influence of Eastern traditions on the Greeks was inevitable. But the process was slow and only became apparent a few centuries later.
In Hellenistic times, Osiris was commonly known by the name Serapis. These gods were equated with the Greek gods: Isis with Demeter and Aphrodite; Horus with Apollo and Helios; Serapis with Zeus, Dionysus, and Hades (Pluto). Both Greek and Egyptian myths were adopted for these deities.
Roman imperial period
The great period of mystery religions began when the Romans imposed peace on the Mediterranean world. Dionysian or Bacchic societies flourished throughout the empire: in Greece itself, in the Greek islands, in Asia Minor, along the Danube River, and especially in Italy and Rome.
Hundreds of inscriptions attest to Bacchic mysteries. In some circles, Orphic and Dionysian ideas were mixed, as in the community that gathered in the underground basilica near the Porta Maggiore in Rome. There was also a mixture of ideas in the community for which the Orphic hymns were written.
The mystery cults that had been familiar since ancient times, the national religions of the peoples of the Greek East in their Hellenized versions, began to spread. A slightly exotic flavor surrounded these religions and made them particularly attractive to the Greeks and Romans. The most popular of the Eastern mysteries was the cult of Isis. It was already fashionable in Rome at the time of Emperor Augustus, at the beginning of the Christian era.
Common features in the Roman imperial period
During the first three centuries of the Christian era, different mystery religions coexisted in the Roman Empire. All of them had developed from local and national cults and later became cosmopolitan and international. However, the mystery religions would never have developed and expanded as they did without the new social conditions brought about by the unification of the Mediterranean world by the Romans.
Priesthood
The organization of the mystery religions was rather vague. The priests of Dionysus were wealthy laymen, as priests always were in Greece. The Roman community of the Great Mother had a large group of priests (the galli), headed by a high priest (the Archigallus).
Eunuchs dressed in women’s attire, who kept their hair long and perfumed with ointment, and who celebrated the rites of the goddess with music and wild dances until their frenzied excitement found its culmination in self-flagellation, self-laceration, or exhaustion.
In addition to the priests, there were priestesses and many minor officials. The followers were organized according to their role in the ritual procession as tree bearers (dendrophori) or cane bearers (cannophori). The men who carried the statue in the rites of Jupiter Dolichenus were called the sedan chair men (lecticarii).
Rites and festivals
A period of preparation preceded initiation into each of the mysteries. In the religion of Isis, for example, a period of fasting lasting 11 days, including abstinence from meat, wine, and sexual activity, was required before the ceremony. Candidates were segregated from the common people in special apartments in the sacred enclosure of the community center; they were called “the hagneuontes.”
Literature
Communities with this particular mystery religion had hymns, but almost none of them have survived. The opening words of some hymns from the Sta. Prisca Mithraeum in Rome are known, and there are some Isiac poems. More important is a text of 40 sentences revealing the goddess Isis; it was found in four different and geographically distant places and was probably displayed in all the sanctuaries of Isis.
Accounts of the miracles of the gods were preserved in many temple libraries; examples of these accounts have been found on papyrus and stone. According to a recent theory, the literary genre of romance developed from these narratives. The last part of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses is a text by Isis that recounts in detail the initiation into the mystery religion of the Egyptians.
Theology
The creeds of the mystery religions were never elaborated to the same extent as Christian creeds. However, the doctrines of the mysteries can be called theology. One of the central themes in the mystery writings was cosmogony, the theory of the origin or creation of the world.
In the Hermetic treatises, the Chaldean Oracles, and the little-known writings of Mithraism, cosmogony was modeled on Plato’s Timaeus and always dealt with the creation of the soul and its subsequent destiny.
Mystery Religions and Christianity
Christianity originated during the Roman Empire, which was also the time when the mysteries reached their peak of popularity. This was by no means an accident. The Christian theologian Origen wrote in the third century that it was part of the divine plan that Christ was born under Emperor Augustus: the entire Mediterranean world was united by the Romans, and conditions for missionary work were more favorable than ever before.
The simultaneous spread of the mystery religions and Christianity and the striking similarities between them, however, demand some explanation of their relationship. The hypothesis of mutual dependence has been proposed by scholars—especially a dependence of Christianity on the mysteries—but such theories have been dismissed. The similarities must rather be explained by parallel developments of similar origins.
In both cases, ritualistic national religions were transformed, and the transformation followed similar lines: from national to ecumenical religion, from ritual ceremonies and taboos to spiritual doctrines set down in books, from the idea of inherited tradition to the idea of revelation.
The parallel development was favored by the new conditions prevailing in the Roman Empire, in which the old political units dissolved and the entire civilized world was ruled by a monarch. People were free to move from one country to another and became cosmopolitan.
