To New Paganism
This is a side project of mine I’ve been working on for a little while now. My goal was to release it around the time of the White Huns Intermission, but as you can see I got it finished a little bit early. Over the next month or so I mean to finish it up.
Unlike the White Huns, it will have a smaller scale and I have no intention of taking it more than a few centuries in time, and will generally present snapshots rather than a coherent timeline. Also unlike the White Huns, the focus is more on culture and society than politics and the rise and fall of empires, although the two obviously are intertwined.
My aim is to make a snapshot of a timeline very different from our own, but again unlike the White Huns, rather than starting with the premise that the Sasanian dynasty loses a battle, the change is a little more personal.
The basic question of the timeline is simple: what would a Roman world without Christianity look like?
What follows is my (hopefully) unique answer to that question.
P.S. I apologize for using BCE and CE dates despite the lack of Jesus. I’d go insane otherwise, and I imagine my poor, poor readers would do the same.
Setting the Stage
Beginning early in the second century the religious life of the Mediterranean began to change. For centuries the traditions of Hellenic thought and faith had drawn on the eclectic and the exotic. The conquests of Alexander had pressed a veneer of Hellenism across much of the near East and the Roman Empire had made it seemingly permanent, providing a unifying force which allowed her subjects and citizens both great opportunity and great anxiety alike.
The world of the “educated pagan” had long been one of well-regulated superstition, governed by ritual and mediated through public life. And so long as traditional social structures endured, every member of society could feel not incorrectly that there was a proper place and order to things. It was only as the social structures of the Roman and Hellenic world began to show cracks that new anxieties boiled up and made fissures in the spiritual world.
Traditional paganism was in many ways impersonal – it sought to describe the world through analogy and symbol. Accordingly, it made sacred countless objects and places – temples and oracles, idols and icons. However, this was distinctly unfulfilling when compared with the new strains of religious thought which were emerging across the Roman world and the near east. New religious expression promised personal stakes, personal struggle and a distinct way of life which could be fulfilling on a local level. Thus the decline of traditional paganism is entirely explicable – indeed it was in many ways inevitable. Sooner or later a period of disruption or uncertainty would combine with radical new religious thought and open the door to wild new possibilities which would send tremors through the Roman world.
The unified and cosmopolitan nature of the new Empire allowed for unprecedented travel, much of it from the east to the west. This travel allowed the spread of ideas and of philosophies but also allowed the well-off commoner to see for the first time the particularism and the disunity of his fellow citizens. Mystery cults provided a first panacea to that feeling of isolation and dissolution – providing a sense of the sacred and the familiar for those who travelled far from home. However, the mystery cult was also fundamentally provincial and exclusive – it did not necessarily hail universal conversion as a goal, and generally each cult sought out a specific niche rather than a general one.
It was through the lingua franca of Koine Greek that the radical ideas of the second century achieved universal consideration. Even as the aristocratic elite retreated into esoteric classicism, the urban “middle class” was able to break free of these bonds and begin to contemplate new and vibrant ideas that simultaneously provided relief from the anxieties brought about by cosmopolitanism and allowed them to embrace it fully. That these ideas were often subversive to the authority of the state and traditional social circles brought them only further appeal.
During plagues and riots, during unrest and disorder, the new cults and religions of the second century provided much needed social order and communities away from home. And while certain cults remained exclusive, esoteric, or simply inaccessible to the vast majority (Mithras and Cybele being primary examples) many others reached out with a sort of radical egalitarianism, seeking an unprecedented universality that was only possible in a world where the Roman Empire had provided such precedent.
Judaism in the Roman Era
On the death of Herod “the Great,” his sons Alexander and Aristobulus inherited his kingdom as equal client-kings of the Roman Empire. Educated and raised amongst the Romans and yet legitimate descendants of the Maccabean line, the two heirs wasted little time in engaging in the typically cutthroat politics of their regime. Not several years previously, they had been targets of the schemes of a significant faction of Herodians – and only their father’s illness and death had saved them from his paranoia. Instead, their father, who had left no clear will, would have his lands divided by two of his least favorite sons, and the remainder of his vast family either placed under virtual arrest or executed.
