February 17, 2026 • 45 mins
In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe dive into the world of Greco-Roman Mystery Cults. What exactly were the Mysteries and how did they factor into religious practices of the day? Find out… (part 1 of 4) (originally published 2/27/2025)
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb. This is a winter break week for us,
so we have some vault episodes for you. This is
going to be part one of our Mystery Cults series
from last year, Part one of four. It originally published
two twenty seven, twenty twenty five. What is it about, Well,
(00:26):
it is a mystery we'll have to experience for yourself.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Now many times on Stuff to Blow Your Mind. When
discussing religion and the ancient Greco Roman world, we have
referred to the mystery cults, also known as the sacred
mysteries or even the mysteries. Watching my stories, we've discussed
specific mystery cults and a little more depth. But I
(01:09):
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
(01:33):
remain and much as 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.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
Well, Rob, I am excited to go on a journey
exploring the mystery cults of the Greco Roman world, But
I kind of like the way that you used to
leave it off, you know, just you know, in this
deity Yes became a focus of the mystery cults and
saying no more, because that is a tradition going all
the way back to the ancient world itself. One of
the main sources we're going to be using in this
(02:08):
series is a great book called Mystery Cults in the
Ancient World. They 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 you mentioned several
times is ancient writers bringing up a mystery cult and
(02:33):
then saying I've been instructed in a dream not to
say any more about this. My lips are sealed, like
Paulsenius will be like, then, this really interesting thing happened
in Samothrace, of which I can tell you nothing, which
itself makes for a very enticing subject.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
Yeah, and and course runs completely counter to our modern
understanding of history, like now everything must be revealed, Please
reveal it to us.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
Yeah, everything, except when you have met face to face
the terrifying power of a god or a goddess. Now, Rob,
I know today you wanted wanted to do some work
laying the groundwork establishing a bit about the historical context
of broader Greco Roman religion in the ancient Mediterranean world,
which is the context in which these mystery cults existed.
(03:23):
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
(03:46):
directions at once.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
That's right. If you were to tell someone I just
joined a mystery cult today, you might be it might
be accurate to think, oh, this individual joined a book club,
or maybe this is a really cool band name. And
if someone were to join a mystery cult, say in
the nineteen eighties or nineteen nineties, in say the United States,
(04:10):
well it's going to have different connotations and it might
read to a certain it might lead to a certain
amount of panic. But yeah, we have to differentiate a
mystery cult in its ancient application.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
Here, right, So we need to do work on both
of those words, actually, on mystery and on cult. So
in modern English, the word cult is typically used to
mean a specific type of religious phenomenon, almost always with
pejorative connotations. So a cult refers to a marginal, extreme
(04:45):
and usually socially harmful form of religion from the point
of view of the person choosing this term. So, for example,
a cult is a religion that has relatively few adherents
compared to major world religions. Maybe one that enforces strict
reverence and obedience of a human leader. Maybe a religion
(05:05):
that requires adherents to cut off contact with loved ones.
And the rest of the outside world things like that.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Yes. Indeed, the word cult has often been used by
more established religious groups against new religious movements, new religious
movements that could potentially have harmful attributes but may not.
This was a hallmark, of course, of the Christian countercult
movement of the late twentieth century, often targeting Christian groups
(05:34):
held as heretical by larger Christian organizations, which of course
is a tail almost as old as Christianity itself in
many respects.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
And in some cases what the Christians were saying about
those people probably resembled what the Roman Pagans were saying
about the early Christians. They meet in secret, and they
eat babies alive and stuff.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
Yeah, And of course all this bleeds over to into
fiction and fantasy. You know, if you play Dungeons and Dragons,
you have probably noticed that I haven't checked in the
new Monster Manual which just came out. I have a
copy of it, but I haven't gotten to the cultists yet.
But generally, cultists are an enemy type in Dungeons and Dragons.
And what do you think of in Dungeons and Dragons.
(06:17):
Within the context of Dungeons and Dragons when you encounter
a cultist, 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 fiction as well.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
Usually their own proprietary robes and daggers if you loot them.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Yes, yes, yeah. If you get a mini of a cultist,
what do you expect to see? A robe and a dagger.
Those are the.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
Hallmarks, right, So that's what cult usually means in English
today in general usage. And then of course you get
the derivative term, you know, like cult films and stuff
that are more ironic usages stemming from that usage. Yeah,
But in the context of Greco Roman history, the word
cult does not have any of those connotations. It doesn't
have any negative implications. It does not imply a marginal
(07:04):
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
(07:27):
of worship. So the cult of Apollo in 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
(07:51):
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
(08:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
So when we think of something like the cult of Cthulhu,
we're just talking about taking care of Cthulhu. Yes, looking
after Cthulhu, tending to the needs of Cthulhu, which sounds
far less frightening and threatening.
