March 4, 2025 • 52 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, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with part
two in our discussion of the mystery religions or mystery
cults of the Ancient Mediterranean. Mystery cult is a category
used by scholars to refer to worship systems in the
ancient Greco Roman world that were centered around powerful, intense
(00:36):
experiences of secretive mystic rights revealed only to the cult's initiates. Now,
in part one of the series, we talked mainly about
the historical context of these rights and some about how
they overlapped with and differed from the most common religious
practices of Greek and Roman polytheism. We also talked about
(00:58):
a book that is going to be one of our
major background sources in these episodes. That is a book
called Mystery Cults in the Ancient World by Hugh Bowden,
who is an ancient historian at King's College, London. This
book was published by Thamson Hudson. The edition both Rob
and I were reading is the one from twenty twenty three.
(01:18):
There was an older edition before that, and today we
wanted to come back and get a little bit deeper
into the mysteries by going beyond the general and looking
at a couple of specific examples.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Yeah, and I feel like one of the really interesting
things about these various mystery cults is that a lot
of the mysteries really do remain, in part because any
knowledge that we have of the ancient world is incomplete,
at least to some degree. But also these guys were
just really good at keeping their mysteries intact in some cases,
(01:52):
and what went on behind closed doors remained behind closed doors,
and we just have to speculate regarding that details of
what say, initiation rights consisted of and what they meant,
both in terms of like personal meaning to the initiate,
but also within like the sort of the larger like
worldview of the particular cult.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
That's right, and we do know a lot of things,
especially about the more public aspects of the mystery religions,
because they often had a kind of you know, public
facing elements and then the hidden elements. And it's particularly
those those secretive hidden elements that you know they are.
There are many cases where we still don't really know
today what they were about We may have some claims
(02:35):
from the ancient world, we may have some pieces of evidence,
but yeah, a lot of mysteries remain.
Speaker 4 (02:41):
Though.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
One thing I do want to mention, it's something we
got into in the last episode, is a bit of
clarification on the role of mystery in mystery religion, because
that can be somewhat misleading and could maybe cause people
to think about the idea of a mystery cult as
a religion where the the main goal is to solve
(03:02):
a kind of information puzzle. It's like to get the
hidden answer to a question, and that really doesn't seem
to be what these mystery religions were primarily about. They
had very elements that we could absolutely call mysterious. There
were secret rights, there were secret sacred objects that were
hidden from view, and all you know, you could only
see what they were if you were initiated. But the
(03:24):
main goal of these religions was, especially as argued by
Bowden in this book, we've been talking about, not primarily
to solve an information puzzle and like learn the secret,
but instead it was to have a profound experience to
take part in these mystic rights, these secret rights that
would cause some kind of experience or encounter directly with
(03:48):
the power of the gods.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
So mystery very much in the sense of the Beatles
album from sixty seven, The Magical Mystery Tour.
Speaker 4 (03:58):
I don't know what sense that would be.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Well, I don't think it really revolves around the particular
puzzle or a particular mystery is there, But it's more,
you know, versed in psychedelic weirdness and yeah, yeah, and
perhaps cryptic meaning. I mean, I am the Walrus, right,
What are we to make of this song? What are
we to make of the imagery associated with it?
Speaker 3 (04:18):
I remember way back when I first heard that, I
was much younger, and the line about the like yellow
custard dripping from a dead dog's eye seemed especially unbeatlesy
to me.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
They get pretty weird, they get pretty weird. There's kind
of the Beatles that you think you know and associate with,
sort of the mainstream understanding of the Beatles, But then
you can really dig into.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
Some weird stuff in there as well, no doubt.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
But setting aside the mysteries of the Beatles, I would
like to turn our attention now to the mysteries of mithraism.
We mentioned, you know, in the last episode, we're talking
very much about the Greco Roman world, and this is
definitely one from the Roman world.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
Right, this is one coming later on the scene than
most of the other examples will we'll end up talking.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
About right, Right, we're talking the first through the fourth
century CE, so it's taking off alongside another brand new religion,
that of the way, centered around the teachings of Jesus Christ.
This would of course come to be known as Christianity
at least by like one hundred CE. But this is
where I should I should throw out that we have
(05:25):
of course mentioned Mithraism in passing or in a few
details on the show. In the past. We mentioned mithra
in our Hogs of Hell episode as well as in
our episodes on Whistling. As I mentioned then, fans of
the Ridley Scott produced sci fi series Raised by Wolves,
which ran twenty twenty through twenty twenty two, we'll also
(05:47):
remember the name as in the fictional future of this series,
it is the predominant religion that is practiced by one
of the key factions in that show. So sort of
like an alternate future where instead of perhaps Christianity taking
off as this influential human religion, what if Mithraism is
(06:09):
the religion that took off and ended up defining a civilization.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
Rob, would it be fair to say, based on what
you've read that it's kind of shocking how little we
know about Mythraism with certainty, given how popular it was
during its heyday in the Roman Empire.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Yeah, that's that is something that impressed me as well,
because we're not talking about something that was just practiced
by say like a few elites, you know, in the
basement of a palace here and there, or something to
that effect, or a few deranged cultists to sort of
imagine the again the sort of Kolakuthulu dungeons and dragons
(06:46):
treatment of cults. Now, this was this was widely practiced
during this time period again, first through fourth century CE,
and it was wildly popular, especially in the Roman army.
H And wherever the Roman army went, so too traveled
the mystery cult of Mithra, with its temples popping up
just throughout the Roman Empire of the time, as far
(07:08):
north as the British Isles. And we have a surviving
archaeological evidence all these special temples, which we'll get back
to in a bit, and we can piece together some
of what went on. Now. One of the interesting things
here that we're going to dig into here is, of course,
the idea that we have a religion, a cult an
(07:31):
organization here, and its ideas are based on pre existing
religious ideas. And for a while, the way historians interpreted
it was to go back to some of the myths
that informed Roman mythraism and use that to try and
piece together what Roman mythraism was all about. So I
(07:51):
want you to keep that in mind as I read
a quote here from an older source. This is from
will Durant Caesar and Christ from nineteen forty four, in
which he writes that during the period of roughly thirty
CE through ninety six CE, one sees a great influx
of foreign faiths and to Rome and Roman life, and
these faiths, he writes, enter into Rome via returning soldiers,
(08:13):
war captives, and also merchants. A lot of people are
coming in and out of Rome. People brought their traditional
gods with them, and he writes that quote. The Roman
government treated these alien faiths for the most part with toleration.
Since it would not permit foreigners to its own worship,
it preferred that they should practice their imported rights rather
(08:35):
than have no religion at all. In return, it required
that each new faith should exercise a similar tolerance towards
other creeds, and should include in its ritual sum obsessence
to the Emperor's genius and the goddess Roma as an
expression of loyalty to the state. So we touched on
this before that. Generally the Romans were like, fine, you
(08:56):
practice whatever faith you already had or have or have
brought with you. Just make sure that it's you know,
checking off the right boxes and you know, not messing
up anything we have going on at the top.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
Not questioning our authority. I don't think that the Roman
rule on this should be seen as generally merciful, because
the Roman Empire for the large part, was not very merciful.
Speaker 4 (09:20):
It was more like they didn't really care about this.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
Their idea of religion was not an evangelical one, and
they were not trying to convince other people to follow it. Instead,
it was just like, you need to obey us and
not cause problems otherwise, practice whatever you want.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Right, Yeah, I think that's a fair way of understanding it. Yeah,
And we don't need to lean into some idea that
the Roman the Roman authorities were just in general super tolerant.
But in this respect, you know, you can make an
argument that, okay, they kind of were, but only because
they didn't care what you're doing, as long as you
didn't upset the order of things. And in this section
(09:56):
of the book by Durant, he does mention Mithra. In Mithraism,
he writes, from hostile Parthia came the cult of another
sudden god, Mithras. Its devotees were enlisted as soldiers in
the great cosmic war of light against darkness, of good
against evil. It was a virile faith that won men
rather than women, and pleased the Roman legions stationed on
(10:18):
distant frontiers where they could hardly hear the voices of
their native gods. So already that's a lot to unpack.
We have this again, this the nineteen forty four text.
But the interpretation that Durant here seems to be making
is that of a foreign mystery cult taken up almost
exclusively by male Roman soldiers, and worshiped in every far
(10:40):
flung corner of the Roman controlled territory. Perhaps some deity
and faith that cast the role of the enlisted not
as mere protectors of Rome, but perhaps his warriors and
some sort of epic struggle against the darkness. All right,
So that was nineteen forty four's interpretation. But where are
we at now, So into Hugh Bowden's mystery Cults in
(11:01):
the Ancient World, which we've been looking at here, the
author does have a lot to say about Mithraism, but
as is often the case with some of these mystery cults,
there's a lot we don't know and we'll never know
concerning the details of the faith. And it seems like
the trend he says, for a while was to try
and use information regarding ancient worship of Mithra in ancient
(11:27):
Iran in the interpretations of this Indo Iranian faith as
a way to try and figure out what Roman Mythraism
was about. Because, to be clear, there was worship of
a deity known as Mithra in ancient Iran and accounts
date back to at least fourteen hundred bcee. And then
eventually Mithra becomes the central figure of these Roman mystery
(11:51):
cults of Mithraism, the details of which again are not
all that forthcoming, but we do have some literary references,
we have archaeological evidence, some of it fairly recent, you know,
and we also have some artistic imagery that has survived,
and from this a fair number of conclusions can be drawn.
But the current predominant interpretation, according to Bowden, is that
(12:14):
the cult of Mithra in the Roman Empire was something
mostly new. It was for the most part for Romans
and by Romans, despite these Persian motifs that were applied
to it. So in previous decades, again, it was common
for historians to try and piece together the details of Mithraism,
based in part on aspects of the ancient Indo Iranian
(12:36):
religion centered around Mithra, but current trends tend to dismiss this.
So in Bowden's chapter on Mithraism, he doesn't mention anything
about soldiers of light against darkness. I'm to assume that
perhaps that's something that previously historians drug in from the
more ancient model of Mithra's worship.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
You know, you can very much see the appeal of
that older interpretive lens, which tries to figure out what
a religion means by searching out the earliest versions of it.
