Greco-Roman Mysteries - Characteristics

Characteristics

Mystery religions form one of three types of Hellenistic religion, the others being the imperial cult or ethnic religion particular to a nation or state, and the philosophic religions such as Neoplatonism. This is also reflected in the tripartite division of "theology" by Varro, in civil theology (concerning the state cult and its stabilizing effect on society), natural theology (philosophical speculation about the nature of the divine) and mythical theology (concerning myth and ritual).

Mysteries thus supplement rather than compete with civil religion. An individual could easily observe the rites of the state cult, be an initiate in one or several mysteries, and at the same time adhere to a certain philosophical school. In contrast to the public rituals of civil religion, participation in which was expected of every member of society, initiation to a mystery was optional within Graeco-Roman polytheism. Many of the cultic aspects of public religion are repeated within the mystery, sacrifices, ritual meals, ritual purifications, etc., just with the additional aspect that they take place in secrecy, confined to a closed set of initiates. This is important in the context of the early persecution of Christians. Christianity was seen as objectionable by the Roman establishment not on grounds of its tenets or practices, but because early Christians chose to consider their faith as precluding the participation in the imperial cult, which was seen as subversive by the Roman establishment.

The mystery cults offered a niche for the preservation of archaic religious ritual, and there is reason to assume that they were very conservative. The Eleusian Mysteries persisted for more than a millennium, more likely close to two millennia, during which period the ritual of public religion changed significantly, from the archaic cult of the Bronze to Early Iron Age to the Hero cult of Hellenistic civilization and again to the imperial cult of the Roman era, while the ritual performances of the mysteries for all we know remained unchanged. "They had, more often than not, come up from a barbarous underworld. They were singularly persistent. The mysteries at Eleusis near Athens lasted for a thousand years; and there is reason to believe that they changed little during that long period."

For this reason, what glimpses we do have of the older Greek mysteries have been taken as reflecting certain archaic aspects of common Indo-European religion, with parallels in Indo-Iranian religion in particular, by Janda (2000). The mystery cults of Greco-Roman antiquity include the Eleusinian Mysteries, the Dionysian Mysteries, and the Orphic Mysteries. Some of the many divinities that the Romans nominally adopted from other cultures also came to be worshipped in Mysteries, for instance, Egyptian Isis, Persian Mithraic Mysteries, Thracian/Phrygian Sabazius, and Phrygian Cybele.