Speaker 3 (08:48):
That's true, it's a beautiful thing. And in fact, this
highlights something about Greek and Roman pagan religion that is
unfamiliar to practitioners of many the major world religions today,
people who are primarily familiar with religion through you know,
Christianity or Islam or Judaism. The most common form of
(09:10):
public religion in the Greek and Roman world was essentially
a transactional quid pro quo relationship between the person or
the local community and a god. So the person and
the community at large performed rituals and sacrifices in honor
(09:32):
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
(09:53):
things like that, and so in order to get the
God to you know, treat you nice as far as
those things beyond you and control wind, 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
(10:15):
for us.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Yeah, I think the agriculture comparison is quite apt here
to think of it almost as like a knowledge of
the unseen world that then you of course have to honor. Like, okay,
we've discovered this. We are aware of this relationship between
these entities we cannot see, but who are quite powerful
(10:37):
over human affairs, and of course we have to cultivate
this relationship. We have to make sure that they're happy
so we can be happy. This is how the world.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
Works, right, and this is the main way religion is
understood among the ancient Greeks and Romans. That way of
approaching religion is fundamentally different from the major religion of
the world today, like Christianity and Islam, which place emphasis
on belief and on a form of mental submission to God.
(11:11):
Mainstream Greek and Roman religion was really there was not
a lot of discourse about what you believed or like,
you know, did you mentally internally honor and love God?
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?
(11:32):
Did you make the sacrifices, did you celebrate the festivals?
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Yeah? Yeah? Do you know what the gods want? And
generally what the gods want are those rituals, are those
sacrifices and so forth. It's more transactional.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
I was thinking about another difference that came to mind
for me as I was reading this Abouden book that
we're going to be talking about in the series. I
can really only speak to my intimate familiarity with Christianity
here in America today. But I think a lot of
modern Christians, at least in the United States, would today
say that God does not need our worship, like he
(12:10):
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
(12:31):
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
(12:53):
Demeter and Persephone, in which Persephone has stolen a way
to the underworld, Demeter is left distraw looking for her.
Eventually she can return back to the upper world for
part of the year, but it has to return to
the underworld for another part of the year, and this
ends up relating to understandings of seasonal cycles. But anyway,
(13:14):
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 harvest, is mourning the kidnapping of her daughter into
the underworld, and she uses her power over the fields
(13:35):
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
(13:56):
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 as the you know,
twenty first century American. It seems to me that that
to the Greco Roman pagans, not only was the worship
(14:18):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
Yes, yes, very different from the idea of well, God
created you, God wants your love, and you are loved
by God and therefore like invited into his arms. No,
this is more we need that grain, like there's a
there's an economy here and it needs to be maintained.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
Yeah, that's right. So anyway, I guess we got into
some digressions there. But that's why the word cult should
not mislead you there. We're not talking about the you know,
the the cultists of dungeons and dragons. It just means
a form of wor worship as understood within the ancient Mediterranean. Now,
(15:13):
the other word in a mystery cult is mystery. This
is an interesting case too. In common usage today, mystery
refers to a sort of puzzle with a hidden solution.
So a mystery story is one where the plot is
propelled by your desire to have a question answered. There
may be a there may be a hidden solution, or
(15:35):
there may be no known solution at all. Sometimes a
mystery refers to a thing that a question that cannot
be answered. Russies yes, So this could imply that a
mystery cult is a form of worship where the main
goal is to solve some kind of information puzzle, to
(15:56):
answer a question, or to access a piece of hidden in.
That's not 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
(16:18):
not to an information puzzle, but to a specific type
of secret initiation ritual known in Greek as mysteria, which
somewhat overlaps with other Greek concepts of orgea and teleti.
A Bowden mentions these three concepts altogether. They seem to
sometimes be used interchangeably, or maybe to refer to related
(16:41):
but slightly different things orgea and teleti. He translates as
mystic rites and initiations. So what are the mysteries? The
mysteries are these initiation rites, 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
(17:02):
might take place inside a kind of a protected building
outside of public view. So in the case of the
Elusinian mysteries, which we'll describe in more detail later, I'm
sure there would be a kind of publicly viewable part
of this festival that 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
(17:28):
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
(17:50):
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
(18:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
Yes, yeah, absolutely. Now I want to add an additional
note on the term that you mentioned already, orgia. This
term is of course used in the context of religious
rights in ancient Greece, and while orgia might entail sexuality,
it does not inherently entail sexuality. I was reading a
bit about this in a really nice twenty twenty three
(18:47):
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
(19:10):
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. Schwenzel, who is
(19:32):
again himself French, wrote an entire book on the subject.
Speaker 3 (19:36):
It's funny how this is one of these terms that
has come around kind of like cult in a way,
where I use the word orgy all the time, not
to refer to anything sexual. I just mean like a
sort of an excessive indulgence in something.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
Right right well, And in fact, he gets into this
a little bit like bringing up the film Babylon for
the kind of thing came out that same year, which
is like a Hollywood Babylon sort of thing, and he
points out that some of the that the movie does
contain a fictional depiction of a Hollywood orgy in the
in the modern sense, but then one might say, well,
(20:14):
this movie is an orgy for the senses in the
metaphorical sense. But again, when you get back to the
use of the of the term or gea, 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 usage of the usages
(20:36):
of the term. The French literature example, you do see
works of that in Daring 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 the right.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
So that's kind of an adaptation. But even in the
original Greek understanding that we were just talking about, as
explained by Bowden, there is the idea that the orgea
or orgea, these mystic rights would have been probably extremely
emotionally intense and overwhelming to the senses. Ancient writers who
do even if they don't describe what the rights themselves were,
(21:18):
they often describe the effect of them, which is that
they are life changing, an overwhelming experience that leaves one
deeply shaken to the core.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
Exactly Now, again, that book by Hugh Bowden has been
one of our key resources here, and Bowden does a
great job as a great approach to the topic, grounding
his initial approach in a discussion of what we might
refer to as this the mainstream religious ecosystem of the
ancient Greco Roman world, and then diving into where the
(21:49):
mystery cults fit in and how they generally differed. And
we've already been engaging with some of this. You know,
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
(22:10):
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 overstatement of
(22:30):
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,
you know your your Zeus, your Apollo, and so forth.
