Cults in the Greek and Roman World

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Pergamon Cistophoric tetradrachm

In ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, there were hundreds of local gods and hundreds of cults, many devoted to specific gods. Many of the cults, were very secretive and had special initiation rituals with sacred tales, symbols, formulas and special rituals oriented towards specific gods. These are often described as mystery cults. Fertility cults and goddesses were often associated with the moon because its phases coincided the menstruation cycles of women and it was thought the moon had power over women.

The cults of the Persian god Mithras and the Egyptian goddess were particularly popular among soldiers in ancient Rome. On foreign cults in the Roman Empire, Strabo wrote in “Geographia” (A.D., c. 20): “In Gaul, the heads of enemies of high repute they used to embalm in cedar oil and exhibit to strangers, and they would not deign to give them back ever for a ransom of an equal weight of gold. But the Romans put a stop to these customs, as well as to all those connected with the sacrifices and divinations that are opposed to our usages. They used to strike a human being, whom they had devoted to death, in the back with a sword, and then divine from his death-struggle. But they would not sacrifice without the Druids. We are told of still other kinds of human sacrifices; for example, they would shoot victims to death with arrows, or impale them in the temples, or having devised a colossus of straw and wood, throw into the colossus cattle and wild animals of all sorts and human beings, and make a burnt-offering of the whole thing.” [Source: Strabo, The Geography of Strabo: Literally Translated, with Notes, translated by H. C. Hamilton & W. Falconer, (London: H. G. Bohn, 1854-1857)]

In “The Life of Tiberius Caesar” (A.D. c. 100), Suetonius wrote: “He abolished foreign cults [from Rome], especially the Egyptian and the Jewish rites, compelling all who were addicted to such superstitions to burn their religious vestments and all their paraphernalia. Those of the Jews who were of military age he assigned to provinces of less healthy climate, ostensibly to serve in the army; the others of that same race or of similar beliefs he banished from the city, on pain of slavery for life if they did not obey. He banished the astrologers as well.”

Websites on Ancient Greece: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Greece sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Hellenistic World sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; BBC Ancient Greeks bbc.co.uk/history/; Perseus Project - Tufts University; perseus.tufts.edu ; ; Gutenberg.org gutenberg.org; British Museum ancientgreece.co.uk; Illustrated Greek History, Dr. Janice Siegel, Hampden–Sydney College hsc.edu/drjclassics ; Cambridge Classics External Gateway to Humanities Resources web.archive.org/web; Ancient Greek Sites on the Web from Medea showgate.com/medea ; Greek History Course from Reed web.archive.org; Classics FAQ MIT classics.mit.edu

Mystery Cults

As we said before many of the cults, were very secretive and had special initiation rituals with sacred tales, symbols, formulas and special rituals oriented towards specific gods. These are often described as mystery cults. The word “mystery” come from the Greek word “mysterion,” which has a range of meanings, from the specific “Eleusinian ritual” to the more general “secret knowledge”. It often inferred something which one was initiated into.

.According to Encyclopedia.com: The most vital forms of religion under the Roman Empire were the Greco-Oriental mystery religions, especially the Mysteries of Isis, of Cybele (Magna Mater Deorum), and of Mithras. Their highly organized emotional cults and their promise of salvation and afterlife to their devotees appealed to all classes of society. The cult of Mithras was essentially a religion for men and was very popular in the legions; Mithraic shrines are found from Syria to Britain. Pagan religious credulity and superstition reached its high point under the Principate. [Source: Encyclopedia.com]

Kiki Karoglou of the Metropolitan Museum of Art wrote:“Shrouded in secrecy, ancient mystery cults fascinate and capture the imagination. A pendant to the official cults of the Greeks and Romans, mystery cults served more personal, individualistic attitudes toward death and the afterlife. Most were based on sacred stories (hieroi logoi) that often involved the ritual reenactment of a death-rebirth myth of a particular divinity. In addition to the promise of a better afterlife, mystery cults fostered social bonds among the participants, called mystai. Initiation fees and other contributions were also expected. [Source: Kiki Karoglou, Department of Greek and Roman Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 2013, metmuseum.org \^/]

