Mystery Cults, Part 1

mystery cults and a little more depth. But I was recently thinking about this and I realized that this was a topic that deserved deeper consideration, and indeed, I think more than once I've personally kind of left it at and this deity was also taken up by the mystery cults, as if to delve deeper is impossible or somehow forbidden. Now, certainly mysteries surrounding the various mystery cults remain and much is left open to interpretation, but we do know quite

a lot. Whole books have been written on the topic, and we're going to follow along in these episodes to see what we can learn and share about the mysteries.

Ancient World that just got a new edition out. I think it was originally published over a decade ago, but it got a new edition in twenty twenty three by an author named Hugh Bowden, who is a professor of ancient history at King's College, London. This is a really great book. But one of the things he mentioned several times is ancient writers bringing up a mystery cult and then saying I have been instructed in a dream not to say any more about this.

But before we do that, I thought it might be important just to do a little bit of disambiguation on terminology, because if you are coming into an episode called mystery cults, and you are bringing the normal connotations of the word mystery and cult that modern English speakers would bring with you, that might send your mind off in several different wrong directions at once.

amount of panic. But yeah, we have to differentiate a mystery cult in its ancient application.

few adherents compared to major world religions. Maybe one that enforces strict reverence and obedience of a human leader. Maybe religion that requires adherents to cut off contact with loved ones and the rest of the outside world. Things like that.

And what do you think of in Dungeons and Dragons Within the context of Dungeons and Dragons when you encounter cultists, well, they are just absolute bad guys with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. They're just they're villains that you battle. They see that another fantasy as well.

a marginal or unusual practice either. There were cults of the mainstream gods of the Greek and Roman pantheon, so you'd have the local cult of Apollo, the local cult of Jupiter, the cult of Dionysus, et cetera. So when used by ancient historians, you can think of the word cult as basically just a synonym for the word worship or system of worship. So the cult of Apollo a particular time and place in the Hellenic world would be the system of beliefs, practices, and social structures under which

Apollo was worshiped. In fact, there's a bit of interesting etymology here. The English word cult is derived through several steps, originally from the Latin cultus, which often literally means worship but also means care in the sense of taking care of something or tending to the needs of something. So, for example, agriculture is tending to the needs of the fields. To cultivate means to till a field and preparation for planting.

So the cult of a particular god is the way of tending to the needs of that God in the form of worship, prayer, festivals, rituals, and sacrifices, the latter of which could take many forms, often agricultural products like grain or the meat of livestock, or could have other forms, you know, maybe a monetary donation, purchasing one of the aforementioned products, or things like incense or wine.

community and a god. So the person and the community at large performed rituals and sacrifices in honor of the god, and in return, the God was expected to provide blessings to the person. So it was generally understood that, you know, the gods would have power over events that were beyond

human control. They can maybe control how, you know, the weather and agricultural outcomes and diseases and things like that, and so in order to get the God to you know, treat you nice as far as those things beyond human control went, the thing you would do is take care of the God. You would honor their festivals, you would make sacrifices to them, you would do prayers for them. And in that sense, you can really look at it

as kind of a contract. There's a bargain. We do things for you, you do things for us.

That That was just not really a common way of approaching it for the ancient Greeks and Romans. Instead, it was did you do the rituals, did you do the prayers? Did you make the sacrifices, did you celebrate the festivals?

is not left wanting if deprived of it. Rather, I think most would say that say something like we worship God because it is right to do so, that God is by nature deserving of worship, and so we his followers are simply acknowledging that. I don't get that impression about Greco Roman pagans. I don't get the feeling they would have thought of it this way. The worship and sacrifices that Greco Roman pagans seem to have given the gods were things that the gods wanted and in fact needed.