You know your 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,
(22:53):
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, right.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
Yeah, that's right. I'm trying to think of a better analogy,
because so you had lots of different gods, and then
you had local versions of all these gods, so almost
more like how you got McDonald's. But the local McDonald's
is a franchise, you know. But that's a little misleading too,
because there's top down control like McDonald's corporates, that's rules
(23:37):
about what franchise owners can do. So, I don't know.
You imagine 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
(23:58):
understood in a different place.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
Right, Yeah, any given community or city states, city state
is going to have its own caste of deities. They
determine the course of people's lives. Individual cult practices are
going to vary widely across the inherently fractured populations, a
variety that was at times due to actual independence, such
as in the post Alexander period where you had a
(24:20):
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
(24:41):
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 we depend on where you were.
(25:01):
You know, they're they're inherently localized. And then you would
also have foreign imported gods that were worshiped locally, uh,
you know, likely with some sort of localized spin as well.
So I hope I don't sound insensitive by continuing to
compare all 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
(25:22):
given location. Uh, some very widespread, but perhaps localized to
some degree, highly localized because cuisines as well, you know
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 bubble gum on it, and
then also imports from from other areas that are again
(25:42):
likely localized to some degree as well. Now there's here
another great question that about explorers early on in the book,
and that is where did these gods come from? And
(26:05):
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
(26:26):
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
Foltaire 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
(26:51):
our ancestors, though they were not created wholesale by spiritual
leaders or religious committees or anything like that. There't nobody
said well, we 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.
(27:13):
So rather, the gods emerged out of a variety of
factors in human evolution and cognition, including Balden 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
(27:37):
the knowledge that something knows of his existence, something knows
and cannot be fled nor hid from, 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
(28:00):
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
(28:21):
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
(28:42):
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
(29:03):
order to protect yourself.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
Right the way you might use the demon Pazuzu to
protect yourself against Lamashetu or something like that.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, we discussed that at length back in October,
and it's interesting to you have to connect these ideas
like these, at least in part, like the rough forms
that would be fleshed out into these traditions of deities
might be in some way connected to just our hardwired
nature to be on the lookout for things that are
(29:32):
watching us and might not you know, might might wish
us no harm, but also might be hungry.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
Yeah. So this is the kind of thing where, of course,
it's impossible to know for sure where our original where
our religious impulses originally come from. We can only come
up with more or less plausible stories about how we
think it may have happened. I find that the kind
of predator consciousness agent detection theory is a fairly strong
(30:00):
candidate in my view. It seems pretty plausible to me.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
Right right, you know, at least for some of like
the initial broad strokes. But obviously you end up having
a lot of additional cultural influences and just basic human
needs that get woven into that, things like you know,
veneration of ancestors and personal loss. I mean, the list
goes on and on.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
Yeah, it's kind of like the way religions develop. It's
like chess games, you know, It's like they can all
start off kind of similar and then branch off into
everything is a unique game in the end.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
Yeah, So the gods about and stresses are invisible and
for the most part unheard. At least, they're not heard
through their voices at least by most people, but rather
through their actions. But unless these actions actually occur inside
a temple devoted to a particular god, it's left up
to our interpretation which deity spoke and what they were
(30:53):
trying to say, And that interpretation was often a state duty.
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
the rights and sacrifices.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
Now we've already alluded to the fact that a lot
of these sacrifices were agricultural products, but they could take
a lot of forms.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
Actually, yeah, he brings up treasure from conquest. You know,
we just got this bunch of gold in and it
seems me prisoners, Yeah, in me prison, it seems right
to give you some of this gods. Also, how about
some meat and the smoke from the burning fat. This
of course is another hallmark of you know, of offerings
(31:42):
to the gods. But I found it really interesting what
he brings up here, pointing out that 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 here eternal. So you offer
(32:02):
the bones up to the eternal gods. While the meat
off the bones, well 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.
Speaker 3 (32:14):
Yeah, so you'd have a common way of dividing up
the animal sacrifice so that, yeah, the humans eat the
meat and the bones and the fat are burned for
the gods. And one way bout in frames this, which
I thought was interesting, is it's kind of a way
for the humans and the gods to enjoy a meal together.
It's a shared festival. So we get the meat and
the gods get to enjoy the smoke rising up from
(32:36):
the burned bones and fat, and the organs that smoke
is rising up into the air where it will 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
(32:58):
pleasing aroma to the Lord rises up and God enjoys
the smell.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
Yeah. Yeah, I also really like the way about and
discuss this here. The idea that when these rights were held,
the gods were invited and present, they were enjoying the
food alongside us and other festivities as well, like the
gods were present there. And of course I guess it's
worth noting that you see echoes of this, you know,
(33:24):
throughout other organized religions, like even today, in like modern
Christian churches, you may hear some form of like well,
when you know, when we gather together and worship God,
God is present, at least in a spiritual.