Dancing maenads

Mystery Cults generally had some kind of initiation. On initiations, Plato wrote that Socrates said: “I fancy that those men who established the mysteries were not unenlightened, but in reality had a hidden meaning when they said long ago that whoever goes uninitiated and unsanctified to the other world will lie in the mire, but he who arrives there initiated and purified will dwell with the gods. For as they say in the mysteries, 'the thyrsus-bearers are many, but the mystics few'; and these mystics are, I believe, those who have been true philosophers. And I in my life have, so far as I could, left nothing undone, and have striven in every way to make myself one of them. But whether I have striven aright and have met with success, I believe I shall know clearly, when I have arrived there, very soon, if it is God's will. [Source: Plato. “Plato in Twelve Volumes,” Vol. 1 translated by Harold North Fowler; Introduction by W.R.M. Lamb. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1966]

The popularity and importance of the mysteries can be seen owing to the great number of those who sought initiation. They represented the religious myths, and their form corresponded to the ordinary religious worship; the mystery was due simply to the fact that in the myth the symbolic and allegorical elements prevailed, and in the worship the purifications and expiations had a specially important place. [Source “The Home Life of the Ancient Greeks” by Hugo Blümner, translated by Alice Zimmern, 1895]

Dionysus Cult

Because his half-breed status made his position at Olympus tenuous, Dionysus did everything he could to make his mortal brethren happy. He gave them rain, male semen, the sap of plants and "the lubricant and stimulant of dance and song" — wine.

David Hernández de la Fuente wrote in National Geographic History: Worship of Dionysus was not uniform in the classic world. Some of it was public and organized, while other rituals were mysterious and carried out in secret. Many Greeks showed their reverence for Dionysus through festivals; in Rome, where he was called Bacchus, these became the Bacchanalia — wild rituals celebrated at night in forests and mountains. The maenads would enter a delirious state of ecstasy, then — inspired by the personification of Dionysus in the form of a priest — dance wildly before setting out on a hunt. [Source: David Hernández de la Fuente, National Geographic History, May 25, 2022]

Demeter Mystery Cults and Myths

Kiki Karoglou of the Metropolitan Museum of Art wrote: “In classical antiquity, the earliest and most celebrated mysteries were the Eleusinian. At Eleusis, the worship of the agricultural deities Demeter and her daughter Persephone, also known as Kore, was based on the growth cycles of nature. Athenians believed they were the first to receive the gift of grain cultivation from Demeter. [Source: Kiki Karoglou, Department of Greek and Roman Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 2013, metmuseum.org \^/]

“Extraordinarily, the goddess herself revealed to them the solemn rites in her honor, as we learn in the Homeric hymn to

Frieze with bulls from the Arsinoé rotunda from Samothrace temple complex

Demeter, which relates the foundation myth of the Eleusinian cult. Hades abducted Persephone while she was picking flowers with her companions in a meadow and carried her off to the Underworld. After wandering in vain looking for her daughter, Demeter arrived at Eleusis. There the wrath of the distressed mother caused a complete failure of the crops, prompting Zeus to order his brother Hades to return the girl. He cunningly tricked Persephone into eating some pomegranate seeds before leaving, thus condemning her to spend part of the year in the Underworld as his wife and the rest among the living with Demeter.

“During the Great Eleusinia, the public aspect of which culminated in the grand procession from the center of Athens to Eleusis along the Sacred Way, the actions and experiences of the initiates mirrored those of the two goddesses in the sacred drama (drama mystikon). In the early sixth century B.C., the "Queen of the Underworld" persona of Kore was introduced and a nocturnal initiation rite called katabasis was added to the festival: a simulated descent to Hades and ritual search for Persephone. Before the entrance to the Telesterion, the central hall of the sanctuary where the secret rites were performed, priestly personnel holding torches met up with the initiates, who until then were wandering in the dark. At the Eleusinian mysteries, the tension between public and private, conspicuous and secret was inherent in the double nature of the cult. Unlike city-state (polis) religion, participation was restricted to individuals who chose to be initiated, to become mystai. At the same time, it was far more inclusive, being open not only to Athenian male citizens, but to non-Athenians, women, and slaves.” \^/

