A Short History of Christianity / Second Edition, Revised, With Additions

by J. M. Robertson

These mysteries were twofold. In the spring time Attis figured as a self-slain youth, beloved by Cybelê, the Mother of the Gods, and devoted to her cultus. Later in the year he figured as Papas, “Father,” and Lord of All; and in this aspect he was more important than Cybelê, who was throned beside him in the mystic drama, with a crowd of women around. The initiate became mystes Atteos, the initiate of Attis; and at this stage the God was adored as the bringer of peace to a disorderly world. But “many were the thyrsus-bearers; few were the mystæ”: it was the spring festival that dwelt in the common knowledge and memory; and then it was that, after a day of procession and mourning, a day of solemn rites, and a “day of blood” on which the high-priest cut his arms and presented his blood as an offering, the slain Demigod rose from the dead, and all was rejoicing for his resurrection. It was the great Phrygian festival; and though the Romans, in introducing the worship of the Great Mother while Hannibal maintained himself in Italy, nominally accepted her alone, it was impossible that the allied worship of Attis should be excluded from the later mysteries. The galli or mutilated priests, who figured in her Hilaria festival, were in fact the God’s representatives. Thus his was one of the popular cults of the later Roman world.

Bound Adonis, the Tammuz of old Assyria, there had played for long ages a more tender devotion. For the Syrians his name meant “the Lord” (=the Adonai of the Hebrew Bible); and over the tale of his untimely slaughter by the boar on Mount Lebanon the Eastern women had yearly wept for a hundred generations. The “women weeping for Tammuz” in the temple of Jerusalem before the exile were his worshippers; and in the Athens of the days of the Peloponnesian war he received the same litany of mourning. For his sacred city of Byblos he was as it were the soul and symbol of the yearly course of Nature; the annual reddening of the Adonis river by the spring floods being for his devotees a mystery of his shed blood. Then came the ritual of grief, in which his wooden and painted effigy, lying with that of Aphroditê, the Goddess who loved him, took the place of the victim in the older rite in which he too was doubtless slain “for the people.” The “gardens of Adonis,” shallow trays in which various green plants grew quickly and as quickly died, had been originally charms to hasten the fertility of the spring, like the sacrifice itself; but long custom made them mere symbols of untimely death, and the cult was one of pathos and compassion, passing in the usual way to exultation and gaiety when, after his effigies had been thrown as corpses into the sea or the springs, the God rose from the dead on the third day, and in the presence of his worshippers, by some mummery of make-believe or mechanical device, was represented as ascending to heaven. As in the cult of Attis, it was women who “found” the risen Lord, whose death they had mourned.

In such worships, it will be seen, much depended on the spirit of sex, which was evoked by the pairing of God and Goddess, a common principle of the ancient Semitic pantheon, here subtilized by romance. Such myths as those of Attis and Adonis, indeed, lent themselves to contrary emotions, the amorous and the ascetic passions figuring in the devotees by turns. Thus the very eunuch priests who represented the extremity of anti-sexualism were credited with a mania of licentiousness; and on the other hand the Great Mother, who in the primitive myth was enamoured of Attis, and yet in one version mutilated him, was by her graver devotees regarded in a holier light. So even Aphroditê, the lover of Adonis, had her supernal aspect as Urania; and the legend of the indifference of Adonis, like that of the self-mutilation of Attis, conveyed a precept and pattern of chastity. Everywhere, as the world grew sophisticated, and the primitive simplicity of appetite was overborne by pessimism and asceticism, the cruder cults tended to become refined and the Goddess-worships grew in dignity. At the sacred city of Hierapolis, in Syria, there was long worshipped a Goddess of immemorial fame, round whose history there floated myths like those of Cybelê and Aphroditê, Attis and Adonis, but whose prestige was apparently maintained rather by minimising than by retailing them. In her cult all the worshippers were wont to puncture their hands or necks, probably in mystic imitation of a slain Demigod such as Attis, connected with her legend; and in her service ascetic priests or hermits ascended phallic pillars to win sanctity by vigils of a week long. Thus was set up for the Goddess a religious renown comparable to that of Yahweh of Jerusalem, bringing multitudes of strangers to her every festival, and filling the treasuries of her priests with gifts.