Speaker 3 (33:36):
Sense, right, Yeah, that's right, though I do get the
feeling there's a difference in that a lot of Christians today,
I would say, probably feel they enjoy a more intimate
connection with God as a person. Then you get from
the idea of at least the public transactional forms of
(33:58):
Greco Roman paganism.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
Yeah, and I guess it's also worth noting that in
like a lot of modern Christian traditions is the idea
that like God is always with you, He's always there
watching what you're doing. You can always speak to him,
even if you don't necessarily hear him speak back to you.
And it's and to put that, at least some of
the ways it's described in other monotheistic religions, is it
(34:22):
like God is closer than your own breath, but another place,
And this is perhaps an interesting example. And then it's
drawing on you know, so called pagan religions and its
fictional treatment. You get into these accusations of the witch's Sabbath,
where witches are gathering together and having their big festival,
(34:44):
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 God,
when you make offerings to the gods, the gods may appear.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
Though in the public festival. I mean, Bowden very much
makes the point that in his view, in the public festivals,
that appearance would be indirect like that it would just
be the understanding there would be like a cult statue
of the God there, and there would be the understanding
that by making the sacrifice, you're kind of sharing a
meal with the gods. But it's very much at least
(35:23):
as 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.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
Yes, this is this is This is a really good
distinction to make. Yes, So the modern Christian Church example,
a God is spiritually present, the totally made up, which
is Sabbath example, the divine or infernal force is physically present.
And in the Greco Roman examples we're discussing here, according
to Bowden, the gods are still very much invisible. We
(36:07):
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, like causing natural
disasters and so forth, affecting the crops and so forth.
Speaker 3 (36:25):
Or communicating through divination maybe exactly. You know, Apollo might
communicate through his priestess at Delphi or something. But yeah,
like you said, largely in affecting the outcomes of events
beyond our control.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
Yeah. So they were invisible, but that doesn't mean they
were absent. They were thought to be very present in
human affairs, and it came when it came time to
engage in these special feats and sacrifices. They were understood
to be present, but were invisible and yeah, and when
I say they're present, though, we should also point out
there would be likenesses as well, so there would be statues,
(36:59):
idols and whatnot carry through the streets or situated within
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,
(37:20):
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
(37:41):
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 value
use of a given religion.
Speaker 3 (38:01):
Yeah, he describes the doctrinal approach to religion as one
in which the rituals are frequent, low intensity, and usually
also they have the element of being semantically clear, like
their meaning is well explained and commonly understood.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
Right, And he points out that some of the various
ancient examples of like the city states carrying out rituals
on a regular basis, these might fall under that classification,
and I was also wondering, well, maybe it would. Also
you could also throw in like minor acts of household
or personal protective right, though I guess that would violate
(38:39):
the general top down organization model involved with the doctrinal.
Now coming back to the imagistic, this is more important
to our discussion of mystery cults. This is the infrequent, intense,
and often nonverbal. It is a high key experience engaging
about points out episodic or flash buld memory rather than
(39:03):
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
(39:27):
these ancient religions.
Speaker 3 (39:29):
Right, So, under this system of classification, the imagistic is
something that happens rarely, is extremely emotionally intense and powerful,
leaves a lasting memory, and often is not clearly explained,
and is left for the person experiencing it to figure
out what it means by themselves exactly. Now, one of
(39:51):
the things that's interesting in the book when he brings
up these concepts of these concepts from the anthropology of religion,
doctrinal religions versus imagistic ones, is that they seem to
often arise in different systems of social organization. That doctrinal
religions are more common in large, large social groupings, maybe
(40:13):
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
organization that are less hierarchical, more egalitarian. And one can
(40:34):
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 tribe of you know, a few dozen
people instead of 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
(40:58):
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
(41:18):
and you're you know, attaining of age within it and
things like that, versus in a big culture, like say
you live 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
(41:39):
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
(42:02):
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,
(42:25):
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
(42:50):
people not only are not allowed to fully explain to
people who have not been initiated, they probably, as Bouten argues,
could not explain lane if they tried. So you've essentially
got both forms within the same general culture, within the
same time and place.
Speaker 1 (43:07):
Yeah, Yeah, so, yeah, this is the basic concept of
the mystery cult. This is the religious ecosystem in which
you will find it. And uh yeah, in the following
episode or episodes of Stuff to Blow your mind, we're
gonna dig in a little deeper and look at some
of these specific examples of mystery cults. What we think
(43:30):
they were up to, what is what is written and known,
what is presumed? Uh, it should be a fun ride,
a high intensity ride. Oh no, it'll be lowkey.
Speaker 3 (43:39):
It'll be low key, I'm kidding, but hopefully of high interest, yes,
low key of high interest, yes, But we're not going
to subject to you to like blindfolded beatings and ritual
mockery and things like that like you might get on
the on the way to the Lusinian mystery yeah, or
on other podcasts, other podcasts, maybe end of that, but
that's not really our vibe here.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
All right, Well, we hope that you'll join us in
those subsequent episodes. The next one should come out the
following Tuesday. In the meantime, though, we'd love to hear
from you if you have any feedback, personal experience and
so forth regarding what we've talked about already. Right in
we'd love to hear from you. A reminder of the
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and
(44:19):
culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, though
on Wednesdays we do a short form episode and on
Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk
about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. If you
want to follow us on social media, well, we're on
different social media's. Whatever you use, you may find us
and we'll just leave the mystery there. We're probably there.
(44:42):
If you're looking for us on Instagram, we're stvy and podcast,
And if you use letterboxed and you want to keep
up with Weird House Cinema, we're Weird House on there.