Because we tend to think about the primacy of originals
like originals in time, you know, we've talked about this
coming up before on the podcast when we were talking
(13:19):
about Greek myths. We're trying to find, like, what's the
earliest written version of this so that we can know
what the real version of the myth is, you know,
but that's not actually the real version of the myth.
And finding maybe the earliest version that was written down
that we still have access to and does not tell
you how people hundreds of years later, in a different
(13:40):
time in place understood the story or what it meant.
It just you know that, I mean, it is worth
knowing that tells you one thing, but it doesn't necessarily
tell you that thing. And so searching out what myth,
what a god or a religious figure mint in one
time and place, even though it came earlier, that doesn't
necessarily tell you what it meant to people in a
(14:01):
different time in a different place. And I think this
is still true today. I think actually, say, if you
just went to the New Testament and read the Gospels
and then tried to read from those and predict what
form Christianity would take as practiced, say in the United
States in the twenty first century, you'd be so far off.
(14:23):
You have no idea what to predict from that.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Yeah, yeah, and I think we can point to examples
of this and other major religions as well, and also elsewhere.
I instantly thought to Dracula, perhaps because I had Dracula
on the mind a lot recently. But it's like, imagine
you were to examine the text known as Dracula three thousand.
Let's see what year did Dracula three thousand come out?
Speaker 4 (14:46):
You think I know off the top of my head.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Yeah, I expect you to two thousand and four.
Speaker 4 (14:51):
Okay, okay, okay, that sounds right.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
So imagine you watch a Dracula three thousand and then
you were like, I wish to understand what this film
is trying to say. I am going to read this
book by brim Stoker Dracula, and that shall answer all
my questions. I can take everything is in that book
and apply it to this movie and me, Yeah, to
a certain extent, there might be some useful connections to
(15:13):
be made there, But Dracula. Dracula movies are all built
around the central figure of Dracula, but the textual Dracula
in brim Stoker's original novel might not prove all that
useful and understanding. Some depictions of Dracula in other media,
including Bella Lugosi's Dracula, which we discussed in Weird Hoalse
Cinema recently, or say Marvel Comics Dracula, The Dracula and
(15:34):
Dracula three thousand, or whatever Dracula update you're looking at. Sometimes,
you know, a Dracula movie may just take Dracula out
of it and they're just ignoring everything else thematically, plot wise,
time period and so forth. Like the Dracula in Monster
Squad is only loosely related to the original novel.
Speaker 4 (15:57):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (15:58):
So it may in fact be a very interest exercise
to see which elements from the older version are poured
it into the newer version and which are left behind.
So it's not like it is useless to compare the versions,
but it is not necessary. But understanding the earlier version
does not necessarily tell you what to expect in the
newer version. Say, if we had pages missing from the
(16:20):
you know, all we had was like an incomplete script
of Dracula three thousand. We didn't have the movie, and
we were trying to figure out what was still in there.
Going back to the novel Dracula would not tell us.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
Right, and that would be again assuming that all all
adaptations of Dracula and all Dracula media still holds the
original novel in some regard or looks to it in
some fashion. You know, you can look at all various
examples though, of religions where there is some sort of
old text that remains important and the particular like model
(16:52):
of that religion may still be unrecognizable across time even
though it's based on the book. And in the case
of Roman mythraism, I'm not it's my understanding that we're
not really dealing with any kind of like central texts
that would have been the authority. The main authority would
have been perhaps some collection of myths, but also a
(17:12):
modern understanding of astrology. And so it really sounds like
it takes mithra It takes this Indo Iranian deity and
then creates a new form out of it, you know,
almost kind of like propping up some astrological ideas with
the appeal of this foreign deity and again creating something
(17:37):
new that is by Romans for Romans, likely with its
origin according to Bowden, in Italy, if not in Rome itself,
rather than the frontiers. It was then carried out to
the frontiers by Roman soldiers.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
Hmm.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Okay, So, based on what the evidence we do have
regarding Roman Mythriism, which again involves some texts, some archaeological evidence,
and also some artistic depictions, the cult would have met
(18:14):
in special cave like and sometimes partially cave based chambers.
These were called mithraeum. They were long, windowless rectangles with
chairs or seating down the long walls of the chamber
and so again no windows, so you just had to
depend on torches and or candles, and these would have
(18:36):
illuminated a strongly astrological decor so based on archaeological evidence,
the exclusively male devotees of Mithraism would often join together,
apparently in feasts that included a lot of meat, some wine.
And I have to note that I'm already getting like
a very strong Elks club vibe here. You know, it
(18:58):
sounds just like a men's club where they're all getting
together to drink and eat meat and maybe observe some rights.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
I mean, if you can experience the power of the
gods and just drink with your bros at the same time,
that's a good two for one.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
Yeah. Yeah, So the astrological decor here would have included
depictions of the Sun is vitally important because Mithra is
even in Roman mythrism, a solar deity or a solar figure.
You have the Moon, the planets all coming together in
what we might think of as an astrological model of
(19:33):
the universe. And Balden argues that in the absence of
any key surviving text and only a few myths of
Mithra and his adventures slash live slash mythic existence, modern
understanding of astrology again like this would have been first
through third century understanding of the stars and then the
astrological model of how these stars and planets are impacting
(19:57):
our lives. This would have likely served as the unifying
factor of the religion across you know, its various far
flung forms. You'd see some changes in the way things
were depicted, but in the absence of any kind of
like top down doctrine, this is what you had, And
so a mithraem Again the temple where the Mithra worshipers
(20:21):
held their ceremonies and their feasts. It likely the building
itself likely served as a model, perhaps for further indoctrinization
into the astrological secrets of Mithraism, but also as a
model of the universe and the initiates place in it,
which I think that alone is kind of interesting to
think of in terms of soldiers in the Roman army,
(20:43):
you know, perhaps very close, if not on the frontiers
of this, you know, this vast region, and perhaps feeling
far from home and having some you know, maybe more
specific thoughts and questions about where I am in time
and space, but perhaps those are echoing you greater questions,
and maybe that's where Mithraism comes into their lives with meaning.
(21:06):
Now again, we have a lot of evidence, archaeological evidence
about what may have gone on at some of the
feasts that they had. There's at least one side and
what is now Belgium from the third century that suggests
ritual destruction of wine vessels as well as feasting. I
think they said that perhaps feasting exclusively on male animals,
(21:26):
but also some eels. That Bouten points out they might
not have been able to sex the eels. Maybe they
meant it meat eat only male eels as well, but
at any rate, they ate a lot of meat, they
drank and or ritually destroyed wine vessels. And then he
also says that there's evidence at this one side and
no other side of a wine vessel with a snake
(21:47):
motif that, when heated, would have resulted in steam escaping
from the serpent's mouth. Oh cool, Yeah, pretty cool. But
we don't know what that may or may not mean.
Maybe it was just cool.
Speaker 4 (21:59):
Well.
Speaker 3 (21:59):
I don't want to comment on mythraism specifically, but with
respect to many of the mystery religions, I think cool
on its own may have.
Speaker 4 (22:08):
Been reason enough.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
Again, a lot of these cults I think you could
you could think of as being oriented towards producing profound, exciting,
dazzling sensory experiences.
Speaker 4 (22:24):
And so I don't know, a.
Speaker 3 (22:26):
Snake breathing out wine steam that seems like that. Could
that could be one of those things?
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I should also point out that I
believe the Belgium site indicates potentially potentially a large feast
like something like hundreds of individuals, But for the most part,
the mithraum were understood to be, you know, smaller places
where you would have a more intimate gathering. And if
there were, and you might have like more than one
mithraeum in a given area so that you could keep
(22:53):
the number small, so that that might also stack up
with some of how we're interpreting what the these spaces
and these meetings could have meant to these individuals. You know,
it would have perhaps been a smaller, comfortable meeting and
not necessarily like a grand feast, all right, so about see.
(23:14):
But obviously it can't all be cozy feasts, right because
as we've been discussing, mystery cults also involved at times
harrowing rights of initiation, sites and sounds that were unique
in life that gave you some insight into the inner
workings of the universe or the afterlife or what have you.
(23:37):
And as Bowden points out, there were apparently some rights
involved here. So there were like seven grades of mythraism,
and it's likely that each initiate that each grade of
mythraism involved a different ritual. But we do know a
little bit about the rituals that were involved, most notably
(23:58):
one that involves a sword and crown. For instance, Christian
writer Tertullian, who lived roughly one through two twenty ce
mentions a mithra in right by which the initiatet is
taken into a dark space. Obviously, the mithram and offered
a crown at sword point, and then he is expected
(24:21):
to strike the crown from their own head onto their
own shoulders and proclaim that no Mithra is my crown.
I do not need any other crown but Mithra. And
based on surviving frescoes and some evidence from some pottery,
we also have some vague ideas that the initiate would
have been brought into this ritual space bound and naked,
(24:43):
or at least blindfolded and naked, and then made kneel
for the placement of the crown, and then eventually made
to lay upon the ground or the floor of the mithram,
perhaps held down even And the general interpretation is indeed
that this, at least this grades initial would have been
rather terrifying. You know, you're at sword point, You're naked,
(25:04):
brought in blindfolded again, into a space that is either
a cave or partially a cave, or at least designed
to be as lightless as a cave and lit only
by torches, with also these added astrological signs around you.
Speaker 3 (25:19):
It's funny, especially in this version, thinking about the comparisons
we have two more recent things in our own culture
like this strikes me as part religious ritual but also
just part fraternity initiation.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Yeah, it reminds me. I can't help but think of
the episode of The Simpsons with it. What are there
the stonecutters stonecutters skin? Yeah, yeah, with the very all
the different initiation rights that were all essentially just ritually
spanking each other.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
I mean in our culture, when that is depicted in
media and storytelling, it's usually played for comedy. Now, it's
kind of mocking the silliness of this, but I think
there are some pretty profound psychological reasons why, you know,
why a lot of brotherhoods or groups that are encouraging
(26:05):
people to form a deep bond and commit to secrecy
and things like that, why they involve painful and confusing
initiation processes. And we'll talk about that more as we
go on and discuss some of these other mystery religions.