And one piece of evidence for this occurred to me when I was reading Bowden's recounting of the myth of Demeter and Persephone, in which Persephone has stolen a way to the underworld. Demeter is left to straw looking for her. Eventually, she can return back to the upper world for part of the year, but has to return to the underworld for another part of the year, and this ends up

relating to understandings of seasonal cycles. But anyway, this myth is related to one of the most important mystery cults in the ancient Mediterranean, the Elusinian Mysteries. More on that later, but there is a part of the myth where Demeter, the Greek goddess of fertile fields and the harbor, is mourning the kidnapping of her daughter into the underworld, and she uses her power over the fields to stop grain

from growing over the earth. And it turns out, at least within a common telling of this tale in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, this is alarming not only to

humans who need to eat the grain. You know that's going to cause famine on earth, but it's also alarming to the gods, because the gods need to receive grain sacrifices from humans, and so Zeus is motivated to do something to fix the situation, and that struck me as very alien to the most common ways of thinking about God that I encounter at least to the twenty first century American. It seems to me that that to the Greco Roman pagans, not only was the worship of the

god's transactional. The gods were not just taking pity on us or doing us a favor by engaging in this deal making. They needed, or at least very much wanted, what we were bringing to the table.

at all. Sometimes a mystery refers to a thing that a question that cannot.

primarily what's going on with mystery cults. While the Greco Roman mystery cults absolutely did have elements of secrecy and privileged information, and we'll get into more of that later as well, the main sense in which the word mystery is used in mystery cults is to refer not to an information puzzle, but to a specific type of secret initiation ritual known in Greek as mysteria, which some somewhat overlaps with other Greek concepts of orgia and teleti. Abouden

mentions these three concepts altogether. They seem to sometimes be used interchangeably, or maybe to refer to related but slightly different things Orgea and teleti. He translates as mystic rights and initiations, So what are the mysteries? The mysteries are these initiation rights, and they could indeed be described as in many ways mysterious. They were often held at night. They were often conducted in secret, so they might take place inside a kind of a protected building outside of

public view. So in the case of the Elusinian mysteries, which will describe in more detail later, I'm sure there would be kind of publicly viewable part of this festival. They would take place outside, people would be able to see it going on, but eventually the festival would progress into an enclosed area inside a kind of temple complex, where things would happen inside and those not initiated into the secret rights would not be able to know what

was going on. Sometimes these rights would also be mysterious in the sense that participants might be blindfolded or hooded so that they couldn't see or understand what was happening. And the rights were often just made up of weird, baffling, frightening, emotionally intense experiences and encounters with the power of the gods.

So there are absolutely things about these rights that we might think of as mysterious and the mystery cults did absolutely have secrets, but the mystery in the name refers to these rights, refers to the strange, powerful, obscure rights of initiation, not so much to an information puzzle mystery in the Sherlock Holmes sense. If that distinction makes sense.

piece in The Conversation by Christian George Schwinzel. This is a historian, a French historian of the ancient world, and he writes about this, and he points out that the term that we in common usage today, org orgy in English, didn't come to mean group sexual activity and excessive food and drink till after eighteen hundred CE, especially during the

nineteenth century, and especially in French literature of the time. Schwinzel, however, stresses that this doesn't mean that the ancient Greeks and Romans didn't engage in such activities. They certainly did, they just referred to them by different names. Games Twinzel, who is again himself French, wrote an entire book on the subject.

orgy for the senses in the metaphorical sense. But again, when you get back to the use of the of the term orgea, it does not necessarily mean any kind of sexual activity was going on. It could, but it doesn't inherently mean that. So it's just another important footnote

about the the usages of the term. The French literature example, you do see works of that in thearing that time period that are portraying the ancient world as engaging in these sorts of rights, that putting more of a you know, an erotic sexual spin on them.

leaves one deeply shaken to the core exactly now.

and how they generally differed. And we've already been engaging with some of this, you know, we have to we have to exit our modern understanding of organized, top down religion and get into a different ecosystem, a different way that things worked in order to understand then how the mystery cults are sort of set aside even from that, So we're we're largely dealing with the world before Christianity and set apart from its key characteristics, namely, you know,

any notion of a centrally organized doctrinal religion. So first up, this is this probably seems like an outrageous overstate the obvious, but there were a lot of gods, yes, and by that we don't just mean the standard twelve Olympians set menu that instantly comes to mind. You know your Zeo's here, Apollo and so forth. You know your main Greek gods, the ones that you're going to see in a poster. They're the ones that are frequently utilized in Greek mythology

themed works of fiction. No, I would say, instead, think of an exhaustive cheesecake factory style menu, one that makes you question whether the kitchen can truly deliver on all of these diverse menu items. Only even that is not a perfect technology, because the cheesecake factory is, as I understand it centrally organized. The idea is that any cheesecake factory you go to is going to have the same exhaustive menu.