Speaker 3 (44:51):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (45:13):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows,
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb. This is a winter break week for us,
so we have some vault episodes for you. This is
going to be part one of our Mystery Cults series
from last year, Part one of four. It originally published
two twenty seven, twenty twenty five. What is it about, Well,
(00:26):
it is a mystery we'll have to experience for yourself.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Now many times on Stuff to Blow Your Mind. When
discussing religion and the ancient Greco Roman world, we have
referred to the mystery cults, also known as the sacred
mysteries or even the mysteries. Watching my stories, we've discussed
specific mystery cults and a little more depth. But I
(01:09):
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
(01:33):
remain and much as 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.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
Well, Rob, I am excited to go on a journey
exploring the mystery cults of the Greco Roman world, But
I kind of like the way that you used to
leave it off, you know, just you know, in this
deity Yes became a focus of the mystery cults and
saying no more, because that is a tradition going all
the way back to the ancient world itself. One of
the main sources we're going to be using in this
(02:08):
series is a great book called Mystery Cults in the
Ancient World. They 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 you mentioned several
times is ancient writers bringing up a mystery cult and
(02:33):
then saying I've been instructed in a dream not to
say any more about this. My lips are sealed, like
Paulsenius will be like, then, this really interesting thing happened
in Samothrace, of which I can tell you nothing, which
itself makes for a very enticing subject.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
Yeah, and and course runs completely counter to our modern
understanding of history, like now everything must be revealed, Please
reveal it to us.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
Yeah, everything, except when you have met face to face
the terrifying power of a god or a goddess. Now, Rob,
I know today you wanted wanted to do some work
laying the groundwork establishing a bit about the historical context
of broader Greco Roman religion in the ancient Mediterranean world,
which is the context in which these mystery cults existed.
(03:23):
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
(03:46):
directions at once.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
That's right. If you were to tell someone I just
joined a mystery cult today, you might be it might
be accurate to think, oh, this individual joined a book club,
or maybe this is a really cool band name. And
if someone were to join a mystery cult, say in
the nineteen eighties or nineteen nineties, in say the United States,
(04:10):
well it's going to have different connotations and it might
read to a certain it might lead to a certain
amount of panic. But yeah, we have to differentiate a
mystery cult in its ancient application.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
Here, right, So we need to do work on both
of those words, actually, on mystery and on cult. So
in modern English, the word cult is typically used to
mean a specific type of religious phenomenon, almost always with
pejorative connotations. So a cult refers to a marginal, extreme
(04:45):
and usually socially harmful form of religion from the point
of view of the person choosing this term. So, for example,
a cult is a religion that has relatively few adherents
compared to major world religions. Maybe one that enforces strict
reverence and obedience of a human leader. Maybe a religion
(05:05):
that requires adherents to cut off contact with loved ones.
And the rest of the outside world things like that.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Yes. Indeed, the word cult has often been used by
more established religious groups against new religious movements, new religious
movements that could potentially have harmful attributes but may not.
This was a hallmark, of course, of the Christian countercult
movement of the late twentieth century, often targeting Christian groups
(05:34):
held as heretical by larger Christian organizations, which of course
is a tail almost as old as Christianity itself in
many respects.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
And in some cases what the Christians were saying about
those people probably resembled what the Roman Pagans were saying
about the early Christians. They meet in secret, and they
eat babies alive and stuff.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
Yeah, And of course all this bleeds over to into
fiction and fantasy. You know, if you play Dungeons and Dragons,
you have probably noticed that I haven't checked in the
new Monster Manual which just came out. I have a
copy of it, but I haven't gotten to the cultists yet.
But generally, cultists are an enemy type in Dungeons and Dragons.
And what do you think of in Dungeons and Dragons.
(06:17):
Within the context of Dungeons and Dragons when you encounter
a cultist, 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 fiction as well.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
Usually their own proprietary robes and daggers if you loot them.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Yes, yes, yeah. If you get a mini of a cultist,
what do you expect to see? A robe and a dagger.
Those are the.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
Hallmarks, right, So that's what cult usually means in English
today in general usage. And then of course you get
the derivative term, you know, like cult films and stuff
that are more ironic usages stemming from that usage. Yeah,
But in the context of Greco Roman history, the word
cult does not have any of those connotations. It doesn't
have any negative implications. It does not imply a marginal
(07:04):
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
(07:27):
of worship. So the cult of Apollo in 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
(07:51):
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
(08:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
So when we think of something like the cult of Cthulhu,
we're just talking about taking care of Cthulhu. Yes, looking
after Cthulhu, tending to the needs of Cthulhu, which sounds
far less frightening and threatening.
Speaker 3 (08:48):
That's true, it's a beautiful thing. And in fact, this
highlights something about Greek and Roman pagan religion that is
unfamiliar to practitioners of many the major world religions today,
people who are primarily familiar with religion through you know,
Christianity or Islam or Judaism. The most common form of
(09:10):
public religion in the Greek and Roman world was essentially
a transactional quid pro quo relationship between the person or
the local community and a god. So the person and
the community at large performed rituals and sacrifices in honor
(09:32):
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
(09:53):
things like that, and so in order to get the
God to you know, treat you nice as far as
those things beyond you and control wind, 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
(10:15):
for us.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Yeah, I think the agriculture comparison is quite apt here
to think of it almost as like a knowledge of
the unseen world that then you of course have to honor. Like, okay,
we've discovered this. We are aware of this relationship between
these entities we cannot see, but who are quite powerful
(10:37):
over human affairs, and of course we have to cultivate
this relationship. We have to make sure that they're happy
so we can be happy. This is how the world.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
Works, right, and this is the main way religion is
understood among the ancient Greeks and Romans. That way of
approaching religion is fundamentally different from the major religion of
the world today, like Christianity and Islam, which place emphasis
on belief and on a form of mental submission to God.