But it seems like not an accident to me, Like
there's a kind of psychological triggering mechanism involved where when
(26:26):
you've been through some kind of pain and suffering, it
for some reason triggers you to commit more deeply.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Yeah, it's like we just pretended to threaten to kill
you with the sword, but now we're all bros. And
we can have some wines and meat that sort of thing.
That's again oversimplification of what's going on here, but we
can't help withdraw those comparisons. So at the center of
all this we still have this solar deity of sorts,
this Mithra at once the Sun itself and also seemingly
(26:57):
a servant of a greater Sun god, perhaps born out
of an egg. I think a little unsure in some
of these depictions, like if Mithra is supposed to be
emerging from an egg or maybe it's the sun. And
then Mithra rises to chase the lunar bull with a
sword and eventually slay it, and that's where we get
to that symbol.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
Yeah, this is one of the main motifs I was
familiar with, not really knowing that much about Mithraism, but
I knew that there were artistic motifs that involved a
sort of fight or struggle with a giant bull or
maybe being killed by a bull or killing the bull.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
Yes, this is the Taroktini, and it is this recurring
visual motif of Mithraism. In it, we see the unconquered
sun god Mithra dressed in a cloak and what is described.
I don't think he's wearing this in every depiction, but
at least it's more prominent in some a Persian style hat,
(27:55):
and he is grappling a bull and stabbing it through
the neck with his sword. At the same time, a
scorpion is stinging the bulls testicles, and a dog and
a snake are drinking blood from the sword wound. Okay,
all while a sun watches on a moon watches on.
There are also two figures that are present that each
(28:17):
have a torch, and they're sometimes part of this is
two One is holding the torch high, one holding the
torch low. Everything is very astrologically charged here, with these
different symbols having zodiac references entailed. The central idea here, though,
which may not have been revealed or apparent to all
(28:38):
adherents to Mithraism, is that it has to do with
the position of the sun and the constellation Taurus during
the hottest months of the year late July till late August.
So Baldn contends that some elements of this faith may
have originally originated in Eastern Anatolia, but the cult of
Mithraism is again likely originated itself largely in Italy and
(29:02):
likely within Rome, and was then taken out to the
far flung frontiers by Roman soldiers. So and it's also
telling that apparently, despite its foreign elements and inspirations quite
clear inspirations, it was likely considered a very Roman thing
to do, and ultimately it backs up and acknowledges Roman ideals,
(29:25):
and so it likely attracted initiates who wanted to be
more Roman, including foreigners in Rome, which is interesting to
think of. It may have offered some degree of social
upward mobility, but it also doesn't seem to have offered
any notion of privileged status in the afterlife, but instead
likely leaned heavily on an astrology fueled understanding of where
(29:49):
one stood in the world and maybe in the universe
in the larger sense. I mean, but this is just
me spitballing here, but it does like all these elements
they do they do sound like the things that might
be created by people who are having a certain crisis
about like who they are and where they belong in
(30:10):
the world. That might you know, fit in in an
empire that is expanding at the same time absorbing different elements,
you know. And then this this structure of this cult
is built out to sort of give you some level
of assurance and say, no, no, no, don't worry. We know
(30:30):
a lot about the movements of the stars and the planets,
and no matter how you know crazy, everything else is
getting out there, like this can tell you exactly where
you are and who you are in the grand scheme
of things.
Speaker 3 (30:42):
Yeah, the meaning is written in the sky.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
Yeah. But at the same time, also like, hey, this
thing's pretty popular. I want to fit in. I should
probably go to this too. I hear they sometimes have
meat and wine, So you know, I think you have
to factor all these different ideas into it. But it
does sound like the initiation rituals could be very terrifying,
at least based on the way that I am interpreting it,
(31:06):
And it seems like Bowden and others have interpreted maybe
it was played just for giggles, but I doubt it
based on so based on the comparisons we have in
other mystery cults.
Speaker 3 (31:26):
Well, speaking of other cults that would interface perfectly with
things that people in the ancient world wrote about. The
next example that I want to talk about. I don't
know if we'll have a chance to explore everything about
these in today's episode with the time we've got left,
but we can at least start talking about the Elusinian Mysteries,
probably the most famous mystery cult of the Greek world. Now,
(31:51):
we know about the Eleusinian Mysteries from a number of
sources of information, primarily from what ancient authors wrote about them,
including from literature that that attempts to describe things about
them directly, but then also from literature that makes oblique
or incidental reference to them. And it turns out there's
(32:11):
a lot of the latter. I mean, there will just
there will just be little dialogues of Plato where you know,
Socrates says something that implies a certain understanding of what
the Elusinian mysteries meant, but is not meaning to talk
about them directly, not like here, let's have a discourse
about them.
Speaker 2 (32:29):
That's another thing. I guess it's interesting, too important to
realize and discussions. It's like, there's there's stuff that is
forgotten because it was secret, and there's also plenty of
things that were forgotten because it was just common knowledge.
Why would you write that down?
Speaker 4 (32:43):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (32:44):
Also, apart from the ancient written sources, we have some physical,
archaeological remains, especially at eleusis the cult center, including artworks
that depict elements of the associated myth. One example of
the ladder is a marble fred from the sanctuary of
Demeter at el Usus, of which there are copies from
(33:06):
scattered about from the Roman period as well. But rob
I included an image in our outline for you to
look at this marble relief. It shows the goddess's Demeter
and Persephone standing on either side of a nude young man,
and they are just towering over the guy. They're much
bigger than he is. The youth is thought to probably
(33:26):
be a figure named Triptolemus, who is a figure in
mythology sent by Demeter to teach agriculture to the people,
sort of a kind of an intermediary Prometheus of grain
in a way. And one interesting thing about this marble
relief you're looking at, rob is that the Demeter and
Persephone here are they're like holding their hands out as
(33:49):
if they're each holding something out to this naked man,
and their marble fingers probably originally held some kind of object,
but that object or those objects are gone.
Speaker 4 (34:00):
And we don't know what they were.
Speaker 3 (34:01):
Oh hell, so some basic facts to ground us about
the Eleusinian mysteries. They were based out of a city
called Eleusis, which was located in the region of Attica,
only about twenty three kilometers west of the city of Athens,
so pretty close to the city of Athens and also
close to another important ancient city called Megara. The myth
(34:24):
associated with the mystic rights of Eleusis is a version
of the story of Demeter and Persephone. Now, as with
most of the big Greek myths, there are multiple versions
of this story in circulation, with lots of differences in
the narrative. So I am specifically going to be talking
about the version of the story found in the Greek
(34:45):
hymn or poem known as the Homeric Hymn to Demeter,
which was written in dactylic Hexameter, probably sometime between six
fifty and five fifty BCE, and this is the take
on the story that seems to directly implicate the city
of Eleusis. So in this myth, Demeter, the Greek goddess
(35:05):
of agriculture in the harvest, has a daughter with the
god Zeus, and in a lot of versions of the
story the daughter is named Persephone, but in the version
of the story told at Eleusis, the daughter is referred
to only as Corey, Corey or Corey Kri, meaning maiden.
So core and Persephone are basically the same character, but
(35:28):
I'm going to use core in my telling here because
of the Eleusinian connection. So the trouble begins in the
story when Zeus, without the consent of Demeter, allows his
brother Hades, the god of the underworld and the king
of the Dead, to kidnap Demeter's daughter, Corey while she
is out gathering flowers upon a plane, and Hades takes
(35:50):
her away to his subterranean kingdom of the Dead. When
Demeter finds out that her daughter is missing, she spends
nine days scouring the earth, scouring the face of the
earth in grief, searching for her daughter by torchlight. It's
mentioned that she carries a torch and eventually a couple
of other gods, Hecate and Helios, tell Demeter what happened,
(36:13):
and so here we get to the part involving the
city of Eleusis. Demeter, disgusted with Zeus and with the
gods for allowing this to happen to her daughter, she
leaves Mount Olympus disguises herself as a human and then
walks all over the world, and eventually she ends up
in the city of Eleusis, where she meets the family
of a king named King Celius, and she is hired
(36:37):
to work for the king's family as a nurse. Now,
in Bowden's retelling of this myth, there are a number
of great details here that are very cryptic to the
modern reader and sort of fascinating.
Speaker 4 (36:50):
For this reason.
Speaker 3 (36:50):
I love little details where it's like, why include that,
what does that mean? So it says that she is
invited into the house of the family of King Celius.
She has offered a chair to sit, but says no, no, no,
I'll just sit on this stool covered in a fleece instead.
M And then she has offered a cup of wine,
but she refuses the wine and instead accepts a type
(37:13):
of beverage. It's a beverage or perhaps a gruel, the
name of which in Greek is spelled k y k
e o n like kai kion, but I have heard
it pronounced as kukion, so I'm gonna say kukon. It
is made of water grain and herbs. Bowden specifies that
(37:35):
the grain is barley, and the herb is mint. So
think of a kind of beverage or gruel made with
with barley, water and mint.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
Could be good, could be good, could be could be
rather refreshing.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
Remember that drink. We may not It may not be
till the next episode that it comes back, but it
will factor in. At el usis also in here. It
says that Demeter smiles at a joke made by a
woman name I am Bi. Anyway, Demeter in disguise is
hired to nurse the newborn prince in this household. The
newborn prince is named Demophoon, but instead of feeding him
(38:13):
each night in secret, she anoints him with ambrosia and
then exposes him to the fire in the hearth. And
there's a reason for this. This is a process she's
doing to make the boy eventually immortal, so she's sort
of transforming this baby into a god. However, it doesn't
work because one night, Demeter in disguise gets caught. She
(38:37):
gets caught in the middle of doing this by medanaira
Demophoan's mother, who screams in terror, which you can understand
why that would happen, but Demeter, Demeter is not happy
about this, She explains what she was doing, and she says,
you know now that the spell is broken. Now that
you've caught me, Demophoon cannot become immortal. And Demeter is
(38:59):
very angry by this reversal, and she says, Okay, what
you've got to do now to appease me is build
me a temple. Build a temple to me in elyusis,
and I will teach you sacred rights that you need
to do in my honor in order to keep me
from getting really mad. Next, and I mentioned this in
the last episode, Demeter says, all grain on Earth is
(39:21):
going to stop growing right now. This is bad for
humans obviously because we need that to eat, but it's
also bad for the gods because they need to receive
grain as sacrifices from humans. So it seems like this
finally gets Zeus to do something about the problem that
he created. He's like, Demeter, what can I do to
(39:41):
make you happy? And Demeter says, give me my daughter back,
and so Zeus agrees. He sends the messenger god Hermes
to Hades to the underworld to tell him that Corey
the Maiden must be allowed to return to the world above.
