The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus

by John Stuart Hay

Unfortunately, the very rule which had made for political greatness was now robbing men of every liberating interest, was leaving society sterile and empty. As a consequence of this, each generation was becoming less wishful to think, and less capable of thought; not that the intellect of Rome had by any means descended to that ultimate plane of intelligence from which it was ready to enslave itself under the retrograde tendencies of Eastern theistic beliefs. Rome, the mistress of the world, had seen good in all Gods; she had acknowledged and included in her worship the philosophies and deities of all nations, tribes, and tongues; every force, natural, physical, and political, was represented at her altars. Rome was comprehensively, sceptically Polytheist, when to her palaces flocked the engineers, astronomers, and philosophers of that vast empire. It was only to the common people, possessed as they were by beliefs in non-human powers, in beings that beset life with malignity, that the restoration of cults and ritual commended itself, and even they were eclectic in their tastes and fancies.

Despite pulpit learning, we know that Rome was no more attracted by those doctrines of the universal socialistic brotherhood which had emanated from Nazareth, than she was by the system of the ecstatic visionary from Tarsus, who was destined—by a more systematic and regular development of his revelations—to capture the freedom of the earlier intellectual religions, as soon as the world’s hoary wisdom, having lost its virility, was involved in the dotage of an unreasoning antiquity.

In the long run we know that the mob triumphed, and that every religion of the West was orientalised, every superstition and neurotic tendency developed, and philosophy was brought to its knees utterly debased, until its function was merely to be the apologist of all that superstition taught or did. For the present, rational thinking men were alive. When they died, exclusive monotheism came, carrying before it, like a flood, the greatness of the former world. But the issue was still uncertain. Had Elagabalus lived; had the beauty and impressiveness of his Semitic ritual made its way; had time been given for men to grasp his idea of one vast, beneficent, divine power, into the empire of whose central authority men might escape from the thousand and one petty marauders of the spirit world, they might have been attracted to the worship of life and light instead of enmeshed by the seductive force of obscure and impossible dogmas, tempted by the bait of an elusive socialism and a problematical futurity.

It was not that Rome, atheist or religious, objected to the worship of Baal. She had her own and a round dozen other Jupiters, as men conceived him to be, and was quite ready to include him amongst the number. The trouble was that rational thinking men could not bring their minds to conceive of any supreme potency in the world, outside man himself; while religious persons had each his own particular conceit in the way of deities, all of which the new Emperor, with more zeal than discretion, proceeded to make subject to his own Lord’s will.

But there was obviously more than mere amalgamation in Antonine’s scheme. We have already pointed out the Emperor’s position of supremacy over the old cults, and discussed the disintegrating tendency of the mystical and independent monotheisms, which was already apparent even in the city itself. The danger which these new religions imported into political life lay in the establishment of an imperium over the souls of men, which, based on superstitious terrors rather than on any appeal to reason or logic, claimed an authority over the mind equal to that of the State over the persons of its subjects.

The main attraction of these forms of faith lay in their ability to supply men with a personal and spiritual religion, which, being free from State intervention, was able to incite its adherents to rebellion, against any policy of which its priesthood disapproved, on spiritual or even on financial grounds. Statesmen had long recognised the danger, and were obviously attempting to cope with the new forces. Antonine’s proposal was one for the extension of his jurisdiction (as Pontifex Maximus) to the new monotheisms, by the amalgamation of these with the older worships over which his authority as Pontifex Maximus was unchallenged. If he had succeeded he would have exerted his headship of religion in much the same fashion as Elizabeth Tudor—claiming a similar headship—exerted hers in the sixteenth century. This policy meant the appointment of State officials endowed with the wealth, titles, and a portion of the vesture of those old prelates, who had by their traditions and claims to magical powers, coerced, and indeed still coerce the minds of the credulous to the disintegration of the State. Antonine foreshadowed what Tudor greatness effected; namely, the erection of a State church, whose business it was to replace an independent priesthood which fostered fanaticism, by a race of civil servants who would restrain and modify superstition, turning all dangerous and harmful elements in the religious life into useful and philanthropic energies, concerning whose profit it would take an anchorite to disagree.

We have traced the steps by which Antonine proceeded to carry out his policy of amalgamation. The erection of that superb and gigantic temple in the XIth region; the summer residence for his God near the Porta Praenestina; and the procession, in which all men and most of the Gods took part, have been catalogued already. It was, however, this very amalgamation to which Rome, atheist and religious, objected. Antonine could have done what pleased him in the way of introducing a new worship; he might have caused all men to assist at his ceremonies, and no one would have objected; but to desecrate the older religions, and deprive them of their treasured possessions, was an offence against all canons of Roman taste.

There can be little doubt that one by one the temples were despoiled of their chief objects of veneration in order that these might contribute to Baal’s glory, and attract more worshippers to his shrine. It was in this way that the Emperor designed to extinguish all the other cults in the city, and so leave his God supreme; but persecution would have been preferable to contempt. Elagabal’s temple was indeed a perfect museum of ecclesiastical relics, all ad majorem dei gloriam; still it did not attract, because it was contrary to the whole spirit of the time; no one demanded a monotheistic creed, and, though all the worships of the city should be comprehended in that of Elagabal, men could not raise devotion towards an amalgamation which, they felt, was neither good deity nor good philosophy.

Undoubtedly the Emperor was most eager. Why he did not persecute in order to attain his end was a mystery, until men understood something of his psychology. He would go (according to Lampridius) to any lengths of personal inconvenience in order that he might further his plan, but would put no one else to unnecessary discomfort or loss. We are told that his desire to obtain the sacred objects from the temple of Cybele led him to sacrifice fat bulls to that Goddess, with his own hands, and, when that was not enough (as the priests proved difficult), that he submitted himself to their ordination (a ceremony which included castration) in order that he might possess himself of their sacred stone.