(11:11):
Mainstream Greek and Roman religion was really there was not
a lot of discourse about what you believed or like,
you know, did you mentally internally honor and love God?
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?
(11:32):
Did you make the sacrifices, did you celebrate the festivals?
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Yeah? Yeah? Do you know what the gods want? And
generally what the gods want are those rituals, are those
sacrifices and so forth. It's more transactional.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
I was thinking about another difference that came to mind
for me as I was reading this Abouden book that
we're going to be talking about in the series. I
can really only speak to my intimate familiarity with Christianity
here in America today. But I think a lot of
modern Christians, at least in the United States, would today
say that God does not need our worship, like he
(12:10):
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
(12:31):
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
(12:53):
Demeter and Persephone, in which Persephone has stolen a way
to the underworld, Demeter is left distraw looking for her.
Eventually she can return back to the upper world for
part of the year, but it has to return to
the underworld for another part of the year, and this
ends up relating to understandings of seasonal cycles. But anyway,
(13:14):
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 harvest, is mourning the kidnapping of her daughter into
the underworld, and she uses her power over the fields
(13:35):
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
(13:56):
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 as the you know,
twenty first century American. It seems to me that that
to the Greco Roman pagans, not only was the worship
(14:18):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
Yes, yes, very different from the idea of well, God
created you, God wants your love, and you are loved
by God and therefore like invited into his arms. No,
this is more we need that grain, like there's a
there's an economy here and it needs to be maintained.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
Yeah, that's right. So anyway, I guess we got into
some digressions there. But that's why the word cult should
not mislead you there. We're not talking about the you know,
the the cultists of dungeons and dragons. It just means
a form of wor worship as understood within the ancient Mediterranean. Now,
(15:13):
the other word in a mystery cult is mystery. This
is an interesting case too. In common usage today, mystery
refers to a sort of puzzle with a hidden solution.
So a mystery story is one where the plot is
propelled by your desire to have a question answered. There
may be a there may be a hidden solution, or
(15:35):
there may be no known solution at all. Sometimes a
mystery refers to a thing that a question that cannot
be answered. Russies yes, So this could imply that a
mystery cult is a form of worship where the main
goal is to solve some kind of information puzzle, to
(15:56):
answer a question, or to access a piece of hidden in.
That's not 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
(16:18):
not to an information puzzle, but to a specific type
of secret initiation ritual known in Greek as mysteria, which
somewhat overlaps with other Greek concepts of orgea and teleti.
A Bowden mentions these three concepts altogether. They seem to
sometimes be used interchangeably, or maybe to refer to related
(16:41):
but slightly different things orgea and teleti. He translates as
mystic rites and initiations. So what are the mysteries? The
mysteries are these initiation rites, 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
(17:02):
might take place inside a kind of a protected building
outside of public view. So in the case of the
Elusinian mysteries, which we'll describe in more detail later, I'm
sure there would be a kind of publicly viewable part
of this festival that 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
(17:28):
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
(17:50):
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
(18:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
Yes, yeah, absolutely. Now I want to add an additional
note on the term that you mentioned already, orgia. This
term is of course used in the context of religious
rights in ancient Greece, and while orgia might entail sexuality,
it does not inherently entail sexuality. I was reading a
bit about this in a really nice twenty twenty three
(18:47):
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
(19:10):
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. Schwenzel, who is
(19:32):
again himself French, wrote an entire book on the subject.
Speaker 3 (19:36):
It's funny how this is one of these terms that
has come around kind of like cult in a way,
where I use the word orgy all the time, not
to refer to anything sexual. I just mean like a
sort of an excessive indulgence in something.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
Right right well, And in fact, he gets into this
a little bit like bringing up the film Babylon for
the kind of thing came out that same year, which
is like a Hollywood Babylon sort of thing, and he
points out that some of the that the movie does
contain a fictional depiction of a Hollywood orgy in the
in the modern sense, but then one might say, well,
(20:14):
this movie is an orgy for the senses in the
metaphorical sense. But again, when you get back to the
use of the of the term or gea, 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 usage of the usages
(20:36):
of the term. The French literature example, you do see
works of that in Daring 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 the right.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
So that's kind of an adaptation. But even in the
original Greek understanding that we were just talking about, as
explained by Bowden, there is the idea that the orgea
or orgea, these mystic rights would have been probably extremely
emotionally intense and overwhelming to the senses. Ancient writers who
do even if they don't describe what the rights themselves were,
(21:18):
they often describe the effect of them, which is that
they are life changing, an overwhelming experience that leaves one
deeply shaken to the core.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
Exactly Now, again, that book by Hugh Bowden has been
one of our key resources here, and Bowden does a
great job as a great approach to the topic, grounding
his initial approach in a discussion of what we might
refer to as this the mainstream religious ecosystem of the
ancient Greco Roman world, and then diving into where the
(21:49):
mystery cults fit in and how they generally differed. And
we've already been engaging with some of this. You know,
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
(22:10):
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 overstatement of
(22:30):
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,
you know your your Zeus, your Apollo, and so forth.