Cult of the Great Gods at Samothrace

Samothrace, a rocky island in the northern Aegean Sea, was home to the Sanctuary of the Great Gods, a mystery cult devoted to enigmatic deities who were thought to grant protection to seafarers. Today Samothrace can be reached by ferry from Kavala in northern Greece and Lemnos. It is home of the tallest mountain in the Aegean, 1611-meter (5285-foot) -high Fengari, where according to Homer Poseidon watched the Trojan War. The famous Louvre statue, Nike of Samothrace, also known as Winged Victory of Samothrace, was found here. [Source: Benjamin Leonard, Archaeology Magazine, September/October 2021]

Benjamin Leonard wrote in Archaeology Magazine: During the day, Samothrace is often veiled by clouds. Wind sweeps across the landscape, and the turbulent waters remain, as they were in antiquity, dangerous for seafarers. When the clouds clear at night, however, the peak of Mount Fengari at the island’s center, which reaches a mile into the sky, becomes visible. From the vantage point of the peak, Nestled in a deep ravine in the mountain’s shadow lie the remains of the Sanctuary of the Theoi Megaloi, or Great Gods.

From at least the seventh century B.C., pilgrims walked under the cover of darkness from the nearby ancient city, now known as Palaeopolis, to the sanctuary to be inducted into a secret religious cult. As they passed through an immense marble gateway onto the sanctuary’s eastern hill, they might have heard the rush of water coursing through a channel beneath the entranceway. Amid the sounds of music and chanting emanating from farther within the sanctuary, the prospective initiates reached a sunken circular court. Here, ritual dancing and other performances might have taken place, surrounded by bronze statues that were likely dedicated by previous initiates. The noise and darkness, as well as the use of blindfolds, probably induced an altered state of mind that prepared participants for the forthcoming rituals and sacred revelations. By the flickering light of oil lamps and torches, they began the steep descent down the Sacred Way, to the sanctuary’s heart, to be initiated into the mysteries of the Great Gods.

Introduction of Foreign Cults to Ancient Rome

Bronze hand used in the worship of Sabazios, AD 1st–2nd century CE; the hand is decorated with religious symbols that were designed to stand in sanctuaries or were carried on poles in processions

According to Encyclopedia.com: From the Second Punic War to the End of the Republic (218–231 B.C.). The long and terrible war with Hannibal caused an outburst of all kinds of superstition and led the state to resort to alien cults that seemed more effective. The Ludi Magni were celebrated with great pomp in 217 B.C.; the Ludi Apollinares were instituted in 212 B.C.; and the Ludi Megalenses, in 204 B.C.. These games were intended primarily to honor the gods, but, by furnishing entertainment at the same time, they lessened anxiety and tension. After Cannae (216 B.C.), the Romans buried alive two Gauls and two Greeks in the Forum Boarium to appease the angry gods. Later a supplicatio was decreed and a lectisternium in which 12 Greek and Roman gods were carried side by side, thus indicating that the Roman religion had really become Greco-Roman. [Source:Encyclopedia.com]

In 205 B.C. , on the advice of the Sibylline Books, the cult of Cybele, the Great Mother of Asia Minor, was introduced at Rome, and her fetish, the black stone of Pessinus, was brought with all solemnity to Rome and placed in the Temple of Victory on the Palatine. Subsequently, the Romans restricted the cult of Cybele as much as possible, but it had come to stay. The orgiastic cult of diony sus or Bacchus spread to Rome from South Italy, but in 186 B.C. it was suppressed by the Roman Senate, whose stern decree, Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus, is extant. On the other hand, from the early 3d B.C. century the state itself fostered the cults of abstract personifications, as that of Victory mentioned above. Thus Libertas, Pietas, Concordia, Salus, Pax, among others, were the object of cult. Caesar himself received divine honor indirectly by the erecting of a temple to his Clementia.