This state of affairs would not last forever. In 34 CE, Alexander would pass away, and Aristobulus would follow him some three years later. By all accounts they had been good monarchs. Alexander was handsome and frank, Hellenized but still fully Jewish and with significant legitimacy. Their legacy, however, would be slowly yielding to encroaching Roman power, a force they had neither the means nor the will to fight, having been thoroughly inculcated into Roman culture. They supported the powerful Sadducee faction, a group which remained power after their deaths by accommodating (if uneasily) the arrival of Roman governance after the 37 CE annexation of Judea into the Empire overseen by Caligula.
This annexation saw major changes in the province – the capital was located at Caesarea Maratima, and the province was overseen by a Prefect, although at certain times, such as between 43-51 CE, there are records of client Kings being given limited authority, perhaps to quell dissent. However, ultimately the rebellious Zealot movement would result in the growth of Jewish-Greek tensions in Alexandria and elsewhere – local pacification efforts eventually escalated into a brutal war in which little quarter was given. The Jewish people were scattered and sold into slavery, with many abandoning their traditional religion and culture. Those who retained their faith were a majority, but one who, with the destruction of the temple in 74 CE, were bereft of a center of faith and meaning.
It would be centuries before the Jewish identity truly recovered, and with the destruction of records and sacred texts, in many senses it never did – what came after the destruction of the temple was fundamentally dissimilar from the religion that preceded it, and sought to totally isolate itself from Hellenic thought and culture in a way which prevented its mass appeal. Conversion to Judaism was made impossible for outsiders and the faith turned inwards, seeking answers for the vast calamities that had afflicted it much as they had centuries ago during the Babylonian Captivity. While this was a time of transcendent expression and beautiful elegiac mourning, it also represented an abandonment of the possibility for Judaic and Hellenic thought to merge and create something greater. Apart from a few scattered gnostic movements, Judaism retreated from the public eye.
In Syria Palestinia, their ancient homeland, they became a minority, outnumbered by transplanted Syrians and Nabataeans, a still-thriving Samaritan community, and even those who identified as Helleno-Roman. Those Jewish communities which endured were scattered across the empire, in many senses no different than many of the exclusive oriental mystery cults which would become vogue.
Fire and Truth
Almost nothing is clearly known about Adurnarseh, the founder of the religion Ardayasna or Aletheismos. Unlike his successors and those who would spread his word, the hagiography surrounding his life is sufficiently vague and is largely manufactured by both his partisans and detractors. What is known that he was born into lofty circumstances into the Arascid Empire during the reign of Tiradat. Assuming that the tales of his virgin birth and improbable childhood are false, commonalities in the varying accounts of his life suggest that from a young age he was wracked by seizures and visions. While as an adult these problems seem to have gone away to some degree, they left him with a distinct fascination with religion.
As most educated Parthians of his day, he had great knowledge of the Hellenistic and Mazdayasna traditions that informed his people’s largely acquired culture, and over time he renounced his privileged upbringing and lived as an ascetic, preaching to the common people a radical message. Much of what he supposedly sought to do was to divest the preaching of Zarathustra from its Iranian origin and make a compelling case for the equality of the faithful. He encouraged his believers to hold all property in common and give generously to charity. Any quest for the historical Adurnarseh must contend with the clear Hellenization of his teachings, and the ways in which many statements attributed to him seem to come out of the mouths of a Neoplatonist philosopher rather than a Parthian aristocrat-turned radical populist lay preacher.
Notably, Adurnarseh’s conception of the religion felt there was no cause for the veneration of any deity but Zeus-Ahuramazda, with whom the devotee was expected to have a personal and private relationship. As the ultimate force of Truth (but not the creator) Ahuramazda was to lead individuals through their daily struggle with evil. Adurnarseh attributed evil not to an equivalent (if inevitably doomed) cosmic force but rather the actions of spirits or “demons.” His religion acknowledged reincarnation to varying worlds and levels depending on actions in this life, with the lowest level being reborn as a demon and spitefully seeking to drag other lost souls further into the great Lie. By abandoning any sense of orthodoxy he supposedly made enemies of the priesthood, and ultimately fled into Syria and there, in the Roman Empire, left the world in a gout of flame – a true miracle.
