Roman Mystery "cults": What were their beliefs?

Zioneer

Banned
I mean, beyond belief in Mithras, or Isis, or whatnot, what did the various mystery religions teach? What were their doctrines and practices?

Also, were there any popular, more socially open religions (besides Christianity)?

What were some of the more esoteric "cults"?

Just curious; I've been reading up on Mithras on Wiki, and I find the concept of the dozens of secretive rival religions fascinating.
 
The short and honest answer is, we don't know. That doesn't stop us from guessing, and you can spend many entertaining hours reading what hobbyists like Sigmund Freud, literary masters like Robert Graves and experts like the eminently dour Merkelbach think of the matter. In the end, you will have a collection of wonderful snippets of surviving information, and as many coherent and mutually exclusive explanations as you've read authors.

Go for it. Just don't expect reliable answers. I suspect most mystery religions didn't have a doctrine, actually.
 
I mean, beyond belief in Mithras, or Isis, or whatnot, what did the various mystery religions teach? What were their doctrines and practices?

Also, were there any popular, more socially open religions (besides Christianity)?

What were some of the more esoteric "cults"?

Just curious; I've been reading up on Mithras on Wiki, and I find the concept of the dozens of secretive rival religions fascinating.

I believe worshiping Mithras was popular in the army.
 
If they told everyone what they believed and let their beliefs be written down for us, they wouldn't really be mystery cults now would they?

Seriously though, I would suspect that their generally secretive and exclusive practices would make it unlikely for us to ever really know for sure what they did and what they believed in beyond what we already know.
 
Sabazius, Eleusian, Cybele, Orphesian, Dionysian...what they did is a mystery but for the most part they offered similar things to Christanity. A revelation and personal faith through aestic practices and reincarnation bliss. Many or most intertwined with the Philosopher Religions (Neoplatonism, Pythagoreas, Stoics, etc).
 
I believe Judaism was socially open until Christianity became the most favored state religion under Constantine (all other non-Jewish religions weren't criminalised until Theodosius I). There were edicts and laws passed under Constantine which forbade Jews from proselytizing Christians.
 

Zioneer

Banned
Okay, thanks. A few more questions:

Could any of the mystery religions be reformed into a "populist" religion like Christianity or possibly Sol Invictus? If so, which was the most probable one?

How did most Roman citizens see the various cults and small religions? Did they believe in more than one at a time? did they act friendly towards members of different "cults" (ex, you are a Mithraist but your neighbor is a Dionysian, how do you treat him)?

Besides Egalabus, were there any emperors (or usurpers) who followed religions other than Sol Invictus, traditional Greek-Roman faiths, or Christianity?

What kind of people did each mystery cult appeal to, and why? I mean Mithras was apparently popular in the military, but for what reasons?
 
Okay, thanks. A few more questions:

Could any of the mystery religions be reformed into a "populist" religion like Christianity or possibly Sol Invictus? If so, which was the most probable one?

WE know relatively little about most of them, but it is important to recall that mystery religion doesn't mean secret religion. Some cults, like that of Isis or Serapis, were very open about what they dide and believed in (which didn't stop scare stories from circulating). Even the Mithraists and Eleusinians weren't exactly secretive with most of their doings.

Personally, I think Isis/Serapis and Mithra/Sol had the potential to become (arguably, did become) popular religions certainly. The difference between their role and that of Christianity, though, was that they were not exclusive, so a worshipper of Isis was not forever bound to Isis alone. You could be an Isidian, initiate of Eleusis and dendrophore of Dionysos at the same time (and party with the local compital college, these guys had a reputation as party animals).

The problem is that even if a mystery cult becamne a widespread religious movement, it would not have the mutual commitment between the faithful and the organisation you got in the early church or synagogue. That would prevent it from offering the same social structures, even if it wanted to. Its role would be different.



How did most Roman citizens see the various cults and small religions? Did they believe in more than one at a time? did they act friendly towards members of different "cults" (ex, you are a Mithraist but your neighbor is a Dionysian, how do you treat him)?