Despite the vigilance of the state regarding the introduction of foreign cults and its refusal to give them full or even partial official recognition, the great influx of Greeks and People from the East into Rome in the 2d and 1st centuries B.C. led to the spread not only of new Greek cults but, especially, of Oriental cults that were highly emotional. They had elaborate liturgies and a professional priesthood, and promised an afterlife to their devotees. The Mysteries of isis and osiris, for example, came to Rome around 100 B.C., a century after the introduction of the worship of the Great Mother of Asia Minor. Along with Oriental religions came astrology and other forms of magic and superstition.

The official cults of the state had lost all emotional appeal for the masses, but they continued to be maintained — if in a neglected way — as a part of the governmental machinery by men who no longer held the old beliefs. They were even exploited by more or less unscrupulous candidates for high office, who used them merely to serve their political ambitions. Caesar, for example, although one of the confirmed agnostics of his age, sought and obtained, the office of Pontifex Maximus, the highest religious office in the state.

Cults in the Roman Empire

According to Encyclopedia.com: The most vital forms of religion under the Empire were the Greco-Oriental mystery religions, especially the Mysteries of Isis, of Cybele (Magna Mater Deorum), and of mithras. Their highly organized emotional cults and their promise of salvation and afterlife to their devotees appealed to all classes of society. The cult of Mithras was essentially a religion for men and was very popular in the legions; Mithraic shrines are found from Syria to Britain. Pagan religious credulity and superstition reached its high point under the Principate. Oracles, dreambooks, and other forms of divination had a wide vogue. Men like Apollonius of Tyana and Alexander of Abonoteichos acquired great celebrity as miracle workers, although the latter was a notorious charlatan. [Source: Encyclopedia.com]

The issue of whom the new cults attracted is difficult. Did the different "messages" appeal more to some sections of the inhabitants of Rome than to others? Were the poor more commonly to be found among the adherents than the rich? Women more commonly than men? Did these alternative religions attract those who had only a small role to play in the traditional civic cults and the political order that those cults sustained? Were they, in other words, "religions of disadvantage?" There is no simple answer to those questions. There was enormous variety within the population of Rome, which had no single axis between privilege and disadvantage. In a society where some of the richest and most educated members were to be found outside (and indeed ineligible for) the ranks of the elite, it makes no sense to imagine a single category of "the disadvantaged." Besides, it is very hard now (and no doubt always was for most outside observers) to reconstruct accurately the membership of any particular cult; for apparently casual references to a cult's adherents in the writing of the period are often part and parcel of an attack on that cult — deriding a religion as being, for example, the business of women and slaves. But it is clear that male members of the senatorial order were conspicuously absent from the new cults. No senators are attested as initiates of Jupiter Dolichenus, Jupiter Optimus Maximus Heliopolitanus, Isis, Mithras, or (probably) Christianity before the mid-third century ce.[Source: Arnaldo Momigliano (1987), Simon Price (2005), Encyclopedia of Religion, Encyclopedia.com]

Ivory figurine of Sabazios from the tomb of Alexander IV of Macedon

The cult of Sabazios may have been originally Phrygian, but later was known also as an "ancestral" deity of Thrace. Sabazios appears in Athens in the fifth century B.C. as an orgiastic god. He was known to Aristophanes, and later the orator Aeschines may have become his priest. There is evidence of mysteries of Sabazios in Lydia dating from the fourth century B.C. In Rome the cult was already known in 139 B.C. It may at that time have been confused with Judaism, but Sabazios was often identified with Jupiter or Zeus, and there seems to be no clear evidence of syncretism between Sabazios and Yahweh. Sabazios was most popular in the second century ce, especially in the Danubian region. In Rome his cult left a particularly curious document in the tomb of Vincentius, located in the catacomb of Praetextatus. The document includes scenes of banquets and of judgment after death. Whether this is evidence of mystery ceremonies or of Christian influence remains uncertain (Hermann Dessau, Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae 3961; see Goodenough, 1953, p. 45 for a description) The tomb of Vincentius appears to belong to the third century, when, judging by the epigraphic evidence, there seems to have been a decline of the cult of Sabazios and, indeed, of all mystery cults. Although a shortage of inscriptions does not necessarily imply a shortage of adepts, it leaves the impression that by then Christianity was seriously interfering with the popularity of Oriental cults.

