February 27, 2025 • 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…
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
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 was
(00:40):
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
(01:04):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
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
(01:38):
series is a great book called Mystery Cults in the
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
(02:03):
then saying I have been instructed in a dream not
to say any more about this.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
I can.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
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 2 (02:20):
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 (02:30):
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 to 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.
(02:54):
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
(03:16):
directions at once.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
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,
(03:41):
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 (03:53):
Here, right, And so we need to do work on
both of those words, actually, on mystery and on cult.
So in 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,
(04:14):
extreme 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
(04:35):
religion that requires adherents to cut off contact with loved
ones and the rest of the outside world. Things like that.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
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
(05:04):
held as heretical by larger Christian organizations, which of course
is a tail almost as old as Christianity itself in
many respects.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
And in some cases what the Christians were saying about
those people probably resembled what the Roman Pagans were saying
about the early Christians. You know, they meet in secret,
and they eat babies alive and stuff.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Yeah, and of course all this bleeds over too into
fiction and fantasy. You know, if you play Dungeons and Dragons,
you've 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
(05:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Usually their own proprietary robes and daggers if you loot them.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Yes, yes, yeah. If you get a mini of a cultists,
what do you expect to see a robe and a dagger?
Speaker 3 (06:09):
Those are the 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
(06:33):
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
(06:56):
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,
(07:16):
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.
(07:39):
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
(08:02):
aforementioned products, or things like incense or wine.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
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 (08:18):
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 of the major world religions today.
People who are primarily familiar with religion through Christianity or
Islam or Judaism. The most common form of public religion
(08:42):
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 of the god,
(09:03):
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,
(09:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
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 were aware of this
relationship between these entities we cannot see, but who are
quite powerful over human affairs. And of course we have
(10:09):
to cultivate this relationship. We have to make sure that
they're happy so we can be happy. This is how
the world works.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
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 religions of the
world today, like Christianity and Islam, which place emphasis on
belief and on a form of mental submission to God.
(10:41):
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?
(11:02):
Did you make the sacrifices, did you celebrate the festivals?
Speaker 2 (11:05):
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 (11:15):
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
(11:40):
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
(12:01):
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
(12:23):
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
(12:45):
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
(13:07):
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
(13:31):
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
(13:52):
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 2 (14:01):
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 (14:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
There.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
We're not talking about the you know, the the cultists
of dungeons and dragons. It just means a form of
worship as understood within the ancient Mediterranean. Now, the other
word in a mystery cult is mystery. This is an
(14:47):
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 hidden solution, or there may be no known solution
at all. Sometimes a mystery refers to a thing that
(15:10):
a question that cannot.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
Be answered right unsolved mysteries.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
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 answer a question,
or to access a piece of hidden information. That's not
primarily what's going on with mystery cults. While the Greco
(15:35):
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
(16:00):
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
(16:22):
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
(16:44):
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
(17:04):
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.
(17:30):
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
(17:51):
in the Sherlock Holmes sense. If that distinction makes sense.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Yes, yes, 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 orgea might entail sexuality,
it does not inherently entail sexuality. I was reading a
bit about this in a really nice twenty twenty three
(18:17):
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
(18:40):
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
(19:02):
is again himself French, wrote an entire book on the subject.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
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 2 (19:22):
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 that the movie does contain
a fictional depiction of a Hollywood orgy in the modern sense.
(19:43):
But then one might say, well, 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 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
(20:05):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
Right, 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
(20:46):
themselves were, 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 exactly now.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Again, that book by Hugh Bowden has been one of
our key resources here, and Balden 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 the mainstream religious ecosystem of the ancient Greco Roman world,
and then diving into where the mystery cults fit in
(21:20):
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,
(21:44):
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
(22:06):
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
(22:29):
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.
Speaker 3 (22:45):
Right, 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 Donald's is a franchise, you know they But
that's a little misleading too, because there's top down control
(23:06):
like McDonald's Corporates, that's rules about what franchise owners can do.
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
(23:26):
that god is appreciated and understood in a different place.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
That's right. Yeah, Any given community or city, states, city
state is going to have its own cast 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
(23:50):
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,
(24:12):
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.
(24:34):
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
(24:55):
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
(25:27):
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
(25:49):
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
(26:12):
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
(26:34):
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
(26:56):
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
(27:19):
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
(27:41):
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
(28:04):
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.
(28:27):
So you're potentially using one unseen entity against another in
order to protect.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
Yourself, right the way you might use the demon Pazuzu
to protect yourself against Lamashtu or something like that exactly.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
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
(29:02):
watching us and might not you know, might might wish
us no harm, but also might be hungry.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
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
(29:29):
strong candidate in my view. It seems pretty plausible to me.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
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 (29:51):
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 in the end.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
Yeah, So the gods bout 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
(30:23):
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
via rights and sacrifices.