But Hades has a trick up his sleeve. Before Corey leaves,
he gives her pomegranate seed, a pomegranate seed from the underworld,
(40:04):
and she eats it, and now having eaten the food
of the underworld, she is ensnared. She cannot permanently leave,
and while she's free to spend two thirds of the
year up above, she has to return to the land
of the dead for one third of each year. And
this myth is often linked to seasonal cycles of growth
(40:26):
in agriculture, though not necessarily with the seasons you're thinking of.
I think the natural way that most people would interpret
it is okay, so the you know, the daughter of
the grain goddess, she can come up to the upper
world during the you know, the spring, in the summer
the warm months, and then in the winter when the
when the plants die after the harvest, she disappears.
Speaker 4 (40:47):
Into the underworld.
Speaker 3 (40:49):
That may be it, but actually Bowden says it could
be the other way around, because in Greece, the hottest
part of the summer was sort of often the least
productive agricultural seeds because things would be very dry, and
the winter was actually used as a It was a
very productive agricultural season, and so maybe sort of that
way around instead of the way we naturally think. But
(41:11):
however it actually lines up with the seasonal timeline. It's
clear to understand why this myth has agricultural significance.
Speaker 4 (41:19):
Anyway.
Speaker 3 (41:20):
At the end of the myth, after being comforted by
her own mother Raya, who is one of the Titans,
Demeter allows the grain to grow again. And then Demeter,
as she promised, comes back to the people of Eleusis
to teach them the mysteries. She teaches them special rights
that they would have to do in her honor. And
(41:40):
then I want to read from What follows is a
translation of a passage in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter,
the version that appears in Bowden's book.
Speaker 4 (41:51):
So it goes, so.
Speaker 3 (41:53):
The whole broad earth grew heavy with leafage and bloom,
and she went to the lawgiver kings Triptolemus and horse Goading, Diocles,
strong Eumolpus, and Celius, leader of hosts, and showed them
the conduct of her sacred matters, and taught her solemn rights,
which one cannot depart from or inquire about, or broadcast
(42:16):
for great awe of the gods restrains us from speaking.
Blessed is he of men on earth who has beheld them,
whereas he that is uninitiated in the rights, or he
that has no part in them, never enjoys a similar
lot down in the musty dark when he is dead.
Speaker 2 (42:33):
Oh wow. So first of all, I love that this
is not for broadcast.
Speaker 4 (42:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:37):
And then but then also, unlike seemingly with our example
of mythraism, this mystery cult does seem to impart some
sort of privileged knowledge of and or destination in the afterlife.
Speaker 3 (42:52):
It does, but I want to complicate that with something
in just a minute here. So yeah, so many interesting
things going on here. The goddess teaches the people of
eleusis the secret rituals, says, you cannot depart from these rituals,
so don't change them, don't give them up. You cannot
ask questions about them, no talking, no questioning, and you
(43:12):
cannot talk about them with the uninitiated. You've got to
keep them a secret only to the people who have
been initiated.
Speaker 4 (43:19):
To the cult.
Speaker 3 (43:20):
And of course, if you are initiated and you get
to witness these rights, you are blessed. If you are
not initiated and know nothing of the mysteries, then you
are not blessed, and you will apparently have a worse
fate in Hades, down in the musty dark. And if
I'm interpreting this right, it does not say that those
who have been blessed by witnessing the rights will not
(43:42):
go to Hades. Instead, it just seems like something is
going to be different from them. You know, it's going
to be better for you. Now to explore that a
little more, this last part about the effect of initiation
(44:05):
to the mystic rights on a person's lot in the afterlife.
That is a major part of how mystery cults have
been understood by later scholars. Was, I think once widely
held that the mystery cults of the reco Roman world
were mainly about improving a person's lot in the afterlife.
(44:26):
But Bowden argues that, at least in some cases, the
evidence is this was not a major focus of the rights,
and that any belief that you would have a better
afterlife by having been initiated was more of a side
effect of having achieved a special closeness or direct encounter
with the gods through the mysteries. It was not the
(44:47):
primary goal or function of the mysteries, so we don't
have evidence that the goal was like to go to
heaven by doing these rituals. It was just kind of
like there were blessings and good things about having this
mystic encounter, about going through the rights, and one of
the things that came with it in some cases was
(45:08):
that it's said that something is better for you after
you die.
Speaker 2 (45:12):
Okay, so again, it's not that you're going to get
a better treatment in the afterlife. It's something maybe a
little more sublime. Hear me out. I don't know if
this is a good a good idea, a good one.
It may not be a good idea. Maybe it's not
a good analogy. But imagine you're going to go see
the Android Lloyd Weber musical Cats, and beforehand, someone who
(45:35):
is wise and knowledgeable comes to you and says, before
you go, read this nineteen thirty nine poetry collection Old
Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Elliott. Just
of course, these are the poems that the musical is
based upon. And you might then ask, oh, if I
read this, will I have better seats? No, you will
not have better seats. Based on reading this, but perhaps
you'll understand the musical more or you'll have some deeper
(45:58):
connection with the musical, and that will enhance the experience
of it. Something to that effect, as opposed to like,
will this secret knowledge actually get me closer to the
front or give me more.
Speaker 3 (46:08):
Legrom Yeah, that may well be a good analogy, except again,
it would not be about reading anything in particular here.
It would be like about having the experience. Maybe instead
it's like should you go to see the play? Like
that's really the thing that it's more like, isn't it.
It's like going to take part in and witness something
kind of be part of a collaborative theatrical experience. But yeah,
(46:30):
I think that's a good way of thinking about it,
because I want to read another thing that an ancient
source that abouten mentions in the book. So you know,
many ancient authors, as we talked about last time, are
unable or unwilling to profane the cult of the Lusinian
Mysteries by sharing the secrets of its hidden rights. So
we don't get you know, many ancient sources where people
(46:51):
are like trying to tell us what happened inside the
inside the secret chamber, but multiple writers attest to the
power of the mysteries and the positive effect they had
on those initiated. One of those passages cited in Bowden
is from the Greek anthology by Crnagoras published that was
(47:13):
written in the first century BCE, and what Krnagoras says
is quote, even if yours has always been a sedentary life,
and you have never sailed the sea nor walked the
roads of the land, you should nevertheless go to Attica
so that you may witness those nights of the festival
of Great Demeter. For then your heart may be free
of care while you live, and lighter when you go
(47:35):
to the land of the dead. Oh wow, yeah, So
whatever happens, it is said by many to be a
powerful experience that is perceived as life altering in a
good way. For a modern comparison, when you read some
of these ancient passages where people talk like this, it's
kind of like how some psychedelic evangelists talk about taking
(47:56):
LSD for the first time you realize your cares and
anxiety are meaningless, you lose your fear of death. Maybe
things like that. It's also kind of the way sometimes
people talk about contemplative practices or experiences that they believe
are spiritually important, like meditation, though the way the mysteries
are described it is a much less regular and more
(48:20):
high intensity experience than meditation usually is, I guess, but
similar kind of descriptions of like a way of opening
the mind, of changing your relationship to life. Your heart
is lighter, and you can be lighter when you go
to the land of the dead.
Speaker 2 (48:35):
Yeah, I mean, in some ways, I'm reminded of going
to a haunted attraction here in our modern world. You know,
go to a haunted house around Halloween, where the various
actors and various tricks will be utilized to scare you
and give you a good laugh. I mean, it is
like a sensory overload experience. And granted it it has
(48:55):
no religious agenda. Well I take that back. Sometimes it
does have a religious agenda.
Speaker 4 (48:59):
But yeah, there are those, Yeah, but.
Speaker 2 (49:01):
In general it does. The idea of just scaring you
doesn't have a religious agenda. But now that I've accidentally
mentioned it, I am reminded, Yeah, maybe there's a case
to be made that like church themed or orchestrated haunted
attractions like small town affairs are kind of in keeping
with mystery cults to some degree, I guess based on
(49:23):
my experience of those Christian haunted house haunted attractions, there
tended to be very little in terms of like supernatural
content in them. Generally they were depicting like real life
ours and not so much like here now you are
witnessing angels, maybe you're witnessing demons, but you know you're
(49:45):
not going to see you glory from the other side.
Speaker 3 (49:48):
I think the common recipe is you get to see
people go into hell, yeah, and that the point of
the hell house also is a persuasive one, like it's
supposed to make you afraid that, oh, I'm to go
to hell like the people in the play here, and
it's going to be scary if I don't say the
Sinner's prayer and get saved or go to this church here,
And so it's like a way, it's like a foot
(50:09):
in the door. It's trying to get you into the
actually the doctrinal religion, the regular, more low intensity experience
of going to this church, whereas with the mysteries, it
seems like the point of the mysteries was the experience
of the mysteries is like that was what it was about.
At least in the case of the Elusinian Mysteries. It
(50:30):
wasn't like a persuasive event to try to get you
into to show up every week. Instead, it was like,
this is why you're here, this is what it's all about.
Speaker 2 (50:40):
There there's often the sense that it's not something you
could even put into words exactly like it was that
level of an experience, not I'm keeping again, not dissimilar
from some of the accounts of psychedelic experiences and paranormal experiences.
Rather different from in that regard compared to a haunted attraction,
(51:01):
where generally you can describe everything quite well once you
leave the facilities.
Speaker 3 (51:07):
All right, So we've talked about a written version of
the myth associating the goddess Demeter with the city of
l Jusis, and we've talked about how people in the
ancient world wrote about the personal effect of being initiated
or attending the mysteries. But what's beyond this, of course,
is to describe the rituals themselves. I think we do
(51:27):
not have time left to do that today, so I
think that should be where we pick up in the
next episode.