Another popular Oriental god occupies a place by himself. This is Jupiter Dolichenus, who emerged from Doliche in northern Syria in the first century ce and who has over six hundred monuments. His cult is known mostly in Rome and along the Rhine-Danube border zone. Of the Oriental gods, he seems to have been the least sophisticated and to have disappeared earliest (in the third century). Christian polemicists ignored him. While he circulated in the Empire, he preserved his native attributes: he is depicted as a warrior with Phrygian cap, double ax, and lightning bolt, standing erect over a bull. In the Roman interpretation, the goddess Juno Regina often accompanied him. Twins, identified with the Castores, followed him; their lower parts were unshaped, and they were probably demons. Soldiers seem to have loved the cult of Jupiter Dolichenus. Its priests were not professional, and the adepts called each other brother. Admission to the cult presupposed instruction, if not initiation.

Multitude of Cults and Roman Society

The multitude of cults, religions and god were not necessarily in competition Roger Beck of the University of Toronto Mississauga wrote for the BBC: “They are better seen as complementary enterprises” whose function was twofold: (1) to secure and retain the goodwill of the gods and thereby the wellbeing of the empire and its communities; and (2) to preserve the socio-political order through appropriate activities, principally the festivities of the local religious calendars. [Source: Professor Roger Beck, University of Toronto Mississauga, BBC, February 17, 2011 |::|]

“The prime method of getting (and keeping) the gods ‘onside’ was blood sacrifice. The glue which kept each level of society in its proper place was the system by which imperial and local élites fed and entertained the masses (the famous ‘bread and circuses’) in return for respect and acquiescence in the divinely sanctioned order of things. It is not difficult to see how emperor-worship, a franchise for which rival cities competed avidly, fits into this picture: the emperor’s powers of benefaction were of an order that seemed to eclipse those of mere mortals.

Magna Mater box

In addition to the cult of a particular god in a particular temple in a particular city,” Rome “also licensed outlets for specialised services and products, notably: (a) oracles to foretell the future and explain the present, and (b) healing shrines, which offered the best that antiquity had to offer in human as well as divine medicine. Brand loyalty was assumed, not enforced. In any case the religion business made few demands on the ordinary citizens of Rome and the communities of her empire. Opting in was not a deliberate choice, and opting out was not an option. |::|

“Only national groups were allowed a distinct religion. Rome greatly respected institutions which could legitimately present themselves as ‘traditional’ and ‘ancestral’, and thus as agents of a sound and conservative status quo. Judaism was just such an ancestral religion. It was licensed not only in its homeland but in the diaspora communities elsewhere in the empire. In the homeland, Judaism was focused on the cult of Jahweh in the Temple in Jerusalem, a cult of blood sacrifice of a type familiar to the Romans, peculiar only in its exclusive monotheism. |::|

“In 70 A.D. Judaism underwent a great sea change: with the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. at the climax of the first rebellion, the sacrificial cult ended. Judaism as we know it today is the descendant of the religion of the synagogues of the diaspora and of Palestine after the second rebellion (ended 135 AD). Proselytizing was then strictly forbidden, so Judaism effectively withdrew from the arena of religious competition.”