You know your 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,
(22:53):
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, right.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
Yeah, that's right. I'm trying to think of a better analogy,
because so you had lots of different gods, and then
you had local versions of all these gods, so almost
more like how you got McDonald's. But the local McDonald's
is a franchise, you know. But that's a little misleading too,
because there's top down control like McDonald's corporates, that's rules
(23:37):
about what franchise owners can do. So, I don't know.
You imagine 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
(23:58):
understood in a different place.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
Right, Yeah, any given community or city states, city state
is going to have its own caste of deities. They
determine the course of people's lives. Individual cult practices are
going to vary widely across the inherently fractured populations, a
variety that was at times due to actual independence, such
as in the post Alexander period where you had a
(24:20):
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
(24:41):
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 we depend on where you were.
(25:01):
You know, they're they're inherently localized. And then you would
also have foreign imported gods that were worshiped locally, uh,
you know, likely with some sort of localized spin as well.
So I hope I don't sound insensitive by continuing to
compare all 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
(25:22):
given location. Uh, some very widespread, but perhaps localized to
some degree, highly localized because cuisines as well, you know
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 bubble gum on it, and
then also imports from from other areas that are again
(25:42):
likely localized to some degree as well. Now there's here
another great question that about explorers early on in the book,
and that is where did these gods come from? And
(26:05):
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
(26:26):
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
Foltaire 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
(26:51):
our ancestors, though they were not created wholesale by spiritual
leaders or religious committees or anything like that. There't nobody
said well, we 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.
(27:13):
So rather, the gods emerged out of a variety of
factors in human evolution and cognition, including Balden 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
(27:37):
the knowledge that something knows of his existence, something knows
and cannot be fled nor hid from, 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
(28:00):
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
(28:21):
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
(28:42):
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
(29:03):
order to protect yourself.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
Right the way you might use the demon Pazuzu to
protect yourself against Lamashetu or something like that.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, we discussed that at length back in October,
and it's interesting to you have to connect these ideas
like these, at least in part, like the rough forms
that would be fleshed out into these traditions of deities
might be in some way connected to just our hardwired
nature to be on the lookout for things that are
(29:32):
watching us and might not you know, might might wish
us no harm, but also might be hungry.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
Yeah. So this is the kind of thing where, of course,
it's impossible to know for sure where our original where
our religious impulses originally come from. We can only come
up with more or less plausible stories about how we
think it may have happened. I find that the kind
of predator consciousness agent detection theory is a fairly strong
(30:00):
candidate in my view. It seems pretty plausible to me.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
Right right, you know, at least for some of like
the initial broad strokes. But obviously you end up having
a lot of additional cultural influences and just basic human
needs that get woven into that, things like you know,
veneration of ancestors and personal loss. I mean, the list
goes on and on.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
Yeah, it's kind of like the way religions develop. It's
like chess games, you know, It's like they can all
start off kind of similar and then branch off into
everything is a unique game in the end.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
Yeah, So the gods about and stresses are invisible and
for the most part unheard. At least, they're not heard
through their voices at least by most people, but rather
through their actions. But unless these actions actually occur inside
a temple devoted to a particular god, it's left up
to our interpretation which deity spoke and what they were
(30:53):
trying to say, And that interpretation was often a state duty.
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
the rights and sacrifices.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
Now we've already alluded to the fact that a lot
of these sacrifices were agricultural products, but they could take
a lot of forms.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
Actually, yeah, he brings up treasure from conquest. You know,
we just got this bunch of gold in and it
seems me prisoners, Yeah, in me prison, it seems right
to give you some of this gods. Also, how about
some meat and the smoke from the burning fat. This
of course is another hallmark of you know, of offerings
(31:42):
to the gods. But I found it really interesting what
he brings up here, pointing out that 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 here eternal. So you offer
(32:02):
the bones up to the eternal gods. While the meat
off the bones, well 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.
Speaker 3 (32:14):
Yeah, so you'd have a common way of dividing up
the animal sacrifice so that, yeah, the humans eat the
meat and the bones and the fat are burned for
the gods. And one way bout in frames this, which
I thought was interesting, is it's kind of a way
for the humans and the gods to enjoy a meal together.
It's a shared festival. So we get the meat and
the gods get to enjoy the smoke rising up from
(32:36):
the burned bones and fat, and the organs that smoke
is rising up into the air where it will 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
(32:58):
pleasing aroma to the Lord rises up and God enjoys
the smell.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
Yeah. Yeah, I also really like the way about and
discuss this here. The idea that when these rights were held,
the gods were invited and present, they were enjoying the
food alongside us and other festivities as well, like the
gods were present there. And of course I guess it's
worth noting that you see echoes of this, you know,
(33:24):
throughout other organized religions, like even today, in like modern
Christian churches, you may hear some form of like well,
when you know, when we gather together and worship God,
God is present, at least in a spiritual.
Speaker 3 (33:36):
Sense, right, Yeah, that's right, though I do get the
feeling there's a difference in that a lot of Christians today,
I would say, probably feel they enjoy a more intimate
connection with God as a person. Then you get from
the idea of at least the public transactional forms of
(33:58):
Greco Roman paganism.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
Yeah, and I guess it's also worth noting that in
like a lot of modern Christian traditions is the idea
that like God is always with you, He's always there
watching what you're doing. You can always speak to him,
even if you don't necessarily hear him speak back to you.