So I don't know. You imagine you've you've got your basic list of gods, then you've got a lot of other lesser known gods, and then you've also got the local ways or the local cult of each of the main gods that are going to be different than how that god is appreciated and understood in a different place.

A variety that was at times due to actual independence, such as in the post Alexander period where you had a you know, very formerly united and now fractured empire, or during Roman rule, where you know, everything is is wrapped up under Roman rule, but with local religious customs largely left alone. As long as they're not interfering with what the Romans are doing, fine, go ahead and do

whatever you were doing beforehand. So you know, as an example, in ancient Greece, you'd likely find the major Olympian gods, you know, the Big Twelve anywhere you went, as well as the various underworld deities, although there again might be regional differences in the way any of these are treated. But then you'd also have lesser nature deities and especially body of water specific nymphs and the like that would depend on where you were. You know, they're inherently localized.

And then you would also have foreign imported gods that were worshiped locally, you know, likely with some sort of

localized spin as well. So I hope I don't sound insensitive by continuing to compare all of this to food, but it feels like one of the better ways to compare it to the modern world is to think of all the restaurants in your given location, some very widespread but perhaps localized to some degree, highly localized cuisines as well, whatever that you know, the weird local spin on pizza happens to be in your city, that sort of thing, and then also put a bubblegum on it, and then

also imports from other areas that are again likely localized to some degree as well. Now there's here another great question that that about and explores early on in the book, and that is where did these gods come from? And of course this is a huge question, but he does a great job addressing it in brief, you know, for

the purposes of this work. Because naturally one can go in all manner of exhaustive skeptical rationales for the emergence of belief in gods and human beings, as well as more than a few fringe theories leading up to just belief in their pre existence. You know, you just can go all the way and say, well, Zeus is real. That's all there is to it. I'm reminded of the in sort of looking at the spectrum of different ways of thinking about it, though, I'm reminded of that famous

Voltaire quote, which I'll adjust for our purposes here. If gods did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them. And as Balden explains, the gods did prove necessary to our ancestors, though they were not created wholesale by spiritual leaders or religious committees or anything like that. Nobody said, well, we really need some sort of invisible figure to serve this purpose in our culture or life. Now, again, that may seem like an overstatement of the obvious, but I

think it's important to sort of draw that out. So rather, the gods emerged out of a variety of factors in human evolution and cognition, including Balidan points out our predisposition to have strong reactions to the potential presence of a

predator or a corpse. In this I was reminded of one of the great quotes from Cork McCarthy's The Crossing, where he writes, deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence, Something knows and cannot be fled nor hid from, you know, which is kind of a fancy way of saying it feels like something's

watching you. What is watching you might be a god who knows and Indeed, Balden brings up the ancient tradition of the evil Eye in this which I hadn't quite thought of as a predatory presence before, but that's pretty dead on. You can think of the evil eye roughly as an invisible supernatural entity. You see some ancient traditions regarding the evil Eye from, you know, especially throughout the

Mediterranean world. Jewish superstition in particular holds that it lurks in the world at large, ready to afflict individuals with malign force if provoked, and it's particularly provoked by good luck, by boasting and so forth. So if such an entity is watching you, then what else is watching you? And in fact, we've discussed this on the show. Before you get into traditions like the Hamsa, this is like a

hand eye symbol toward off the evil eye. You get into Gorgonian traditions, you know, some sort of terrifying head to scare away evil and sometimes things like the Haamsa are also connected to the idea of independent supernatural entities. So you're potentially using one unseen entity against another in order to protect.

Various forms of divination were employed to see what the gods wanted, rather again distinct from simply putting one's faith or trust in a deity, but rather figuring out what they want. And again, what they generally want is appeasement via rights and sacrifices.

to the gods. But I found it really interesting what he brings up here, pointing out the bone was often part of the sacrifice that was given to the gods, bone being long lasting, bone being you know, under in a certain way for our purposes here eternal. So you offer the bones up to the eternal gods. While the meat off the bones, well, that's that's not going to last in neither a week, and so that's why we will feast on that, and we will offer the bones to the gods.

be enjoyed by the gods. And this point of view, by the way, is not unique to Greek and Roman paganism. You find this, for example, in the Hebrew Bible. There are multiple passages in the books of I think Exodus and Leviticus that talk about the burnt offering being a pleasing aroma to the Lord. The smoke rises up and God enjoys the smell.

gods were present there. And of course I guess it's worth noting that you see echoes of this, you know, throughout other organized religions, like even today in modern Christian churches you may hear form of like well, when you know, when we gather together and worship God, God is present, at least in a spiritual.

