The Ancient Mystery Cults

Alongside the public worship of cities and households, the ancient Mediterranean world knew another kind of religious experience: the mysteries. These were rites of initiation, open to those who chose to undergo them, in which participants experienced something they were sworn never to reveal. The Greek word mysteria is linked to myein, “to close” the lips or eyes, and initiates were called mystai. Joining did not mean abandoning other gods; it added a personal bond with a particular deity and, often, hope of a better lot after death.

The most famous were the Mysteries of Demeter and her daughter Persephone at Eleusis, near Athens. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, probably composed in the seventh or sixth century BCE, tells how Hades carried Persephone to the underworld, how Demeter’s grief brought famine and how mother and daughter were reunited for part of each year. Each autumn initiates purified themselves in the sea, walked in procession from Athens and, in the great hall called the Telesterion, witnessed what ancient writers called things done, things said and things shown. Men and women, free and slave, could be initiated, provided they spoke Greek and were free of blood-guilt.

In the Roman Empire other mysteries spread widely. Devotees of the Egyptian goddess Isis held initiations described in The Golden Ass, a novel by Apuleius written in the second century CE. The cult of Mithras, popular among soldiers, officials and traders from the late first to the fourth century CE, met in small cave-like temples. Other mysteries honoured Dionysus, the Great Mother Cybele and the gods of Samothrace.

The secrets were remarkably well kept, so the evidence is indirect: inscriptions, temple remains, art, passing references in literature and, from later centuries, hostile accounts by Christian writers. At Eleusis archaeologists have excavated the sanctuary and the Telesterion, and ancient sources tell us that initiates drank the kykeon, a barley drink flavoured with mint, and that the climax involved a revelation amid blazing light. Cicero, himself an initiate, wrote that the mysteries taught people to live with joy and to die with better hope. In 415 BCE the Athenian general Alcibiades was accused of parodying the rites in a private house, which shows how seriously profanation was taken.

For Mithras the archaeology is rich. Hundreds of temples, called mithraea, have been found from Syria to Britain, including the London Mithraeum, discovered in 1954. Almost all contain an image of Mithras slaying a bull, the tauroctony, surrounded by astral symbols. Inscriptions, and a floor mosaic at Ostia showing their symbols, point to seven grades of initiation, from Raven to Father. Since the work of Franz Cumont around 1900 scholars have debated how far the Roman cult derived from the Iranian god Mithra; most now see it as largely a Roman creation using Persian names and imagery. For Isis, Apuleius’s account is vivid but literary, and it pointedly stops short of revealing the central rite.

Theories about the secret core of the mysteries have multiplied. One well-known proposal, that the Eleusinian kykeon contained a hallucinogen derived from ergot, was put forward in 1978 by R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann and Carl Ruck; it remains speculative and is not accepted by most historians.

Because they were secret, the mysteries have long invited speculation. Renaissance humanists saw in them a hidden philosophy, and from the eighteenth century Freemasons and other societies modelled their own initiations partly on what they imagined the ancient mysteries to have been. Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute (1791), with its trials by fire and water and its priests of Isis and Osiris, reflects this Masonic fascination.

Scholars have also asked how the mysteries relate to early Christianity, which spread in the same world and also spoke of rebirth, sacred meals and hope beyond death. Some nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers claimed that Christianity borrowed directly from mystery cults. Most historians today are more cautious, pointing to a shared religious vocabulary and environment rather than direct copying, and noting that much of the evidence for the cults is contemporary with early Christianity or later.

The rites themselves faded as imperial laws against pagan sacrifice took effect at the end of the fourth century CE, and Eleusis suffered further when Goths raided Greece in the 390s. Today its ruins are an archaeological site, and mithraea can be visited beneath the church of San Clemente in Rome and in the City of London. Some modern Pagans have created new rites inspired by the ancient mysteries, acknowledging that the original ceremonies cannot be recovered. For most visitors the appeal lies in an ancient secret that, for once, was truly kept.