Speaker 2 (51:32):
All right, So we'll meet you back here on Thursday
for our continued look at the ancient mystery cults of
the Greco Roman world. In the meantime, we'll remind you
that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science
and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
short form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set
aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird
film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (51:53):
Huge Things, 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, stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (52:15):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with part
two in our discussion of the mystery religions or mystery
cults of the Ancient Mediterranean. Mystery cult is a category
used by scholars to refer to worship systems in the
ancient Greco Roman world that were centered around powerful, intense
(00:36):
experiences of secretive mystic rights revealed only to the cult's initiates. Now,
in part one of the series, we talked mainly about
the historical context of these rights and some about how
they overlapped with and differed from the most common religious
practices of Greek and Roman polytheism. We also talked about
(00:58):
a book that is going to be one of our
major background sources in these episodes. That is a book
called Mystery Cults in the Ancient World by Hugh Bowden,
who is an ancient historian at King's College, London. This
book was published by Thamson Hudson. The edition both Rob
and I were reading is the one from twenty twenty three.
(01:18):
There was an older edition before that, and today we
wanted to come back and get a little bit deeper
into the mysteries by going beyond the general and looking
at a couple of specific examples.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Yeah, and I feel like one of the really interesting
things about these various mystery cults is that a lot
of the mysteries really do remain, in part because any
knowledge that we have of the ancient world is incomplete,
at least to some degree. But also these guys were
just really good at keeping their mysteries intact in some cases,
(01:52):
and what went on behind closed doors remained behind closed doors,
and we just have to speculate regarding that details of
what say, initiation rights consisted of and what they meant,
both in terms of like personal meaning to the initiate,
but also within like the sort of the larger like
worldview of the particular cult.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
That's right, and we do know a lot of things,
especially about the more public aspects of the mystery religions,
because they often had a kind of you know, public
facing elements and then the hidden elements. And it's particularly
those those secretive hidden elements that you know they are.
There are many cases where we still don't really know
today what they were about We may have some claims
(02:35):
from the ancient world, we may have some pieces of evidence,
but yeah, a lot of mysteries remain.
Speaker 4 (02:41):
Though.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
One thing I do want to mention, it's something we
got into in the last episode, is a bit of
clarification on the role of mystery in mystery religion, because
that can be somewhat misleading and could maybe cause people
to think about the idea of a mystery cult as
a religion where the the main goal is to solve
(03:02):
a kind of information puzzle. It's like to get the
hidden answer to a question, and that really doesn't seem
to be what these mystery religions were primarily about. They
had very elements that we could absolutely call mysterious. There
were secret rights, there were secret sacred objects that were
hidden from view, and all you know, you could only
see what they were if you were initiated. But the
(03:24):
main goal of these religions was, especially as argued by
Bowden in this book, we've been talking about, not primarily
to solve an information puzzle and like learn the secret,
but instead it was to have a profound experience to
take part in these mystic rights, these secret rights that
would cause some kind of experience or encounter directly with
(03:48):
the power of the gods.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
So mystery very much in the sense of the Beatles
album from sixty seven, The Magical Mystery Tour.
Speaker 4 (03:58):
I don't know what sense that would be.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Well, I don't think it really revolves around the particular
puzzle or a particular mystery is there, But it's more,
you know, versed in psychedelic weirdness and yeah, yeah, and
perhaps cryptic meaning. I mean, I am the Walrus, right,
What are we to make of this song? What are
we to make of the imagery associated with it?
Speaker 3 (04:18):
I remember way back when I first heard that, I
was much younger, and the line about the like yellow
custard dripping from a dead dog's eye seemed especially unbeatlesy
to me.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
They get pretty weird, they get pretty weird. There's kind
of the Beatles that you think you know and associate with,
sort of the mainstream understanding of the Beatles, But then
you can really dig into.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
Some weird stuff in there as well, no doubt.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
But setting aside the mysteries of the Beatles, I would
like to turn our attention now to the mysteries of mithraism.
We mentioned, you know, in the last episode, we're talking
very much about the Greco Roman world, and this is
definitely one from the Roman world.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
Right, this is one coming later on the scene than
most of the other examples will we'll end up talking.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
About right, Right, we're talking the first through the fourth
century CE, so it's taking off alongside another brand new religion,
that of the way, centered around the teachings of Jesus Christ.
This would of course come to be known as Christianity
at least by like one hundred CE. But this is
where I should I should throw out that we have
(05:25):
of course mentioned Mithraism in passing or in a few
details on the show. In the past. We mentioned mithra
in our Hogs of Hell episode as well as in
our episodes on Whistling. As I mentioned then, fans of
the Ridley Scott produced sci fi series Raised by Wolves,
which ran twenty twenty through twenty twenty two, we'll also
(05:47):
remember the name as in the fictional future of this series,
it is the predominant religion that is practiced by one
of the key factions in that show. So sort of
like an alternate future where instead of perhaps Christianity taking
off as this influential human religion, what if Mithraism is
(06:09):
the religion that took off and ended up defining a civilization.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
Rob, would it be fair to say, based on what
you've read that it's kind of shocking how little we
know about Mythraism with certainty, given how popular it was
during its heyday in the Roman Empire.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Yeah, that's that is something that impressed me as well,
because we're not talking about something that was just practiced
by say like a few elites, you know, in the
basement of a palace here and there, or something to
that effect, or a few deranged cultists to sort of
imagine the again the sort of Kolakuthulu dungeons and dragons
(06:46):
treatment of cults. Now, this was this was widely practiced
during this time period again, first through fourth century CE,
and it was wildly popular, especially in the Roman army.
H And wherever the Roman army went, so too traveled
the mystery cult of Mithra, with its temples popping up
just throughout the Roman Empire of the time, as far
(07:08):
north as the British Isles. And we have a surviving
archaeological evidence all these special temples, which we'll get back
to in a bit, and we can piece together some
of what went on. Now. One of the interesting things
here that we're going to dig into here is, of course,
the idea that we have a religion, a cult an
(07:31):
organization here, and its ideas are based on pre existing
religious ideas. And for a while, the way historians interpreted
it was to go back to some of the myths
that informed Roman mythraism and use that to try and
piece together what Roman mythraism was all about. So I
(07:51):
want you to keep that in mind as I read
a quote here from an older source. This is from
will Durant Caesar and Christ from nineteen forty four, in
which he writes that during the period of roughly thirty
CE through ninety six CE, one sees a great influx
of foreign faiths and to Rome and Roman life, and
these faiths, he writes, enter into Rome via returning soldiers,
(08:13):
war captives, and also merchants. A lot of people are
coming in and out of Rome. People brought their traditional
gods with them, and he writes that quote. The Roman
government treated these alien faiths for the most part with toleration.
Since it would not permit foreigners to its own worship,
it preferred that they should practice their imported rights rather
(08:35):
than have no religion at all. In return, it required
that each new faith should exercise a similar tolerance towards
other creeds, and should include in its ritual sum obsessence
to the Emperor's genius and the goddess Roma as an
expression of loyalty to the state. So we touched on
this before that. Generally the Romans were like, fine, you
(08:56):
practice whatever faith you already had or have or have
brought with you. Just make sure that it's you know,
checking off the right boxes and you know, not messing
up anything we have going on at the top.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
Not questioning our authority. I don't think that the Roman
rule on this should be seen as generally merciful, because
the Roman Empire for the large part, was not very merciful.
Speaker 4 (09:20):
It was more like they didn't really care about this.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
Their idea of religion was not an evangelical one, and
they were not trying to convince other people to follow it. Instead,
it was just like, you need to obey us and
not cause problems otherwise, practice whatever you want.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Right, Yeah, I think that's a fair way of understanding it. Yeah,
And we don't need to lean into some idea that
the Roman the Roman authorities were just in general super tolerant.
But in this respect, you know, you can make an
argument that, okay, they kind of were, but only because
they didn't care what you're doing, as long as you
didn't upset the order of things. And in this section
(09:56):
of the book by Durant, he does mention Mithra. In Mithraism,
he writes, from hostile Parthia came the cult of another
sudden god, Mithras. Its devotees were enlisted as soldiers in
the great cosmic war of light against darkness, of good
against evil. It was a virile faith that won men
rather than women, and pleased the Roman legions stationed on
(10:18):
distant frontiers where they could hardly hear the voices of
their native gods. So already that's a lot to unpack.
We have this again, this the nineteen forty four text.
But the interpretation that Durant here seems to be making
is that of a foreign mystery cult taken up almost
exclusively by male Roman soldiers, and worshiped in every far
(10:40):
flung corner of the Roman controlled territory. Perhaps some deity
and faith that cast the role of the enlisted not
as mere protectors of Rome, but perhaps his warriors and
some sort of epic struggle against the darkness. All right,
So that was nineteen forty four's interpretation. But where are
we at now, So into Hugh Bowden's mystery Cults in
(11:01):
the Ancient World, which we've been looking at here, the
author does have a lot to say about Mithraism, but
as is often the case with some of these mystery cults,
there's a lot we don't know and we'll never know
concerning the details of the faith. And it seems like
the trend he says, for a while was to try
and use information regarding ancient worship of Mithra in ancient
(11:27):
Iran in the interpretations of this Indo Iranian faith as
a way to try and figure out what Roman Mythraism
was about. Because, to be clear, there was worship of
a deity known as Mithra in ancient Iran and accounts
date back to at least fourteen hundred bcee. And then
eventually Mithra becomes the central figure of these Roman mystery
(11:51):
cults of Mithraism, the details of which again are not
all that forthcoming, but we do have some literary references,
we have archaeological evidence, some of it fairly recent, you know,
and we also have some artistic imagery that has survived,
and from this a fair number of conclusions can be drawn.
But the current predominant interpretation, according to Bowden, is that
(12:14):
the cult of Mithra in the Roman Empire was something
mostly new. It was for the most part for Romans
and by Romans, despite these Persian motifs that were applied
to it. So in previous decades, again, it was common
for historians to try and piece together the details of Mithraism,
based in part on aspects of the ancient Indo Iranian
(12:36):
religion centered around Mithra, but current trends tend to dismiss this.
So in Bowden's chapter on Mithraism, he doesn't mention anything
about soldiers of light against darkness. I'm to assume that
perhaps that's something that previously historians drug in from the
more ancient model of Mithra's worship.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
You know, you can very much see the appeal of
that older interpretive lens, which tries to figure out what
a religion means by searching out the earliest versions of it.