A lot depended on personal views, but generally, acceptance was the rule and persecution the exception. As long as a religion fit the Roman social structure, it was accepted (really much like today). The going assumption was that a good person had to be religious, not have a specific religion (again, much like today, including the unspoken assumptions about what 'being religious' entails). So if you were a worshipper of Mithra, bog-standard initiate, nothing fancy, then nothing except lack of funds and time would keep you from also becoming initiate in Eleusis or joining a dendrophore society. These things were not mutually exclusive. Some religions were more highly regarded than others in some quarters - a soldier who was too fond of worshipping Cybele might be looked on askance the way a Mithraist would not be - but they rubbed along. So if you were a traditional Roman, you might look at your Dionysian neighbour much the way a Mormon today might view a Unitarian Universalist or Tibetan Buddhist: Weird guy, questionable morals, but not something that would get in the way of good neighbourliness.


Besides Egalabus, were there any emperors (or usurpers) who followed religions other than Sol Invictus, traditional Greek-Roman faiths, or Christianity?

"Traditional Greek-Roman faiths" is an awfully wide field. Marcus Aurelius was a Stoic, which is perilously close to a Kulturprotestant. IIRC it was Aurelian who had a statue of Jesus in his personal shrine. Gallienus seems to have been a very traditrional Phjilhellene and Eleusinian. Hadrian initiated the religion of the Deified Antinous. In the end, it's hard to speak of personal religious faith when you are a living God whose job entails maintaining the pax Deorum.

What kind of people did each mystery cult appeal to, and why? I mean Mithras was apparently popular in the military, but for what reasons?

We don't really know. Mithra may have been popular with soldiers because it played on the image of the tough, manly Persian "riding, shooting bows and telling the truth". The name Mithra itself seems to be derived from the word for a pact, oath, or treaty. Isis had a reputation of appealing to impressionable, overcivilised urbanites, Cybele to men and women of loose sexual morals. It's hard to say how much truth there is to this. A broad reading of modern comments might similarly lead you to believe that Unitarianism appeals to Hippies, Mormonism to lawyers and Baptism to ultraconservative nutcases, but that doesn't mean it's true.
 
It's suggested that the early Church adopted several of the rituals of the Mithras cult, which was very popular in the Roman Army. There were a lot of similarities, including resurrection, symbolic blood sacrifice, etc, so the soldiers largely saw Christianity as Mithraism under a new guise, and were easy to convert, bringing one of the large powerblocs of the Empire under the new religion.
 
Part of the idea of "mystery cult" is that there are certain important aspects of the world and the human spirit that don't go into words. In a sense orthodox Christianity is just such a mystery religion; important things are called "mysteries." (Well, they are if you are raised Roman Catholic anyway, as I was, I've never participated in other denominations, but I do believe many of them preserve the same language and attitude).

When I was in first grade the nun who taught my class in Catholic school told us a story about IIRC St. Anthony; he was wandering on a beach, pondering the deep doctrines of the Church, when he encountered a small boy with a bucket and scoop. The boy was putting more sea water into the bucket which was already overflowing; the man asked him, "what are you doing?"

The boy said, "Oh, I'm going to bring the ocean home in this bucket."

The man smiled and said, "But child, your bucket is already full, look at the vastness of the sea before you, how can you dream of doing such a thing?"

And the boy looked up into the eyes of Anthony and said "And how can you hope to fathom the infinite mind of God with your frail human soul?" and then vanished...

Sister made sure to explain to us six year olds that the boy was an angel sent by God to teach the future saint a lesson in humility.

To be sure, within Christianity there are divisions; some branches were more like "mystery cults" than others--the essential thing about a proper "mystery cult" is that they make some kind of effort to convey that which cannot be conveyed by words by other means--by rituals, by dance, by music, very commonly by drugs integrated into all this. The Initiates who have participated in the Mysteries have indeed learned something new (well, they believe so anyway) but no matter how eloquent and poetic they are, they can't put it into words, because the Universe is not made of words. The orthodox branches of Christianity, following the doctrines approved by Emperor Constantine as part of the process of promoting Christianity to the official religion of the Empire, tend to deemphasize this as much as possible and get quite wordy in their exposition of the nature of God and the duties of a good Christian. Still the whole idea of the Holy Spirit, canonized as an aspect of God Himself, seems to me to be to acknowledge this deeper, preverbal reality, as does a lot of other Catholic stuff I'm familiar with.