Magna Mater (Cybele) Cults

Magna Mater ("Great Mother") was the Roman version of Cybele, an Anatolian mother goddess that may date back to 10,0000-year-old Çatalhöyük, the world’s oldest town, where statues of plump women, sometimes sitting, have been found in excavations. She is Phrygia's only known goddess, and was probably its state deity. Her Phrygian cult was adopted and adapted by Greek colonists of Asia Minor and spread to mainland Greece and its more distant western colonies around the 6th century B.C.. Some scholars say the cult of Cybele was brought to Rome in 205 or 204 B.C.. The Roman state adopted and developed a particular form of her cult after the Sibylline oracle recommended her conscription as a key religious ally in Rome's second war against Carthage. Roman mythographers reinvented her as a Trojan goddess, and thus an ancestral goddess of the Roman people by way of the Trojan prince Aeneas. With Rome's eventual hegemony over the Mediterranean world, Romanized forms of Cybele's cults spread throughout the Roman Empire. The meaning and morality of her cults and priesthoods were topics of debate and dispute in Greek and Roman literature, and remain so in modern scholarship. [Source: Wikipedia]

According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “In 204 B.C., during the Second Punic War, the Romans consulted the Sibylline Oracles, which declared that the foreign invader would be driven from Italy only if the Idaean Mother (Cybele) from Anatolia were brought to Rome. The Roman political elite, in a carefully orchestrated effort to unify the citizenry, arranged for Cybele to come inside the pomerium (a religious boundary-wall surrounding a city), built her a temple on the Palatine Hill, and initiated games in honor of the Great Mother, an official political and social recognition that restored the pax deorum. [Source: Claudia Moser, Metropolitan Museum of Art, April 2007, metmuseum.org \^/]

“After Cybele and the foreign ways of her exotic priesthood were introduced to Rome, she became a popular goddess in Roman towns and villages in Italy. But the enthusiasm that accompanied the establishment of her cult was soon followed by suspicion and legal prohibitions. The eunuch priests (galli) that attended Cybele's cult were confined in the sanctuary; Roman men were forbidden to castrate themselves in imitation of the galli, and only once a year were these eunuchs, dressed in exotic, colorful garb, allowed to dance through the streets of Rome in jubilant celebration. Nevertheless, the popularity of the goddess persisted, especially in the Imperial period, when the ruling family, eager to emphasize its Trojan ancestry, associated itself with and publicly worshipped Cybele, a goddess whose epithet, Mater Idaea, designated her as Trojan and whose cult was deeply connected with Troy and its origins.” \^/

Mithraism

Mithraism was one of best known foreign cults in the late Roman Empire. Professor Roger Beck of the University of Toronto Mississauga wrote for the BBC: “The Mithraists were worshippers of the ‘Unconquered Sun God Mithras’, as the inscriptions call him. We know a good deal about them because archaeology has disinterred many meeting places together with numerous artifacts and representations of the cult myth, mostly in the form of relief sculpture. “From this evidence we know that the cult was the last of the important mystery cults to evolve and that it thrived in the second and third centuries A.D. and waned in the fourth as élite patronage was gradually transferred to Christianity. [Source: Professor Roger Beck, BBC, February 17, 2011 |::|]

colorized Mithraic banquet

According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “Unlike the public rituals and processions dedicated to Cybele and Isis in Imperial Rome, the worship of Mithras was secret and mysterious. At the end of the first century A.D., the Iranian god Mithras, creator and protector of animal and plant life, began to appear in Italy, becoming especially popular with Roman legionaries, imperial slaves, and ex-slaves. Not limited to the class of soldiers, however, Mithraists could also be found in the circles of the imperial households. In the absence of Mithraic literature, evidence of the cult, its rituals, and customs comes from archaeological finds and depictions of the god.” [Source: Claudia Moser, Metropolitan Museum of Art, April 2007, metmuseum.org \^/]

David Fingrut wrote: “For over three hundred years the rulers of the Roman Empire worshipped the god Mithras. Known throughout Europe and Asia by the names Mithra, Mitra, Meitros, Mihr, Mehr, and Meher, the veneration of this god began some 4000 years ago in Persia, where it was soon imbedded with Babylonian doctrines. The faith spread east through India to China, and reached west throughout the entire length of the Roman frontier; from Scotland to the Sahara Desert, and from Spain to the Black Sea. Sites of Mithraic worship have been found in Britain,a Italy, Romania, Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, Turkey, Persia, Armenia, Syria, Israel, and North Africa. In Rome, more than a hundred inscriptions dedicated to Mithras have been found, in addition to 75 sculpture fragments, and a series of Mithraic temples situated in all parts of the city. One of the largest Mithraic temples built in Italy now lies under the present site of the Church of St. Clemente, near the Colosseum in Rome.” [Source: David Fingrut in conjunction with a high-school course at Toronto's SEED Alternative School, 1993, based largely on the work of Franz Cumont (1868-1947) /]