And it's and to put that, at least some of
the ways it's described in other monotheistic religions, is it
(34:22):
like God is closer than your own breath, but another place,
And this is perhaps an interesting example. And then it's
drawing on you know, so called pagan religions and its
fictional treatment. You get into these accusations of the witch's Sabbath,
where witches are gathering together and having their big festival,
(34:44):
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 God,
when you make offerings to the gods, the gods may appear.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
Though in the public festival. I mean, Bowden very much
makes the point that in his view, in the public festivals,
that appearance would be indirect like that it would just
be the understanding there would be like a cult statue
of the God there, and there would be the understanding
that by making the sacrifice, you're kind of sharing a
meal with the gods. But it's very much at least
(35:23):
as 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.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
Yes, this is this is This is a really good
distinction to make. Yes, So the modern Christian Church example,
a God is spiritually present, the totally made up, which
is Sabbath example, the divine or infernal force is physically present.
And in the Greco Roman examples we're discussing here, according
to Bowden, the gods are still very much invisible. We
(36:07):
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, like causing natural
disasters and so forth, affecting the crops and so forth.
Speaker 3 (36:25):
Or communicating through divination maybe exactly. You know, Apollo might
communicate through his priestess at Delphi or something. But yeah,
like you said, largely in affecting the outcomes of events
beyond our control.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
Yeah. So they were invisible, but that doesn't mean they
were absent. They were thought to be very present in
human affairs, and it came when it came time to
engage in these special feats and sacrifices. They were understood
to be present, but were invisible and yeah, and when
I say they're present, though, we should also point out
there would be likenesses as well, so there would be statues,
(36:59):
idols and whatnot carry through the streets or situated within
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,
(37:20):
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
(37:41):
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 value
use of a given religion.
Speaker 3 (38:01):
Yeah, he describes the doctrinal approach to religion as one
in which the rituals are frequent, low intensity, and usually
also they have the element of being semantically clear, like
their meaning is well explained and commonly understood.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
Right, And he points out that some of the various
ancient examples of like the city states carrying out rituals
on a regular basis, these might fall under that classification,
and I was also wondering, well, maybe it would. Also
you could also throw in like minor acts of household
or personal protective right, though I guess that would violate
(38:39):
the general top down organization model involved with the doctrinal.
Now coming back to the imagistic, this is more important
to our discussion of mystery cults. This is the infrequent, intense,
and often nonverbal. It is a high key experience engaging
about points out episodic or flash buld memory rather than
(39:03):
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
(39:27):
these ancient religions.
Speaker 3 (39:29):
Right, So, under this system of classification, the imagistic is
something that happens rarely, is extremely emotionally intense and powerful,
leaves a lasting memory, and often is not clearly explained,
and is left for the person experiencing it to figure
out what it means by themselves exactly. Now, one of
(39:51):
the things that's interesting in the book when he brings
up these concepts of these concepts from the anthropology of religion,
doctrinal religions versus imagistic ones, is that they seem to
often arise in different systems of social organization. That doctrinal
religions are more common in large, large social groupings, maybe
(40:13):
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
organization that are less hierarchical, more egalitarian. And one can
(40:34):
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 tribe of you know, a few dozen
people instead of 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
(40:58):
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
(41:18):
and you're you know, attaining of age within it and
things like that, versus in a big culture, like say
you live 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
(41:39):
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
(42:02):
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,
(42:25):
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
(42:50):
people not only are not allowed to fully explain to
people who have not been initiated, they probably, as Bouten argues,
could not explain lane if they tried. So you've essentially
got both forms within the same general culture, within the
same time and place.
Speaker 1 (43:07):
Yeah, Yeah, so, yeah, this is the basic concept of
the mystery cult. This is the religious ecosystem in which
you will find it. And uh yeah, in the following
episode or episodes of Stuff to Blow your mind, we're
gonna dig in a little deeper and look at some
of these specific examples of mystery cults. What we think
(43:30):
they were up to, what is what is written and known,
what is presumed? Uh, it should be a fun ride,
a high intensity ride. Oh no, it'll be lowkey.
Speaker 3 (43:39):
It'll be low key, I'm kidding, but hopefully of high interest, yes,
low key of high interest, yes, But we're not going
to subject to you to like blindfolded beatings and ritual
mockery and things like that like you might get on
the on the way to the Lusinian mystery yeah, or
on other podcasts, other podcasts, maybe end of that, but
that's not really our vibe here.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
All right, Well, we hope that you'll join us in
those subsequent episodes. The next one should come out the
following Tuesday. In the meantime, though, we'd love to hear
from you if you have any feedback, personal experience and
so forth regarding what we've talked about already. Right in
we'd love to hear from you. A reminder of the
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and
(44:19):
culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, though
on Wednesdays we do a short form episode and on
Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk
about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. If you
want to follow us on social media, well, we're on
different social media's. Whatever you use, you may find us
and we'll just leave the mystery there. We're probably there.
(44:42):
If you're looking for us on Instagram, we're stvy and podcast,
And if you use letterboxed and you want to keep
up with Weird House Cinema, we're Weird House on there.
Speaker 3 (44:51):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (45:13):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows,
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