Because we tend to think about the primacy of originals
like originals in time, you know, we've talked about this
coming up before on the podcast when we were talking
(13:19):
about Greek myths. We're trying to find, like, what's the
earliest written version of this so that we can know
what the real version of the myth is, you know,
but that's not actually the real version of the myth.
And finding maybe the earliest version that was written down
that we still have access to and does not tell
you how people hundreds of years later, in a different
(13:40):
time in place understood the story or what it meant.
It just you know that, I mean, it is worth
knowing that tells you one thing, but it doesn't necessarily
tell you that thing. And so searching out what myth,
what a god or a religious figure mint in one
time and place, even though it came earlier, that doesn't
necessarily tell you what it meant to people in a
(14:01):
different time in a different place. And I think this
is still true today. I think actually, say, if you
just went to the New Testament and read the Gospels
and then tried to read from those and predict what
form Christianity would take as practiced, say in the United
States in the twenty first century, you'd be so far off.
(14:23):
You have no idea what to predict from that.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Yeah, yeah, and I think we can point to examples
of this and other major religions as well, and also elsewhere.
I instantly thought to Dracula, perhaps because I had Dracula
on the mind a lot recently. But it's like, imagine
you were to examine the text known as Dracula three thousand.
Let's see what year did Dracula three thousand come out?
Speaker 4 (14:46):
You think I know off the top of my head.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Yeah, I expect you to two thousand and four.
Speaker 4 (14:51):
Okay, okay, okay, that sounds right.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
So imagine you watch a Dracula three thousand and then
you were like, I wish to understand what this film
is trying to say. I am going to read this
book by brim Stoker Dracula, and that shall answer all
my questions. I can take everything is in that book
and apply it to this movie and me, Yeah, to
a certain extent, there might be some useful connections to
(15:13):
be made there, But Dracula. Dracula movies are all built
around the central figure of Dracula, but the textual Dracula
in brim Stoker's original novel might not prove all that
useful and understanding. Some depictions of Dracula in other media,
including Bella Lugosi's Dracula, which we discussed in Weird Hoalse
Cinema recently, or say Marvel Comics Dracula, The Dracula and
(15:34):
Dracula three thousand, or whatever Dracula update you're looking at. Sometimes,
you know, a Dracula movie may just take Dracula out
of it and they're just ignoring everything else thematically, plot wise,
time period and so forth. Like the Dracula in Monster
Squad is only loosely related to the original novel.
Speaker 4 (15:57):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (15:58):
So it may in fact be a very interest exercise
to see which elements from the older version are poured
it into the newer version and which are left behind.
So it's not like it is useless to compare the versions,
but it is not necessary. But understanding the earlier version
does not necessarily tell you what to expect in the
newer version. Say, if we had pages missing from the
(16:20):
you know, all we had was like an incomplete script
of Dracula three thousand. We didn't have the movie, and
we were trying to figure out what was still in there.
Going back to the novel Dracula would not tell us.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
Right, and that would be again assuming that all all
adaptations of Dracula and all Dracula media still holds the
original novel in some regard or looks to it in
some fashion. You know, you can look at all various
examples though, of religions where there is some sort of
old text that remains important and the particular like model
(16:52):
of that religion may still be unrecognizable across time even
though it's based on the book. And in the case
of Roman mythraism, I'm not it's my understanding that we're
not really dealing with any kind of like central texts
that would have been the authority. The main authority would
have been perhaps some collection of myths, but also a
(17:12):
modern understanding of astrology. And so it really sounds like
it takes mithra It takes this Indo Iranian deity and
then creates a new form out of it, you know,
almost kind of like propping up some astrological ideas with
the appeal of this foreign deity and again creating something
(17:37):
new that is by Romans for Romans, likely with its
origin according to Bowden, in Italy, if not in Rome itself,
rather than the frontiers. It was then carried out to
the frontiers by Roman soldiers.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
Hmm.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Okay, So, based on what the evidence we do have
regarding Roman Mythriism, which again involves some texts, some archaeological evidence,
and also some artistic depictions, the cult would have met
(18:14):
in special cave like and sometimes partially cave based chambers.
These were called mithraeum. They were long, windowless rectangles with
chairs or seating down the long walls of the chamber
and so again no windows, so you just had to
depend on torches and or candles, and these would have
(18:36):
illuminated a strongly astrological decor so based on archaeological evidence,
the exclusively male devotees of Mithraism would often join together,
apparently in feasts that included a lot of meat, some wine.
And I have to note that I'm already getting like
a very strong Elks club vibe here. You know, it
(18:58):
sounds just like a men's club where they're all getting
together to drink and eat meat and maybe observe some rights.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
I mean, if you can experience the power of the
gods and just drink with your bros at the same time,
that's a good two for one.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
Yeah. Yeah, So the astrological decor here would have included
depictions of the Sun is vitally important because Mithra is
even in Roman mythrism, a solar deity or a solar figure.
You have the Moon, the planets all coming together in
what we might think of as an astrological model of
(19:33):
the universe. And Balden argues that in the absence of
any key surviving text and only a few myths of
Mithra and his adventures slash live slash mythic existence, modern
understanding of astrology again like this would have been first
through third century understanding of the stars and then the
astrological model of how these stars and planets are impacting
(19:57):
our lives. This would have likely served as the unifying
factor of the religion across you know, its various far
flung forms. You'd see some changes in the way things
were depicted, but in the absence of any kind of
like top down doctrine, this is what you had, And
so a mithraem Again the temple where the Mithra worshipers
(20:21):
held their ceremonies and their feasts. It likely the building
itself likely served as a model, perhaps for further indoctrinization
into the astrological secrets of Mithraism, but also as a
model of the universe and the initiates place in it,
which I think that alone is kind of interesting to
think of in terms of soldiers in the Roman army,
(20:43):
you know, perhaps very close, if not on the frontiers
of this, you know, this vast region, and perhaps feeling
far from home and having some you know, maybe more
specific thoughts and questions about where I am in time
and space, but perhaps those are echoing you greater questions,
and maybe that's where Mithraism comes into their lives with meaning.
(21:06):
Now again, we have a lot of evidence, archaeological evidence
about what may have gone on at some of the
feasts that they had. There's at least one side and
what is now Belgium from the third century that suggests
ritual destruction of wine vessels as well as feasting. I
think they said that perhaps feasting exclusively on male animals,
(21:26):
but also some eels. That Bouten points out they might
not have been able to sex the eels. Maybe they
meant it meat eat only male eels as well, but
at any rate, they ate a lot of meat, they
drank and or ritually destroyed wine vessels. And then he
also says that there's evidence at this one side and
no other side of a wine vessel with a snake
(21:47):
motif that, when heated, would have resulted in steam escaping
from the serpent's mouth. Oh cool, Yeah, pretty cool. But
we don't know what that may or may not mean.
Maybe it was just cool.
Speaker 4 (21:59):
Well.
Speaker 3 (21:59):
I don't want to comment on mythraism specifically, but with
respect to many of the mystery religions, I think cool
on its own may have.
Speaker 4 (22:08):
Been reason enough.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
Again, a lot of these cults I think you could
you could think of as being oriented towards producing profound, exciting,
dazzling sensory experiences.
Speaker 4 (22:24):
And so I don't know, a.
Speaker 3 (22:26):
Snake breathing out wine steam that seems like that. Could
that could be one of those things?
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I should also point out that I
believe the Belgium site indicates potentially potentially a large feast
like something like hundreds of individuals, But for the most part,
the mithraum were understood to be, you know, smaller places
where you would have a more intimate gathering. And if
there were, and you might have like more than one
mithraeum in a given area so that you could keep
(22:53):
the number small, so that that might also stack up
with some of how we're interpreting what the these spaces
and these meetings could have meant to these individuals. You know,
it would have perhaps been a smaller, comfortable meeting and
not necessarily like a grand feast, all right, so about see.
(23:14):
But obviously it can't all be cozy feasts, right because
as we've been discussing, mystery cults also involved at times
harrowing rights of initiation, sites and sounds that were unique
in life that gave you some insight into the inner
workings of the universe or the afterlife or what have you.
(23:37):
And as Bowden points out, there were apparently some rights
involved here. So there were like seven grades of mythraism,
and it's likely that each initiate that each grade of
mythraism involved a different ritual. But we do know a
little bit about the rituals that were involved, most notably
(23:58):
one that involves a sword and crown. For instance, Christian
writer Tertullian, who lived roughly one through two twenty ce
mentions a mithra in right by which the initiatet is
taken into a dark space. Obviously, the mithram and offered
a crown at sword point, and then he is expected
(24:21):
to strike the crown from their own head onto their
own shoulders and proclaim that no Mithra is my crown.
I do not need any other crown but Mithra. And
based on surviving frescoes and some evidence from some pottery,
we also have some vague ideas that the initiate would
have been brought into this ritual space bound and naked,
(24:43):
or at least blindfolded and naked, and then made kneel
for the placement of the crown, and then eventually made
to lay upon the ground or the floor of the mithram,
perhaps held down even And the general interpretation is indeed
that this, at least this grades initial would have been
rather terrifying. You know, you're at sword point, You're naked,
(25:04):
brought in blindfolded again, into a space that is either
a cave or partially a cave, or at least designed
to be as lightless as a cave and lit only
by torches, with also these added astrological signs around you.
Speaker 3 (25:19):
It's funny, especially in this version, thinking about the comparisons
we have two more recent things in our own culture
like this strikes me as part religious ritual but also
just part fraternity initiation.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Yeah, it reminds me. I can't help but think of
the episode of The Simpsons with it. What are there
the stonecutters stonecutters skin? Yeah, yeah, with the very all
the different initiation rights that were all essentially just ritually
spanking each other.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
I mean in our culture, when that is depicted in
media and storytelling, it's usually played for comedy. Now, it's
kind of mocking the silliness of this, but I think
there are some pretty profound psychological reasons why, you know,
why a lot of brotherhoods or groups that are encouraging
(26:05):
people to form a deep bond and commit to secrecy
and things like that, why they involve painful and confusing
initiation processes. And we'll talk about that more as we
go on and discuss some of these other mystery religions.