Of kindred character and equivalent range with the cults of Attis and Adonis was that of Dionysos, the most many-sided of the divinities adopted by the Greeks from Asia. Figuring first as Bacchus, a Thracian God of beer,[2] and later as the God of wine, he seems to have made way in early Greece partly by virtue of the sheer frenzy set up in his women worshippers by unwonted potations. But such phenomena caused their own correction; and the adoption of the cult by the cities brought it within the restraining sway of Greek culture. Of all the older Greek worships, the most popular was that (perhaps oriental in origin) of Dêmêtêr and Persephonê, the Mourning Mother and the Virgin Daughter, who had primarily signified mother earth and the seed corn; and with their worship in the great Eleusinian mysteries was bound up that of Dionysos. Son of Zeus and the Virgin Goddess Persephonê or the mortal virgin Semelê—for the myths were legion—he was carried in effigy as a new-born babe in a manger-basket on the eve of the winter solstice. In this capacity he was pre-eminently the Babe-God, Iacchos, “the suckling.” Further, he figures in one myth as being torn to pieces by the Titans,[3] and as restored to life or reborn (after Zeus has terribly avenged him) by his mother Semelê (really an old Earth-Goddess) or by the Mother-Goddess, Dêmêtêr; wherefore he is represented as a suckling at Dêmêtêr’s breast. In the triennial dramatic mysteries in his honour an eating of raw flesh by the devotees was held to commemorate his sacrificial death, which was, however, mystically conceived to mean the making of wine from grapes. In other and commoner forms of the sacred banquet, the wine figured specially as his blood, and the bread as Dêmêtêr=Ceres; and in this transparent form the symbolism of “body and blood” was a household word among the Romans. In their popular religion, being assimilated to an ancient Roman God, the Wine-God was known as Liber, “the child,” as “Father Liber,” and as Bacchus, while Ceres or Proserpine was paired with him as Libera. The doctrine, found among the Manichæans in the fourth century, that “Jesus hangs on every tree,” is in all likelihood a development from this worship, in which Dionysos was God of the vine in particular, but of all vegetation besides. For such mystics as wrote and conned the Orphic hymns, however, he was a God of manifold potency; and there centred round him a whole theosophy of ascetic ethic, in which the ideal of the worshipper was to strive, suffer, and conquer in common with the God, who was the giver of immortality.

Of his cult in particular it is difficult to grasp any general significance, so inextricably did it become entwined with others, in particular with the Phrygian cult of Sabazios,[4] and with the Corybantic mysteries, in connection with which are to be traced a whole series of local deities of the same stamp as those under notice, just as the myth of Apollo can be seen to have absorbed a whole series of local Sun-Gods. Thus the mortal Jasion or Iasious is slain by Zeus for being the lover of Cybelê, who however bears to him a divine son, Korybas; and he in turn figures also as the son of the Virgin Persephonê, and without father, human or divine. In the Orphic hymns Korybas is the mighty Lord of the underworld, who frees the spirit from all terrible visions, a giver of blessedness and of sorrow, a God of double nature. So Dionysos, like the Hindu Fire-God Agni, is born of two mothers; and like Hermes and Herakles he has descended to Hades and returned, victorious over death. In all such cults alike is to be noted the gradual emergence of the relation of maternity as well as paternity, the Mother Goddess coming more and more to the front as such; while the Son-God, in the case of Dionysos and Dêmêtêr, tends to overshadow or supersede the Daughter-Goddess, who in Rome had twinned with Bacchus under their names of Liber and Libera.

In the case of the far-famed cult of Osiris, again, there gradually took place a similar transformation. In the oldest Egyptian lore, Osiris is at once the brother and the husband of Isis, who, when he is slain and dismembered by Typhon, gathers together the scattered limbs for burial. Thereafter their son, Horus (who in turn had been found dead in his floating cradle and reborn by his mother), avenges his father, who remains Judge of the Dead in the underworld. But as the cult develops, Horus, who in one of his aspects—perhaps originally signifying different deities—is an adult and powerful God, becomes specially the child of Isis and Osiris, and is typically represented as a suckling at his mother’s breast, or as the babe born like Jesus on the eve of the winter solstice; while Osiris remains the suffering God, to be mourned and rejoiced over; and it is to him that the devotee turns in the mysteries for the mystic regeneration, which involved a worship of the Osirian cross, the emblem of the God. “I clasp the sycamore tree,” says the Osirified soul in the Book of the Dead; “I myself am joined unto the sycamore tree, and its arms are opened unto me graciously.” But Osiris in turn “shall establish as prince and ruler his son Horus”; and the soul in the underworld, in some rituals, becomes one with Horus, as in others with Osiris. Out of the medley there emerged for the popular mind the dominant impressions of Osiris as the Saviour and Judge of the Dead; of Isis as the Queen of Heaven, the Sorrowing Goddess, the Mother-Goddess; and of Horus as the Divine Son, Hor-pa-khrot, “Horus the Child,” of whom the Greeks in their fanciful way made a Harpocrates, the God of Silence, misunderstanding the symbol of the finger in the mouth, which for the Egyptians meant merely childhood. As we have seen, the Osirian cult and that of Serapis, grafted on it in the time of the Ptolemies, made popular the symbol of the cross long before Christianity, and prepared for the latter religion in many other ways.