Like the multitude of cults, the key feature that enabled the endurance of Aletheism was its strong sense of community. Even before the establishment of a codified priesthood, when the movement was still largely underground and subject to sporadic persecution and general distrust for its foreignness and iconoclasm (in a manner not wholly dissimilar to that faced by Judaism) Aletheist communities delivered their wealth to the community and shared what they had in a model of “divine charity” whose communalism provided great security for Roman citizens during times of civil unrest. In 254, when barbarian raids took many captive Romans, the Aletheists of Illyria paid many ransoms and forgave all the debts of the captives – an act which earned them great loyalty and many new converts. The plague of Cyprian was met with enthusiastic donations and hospital services from many cults, but the Aletheist movement once again provided a critical foundation of support for many who felt abandoned and powerless.
The religion would only be properly codified during the expansive conquests of the Osrhoene Empire, when the cult became briefly the religion of their Emperors, including the legendary conqueror Antiochus Avadius, who for a moment seemed posed to be a new Alexander, uniting the Near East and the Mediterranean worlds under a single imperial title. Ironically, this was to some degree what prevented further growth and widespread acceptance for the movement. The Osrhoene Empire was powerful and expansive, and in many ways claimed to be the successor to Rome – but it was living on borrowed time. Eventually Roman power would re-assert itself and with the fall of Edessa in 284, Aletheism was reduced to one of many cults, and one whose rivals were increasingly adapting to its success.
Despite this setback, Antiochus Avadius at the council of Apamea in 273 codified the Book of Revelations and established the hierarchy of priests, creating the office of Praeses which survived the fleeting period of state religion and became local hierophants with broad administrative powers over the affairs of their congregation. Post-Apamea, the Aletheist religion was a permanent part of the cultural life of the Roman world, and a generation of persecution would be followed by several decades of benign neglect as a series of martial Emperors were unable to take their eyes off the Danube and Rhine frontiers for the strength of the barbarians at the gates. By the time an Emperor would again be able to focus on the heartland of the Roman world, the situation had fundamentally changed beyond any need to persecute the faith directly.
This is a side project of mine I’ve been working on for a little while now. My goal was to release it around the time of the White Huns Intermission, but as you can see I got it finished a little bit early. Over the next month or so I mean to finish it up.
Unlike the White Huns, it will have a smaller scale and I have no intention of taking it more than a few centuries in time, and will generally present snapshots rather than a coherent timeline. Also unlike the White Huns, the focus is more on culture and society than politics and the rise and fall of empires, although the two obviously are intertwined.
My aim is to make a snapshot of a timeline very different from our own, but again unlike the White Huns, rather than starting with the premise that the Sasanian dynasty loses a battle, the change is a little more personal.
The basic question of the timeline is simple: what would a Roman world without Christianity look like?
What follows is my (hopefully) unique answer to that question.
P.S. I apologize for using BCE and CE dates despite the lack of Jesus. I’d go insane otherwise, and I imagine my poor, poor readers would do the same.
Setting the Stage
Beginning early in the second century the religious life of the Mediterranean began to change. For centuries the traditions of Hellenic thought and faith had drawn on the eclectic and the exotic. The conquests of Alexander had pressed a veneer of Hellenism across much of the near East and the Roman Empire had made it seemingly permanent, providing a unifying force which allowed her subjects and citizens both great opportunity and great anxiety alike.
The world of the “educated pagan” had long been one of well-regulated superstition, governed by ritual and mediated through public life. And so long as traditional social structures endured, every member of society could feel not incorrectly that there was a proper place and order to things. It was only as the social structures of the Roman and Hellenic world began to show cracks that new anxieties boiled up and made fissures in the spiritual world.
Traditional paganism was in many ways impersonal – it sought to describe the world through analogy and symbol. Accordingly, it made sacred countless objects and places – temples and oracles, idols and icons. However, this was distinctly unfulfilling when compared with the new strains of religious thought which were emerging across the Roman world and the near east. New religious expression promised personal stakes, personal struggle and a distinct way of life which could be fulfilling on a local level. Thus the decline of traditional paganism is entirely explicable – indeed it was in many ways inevitable. Sooner or later a period of disruption or uncertainty would combine with radical new religious thought and open the door to wild new possibilities which would send tremors through the Roman world.