Speaker 3 (30:45):
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 2 (30:51):
Actually, yeah, he brings up treasure from conquest. You know,
we just got this bunch of gold in and it
seems rvy prisoners, Yeah, and mean 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
(31:12):
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
(31:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (31:45):
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 a bout in frames this
which I thought was interesting, is it's kind of a
way for the humans and the gods to enjoy altogether.
It's a shared festival. So we get the meat and
the gods get to enjoy the smoke rising up from
(32:06):
the burned bones and fat, and the organs that that's
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
(32:28):
pleasing aroma to the Lord. The smoke rises up and
God enjoys the smell.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
Yeah, yeah, I also really liked the way about and
discussed this here, the idea that when these rites 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,
(32:54):
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.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
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
(33:28):
Greco Roman paganism.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
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
(33:53):
like God is closer than your own breath. Yeah, but
another place, and this is perhaps an interesting exams ample.
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
(34:15):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:33):
In the public festival. I mean, Bouten 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
(34:53):
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 2 (35:14):
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
(35:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
Forth, 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 2 (36:08):
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 when I say
they're present, though, we should also point out there would
be likenesses as well, So there would be of statues,
(36:29):
idols and whatnot carried 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,
(36:50):
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
(37:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (37:31):
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 2 (37:49):
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
(38:09):
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 and points out episodic or flash bulb memory rather
(38:33):
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
(38:57):
world of these ancient religions.
Speaker 3 (38:59):
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
(39:21):
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,
(39:43):
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.
(40:03):
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,
(40:25):
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,
(40:49):
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
(41:10):
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
(41:30):
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
(41:52):
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
(42:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:37):
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 yeah, in the following episode
or episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, we're going
to dig in a little deeper and look at some
of these specific examples of mystery cults, what we think
(43:00):
they were up to, what is written and known, what
is presumed it should be a fun ride, a high
intensity ride. Oh no, it'll be low key.
Speaker 3 (43:10):
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 way to the Lucinian Mystery.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
Yeah, or on other podcasts, other podcasts maybe ended that,
but that's not really our vibe here. All right, Well,
we hope that you'll join us in those subsequent episodes,
so 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
(43:46):
to hear from you. A reminder of the stuff. To Blow
Your Mind is primarily a science and 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 medias.
Whatever you use, you may find us, and you know,
(44:09):
we'll just leave the mystery there. We're probably there. 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 (44:21):
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
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (45:01):
Predation Ratatatator
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
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 was
(00:40):
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
(01:04):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
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
(01:38):
series is a great book called Mystery Cults in the
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
(02:03):
then saying I have been instructed in a dream not
to say any more about this.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
I can.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
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 2 (02:20):
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 (02:30):
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 to 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.
(02:54):
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
(03:16):
directions at once.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
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,
(03:41):
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 (03:53):
Here, right, And so we need to do work on
both of those words, actually, on mystery and on cult.
So in 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,
(04:14):
extreme 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
(04:35):
religion that requires adherents to cut off contact with loved
ones and the rest of the outside world. Things like that.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
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
(05:04):
held as heretical by larger Christian organizations, which of course
is a tail almost as old as Christianity itself in
many respects.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
And in some cases what the Christians were saying about
those people probably resembled what the Roman Pagans were saying
about the early Christians. You know, they meet in secret,
and they eat babies alive and stuff.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Yeah, and of course all this bleeds over too into
fiction and fantasy. You know, if you play Dungeons and Dragons,
you've 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
(05:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Usually their own proprietary robes and daggers if you loot them.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Yes, yes, yeah. If you get a mini of a cultists,
what do you expect to see a robe and a dagger?
Speaker 3 (06:09):
Those are the 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
(06:33):
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
(06:56):
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,
(07:16):
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.
(07:39):
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
(08:02):
aforementioned products, or things like incense or wine.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
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 (08:18):
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 of the major world religions today.
People who are primarily familiar with religion through Christianity or
Islam or Judaism. The most common form of public religion
(08:42):
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 of the god,
(09:03):
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,
(09:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
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 were aware of this
relationship between these entities we cannot see, but who are
quite powerful over human affairs. And of course we have
(10:09):
to cultivate this relationship. We have to make sure that
they're happy so we can be happy. This is how
the world works.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
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 religions of the
world today, like Christianity and Islam, which place emphasis on
belief and on a form of mental submission to God.
(10:41):
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?
(11:02):
Did you make the sacrifices, did you celebrate the festivals?