And then it's drawing on, you know, so called pagan religions. In its fictional treatment, you get into these accusations of the witch's Sabbath, where witches are gathering together and having their big festival, and then who shows up, Oh, it's the hornet goat himself. It's Satan who appears physically, which you know kind of like matches up to a limited degree with some of these ancient Greco Roman ideas that

when you celebrate the gods. When you make offerings to the gods, the gods may appear, though.

meal with the gods. But it's very much, at least as this book argues, very much not the feeling with the public religions, the transactional ones, that God's presence is felt intimately, because that's kind of the difference that makes the mystery cults so appealing. That's when you actually have what feels like a more direct encounter with the presence of the God.

don't see them, we don't hear them. But again, their presence is known not by anything they're doing, you know, they're at the festivities, but what they are doing in the world at large that affects humans, causing natural disasters and so forth, affecting the crops and so.

a temple. At any rate, these various cults, as we've been discussing, engaged in activities that were concerned with maintaining proper relations with the gods and about and indicates you can roughly divide such rights into two modes of religiosity, imagistic and doctrinal. So the doctrinal is more like regular low key maintenance. So you know, you bring your car in, you know, every for so many miles whatever the sticker

tells you. It's generally what, you know, a certain amount of time or certain amount of miles, bring it in, get some low key maintenance, and that's all you really need to do. And you can also compare this, he points out to modern weekly Christian religious services. You know, like you're going to go. It's not going to necessarily knock your socks off, but it's you know about regularly engaging in the top down information and rights and values of a given religion. Yeah.

our discussion of mystery cults. This is the infrequent, intense, and often nonverbal. It is a high key experience engaging about and points out episodic or flash bulb memory rather than semantic memory. So we're talking high levels of arousal, an experience, a roller coaster ride. And while this latter classification is not unique to the nature of mystery cults, it does seem to be a defining factor as we'll

be exploring. So you're talking about engaging in a just jaw dropping experience of the gods and or the unseen world of these ancient religions.

to often arise in different systems of social organization. That doctrinal religions are more common in large, large social groupings, maybe in say cities or towns, you know, places where there are lots of people gathered together, and places that tend to be more socially hierarchical, where you've got levels of authority, whereas more often we find imagistic forms of religion in people that live in smaller groups, smaller social

systems of or organization, that are less hierarchical, more egalitarian. And one can kind of think of reasons that may be the case, Like it just occurred to me that you know, in smaller societies with less hierarchy, you know, you say you're living in a in a tribe of you know, a few dozen people instead of in a in a big city full of strangers, A lot more of your existence is probably governed by individual relationships between people, and that might affect like how the meaning of experience

needs to be managed. There's maybe a lot more room for ambiguity and trying to understand the uh, you know, what life means? What was the meaning of a powerful emotional experience you had that has something to do with your role in this society and and you're you're you know,

attaining of age within it and things like that. Versus in a big culture, like say you live in a in a city state with a lot of strangers around, there is a lot less social trust and a lot less based on individual relationships that will be maintained over time. You're going to be doing economic transactions with strangers and things like that, and thus you really might need you might get more comfort from the idea of a system of clearly explained rules. You know, does that make sense?

Like that you want to kind of legal doctrine there where things are explained and you don't have to worry about not understanding what the religious experience means anyway. So there's that kind of distinction about where you find these different modes of religion most often. But it's not a strict rule here because clearly one of the things that's going to come up in this book is that while you've got these public forms of ancient cults in the

Greco Roman world that are. You know, you can argue about which category they fit better in, but they probably fit better into the doctrinal version. You know, they're more about kind of clearly explained relationships. They're more kind of low intensity than high intensity. So you've got those going on in the Ancient City States. But then you also have this parallel form of religion, which are the mystery cults, which I think you can very much argue are more

like the imagistic religions. They are based on these rights that are powerful, extreme emotional experiences that people not only are not allowed to fully explain to people who have not been initiated, they probably, as Bouten argues, could not explain if they tried. So you've essentially got both forms within the same general culture, within the same time and place.

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