The unified and cosmopolitan nature of the new Empire allowed for unprecedented travel, much of it from the east to the west. This travel allowed the spread of ideas and of philosophies but also allowed the well-off commoner to see for the first time the particularism and the disunity of his fellow citizens. Mystery cults provided a first panacea to that feeling of isolation and dissolution – providing a sense of the sacred and the familiar for those who travelled far from home. However, the mystery cult was also fundamentally provincial and exclusive – it did not necessarily hail universal conversion as a goal, and generally each cult sought out a specific niche rather than a general one.
It was through the lingua franca of Koine Greek that the radical ideas of the second century achieved universal consideration. Even as the aristocratic elite retreated into esoteric classicism, the urban “middle class” was able to break free of these bonds and begin to contemplate new and vibrant ideas that simultaneously provided relief from the anxieties brought about by cosmopolitanism and allowed them to embrace it fully. That these ideas were often subversive to the authority of the state and traditional social circles brought them only further appeal.
During plagues and riots, during unrest and disorder, the new cults and religions of the second century provided much needed social order and communities away from home. And while certain cults remained exclusive, esoteric, or simply inaccessible to the vast majority (Mithras and Cybele being primary examples) many others reached out with a sort of radical egalitarianism, seeking an unprecedented universality that was only possible in a world where the Roman Empire had provided such precedent.
Judaism in the Roman Era
On the death of Herod “the Great,” his sons Alexander and Aristobulus inherited his kingdom as equal client-kings of the Roman Empire. Educated and raised amongst the Romans and yet legitimate descendants of the Maccabean line, the two heirs wasted little time in engaging in the typically cutthroat politics of their regime. Not several years previously, they had been targets of the schemes of a significant faction of Herodians – and only their father’s illness and death had saved them from his paranoia. Instead, their father, who had left no clear will, would have his lands divided by two of his least favorite sons, and the remainder of his vast family either placed under virtual arrest or executed.
This state of affairs would not last forever. In 34 CE, Alexander would pass away, and Aristobulus would follow him some three years later. By all accounts they had been good monarchs. Alexander was handsome and frank, Hellenized but still fully Jewish and with significant legitimacy. Their legacy, however, would be slowly yielding to encroaching Roman power, a force they had neither the means nor the will to fight, having been thoroughly inculcated into Roman culture. They supported the powerful Sadducee faction, a group which remained power after their deaths by accommodating (if uneasily) the arrival of Roman governance after the 37 CE annexation of Judea into the Empire overseen by Caligula.
This annexation saw major changes in the province – the capital was located at Caesarea Maratima, and the province was overseen by a Prefect, although at certain times, such as between 43-51 CE, there are records of client Kings being given limited authority, perhaps to quell dissent. However, ultimately the rebellious Zealot movement would result in the growth of Jewish-Greek tensions in Alexandria and elsewhere – local pacification efforts eventually escalated into a brutal war in which little quarter was given. The Jewish people were scattered and sold into slavery, with many abandoning their traditional religion and culture. Those who retained their faith were a majority, but one who, with the destruction of the temple in 74 CE, were bereft of a center of faith and meaning.
It would be centuries before the Jewish identity truly recovered, and with the destruction of records and sacred texts, in many senses it never did – what came after the destruction of the temple was fundamentally dissimilar from the religion that preceded it, and sought to totally isolate itself from Hellenic thought and culture in a way which prevented its mass appeal. Conversion to Judaism was made impossible for outsiders and the faith turned inwards, seeking answers for the vast calamities that had afflicted it much as they had centuries ago during the Babylonian Captivity. While this was a time of transcendent expression and beautiful elegiac mourning, it also represented an abandonment of the possibility for Judaic and Hellenic thought to merge and create something greater. Apart from a few scattered gnostic movements, Judaism retreated from the public eye.
In Syria Palestinia, their ancient homeland, they became a minority, outnumbered by transplanted Syrians and Nabataeans, a still-thriving Samaritan community, and even those who identified as Helleno-Roman. Those Jewish communities which endured were scattered across the empire, in many senses no different than many of the exclusive oriental mystery cults which would become vogue.
