CHAPTER I.
DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE IN THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES.
THE power of the old religions was for centuries concentrated in the Mysteries. These were recondite institutions, sometimes wielded by the state, sometimes by a priesthood, sometimes by a ramifying private society. None could be admitted into them save with the permission of the hierarchs, by rites of initiation, and under solemn seals of secrecy. These mysterious institutions, charged with strange attractions, shrouded in awful wonder, were numerous, and, agreeing in some of their fundamental features, were spread nearly all over the world. The writings of the ancients abound with references to them, mostly eulogistic. The mighty part played by these veiled bodies in the life of the periods when they flourished, the pregnant hints and alluring obscurities amid which they stand in relation to the learning of modern times, have repeatedly obtained wide attention, elicited opposite opinions, provoked fierce debates, and led different inquirers to various conclusions as to their true origin, character, scope, meaning, and results.
One of the principal points in discussion by scholars concerning the Mysteries has been whether they inculcated an esoteric doctrine of philosophy, opposed to the popular religion. Some writers have maintained that in their symbols and rites was contained a pure system of monotheistic ethics and religion. Our own opinion is that in some of these institutions, at one period, higher theological views and scientific speculations were unfolded, but in others never. Still, it is extremely difficult to prove any thing on this part of the general subject: there is much that is plausible to be said on both sides of the question. Another query to be noticed in passing is in regard to the degree of exclusiveness and concealment really attached to the form of initiation. Lobeck, in his celebrated work, "Aglaophamus," borne away by a theory, assumes the extravagant position that the Eleusinian Mysteries were almost freely open to all.1 His error seems to lie in not distinguishing sufficiently between the Lesser and the Greater Mysteries, and in not separating the noisy shows of the public festal days from the initiatory and explanatory rites of personal admission within the mystic pale. The notorious
1 Lib. i. sects. 4, 5.
facts that strict inquiry was made into the character and fitness of the applicant before his admission, and that many were openly rejected, that instant death was inflicted on all who intruded unprepared within the sacred circuits, and that death was the penalty of divulging what happened during the celebrations, all are inconsistent with the notion of Lobeck, and prove that the Mysteries were hedged about with dread. Aschylus narrowly escaped being torn in pieces upon the stage by the people on suspicion that in his play he had given a hint of something in the Mysteries. He delivered himself by appealing to the Areopagus, and proving that he had never been initiated. Andocides also, a Greek orator who lived about four hundred years before Christ, was somewhat similarly accused, and only escaped by a strenuous defence of himself in an oration, still extant, entitled "Concerning the Mysteries."
A third preliminary matter is as to the moral character of the services performed by these companies. Some held that their characteristics were divinely pure, intellectual, exalting; others that in abandoned pleasures they were fouler than the Stygian pit. The Church Fathers, Clement, Irenaus, Tertullian, and the rest, influenced by a mixture of prejudice, hatred, and horror, against every thing connected with paganism, declared, in round terms, that the Mysteries were unmitigated sinks of iniquity and shame, lust, murder, and all promiscuous deviltry. Without pausing to except or qualify, or to be thoroughly informed and just, they included the ancient stern generations and their own degraded contemporaries, the vile rites of the Corinthian Aphrodite and the solemn service of Demeter, the furious revels of the Bacchanalians and the harmonious mental worship of Apollo, all in one indiscriminate charge of insane beastliness and idolatry. Their view of the Mysteries has been most circulated among the moderns by Leland's learned but bigoted work on the "Use and Necessity of a Divine Revelation." He would have us regard each one as a vortex of atheistic sensuality and crime. There should be discrimination. The facts are undoubtedly these, as we might abundantly demonstrate were it in the province of the present essay. The original Mysteries, the authoritative institutions co ordinated with the state or administered by the poets and philosophers, were pure: their purpose was to purify the lives and characters of their disciples. Their means were a complicated apparatus of sensible and symbolic revelations and instructions admirably calculated to impress the most salutary moral and religious lessons. In the first place, is it credible that the state would fling its auspices over societies whose function was to organize lawlessness and debauchery, to make a business of vice and filth? Among the laws of Solon is a regulation decreeing that the Senate shall convene in the Eleusinian temple, the day after the festival, to inquire whether every thing had been done with reverence and propriety. Secondly, if such was the character of these secrets, why was inquisition always made into the moral habits of the candidate, that he might be refused admittance if they were bad? This inquiry was severe, and the decision unrelenting. Alcibiades was rejected, as we learn from Plutarch's life of him, on account of his dissoluteness and insubordination in the city. Nero dared not attend the Eleusinian Mysteries, "because to the murder of his mother he had joined the slaughter of his paternal aunt."2 All accepted candidates were scrupulously purified in thought and body, and clad in white robes, for nine days previous to their reception. Thirdly, it is intrinsically absurd to suppose that an institution of gross immorality and cruelty could have flourished in the most polite and refined Greek nation, as the Eleusinian Mysteries did for over eighteen hundred years, ranking among its members a vast majority of both sexes, of all classes, of all ages, and constantly celebrating its rites before immense audiences of them all. Finally, a host of men like Plato, Sophocles, Cimon, Lycurgus, Cicero, were members of these bodies, partook in their transactions, and have left on record eulogies of them and of their influence. The concurrent testimony of antiquity is that in the Great Mysteries the desires were chastened, the heart purified, the mind calmed, the soul inspired, all the virtues of morality and hopes of religion taught and enforced with sublime solemnities. There is no just ground for suspecting this to be false.
But there remains something more and different to be said also. While the authorized Mysteries were what we have asserted, there did afterwards arise spurious Mysteries, in names, forms, and pretensions partially resembling the genuine ones, under the control of the most unprincipled persons, and in which unquestionably the excesses of unbelief, drunkenness, and prostitution held riot. These depraved societies were foreign grafts from the sensual pantheism ever nourished in the voluptuous climes of the remote East. They established themselves late in Greece, but were developed at Rome in such unbridled enormities as compelled the Senate to suppress them. Livy gives a detailed and vivid account of the whole affair in his history.3 But the gladiators, scoundrels, rakes, bawds, who swarmed in these stews of rotting Rome, are hardly to be confounded with the noble men and matrons of the earlier time who openly joined in the pure Mysteries with the approving example of the holiest bards, the gravest statesmen, and the profoundest sages, men like Pindar, Pericles, and Pythagoras. Ample facilities are afforded in the numerous works to which we shall refer for unmasking the different organizations that travelled over the earth in the guise of the Mysteries, and of seeing what deceptive arts were practised in some, what superhuman terrors paraded in others, what horrible cruelties perpetrated in others, what leading objects sought in each.
The Mysteries have many bearings on several distinct subjects; but in those aspects we have not space here to examine them. We purpose to consider them solely in their relation to the doctrine of a future life. We are convinced that the very heart of their secret, the essence of their meaning in their origin and their end, was no other than the doctrine of an immortality succeeding a death. Gessner published a book at Gottingen, so long ago as the year 1755, maintaining this very assertion. His work, which is quite scarce now, bears the title "Dogma de perenni Animoruin Natura per Sacra pracipue Eleusinia Propagata." The consenting testimony of more than forty of the most authoritative ancient writers comes down to us in their surviving works to the effect that those who were admitted into the Mysteries were thereby purified, led to holy lives, joined in communion with the gods, and
2 Suetonius, Vita Neronis, cap. xxxiv.