Perhaps its closest counterpart, however, was its most tenacious rival, the worship of the Persian Sun-God Mithra, first introduced into Rome in the time of Pompey, whose troops received it from the Cilician pirates, the débris of the army of Mithridates, whom he conquered and enlisted in the Roman service. Mithra being the most august of all the Gods of war, his worship became the special religion of the Roman army. Apart from its promise of immortality, its fascination lay in its elaborate initiations, baptisms, probations, sacraments, and mysteries, which were kept at a higher level of moral stringency than those of almost any of the competing cults. The God was epicene or bisexual, having a male and a female aspect; and there seems to have been no amorous element in his myth at the Christian period. Unless it be decided that such rituals had prevailed all over the East, the Christian eucharist must be held to have been a direct imitation of that of Mithraism, which it so closely resembled that the early Fathers declared the priority of the rival sacrament to be due to diabolic agency. But the Christian rite, as we have seen, had old Palestinian roots, going back to sheer human sacrifice. The Mithraist ritual, indeed, appears to have been the actual source of part of the Christist mystery-play, inasmuch as Mithra, whose special epithet was “the Rock,” was liturgically represented as dead, buried in a rock tomb, mourned over, and raised again amid rejoicing. For the Mithraists also the sign of the cross, made on the forehead, was the supreme symbol; and it was mainly their cult which established the old usage of calling the Sun-day, the first of the week, “the day of the Lord,” Mithra as the Sun being the first of the seven planetary spirits on whose names the week was based. In the third century, the chief place of the cult in the empire was on the Vatican mount at Rome; and there it was that Christian legend located the martyrdom of Peter, who, as we have seen, was assimilated to Mithra both in name and in attributes.[5]

In a special degree the Osirian and Dionysian and Mithraic cults seem to have insisted on the doctrine of immortality correlatively with the doctrine of eternal punishment; and insofar as Mithraism is to be known from the present form of the Zendavesta, which is but a revised portion of the older Mazdean literature, it appealed to the imagination on this side at least as winningly as did the Jesuist literature in respect, for instance, of the Apocalypse. Mithra was the God of the upper and the nether world, the keeper of the keys of heaven and hell, of life and death; and, like Osiris, he was the judge of men’s deeds. Like the other Saviour-cults, too, Mithraism anticipated Christism in evolving the attraction of a Mother-Goddess, the worship of Cybelê being adapted to his as it had been to that of Attis. In one other aspect it seems to have run closely parallel to early Jesuism. The singular phrase in the Apocalypse about garments “washed in the blood of the Lamb” points to an early Jesuist use of the practice of the kriobolium, which with the taurobolium was one of the most striking of the Mithraic rites. In these repulsive ceremonies the ram or bull—always young, on the principle that the sacrifice must be pure—was slain over a grating, so that the blood dripped on the initiate, who was placed in a pit beneath, and who was instructed to wear the blood-stained garment for some days. It was believed that the ceremony had a supreme saving grace; and the initiate was solemnly described as in æternum renatus, “born again for eternity.” In regard to both animals the symbolism was partly astronomical, having latterly reference to the sun’s entrance into the constellations of the Bull and the Ram at different stages of his course. Mithra’s oldest and best-known symbol was the bull; but inasmuch as the sun had anciently been seen by the Chaldean astronomers to be in the constellation Aries at the spring season, the beginning of the ancient year, the lamb had long been likewise adopted into the mysteries of the solar cults. About the beginning of the Christian era the year-opening constellation was Pisces; and the Divine Fish accordingly figures to a great extent in early Christian symbols.

As we have seen, the primordial Jesuism, with its Lamb “slain from the founding of the world,” probably conceived of its deity in terms of the astronomical symbol; but the prominence given by Mithraism to the blood-ritual would serve to bring that into disuse among the Gentile Christists, whose creed further made Jesus the final paschal sacrifice, and reduced the apocalyptic phrase to a moral metaphor. Nonetheless, the rites and theories of the great pagan cults, all of which flourished in Palestine itself in the pre-Roman period, must be recognized as factors in its creation.

How completely Christianity belongs to the world of religious ideas in which it arose may be realised, finally, by a glance at the worship of the Roman Emperor, already established before the Christian era. In Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, written about 40 B.C., there is sung for Romans the universal myth of the coming Child, who is to be Saviour and Lord of a rejuvenated earth, and whom Virgil was ready to identify with the nephew of Augustus. But in the same period he sings of Augustus as already divine; and Augustus in due course exploited for himself the whole idea. Not only did he, like Alexander, set in currency the typical fable of his mother’s intercourse with Apollo, and a Roman version of the ancient myth which in the gospels becomes the story of the Massacre of the Innocents: in edicts which are in part actually preserved on monuments he gave himself out in the East as a God and Saviour whose birthday was henceforth to be celebrated as the beginning of an evangel to the world, and who was to make an end of war and disorder. Later emperors continued the expedient, which had been well tried by Persian and Egyptian kings in previous ages.