Dr Nigel Pollard of Swansea University wrote for the BBC: “While Mithraism displays some Iranian elements and influences, in its Roman form it may have been a quasi-oriental cult that took on its own distinctive character within the multicultural environment of the Roman empire. It was widespread in the second and third centuries AD. In Britain, for example, mithraic temples have been discovered in London and on Hadrian's Wall. Many (but not all) of the worshippers of Mithras were soldiers and lower-ranking government officials. The cult required individual initiation (by revelation of secrets - hence these religions collectively are often known as 'mystery religions') and promised personal salvation, in contrast to the state cults. [Source: Dr Nigel Pollard of Swansea University, BBC, March 29, 2011 |::|]

Cultic Dining

L. Michael White of the University of Texas at Austin told PBS: The “communal meal was an important ritual that bonded the members of the community together. Dining itself, though, was nothing uncommon as a religious performance among members of the Roman world. Dinner parties were given all time. Private dinner parties as well as public festivals, but one of the most interesting aspects of dining that we find is what we might call religious or cultic dining, or club banquets; in these club banquets more often than not there's a kind of patron deity who could be expected to oversee the proceedings. [Source: L. Michael White, Professor of Classics and Director of the Religious Studies Program University of Texas at Austin, Frontline, PBS, April 1998]

“The Mithras cult is known for its dining practices but one of the most popular form of cultic dining that we hear about is found in the Egyptian cults. The cult of Serapis, the god from Egypt, the consort of Isis. We have papyrus invitations from the Roman world which say the god Serapis invites you to dinner at his couch. Meaning his dinner table, his dinner party at eight o'clock on Tuesday evening ... So it's interesting that the Christians do something that looks very much like these religious practices, and at times they actually have to work very hard to distinguish themselves from what the pagans do.

“The Christian writer Tertullian from North Africa around the year 197 really goes way out on a limb to try to make some distinctions. He says, "We Christians hold meals, sure, but we really don't do anything all that extraordinary. In fact, they're very tame. It's not at all like those people who follow the god Serapis. Why when they throw a dinner party you have to call out the fire brigades. We're nothing like that." But indeed the very point that he has to make suggests that in the eyes of a lot of people that's exactly how they looked.

Egyptian God Cults in the Greco-Roman Era

Greek Isis- Aphrodite

Holland Lee Hendrix of the Union Theological Seminary told PBS: “In the religious mix of the time, it's very important to realize that one would have experienced institutions and deities who would come from rather remote places. In the Hellenistic period, in the 3rd, 2nd centuries B.C., a number of very important religions that had been distinctive to Egypt and to Syria, for example, began to migrate in substantial ways, in very important ways, throughout the Roman Empire. One would have found in the major cities of the Mediterranean basin a cult of the Egyptian gods. One would have cults of the Syrian gods.... The Egyptian cult and Mithraism were two of the great religious movements of the time and certainly would have posed some of the most difficult competition for Christianity. [Source: “Holland Lee Hendrix, President of the Faculty, Union Theological Seminary, Frontline, PBS, April 1998 ]

“Egyptian cults come in a whole host of varieties, but let's sort of take the garden variety. The garden variety of the Egyptian cult would have included probably Isis as the ascendant deity. Isis was perceived by her devotees as being remarkably attentive. Isis would respond to you when you were in trouble. She would answer your prayers. She had that reputation. A bit more removed is Isis's consort, Serapis, again, a creature from the Hellenistic period. Serapis is a bit less popular, again at the popular level, with the people. One very often finds him as a consort of Isis. Serapis is viewed as a more remote, Jupiter-like, Zeus-like, figure and is often in fact presented in iconography with the characteristics of Jupiter and Zeus.

