The Religious Thought of the Greeks, from Homer to the Triumph of Christianity

by Clifford Herschel Moore

According to the Mithraic doctrine the divine essence in man survived, and was susceptible of rewards and punishments after this life. When the body died the emissaries from heaven and the powers of darkness contended for the possession of the soul. It stood on trial before Mithras, the final judge. If the man had been impure, his soul was dragged below for torture, but if virtuous, then his soul rose to the celestial regions. At this point we come upon a doctrine which seems to be foreign to Mazdaism, and which was doubtless borrowed from alien sources. The heavens were conceived to be seven spheres presided over by the seven planets, the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn. In each sphere was a gate guarded by an angel of Ormuzd. To open these gates magic names and passwords were necessary, which were known only to the initiates. The souls of men were thought to have descended from the empyrean through these spheres, receiving from the planets that presided over them the passions and qualities which they exhibited when incarnate on earth. As the righteous soul returned, it dropped at each stage of its ascent its earthly passions and faculties like garments, until, stripped and pure, it entered into eternal bliss. In the realms of everlasting light beyond the stars, it enjoyed the companionship of the gods themselves.

With this concept of the final fate of the soul there was inconsistently united a doctrine of a final resurrection of the flesh when the world should come to an end. It may be that the sublimated doctrine of the bliss of the purified soul did not appeal to the ordinary man, and that, therefore, there was introduced from some external source this belief that the whole man, flesh and spirit alike, would ultimately enjoy a blissful existence. In any case the Mithraist believed that the struggle between the contending powers of good and evil was not to continue forever; that in the fullness of time the evil powers would destroy the world, but that Mithras would once more descend, wake the dead, and separate the good from the evil; with a new communion he would then confer immortality on all the just, while the wicked would be consumed with Ahriman and his fiends, and Mithras would reign in a new and sinless world forever.

These are some of the essential features of Mithraism. It was a religion which called for unceasing effort, for action on the part of men, and which promised them divine aid in their efforts. It is little wonder that it was popular in the Roman Empire, or that it appealed to soldiers and to civilians alike. The remains of its chapels and the dedications to its god furnish more abundant evidence than we possess for any other oriental religion. Although in common with other cults of this sort it had fallen into decay in the provinces of the western world before the end of the third century, yet it was kept alive by the pagan revival at Rome until nearly 400 a.d.

In the cult of the Great Mother of the Gods and Attis also there developed certain rites which gave the promise of security here and of salvation after death—the greatest religious concern of the opening centuries of the Roman Empire. Down to the close of the Republic the Great Mother apparently exerted no very wide or deep influence on the people. She had quickly accomplished the purpose for which she had been brought in 204 b.c., and therefore, with the exceptions of which I spoke earlier in this lecture, her worship was left to the Phrygian priests. Attis certainly played a small part at Rome before the Empire, but by the second century of our era, if not before, he overshadowed to a considerable extent the Great Goddess herself.

The story of Attis has many forms in detail, due no doubt to original local differences and to the influences of later environment. The kernel of the literary myth is as follows: Attis, a beautiful shepherd, was loved by the Great Goddess; when he refused her advances, he was driven mad by her, and in his frenzy mutilated himself at the foot of a pine tree, into which his spirit departed, while from his blood sprang violets. But in answer to the prayers of the mourning goddess Attis was presently restored to life. The primitive elements from which this myth developed we need not now discuss, but it will be sufficient to note that in Attis, as in Adonis, we have an eastern vegetation-divinity, a god who dies and lives again, thus becoming a symbol of man’s resurrection into immortality and an earnest of his hope. The parallel cases of Osiris, Dionysus, and Persephone will also occur to all.

In honor of Attis a spring festival was held in which the drama of the myth was repeated by the priests and devotees. This festival was introduced at Rome during the reign of Claudius (41-54 a.d.), from which time the god’s importance there may be dated.[293] The celebration began on March 15, which is designated in a calendar of the fourth century by Canna intrat. These obscure words must be brought into connection with the colleges of the Cannophori, “reed-bearers,” which are known to us from inscriptions, but the significance of the day is not clear; apparently it is to be connected with the story of the discovery of the infant Attis, who had been exposed among the reeds by the banks of the river Gallus. On March 22, Arbor intrat, the dendrophori, “tree-bearers,” cut down a pine tree and in solemn procession brought its trunk, decorated with violets and woolen fillets, to the temple of the Great Mother on the Palatine. This act was obviously in memory of the pine tree into which the spirit of Attis passed at his death. Two days later came the “day of blood,” Sanguen, dies Sanguinis, which marked the height of the mourning for Attis. Stimulated by wild music and dances, the Galli scourged themselves with whips loaded with pieces of bone or metal, slashed their arms with knives, offering their blood on the altar of the goddess, while the would-be Galli mutilated themselves. The whole period from the first day was a time of sorrow, during which fasting and continence were required; it was followed on March 25th, Hilaria, “rejoicing,” by the wildest outbursts of joy in celebration of the resurrection of Attis.[294] The next day was that of “rest,” Requietio; and on the 27th, the festival closed with the solemn bathing in the brook Almo of the sacred meteoric stone, which was the symbol of the Great Mother. It is clear that this festival, centering in the spring equinox, had its origin in rites which were intended to recall the vegetation from its winter’s death into vernal life again, but like other similar festivals it had long had a deeper meaning before it came to Rome. As the Orphic devotee by participation in the holy rites became a Bacchus, the Isiac an Osiris, so here the orgiastic participant became an Attis and received assurance of his own resurrection. The result was identical in all essentials with that in other mysteries.

