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In the first generations of the Imperial age, the antique polytheism gradually dissolved, often without any alteration of outward ritual and mythic form, into the Magian monotheism.[[503]] A new soul had come up, and it lived the old forms in a new mode. The names continued, but they covered other numina.
In all Late-Classical cults, those of Isis and Cybele, of Mithras and Sol and Serapis, the divinity is no longer felt as a localized and formable being. In old times, Hermes Propylæus had been worshipped at the entrance of the Acropolis of Athens, while a few yards away, at the point where later the Erechtheum was built, was the cult-site of Hermes as the husband of Aglaure. At the South extremity of the Roman Capitol, close to the sanctuary of Juppiter Feretrius (which contained, not a statue of the god, but a holy stone, silex[[504]]) was that of Juppiter Optimus Maximus, and when Augustus was laying down the huge temple of the latter he was careful to avoid the ground to which the numen of the former adhered.[[505]] But in Early Christian times Juppiter Dolichenus or Sol Invictus[[506]] could be worshipped “wheresoever two or three were gathered together in his name.” All these deities more and more came to be felt as a single numen, though the adherents of a particular cult would believe that they in particular knew the numen in its true shape. Hence it is that Isis could be spoken of as the “million-named.” Hitherto, names had been the designations of so many gods different in body and locality, now they are titles of the One whom every man has in mind.
This Magian monotheism reveals itself in all the religious creations that flooded the Empire from the East—the Alexandrian Isis, the Sun-god favoured by Aurelian (the Baal of Palmyra), the Mithras protected by Diocletian (whose Persian form had been completely recast in Syria), the Baalath of Carthage (Tanit, Dea Cælestis[[507]]) honoured by Septimius Severus. The importation of these figures no longer increases as in Classical times the number of concrete gods. On the contrary, they absorb the old gods into themselves, and do so in such a way as to deprive them more and more of picturable shape. Alchemy is replacing statics. Correspondingly, instead of the image we more and more find symbols—e.g., the Bull, the Lamb, the Fish, the Triangle, the Cross—coming to the front. In Constantine’s “in hoc signo vinces” scarcely an echo of the Classical remains. Already there is setting in that aversion to human representation that ended in the Islamic and Byzantine prohibitions of images.
Right down to Trajan—long after the last trait of Apollinian world-feeling had departed from the soil of Greece—the Roman state-worship had strength enough to hold to the Euclidean tendency and to augment its world of deities. The gods of the subject lands and peoples were accorded recognized places of worship, with priesthood and ritual, in Rome, and were themselves associated as perfectly definite individuals with the older gods. But from that point the Magian spirit began to gain ground even here, in spite of an honourable resistance which centred in a few of the very oldest patrician families.[[508]] The god-figures as such, as bodies, vanished from the consciousness of men, to make way for a transcendental god-feeling which no longer depended on sense-evidences; and the usages, festivals and legends melted into one another. When in 217 Caracalla put an end to all sacral-legal distinctions between Roman and foreign deities and Isis, absorbing all older female numina, became actually the first goddess of Rome[[509]] (and thereby the most dangerous opponent of Christianity and the most obnoxious target for the hatred of the Fathers), then Rome became a piece of the East, a religious diocese of Syria. Then the Baals of Doliche, Petra, Palmyra and Edessa began to melt into the monotheism of Sol, who became and remained (till his representative Licinius fell before Constantine) God of the Empire. By now, the question was not between Classical and Magian—Christianity was in so little danger from the old gods that it could offer them a sort of sympathy—but it was, which of the Magian religions should dictate religious form to the world of the Classical Empire? The decline of the old plastic feeling is very clearly discernible in the stages through which Emperor-worship passed—first, the dead emperor taken into the circle of State gods by resolution of the Senate (Divus Julius, 42 B.C.), a priesthood provided for him and his image removed from amongst the ancestor-images that were carried in purely domestic celebrations; then, from Marcus Aurelius, no further consecrations of priests (and, presently, no further building of temples) for the service of deified emperors, for the reason that religious sentiment was now satisfied by a general “templum divorum”; finally, the epithet Divus used simply as a title of members of the Imperial family. This end to the evolution marks the victory of the Magian feeling. It will be found that multiple names in the inscriptions (such as Isis-Magna Mater-Juno-Astarte-Bellona, or Mithras-Sol Invictus-Helios) come to signify titles of one sole existent Godhead.[[510]]