Now, if modern Roman Catholicism were in fact a Mystery Religion in the sense that the Eleusian Mysteries probably were, I'd at some point have gone through some ritual or other that would have transformed my consciousness or perceptions at least briefly; perhaps it's because I was some kind of wicked sinner (though I didn't think I was, maybe that was the problem:rolleyes:) but none of the Sacraments ever had that kind of effect on me. I made a big effort to be a holier person after I was Confirmed, and to push past my quotidian concept of reality to grasp a glimpse of something otherworldly during various prayers, meditations, and so forth, but nothing remarkable ever happened. Yet the literature of thousands of years of Christian (and Sufi, and lots of other traditions) mystics is abundant. Later as an adult (legally speaking anyway, dunno if I really qualify as one even yet!:p) I did indeed have some fairly mystical experiences using means not actually sanctioned by the Church in my knowledge anyway, and one time just contemplating something (an exhibit of the images stored on the Voyager probe records, at JPL, as it happens). Scholars sometimes call it "the Oceanic Experience" or some such. (Shades of St. Anthony and the angel-boy!)

Another possibility regarding me and my evaporated faith is, I didn't go the full monty--Catholic tradition is full of very stringent rituals of privation, of fasting and self-mortification and so on. Perhaps a monk, or a person on a long retreat, who goes through the physically demanding path prescribed for hermits and the like does indeed come upon something transcendental; a skeptic could say they were simply hallucinating from hunger, thirst, or exhaustion, but the same could be said about many other traditions of "enlightenment" of course. If the blinding insight one comes upon cannot be verbalized, it cannot be placed on a table to be inspected and certified whether it's cosmic truth or just the result of brain electrolytes getting out of balance. The point here is, Christianity has in its deep traditions just such extreme rituals, and they may indeed have been, for the prophets, hermits, monks and other mystics who recorded their findings as best they could just of the same kind of character as the Classical era "Mystery cults."

My guess is that most of the religions you've been lumping in as "Mystery Cults" weren't that--I don't think Mithraism was for instance. Whereas the real Mystery Cults involved some sort of "consciousness-raising," more or less psychedelic experience that, when completed, was simply not amenable to being written down. For such a cult to continue to convey its teachings, if such we can call them, from that day to this, it would have to have continued its practice, making new Initiates and having them in turn initiate others, through the centuries, and you would then have to go to them and be Initiated in your turn to know what they are teaching--and then you couldn't write it down either.

As part of the "spin the wheel and take your pick" approach carlton_bach mentioned above, you might imagine such a cult has indeed survived. But you'd be on thin ice there regarding Board policy, as I understand it--skating dangerously close to "Hidden History" and "conspiracy theory." I can imagine such a cult existing innocuously and thus avoiding the charge of conspiracy--from one direction. You'd still have to explain how it survives a couple thousand years of zealous persecution of the unorthodox by the inquisitions and jihads of various powerful orthodox religions; any explanation involving secret agreements of tolerance risk one kind of conspiracy theory charge and any about them being so clever they never get caught--another. By definition such a cult would be Hidden History...
 
The problem with that understanding of mystery cult is that it really depends on individual experience. The mystical union or insight beyond rational thought is something that not everybody will have, even if it is the aim of cultic practice (and enough people experience it in Catholicism for a classification as a mystery cult to make sense).

A better explanation, I think, would be that mystery cults were originally cults that were designed to include a limited number of adherents, a select group. Most ancient religious practice was public and inclusive, and though an individual might be a ritual specialist, there was supposed to be nothing secret or exclusive in his knowledge and experience. Initiate, on the other hand, were part of an exclusive and special group.

The problem with that is, of course, that once a mystery cult grows big enough to encompass most of the population, it ceases to be special. That is something that Mithraism or Eleusinanism would have to deal with, as Christianity arguably did.
 
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