But from the second century of our era there was celebrated in the western part of the Roman Empire another mystic rite in the worship of the Great Mother to which we must now turn our attention for a moment. I mean that ritual of purification and regeneration by means of the blood of a slain bull which the ancients called the taurobolium. Without much doubt this rite developed from the sacrifice of a bull to the Great Mother, such as was made annually on March 15 at Rome. But the taurobolium was no ordinary sacrifice. It is first mentioned in the west in an inscription from Puteoli of 134 a.d.;[295] thence it quickly spread to Rome, from there to Lyons; and it was celebrated in many parts of the western provinces during the second and third centuries. Like the other oriental rites it lived on at Rome long after it had died in the provinces, the last celebration being near the close of the fourth century. One of the earliest places at Rome for the performance of the taurobolium was in the Vatican district close by the circus erected by the Emperor Caligula and enlarged by Nero. There, certainly from the time of Antoninus Pius to the end of the fourth century, this purifying and regenerating ritual was performed, never with more passionate hope of its efficacy than during the fourth century, when for some seventy years this pagan shrine and St. Peter’s first basilica stood side by side, fanes of the dying faith and of the triumphing religion. It stirs the imagination to recall that when in the early seventeenth century certain changes were being made in the present St. Peter’s, a considerable number of inscriptions were discovered buried in the ground, recording the celebration of the taurobolium by members of the nobility after the first St. Peter’s had been built.[296] So side by side the two rival religions contended for the mastery.

The two descriptions of the ritual we have date from the fourth century.[297] The one who was to be purified, after first laying aside his ordinary garments and dressing himself in rags as a suppliant and beggar, descended into a pit. This was covered with planks pierced with holes; then the sacred bull was slain over the planks that his blood, falling on the devotee, might cleanse him and give him freedom from his sin. The recipient endeavored to have every part of his person—especially his eyes, nose, and ears—washed by the cleansing streams; he opened his mouth to catch the falling blood and swallowed it. When he issued forth from the pit, dripping with his horrible purification, he was greeted by his fellow consecrates as one who had been born again. Usually the efficacy of the new birth given by the taurobolium was thought to last only twenty years (renatus in XX annos), at the expiration of which time the ritual was apparently repeated;[298] once, however, we have the confident assertion that the devotee was “born again for eternity.”[299]

In all these mystic rites there were many common elements. First, all gave assurance of the salvation of the soul through the exact performance of the rites of initiation and through the ritual of service. As we have earlier seen, philosophy, especially Neopythagoreanism and Neoplatonism, aimed at the same object as these oriental faiths; the means were different but the end was one. The devotee of Mithras, of Isis, of Cybele and Attis,—whatever the god might be—believed that by initiation he had been born into a new life, that the rites which he celebrated had a purifying power, and that they protected him against the assaults of evil spirits. Furthermore his religious life was constantly fed and nourished by membership in a brotherhood which was consecrated and set apart from the rest of the world, as well as by regular services within the shrine of his divinity. Again the gods of Greece and Rome required only occasional and rare service; the Orientals claimed the whole of a man’s life: not only at the great festivals but apparently at daily matins and vespers they received the praise and worship of their followers. The priests were no longer civilians, sharing in the ordinary life of their communities, but persons withdrawn for the divine service, distinguished by their dress and other signs. Moreover these oriental mystic religions were practically universal, in spite of the fact that only men were admitted to the mysteries of Mithras; membership in the sacred associations did not depend on birth, wealth, or learning, but on devotion. Advance in religious proficiency was usually marked by different grades, to which the devotee received a divine call. In these initiations the individual obtained direct revelations which gave him knowledge and freedom. He was made to feel his relation to the universe both visible and invisible, and to find himself in unity with it. Rebirth into a new life, constant support of faith through membership in a sacred community and by religious services, confident assurance of salvation—these were the common characteristics of the oriental religions which go far to explain their hold on the Roman world in the early centuries of our era.

The question may well be asked how far these religions inculcated morality and what their ethical characters were. It is certainly true that originally they were not moral or concerned with morality any more than most other religions have been; indeed in the stories of Cybele and Attis, of Isis and Osiris, and of many other gods, there were obscene elements almost as offensive to the enlightened ancient as to us. Mithraism on the other hand was singularly free from coarse myths. In time the baser tales were allegorized and their symbolism universally accepted, so that, as St. Augustine tells us, the ancient stories were interpreted to the people for their moral edification. Isis became the everpresent divine mother and kind providence; Serapis was a god of gracious pity toward men; the Great Mother laid aside her wild Phrygian character and changed into the beneficent mother of all Nature, while Attis became the Sun-god, the common symbol of all-embracing divinity. With such changes as these came a response to what we may call secular ethics, and there can be no question that from the second century of our era at least the oriental faiths taught a morality which would win our approval in large measure today. There were indeed many elements in them which made for righteousness. The concept of divinity as a kindly providence which cared for the individual and exacted the same good qualities from man, the unremitting devotion demanded of the devotees, the sense of moral pollution and the longing for moral purification, the shifting of men’s eyes from the material gains of this world to the ideal rewards of the next—all these and many other things gave to the oriental cults distinct and positive ethical and spiritual values. Furthermore, the self-restraint, the gentle asceticism, the obligation to strive unceasingly on the side of righteousness against the evil powers, which these religions imposed, are not to be neglected. Within the religious bodies, whose members were brothers (fratres, consecranei) the individual learned submission to the head of the society (pater), gained self-control and courage for his struggle against the evils of life. No one can read the evidence we possess and not be impressed by the earnestness and devotion of the faithful. That the oriental religions actually contributed to the higher moral and spiritual life of the Roman Empire during the second, third, and fourth centuries is certain.