But it seems like not an accident to me, Like
there's a kind of psychological triggering mechanism involved where when
(26:26):
you've been through some kind of pain and suffering, it
for some reason triggers you to commit more deeply.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Yeah, it's like we just pretended to threaten to kill
you with the sword, but now we're all bros. And
we can have some wines and meat that sort of thing.
That's again oversimplification of what's going on here, but we
can't help withdraw those comparisons. So at the center of
all this we still have this solar deity of sorts,
this Mithra at once the Sun itself and also seemingly
(26:57):
a servant of a greater Sun god, perhaps born out
of an egg. I think a little unsure in some
of these depictions, like if Mithra is supposed to be
emerging from an egg or maybe it's the sun. And
then Mithra rises to chase the lunar bull with a
sword and eventually slay it, and that's where we get
to that symbol.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
Yeah, this is one of the main motifs I was
familiar with, not really knowing that much about Mithraism, but
I knew that there were artistic motifs that involved a
sort of fight or struggle with a giant bull or
maybe being killed by a bull or killing the bull.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
Yes, this is the Taroktini, and it is this recurring
visual motif of Mithraism. In it, we see the unconquered
sun god Mithra dressed in a cloak and what is described.
I don't think he's wearing this in every depiction, but
at least it's more prominent in some a Persian style hat,
(27:55):
and he is grappling a bull and stabbing it through
the neck with his sword. At the same time, a
scorpion is stinging the bulls testicles, and a dog and
a snake are drinking blood from the sword wound. Okay,
all while a sun watches on a moon watches on.
There are also two figures that are present that each
(28:17):
have a torch, and they're sometimes part of this is
two One is holding the torch high, one holding the
torch low. Everything is very astrologically charged here, with these
different symbols having zodiac references entailed. The central idea here, though,
which may not have been revealed or apparent to all
(28:38):
adherents to Mithraism, is that it has to do with
the position of the sun and the constellation Taurus during
the hottest months of the year late July till late August.
So Baldn contends that some elements of this faith may
have originally originated in Eastern Anatolia, but the cult of
Mithraism is again likely originated itself largely in Italy and
(29:02):
likely within Rome, and was then taken out to the
far flung frontiers by Roman soldiers. So and it's also
telling that apparently, despite its foreign elements and inspirations quite
clear inspirations, it was likely considered a very Roman thing
to do, and ultimately it backs up and acknowledges Roman ideals,
(29:25):
and so it likely attracted initiates who wanted to be
more Roman, including foreigners in Rome, which is interesting to
think of. It may have offered some degree of social
upward mobility, but it also doesn't seem to have offered
any notion of privileged status in the afterlife, but instead
likely leaned heavily on an astrology fueled understanding of where
(29:49):
one stood in the world and maybe in the universe
in the larger sense. I mean, but this is just
me spitballing here, but it does like all these elements
they do they do sound like the things that might
be created by people who are having a certain crisis
about like who they are and where they belong in
(30:10):
the world. That might you know, fit in in an
empire that is expanding at the same time absorbing different elements,
you know. And then this this structure of this cult
is built out to sort of give you some level
of assurance and say, no, no, no, don't worry. We know
(30:30):
a lot about the movements of the stars and the planets,
and no matter how you know crazy, everything else is
getting out there, like this can tell you exactly where
you are and who you are in the grand scheme
of things.
Speaker 3 (30:42):
Yeah, the meaning is written in the sky.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
Yeah. But at the same time, also like, hey, this
thing's pretty popular. I want to fit in. I should
probably go to this too. I hear they sometimes have
meat and wine, So you know, I think you have
to factor all these different ideas into it. But it
does sound like the initiation rituals could be very terrifying,
at least based on the way that I am interpreting it,
(31:06):
And it seems like Bowden and others have interpreted maybe
it was played just for giggles, but I doubt it
based on so based on the comparisons we have in
other mystery cults.
Speaker 3 (31:26):
Well, speaking of other cults that would interface perfectly with
things that people in the ancient world wrote about. The
next example that I want to talk about. I don't
know if we'll have a chance to explore everything about
these in today's episode with the time we've got left,
but we can at least start talking about the Elusinian Mysteries,
probably the most famous mystery cult of the Greek world. Now,
(31:51):
we know about the Eleusinian Mysteries from a number of
sources of information, primarily from what ancient authors wrote about them,
including from literature that that attempts to describe things about
them directly, but then also from literature that makes oblique
or incidental reference to them. And it turns out there's
(32:11):
a lot of the latter. I mean, there will just
there will just be little dialogues of Plato where you know,
Socrates says something that implies a certain understanding of what
the Elusinian mysteries meant, but is not meaning to talk
about them directly, not like here, let's have a discourse
about them.
Speaker 2 (32:29):
That's another thing. I guess it's interesting, too important to
realize and discussions. It's like, there's there's stuff that is
forgotten because it was secret, and there's also plenty of
things that were forgotten because it was just common knowledge.
Why would you write that down?
Speaker 4 (32:43):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (32:44):
Also, apart from the ancient written sources, we have some physical,
archaeological remains, especially at eleusis the cult center, including artworks
that depict elements of the associated myth. One example of
the ladder is a marble fred from the sanctuary of
Demeter at el Usus, of which there are copies from
(33:06):
scattered about from the Roman period as well. But rob
I included an image in our outline for you to
look at this marble relief. It shows the goddess's Demeter
and Persephone standing on either side of a nude young man,
and they are just towering over the guy. They're much
bigger than he is. The youth is thought to probably
(33:26):
be a figure named Triptolemus, who is a figure in
mythology sent by Demeter to teach agriculture to the people,
sort of a kind of an intermediary Prometheus of grain
in a way. And one interesting thing about this marble
relief you're looking at, rob is that the Demeter and
Persephone here are they're like holding their hands out as
(33:49):
if they're each holding something out to this naked man,
and their marble fingers probably originally held some kind of object,
but that object or those objects are gone.
Speaker 4 (34:00):
And we don't know what they were.
Speaker 3 (34:01):
Oh hell, so some basic facts to ground us about
the Eleusinian mysteries. They were based out of a city
called Eleusis, which was located in the region of Attica,
only about twenty three kilometers west of the city of Athens,
so pretty close to the city of Athens and also
close to another important ancient city called Megara. The myth
(34:24):
associated with the mystic rights of Eleusis is a version
of the story of Demeter and Persephone. Now, as with
most of the big Greek myths, there are multiple versions
of this story in circulation, with lots of differences in
the narrative. So I am specifically going to be talking
about the version of the story found in the Greek
(34:45):
hymn or poem known as the Homeric Hymn to Demeter,
which was written in dactylic Hexameter, probably sometime between six
fifty and five fifty BCE, and this is the take
on the story that seems to directly implicate the city
of Eleusis. So in this myth, Demeter, the Greek goddess
(35:05):
of agriculture in the harvest, has a daughter with the
god Zeus, and in a lot of versions of the
story the daughter is named Persephone, but in the version
of the story told at Eleusis, the daughter is referred
to only as Corey, Corey or Corey Kri, meaning maiden.
So core and Persephone are basically the same character, but
(35:28):
I'm going to use core in my telling here because
of the Eleusinian connection. So the trouble begins in the
story when Zeus, without the consent of Demeter, allows his
brother Hades, the god of the underworld and the king
of the Dead, to kidnap Demeter's daughter, Corey while she
is out gathering flowers upon a plane, and Hades takes
(35:50):
her away to his subterranean kingdom of the Dead. When
Demeter finds out that her daughter is missing, she spends
nine days scouring the earth, scouring the face of the
earth in grief, searching for her daughter by torchlight. It's
mentioned that she carries a torch and eventually a couple
of other gods, Hecate and Helios, tell Demeter what happened,
(36:13):
and so here we get to the part involving the
city of Eleusis. Demeter, disgusted with Zeus and with the
gods for allowing this to happen to her daughter, she
leaves Mount Olympus disguises herself as a human and then
walks all over the world, and eventually she ends up
in the city of Eleusis, where she meets the family
of a king named King Celius, and she is hired
(36:37):
to work for the king's family as a nurse. Now,
in Bowden's retelling of this myth, there are a number
of great details here that are very cryptic to the
modern reader and sort of fascinating.
Speaker 4 (36:50):
For this reason.
Speaker 3 (36:50):
I love little details where it's like, why include that,
what does that mean? So it says that she is
invited into the house of the family of King Celius.
She has offered a chair to sit, but says no, no, no,
I'll just sit on this stool covered in a fleece instead.
M And then she has offered a cup of wine,
but she refuses the wine and instead accepts a type
(37:13):
of beverage. It's a beverage or perhaps a gruel, the
name of which in Greek is spelled k y k
e o n like kai kion, but I have heard
it pronounced as kukion, so I'm gonna say kukon. It
is made of water grain and herbs. Bowden specifies that
(37:35):
the grain is barley, and the herb is mint. So
think of a kind of beverage or gruel made with
with barley, water and mint.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
Could be good, could be good, could be could be
rather refreshing.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
Remember that drink. We may not It may not be
till the next episode that it comes back, but it
will factor in. At el usis also in here. It
says that Demeter smiles at a joke made by a
woman name I am Bi. Anyway, Demeter in disguise is
hired to nurse the newborn prince in this household. The
newborn prince is named Demophoon, but instead of feeding him
(38:13):
each night in secret, she anoints him with ambrosia and
then exposes him to the fire in the hearth. And
there's a reason for this. This is a process she's
doing to make the boy eventually immortal, so she's sort
of transforming this baby into a god. However, it doesn't
work because one night, Demeter in disguise gets caught. She
(38:37):
gets caught in the middle of doing this by medanaira
Demophoan's mother, who screams in terror, which you can understand
why that would happen, but Demeter, Demeter is not happy
about this, She explains what she was doing, and she says,
you know now that the spell is broken. Now that
you've caught me, Demophoon cannot become immortal. And Demeter is
(38:59):
very angry by this reversal, and she says, Okay, what
you've got to do now to appease me is build
me a temple. Build a temple to me in elyusis,
and I will teach you sacred rights that you need
to do in my honor in order to keep me
from getting really mad. Next, and I mentioned this in
the last episode, Demeter says, all grain on Earth is
(39:21):
going to stop growing right now. This is bad for
humans obviously because we need that to eat, but it's
also bad for the gods because they need to receive
grain as sacrifices from humans. So it seems like this
finally gets Zeus to do something about the problem that
he created. He's like, Demeter, what can I do to
(39:41):
make you happy? And Demeter says, give me my daughter back,
and so Zeus agrees. He sends the messenger god Hermes
to Hades to the underworld to tell him that Corey
the Maiden must be allowed to return to the world above.