“Then one would have also encountered in the Egyptian cult Harpocrates, and this was specifically a Holly creation. Hippocrates was understood as a youth associated with Isis.... Hypocrates was characterized in the iconography very interestingly, with his finger to his lips invoking the silence of the mysteries of the Egyptian cult. Mysteries were a very important part in Egyptian religion and made it terribly attractive to people because one could be introduced into a special knowledge and a special way of viewing things and probably a special promise of afterlife....

Isis Mystery Cults

Isis was an Egyptian goddess popular throughout the Mediterranean world. According to Archaeology magazine: Though Isis was the most powerful magician and healer among the gods, she did not have her own dedicated temples until late in ancient Egyptian history. Nectanebo II (r. 360–343 B.C.), the last native Egyptian pharaoh, was the first king to commission a temple dedicated to Isis, choosing to build her sanctuary at the site of Behbeit el-Hagar in the Nile Delta. The Macedonian pharaohs of the Ptolemaic Dynasty (305–30 B.C.) dedicated many more to Isis throughout Egypt, including those on the island of Philae. [Source: Archaeology magazine, November 2021]

The worship of Isis at temples in the seaside Ptolemaic capital of Alexandria drew the attention of seafarers from across the Mediterranean. They adopted her as a patron goddess and spread her cult throughout the Greco-Roman world, where she was assimilated with goddesses of fertility such as Demeter and Venus. Outside of Egypt and Nubia, where she retained her queenly status, she eventually lost her association with royal authority. From Britain to Afghanistan, the cult of Isis may have especially appealed to women and slaves.

Temples to Isis were also built across the classical world. One of the best preserved is the Temple of Isis at Pompeii (see “Digging Deeper into Pompeii’s Past”), whose vivid murals depicting the goddess were widely celebrated when they were first unearthed in the eighteenth century. Some scholars believe the temple so impressed Mozart, who visited in 1769, that it heavily influenced the composition of his most mystical opera, The Magic Flute.

Roman-era Isis water ceremony

Did the Christian Idea of Salvation Come From Mystery Cult Initiations?

Roger Beck of the University of Toronto Mississauga wrote for the BBC: “The Greek word mystêrion denotes initiation. Baptism initiates you into the Christian mystery, for example; and yes, early Christianity both can and should be classified with the pagan mystery cults. [Source: Professor Roger Beck, BBC, February 17, 2011 |::|]

“Initiation brings you into a relationship with the god or gods of the cult. Much as Christian initiation brings you into a relationship with Jesus, the Christ, so initiation into the pagan mysteries brings you into a relationship with ‘Egyptian’ Isis, or ‘Persian’ Mithras, or home-grown Dionysus-Bacchus, or one or other of the several Great Mother goddesses and their junior consorts (Cybele and Attis for example). |::|

“If asked to define the essence of the ‘relationship’ in a single word most initiates would probably reply with the Greek or Latin words (sôtêria, salus) meaning the state of being ‘safe and sound’, of being ‘saved’. ‘Salvation’ is also a fair translation, provided we remember that for most pagan initiates it would mean physical and material protection, health and well-being vouchsafed by the god, with or without the bonus of spiritual rescue now and in the hereafter. |::|

“By initiation into a mystery you enter a community of fellow initiates. Now fellowship in a bleak world, where pain and poverty are the norms, is a precious commodity. In market terms, it enhances a firm’s competitiveness. Apart from Judaism, only two religious 'firms' in antiquity developed this feature of community life to the full: Christianity and Mithraism. |::|

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Greece sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Hellenistic World sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; BBC Ancient Greeks bbc.co.uk/history/; Canadian Museum of History, Perseus Project - Tufts University; perseus.tufts.edu ; MIT Classics Online classics.mit.edu ; Gutenberg.org, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Live Science, Discover magazine, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Encyclopædia Britannica, "The Discoverers" and "The Creators" by Daniel Boorstin. "Greek and Roman Life" by Ian Jenkins from the British Museum, Wikipedia, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP and various books and other publications.

Last updated September 2024