Fire and Truth
Almost nothing is clearly known about Adurnarseh, the founder of the religion Ardayasna or Aletheismos. Unlike his successors and those who would spread his word, the hagiography surrounding his life is sufficiently vague and is largely manufactured by both his partisans and detractors. What is known that he was born into lofty circumstances into the Arascid Empire during the reign of Tiradat. Assuming that the tales of his virgin birth and improbable childhood are false, commonalities in the varying accounts of his life suggest that from a young age he was wracked by seizures and visions. While as an adult these problems seem to have gone away to some degree, they left him with a distinct fascination with religion.
As most educated Parthians of his day, he had great knowledge of the Hellenistic and Mazdayasna traditions that informed his people’s largely acquired culture, and over time he renounced his privileged upbringing and lived as an ascetic, preaching to the common people a radical message. Much of what he supposedly sought to do was to divest the preaching of Zarathustra from its Iranian origin and make a compelling case for the equality of the faithful. He encouraged his believers to hold all property in common and give generously to charity. Any quest for the historical Adurnarseh must contend with the clear Hellenization of his teachings, and the ways in which many statements attributed to him seem to come out of the mouths of a Neoplatonist philosopher rather than a Parthian aristocrat-turned radical populist lay preacher.
Notably, Adurnarseh’s conception of the religion felt there was no cause for the veneration of any deity but Zeus-Ahuramazda, with whom the devotee was expected to have a personal and private relationship. As the ultimate force of Truth (but not the creator) Ahuramazda was to lead individuals through their daily struggle with evil. Adurnarseh attributed evil not to an equivalent (if inevitably doomed) cosmic force but rather the actions of spirits or “demons.” His religion acknowledged reincarnation to varying worlds and levels depending on actions in this life, with the lowest level being reborn as a demon and spitefully seeking to drag other lost souls further into the great Lie. By abandoning any sense of orthodoxy he supposedly made enemies of the priesthood, and ultimately fled into Syria and there, in the Roman Empire, left the world in a gout of flame – a true miracle.
Like the multitude of cults, the key feature that enabled the endurance of Aletheism was its strong sense of community. Even before the establishment of a codified priesthood, when the movement was still largely underground and subject to sporadic persecution and general distrust for its foreignness and iconoclasm (in a manner not wholly dissimilar to that faced by Judaism) Aletheist communities delivered their wealth to the community and shared what they had in a model of “divine charity” whose communalism provided great security for Roman citizens during times of civil unrest. In 254, when barbarian raids took many captive Romans, the Aletheists of Illyria paid many ransoms and forgave all the debts of the captives – an act which earned them great loyalty and many new converts. The plague of Cyprian was met with enthusiastic donations and hospital services from many cults, but the Aletheist movement once again provided a critical foundation of support for many who felt abandoned and powerless.
The religion would only be properly codified during the expansive conquests of the Osrhoene Empire, when the cult became briefly the religion of their Emperors, including the legendary conqueror Antiochus Avadius, who for a moment seemed posed to be a new Alexander, uniting the Near East and the Mediterranean worlds under a single imperial title. Ironically, this was to some degree what prevented further growth and widespread acceptance for the movement. The Osrhoene Empire was powerful and expansive, and in many ways claimed to be the successor to Rome – but it was living on borrowed time. Eventually Roman power would re-assert itself and with the fall of Edessa in 284, Aletheism was reduced to one of many cults, and one whose rivals were increasingly adapting to its success.
Despite this setback, Antiochus Avadius at the council of Apamea in 273 codified the Book of Revelations and established the hierarchy of priests, creating the office of Praeses which survived the fleeting period of state religion and became local hierophants with broad administrative powers over the affairs of their congregation. Post-Apamea, the Aletheist religion was a permanent part of the cultural life of the Roman world, and a generation of persecution would be followed by several decades of benign neglect as a series of martial Emperors were unable to take their eyes off the Danube and Rhine frontiers for the strength of the barbarians at the gates. By the time an Emperor would again be able to focus on the heartland of the Roman world, the situation had fundamentally changed beyond any need to persecute the faith directly.