But Hades has a trick up his sleeve. Before Corey leaves,
he gives her pomegranate seed, a pomegranate seed from the underworld,
(40:04):
and she eats it, and now having eaten the food
of the underworld, she is ensnared. She cannot permanently leave,
and while she's free to spend two thirds of the
year up above, she has to return to the land
of the dead for one third of each year. And
this myth is often linked to seasonal cycles of growth
(40:26):
in agriculture, though not necessarily with the seasons you're thinking of.
I think the natural way that most people would interpret
it is okay, so the you know, the daughter of
the grain goddess, she can come up to the upper
world during the you know, the spring, in the summer
the warm months, and then in the winter when the
when the plants die after the harvest, she disappears.
Speaker 4 (40:47):
Into the underworld.
Speaker 3 (40:49):
That may be it, but actually Bowden says it could
be the other way around, because in Greece, the hottest
part of the summer was sort of often the least
productive agricultural seeds because things would be very dry, and
the winter was actually used as a It was a
very productive agricultural season, and so maybe sort of that
way around instead of the way we naturally think. But
(41:11):
however it actually lines up with the seasonal timeline. It's
clear to understand why this myth has agricultural significance.
Speaker 4 (41:19):
Anyway.
Speaker 3 (41:20):
At the end of the myth, after being comforted by
her own mother Raya, who is one of the Titans,
Demeter allows the grain to grow again. And then Demeter,
as she promised, comes back to the people of Eleusis
to teach them the mysteries. She teaches them special rights
that they would have to do in her honor. And
(41:40):
then I want to read from What follows is a
translation of a passage in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter,
the version that appears in Bowden's book.
Speaker 4 (41:51):
So it goes, so.
Speaker 3 (41:53):
The whole broad earth grew heavy with leafage and bloom,
and she went to the lawgiver kings Triptolemus and horse Goading, Diocles,
strong Eumolpus, and Celius, leader of hosts, and showed them
the conduct of her sacred matters, and taught her solemn rights,
which one cannot depart from or inquire about, or broadcast
(42:16):
for great awe of the gods restrains us from speaking.
Blessed is he of men on earth who has beheld them,
whereas he that is uninitiated in the rights, or he
that has no part in them, never enjoys a similar
lot down in the musty dark when he is dead.
Speaker 2 (42:33):
Oh wow. So first of all, I love that this
is not for broadcast.
Speaker 4 (42:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:37):
And then but then also, unlike seemingly with our example
of mythraism, this mystery cult does seem to impart some
sort of privileged knowledge of and or destination in the afterlife.
Speaker 3 (42:52):
It does, but I want to complicate that with something
in just a minute here. So yeah, so many interesting
things going on here. The goddess teaches the people of
eleusis the secret rituals, says, you cannot depart from these rituals,
so don't change them, don't give them up. You cannot
ask questions about them, no talking, no questioning, and you
(43:12):
cannot talk about them with the uninitiated. You've got to
keep them a secret only to the people who have
been initiated.
Speaker 4 (43:19):
To the cult.
Speaker 3 (43:20):
And of course, if you are initiated and you get
to witness these rights, you are blessed. If you are
not initiated and know nothing of the mysteries, then you
are not blessed, and you will apparently have a worse
fate in Hades, down in the musty dark. And if
I'm interpreting this right, it does not say that those
who have been blessed by witnessing the rights will not
(43:42):
go to Hades. Instead, it just seems like something is
going to be different from them. You know, it's going
to be better for you. Now to explore that a
little more, this last part about the effect of initiation
(44:05):
to the mystic rights on a person's lot in the afterlife.
That is a major part of how mystery cults have
been understood by later scholars. Was, I think once widely
held that the mystery cults of the reco Roman world
were mainly about improving a person's lot in the afterlife.
(44:26):
But Bowden argues that, at least in some cases, the
evidence is this was not a major focus of the rights,
and that any belief that you would have a better
afterlife by having been initiated was more of a side
effect of having achieved a special closeness or direct encounter
with the gods through the mysteries. It was not the
(44:47):
primary goal or function of the mysteries, so we don't
have evidence that the goal was like to go to
heaven by doing these rituals. It was just kind of
like there were blessings and good things about having this
mystic encounter, about going through the rights, and one of
the things that came with it in some cases was
(45:08):
that it's said that something is better for you after
you die.
Speaker 2 (45:12):
Okay, so again, it's not that you're going to get
a better treatment in the afterlife. It's something maybe a
little more sublime. Hear me out. I don't know if
this is a good a good idea, a good one.
It may not be a good idea. Maybe it's not
a good analogy. But imagine you're going to go see
the Android Lloyd Weber musical Cats, and beforehand, someone who
(45:35):
is wise and knowledgeable comes to you and says, before
you go, read this nineteen thirty nine poetry collection Old
Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Elliott. Just
of course, these are the poems that the musical is
based upon. And you might then ask, oh, if I
read this, will I have better seats? No, you will
not have better seats. Based on reading this, but perhaps
you'll understand the musical more or you'll have some deeper
(45:58):
connection with the musical, and that will enhance the experience
of it. Something to that effect, as opposed to like,
will this secret knowledge actually get me closer to the
front or give me more.
Speaker 3 (46:08):
Legrom Yeah, that may well be a good analogy, except again,
it would not be about reading anything in particular here.
It would be like about having the experience. Maybe instead
it's like should you go to see the play? Like
that's really the thing that it's more like, isn't it.
It's like going to take part in and witness something
kind of be part of a collaborative theatrical experience. But yeah,
(46:30):
I think that's a good way of thinking about it,
because I want to read another thing that an ancient
source that abouten mentions in the book. So you know,
many ancient authors, as we talked about last time, are
unable or unwilling to profane the cult of the Lusinian
Mysteries by sharing the secrets of its hidden rights. So
we don't get you know, many ancient sources where people
(46:51):
are like trying to tell us what happened inside the
inside the secret chamber, but multiple writers attest to the
power of the mysteries and the positive effect they had
on those initiated. One of those passages cited in Bowden
is from the Greek anthology by Crnagoras published that was
(47:13):
written in the first century BCE, and what Krnagoras says
is quote, even if yours has always been a sedentary life,
and you have never sailed the sea nor walked the
roads of the land, you should nevertheless go to Attica
so that you may witness those nights of the festival
of Great Demeter. For then your heart may be free
of care while you live, and lighter when you go
(47:35):
to the land of the dead. Oh wow, yeah, So
whatever happens, it is said by many to be a
powerful experience that is perceived as life altering in a
good way. For a modern comparison, when you read some
of these ancient passages where people talk like this, it's
kind of like how some psychedelic evangelists talk about taking
(47:56):
LSD for the first time you realize your cares and
anxiety are meaningless, you lose your fear of death. Maybe
things like that. It's also kind of the way sometimes
people talk about contemplative practices or experiences that they believe
are spiritually important, like meditation, though the way the mysteries
are described it is a much less regular and more
(48:20):
high intensity experience than meditation usually is, I guess, but
similar kind of descriptions of like a way of opening
the mind, of changing your relationship to life. Your heart
is lighter, and you can be lighter when you go
to the land of the dead.
Speaker 2 (48:35):
Yeah, I mean, in some ways, I'm reminded of going
to a haunted attraction here in our modern world. You know,
go to a haunted house around Halloween, where the various
actors and various tricks will be utilized to scare you
and give you a good laugh. I mean, it is
like a sensory overload experience. And granted it it has
(48:55):
no religious agenda. Well I take that back. Sometimes it
does have a religious agenda.
Speaker 4 (48:59):
But yeah, there are those, Yeah, but.
Speaker 2 (49:01):
In general it does. The idea of just scaring you
doesn't have a religious agenda. But now that I've accidentally
mentioned it, I am reminded, Yeah, maybe there's a case
to be made that like church themed or orchestrated haunted
attractions like small town affairs are kind of in keeping
with mystery cults to some degree, I guess based on
(49:23):
my experience of those Christian haunted house haunted attractions, there
tended to be very little in terms of like supernatural
content in them. Generally they were depicting like real life
ours and not so much like here now you are
witnessing angels, maybe you're witnessing demons, but you know you're
(49:45):
not going to see you glory from the other side.
Speaker 3 (49:48):
I think the common recipe is you get to see
people go into hell, yeah, and that the point of
the hell house also is a persuasive one, like it's
supposed to make you afraid that, oh, I'm to go
to hell like the people in the play here, and
it's going to be scary if I don't say the
Sinner's prayer and get saved or go to this church here,
And so it's like a way, it's like a foot
(50:09):
in the door. It's trying to get you into the
actually the doctrinal religion, the regular, more low intensity experience
of going to this church, whereas with the mysteries, it
seems like the point of the mysteries was the experience
of the mysteries is like that was what it was about.
At least in the case of the Elusinian Mysteries. It
(50:30):
wasn't like a persuasive event to try to get you
into to show up every week. Instead, it was like,
this is why you're here, this is what it's all about.
Speaker 2 (50:40):
There there's often the sense that it's not something you
could even put into words exactly like it was that
level of an experience, not I'm keeping again, not dissimilar
from some of the accounts of psychedelic experiences and paranormal experiences.
Rather different from in that regard compared to a haunted attraction,
(51:01):
where generally you can describe everything quite well once you
leave the facilities.
Speaker 3 (51:07):
All right, So we've talked about a written version of
the myth associating the goddess Demeter with the city of
l Jusis, and we've talked about how people in the
ancient world wrote about the personal effect of being initiated
or attending the mysteries. But what's beyond this, of course,
is to describe the rituals themselves. I think we do
(51:27):
not have time left to do that today, so I
think that should be where we pick up in the
next episode.
Speaker 2 (51:32):
All right, So we'll meet you back here on Thursday
for our continued look at the ancient mystery cults of
the Greco Roman world. In the meantime, we'll remind you
that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science
and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
short form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set
aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird
film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (51:53):
Huge Things, 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, stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (52:15):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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