Thames and Hudson (2023) p/b 304pp £14.99 (ISBN 9780500297278)
When discussing how Greeks and Romans worshipped, there can be a tendency to focus on great state or polis religions, where open-air sacrifices were performed at altars before marble temples, and where the correct public repetition of ritual was arguably more important than private belief. Yet, this is only part of a much larger picture. Coexisting with these civic celebrations were a vast number of lesser ceremonies held for minor gods in homes, in local communities or in the countryside, for which less evidence survives. Equally important (though with even less surviving evidence) were mystery cults often celebrated in windowless halls or subterranean chapels, where individuals underwent initiation which they hoped might transform their lives. There has been much speculation about what this initiation involved, and what outcomes were hoped for. Because initiates were sworn to silence (for example, in his Geography, Pausanias repeatedly refuses to give any details), no first-hand accounts survive, and references in the works of Christian Fathers are probably either too sensationalist or simply too ignorant to be credible. As a result, either these mystery cults tend to be ignored or (worse still) those seeking to recreate them stitch together unreliable titbits to form romanticised and sometimes salacious fantasies.
B.’s book (first published 2010, here updated) bucks this trend. Focussing on specific mystery religions of the Greek and Roman world—those at Eleusis and Samothrace, those centred round the Mother of the Gods, Dionysus, Cybele, Isis and Mithras, as well as numerous apparently more minor cults such as those of the Kabeiroi near Thebes—he weighs the evidence, considers the sources, and reaches well-reasoned conclusions. Many cults shared common features (the Eleusinian Mysteries, for example, were so important that others adopted their hierarchies of office holders), but while some involved well-known named deities, such as Demeter and Dionysus, in others, such as the Mysteries of Samothrace or the cult of the Kabeiroi, the identity of the gods being worshipped may have been unknown even to their worshippers. Common to all were initiation rites, which often involved disorientation and sometimes physical pain; secrecy was mandatory; and it was the experience of the initiation itself, rather than any message being imparted, that was important. ‘The reason for seeking initiation’, B. suggests, ‘was in order to become an initiate—to gain a new status and to establish a closer relationship with the divine. All kinds of good things might then flow from the gods because of this new status.’ However, ‘the desire to identify a lost secret something that, once it is correctly identified, will explain what a mystery cult is all about—is bound to fail… It is unlikely that any such lost secret ever existed.’
Some may question whether B.’s meticulously scholarly approach leads him to dismiss too readily the connection between, say, the Eleusinian Mysteries and the afterlife, but even they will find his arguments compelling and challenging. General readers, too, will find this book, a paperback edition of a work first published in 2010, immensely useful, and for the price (with 19 colour plates, a map, notes, bibliography and index) it certainly belongs in any library. It is intriguing to the end. In his final chapter, B. compares the experience of the initiate to that of worshippers in snake-handling Pentecostalist churches in the USA today, and quotes one journalist who was ‘drawn into their practices’ going into a trance as he raised a rattlesnake above his head: ‘It must be close to our perception of paradise, and it’s like before you’re born or after you die.’
David Stuttard