Speaker 2 (11:05):
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 (11:15):
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
(11:40):
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
(12:01):
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
(12:23):
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
(12:45):
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
(13:07):
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
(13:31):
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
(13:52):
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 2 (14:01):
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 (14:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
There.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
We're not talking about the you know, the the cultists
of dungeons and dragons. It just means a form of
worship as understood within the ancient Mediterranean. Now, the other
word in a mystery cult is mystery. This is an
(14:47):
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 hidden solution, or there may be no known solution
at all. Sometimes a mystery refers to a thing that
(15:10):
a question that cannot.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
Be answered right unsolved mysteries.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
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 answer a question,
or to access a piece of hidden information. That's not
primarily what's going on with mystery cults. While the Greco
(15:35):
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
(16:00):
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
(16:22):
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
(16:44):
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
(17:04):
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.
(17:30):
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
(17:51):
in the Sherlock Holmes sense. If that distinction makes sense.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Yes, yes, 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 orgea might entail sexuality,
it does not inherently entail sexuality. I was reading a
bit about this in a really nice twenty twenty three
(18:17):
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
(18:40):
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
(19:02):
is again himself French, wrote an entire book on the subject.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
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 2 (19:22):
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 that the movie does contain
a fictional depiction of a Hollywood orgy in the modern sense.
(19:43):
But then one might say, well, 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 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
(20:05):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
Right, 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
(20:46):
themselves were, 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 exactly now.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Again, that book by Hugh Bowden has been one of
our key resources here, and Balden 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 the mainstream religious ecosystem of the ancient Greco Roman world,
and then diving into where the mystery cults fit in
(21:20):
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,
(21:44):
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
(22:06):
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
(22:29):
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.
Speaker 3 (22:45):
Right, 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 Donald's is a franchise, you know they But
that's a little misleading too, because there's top down control
(23:06):
like McDonald's Corporates, that's rules about what franchise owners can do.
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
(23:26):
that god is appreciated and understood in a different place.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
That's right. Yeah, Any given community or city, states, city
state is going to have its own cast 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
(23:50):
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,
(24:12):
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.
(24:34):
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
(24:55):
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
(25:27):
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
(25:49):
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
(26:12):
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
(26:34):
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
(26:56):
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
(27:19):
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
(27:41):
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
(28:04):
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.
(28:27):
So you're potentially using one unseen entity against another in
order to protect.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
Yourself, right the way you might use the demon Pazuzu
to protect yourself against Lamashtu or something like that exactly.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
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
(29:02):
watching us and might not you know, might might wish
us no harm, but also might be hungry.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
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
(29:29):
strong candidate in my view. It seems pretty plausible to me.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
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 (29:51):
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 in the end.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
Yeah, So the gods bout 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
(30:23):
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
via rights and sacrifices.
Speaker 3 (30:45):
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 2 (30:51):
Actually, yeah, he brings up treasure from conquest. You know,
we just got this bunch of gold in and it
seems rvy prisoners, Yeah, and mean 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
(31:12):
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
(31:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (31:45):
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 a bout in frames this
which I thought was interesting, is it's kind of a
way for the humans and the gods to enjoy altogether.
It's a shared festival. So we get the meat and
the gods get to enjoy the smoke rising up from
(32:06):
the burned bones and fat, and the organs that that's
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
(32:28):
pleasing aroma to the Lord. The smoke rises up and
God enjoys the smell.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
Yeah, yeah, I also really liked the way about and
discussed this here, the idea that when these rites 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,
(32:54):
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.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
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
(33:28):
Greco Roman paganism.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
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
(33:53):
like God is closer than your own breath. Yeah, but
another place, and this is perhaps an interesting exams ample.
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
(34:15):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:33):
In the public festival. I mean, Bouten 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
(34:53):
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 2 (35:14):
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
(35:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
Forth, 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 2 (36:08):
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 when I say
they're present, though, we should also point out there would
be likenesses as well, So there would be of statues,
(36:29):
idols and whatnot carried 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,
(36:50):
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
(37:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (37:31):
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 2 (37:49):
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
(38:09):
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 and points out episodic or flash bulb memory rather
(38:33):
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
(38:57):
world of these ancient religions.
Speaker 3 (38:59):
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
(39:21):
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,
(39:43):
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.
(40:03):
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,
(40:25):
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,
(40:49):
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
(41:10):
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
(41:30):
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
(41:52):
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
(42:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:37):
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 yeah, in the following episode
or episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, we're going
to dig in a little deeper and look at some
of these specific examples of mystery cults, what we think
(43:00):
they were up to, what is written and known, what
is presumed it should be a fun ride, a high
intensity ride. Oh no, it'll be low key.
Speaker 3 (43:10):
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 way to the Lucinian Mystery.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
Yeah, or on other podcasts, other podcasts maybe ended that,
but that's not really our vibe here. All right, Well,
we hope that you'll join us in those subsequent episodes,
so 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
(43:46):
to hear from you. A reminder of the stuff. To Blow
Your Mind is primarily a science and 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 medias.
Whatever you use, you may find us, and you know,
(44:09):
we'll just leave the mystery there. We're probably there. 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 (44:21):
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
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
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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