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This is the first book to describe and explain all of the ancient world's major mystery cults--one of the most intriguing but least understood aspects of Greek and Roman religion. In the nocturnal Mysteries at Eleusis, participants dramatically re-enacted the story of Demeter's loss and recovery of her daughter Persephone; in the Bacchic cult, bands of women ran wild in the Greek countryside to honor Dionysus; and in the mysteries of Mithras, men came to understand the nature of the universe and their place within it through frightening initiation ceremonies and astrological teachings. These cults were an important part of life in the ancient Mediterranean world, but their actual practices were shrouded in secrecy, and many of their features have remained unclear until now.
By richly illustrating the evidence from ancient art and archaeology, and drawing on enlightening new work in the anthropology and cognitive science of religion, Mystery Cults of the Ancient World allows readers to imagine as never before what it was like to take part in these ecstatic and life-changing religious rituals--and what they meant to those who participated in them. Stunning images of Greek painted pottery, Roman frescoes, inscribed gold tablets from Greek and South Italian tombs, and excavated remains of religious sanctuaries help show what participants in these initiatory cults actually did and experienced.
A fresh and accessible introduction to a fascinating subject, this is a book that will interest general readers, as well as students and scholars of classics and religion.
- Sales Rank: #1142760 in Books
- Published on: 2010-04-04
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 10.22" h x 1.33" w x 7.64" l, 2.48 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 256 pages
From Booklist
This intriguing book offers the latest archaeological and textual information about some of the ancient world’s least-known, most compelling religions, most of which center on goddesses; for instance, Demeter, whose rites at Eleusis were attended by millions of initiates who kept the experience secret for hundreds of years, so that we still do not know exactly what happened in the “mysteries.” Two goddesses imported to Rome, Isis of Egypt and Cybele of Asia Minor, developed ecstatic cults among their converted followers. Among the male gods considered, the most significant is Dionysus, the wine god worshiped by the wild maenads, whose religion may have survived for almost a thousand years to crop up again in Pompeii. Bowden distinguishes these religions from others by noting that they are based in experience rather than in doctrine. Full of rarely published information but accessibly written, this is an excellent addition to the literature of ancient religions. --Patricia Monaghan
Review
"Mystery Cults of the Ancient World is clearly written and richly illustrated, and gives a solid introduction to an extremely elusive phenomenon. . . . [I]t remains a reliable and accessible guide to the religions that gave 'mystery' its name."--Richard Smoley, Parabola Magazine
"Greek and Roman men and women by the thousands, even millions, chose to be initiated into religious cults amid strict vows of secrecy; remarkably, not a single voice from antiquity has ever spilled the beans. Despite centuries of scholarly probing, the exact words, visions, benefits, or promises revealed during these closely guarded rituals remain unknown. This important book presents a sensible, convincing account of what these occasions may have offered their participants; how they related to mainstream, public traditions; and what the mysteries likely entailed. . . . Well-organized by cult types, splendidly illustrated, and jargon-free, the book deserves a wide readership."--Choice
"This book should be on the bookshelf of every thinking pagan, from the most scholarly reconstructionist to the most insouciant eclectic. What we need to know--and what it abundantly reveals--is why mystery cults were (and still are) important. . . . [A]s a guide to pre-Christian classical Paganism, this book is unsurpassed."--Barbara Ardinger, Witches and Pagans Magazine
"Students and generalist readers, as well as classicists looking for basic information on mystery cults, will find much useful information here. . . . [T]his is an eminently readable, enlightening overview of a fascinating topic and will become the go-to generalist resource . . . on ancient mystery cults."--Bronwen L. Wickkiser, American Journal of Archaeology
"Mystery Cults of the Ancient World is clearly written and highly accessible both to scholars and interested general readers alike. . . . Bowden's multi-discipline approach to studying the value of these cults in people's lives, rather than an attempt to piece together a list of rituals or practices from scattered sources, is refreshing."--Carey Fleiner, Canadian Journal of History
From the Back Cover
"As clear and well-informed an account as one could imagine of ancient cults involving secret initiation. Hugh Bowden puts together in a highly accessible way the literary and material evidence. Well-paced and an attractive read, this is a very welcome addition to ancient history and religious studies, and will also appeal to the general reader."--Robin Osborne, University of Cambridge
"This book debunks some longstanding misconceptions about mystery cults and provides an accessible introduction to a fascinating topic."--Radcliffe Edmonds, Bryn Mawr College
Most helpful customer reviews
22 of 27 people found the following review helpful.
Mysteries Upon Mysteries
By Rob Hardy
You weren't supposed to understand the secrets of the ancient Greek and Roman mystery cults in the times that they flourished, unless you were yourself an initiate. Now a couple of thousand years after, the secrets remain undisclosed and tantalizing. Not all the cults were small, with some of them, for instance, being important parts of annual civic celebrations. Much of what the initiates went through might have simply been an ineffable religious frenzy that no outsider is going to understand, but there must have been rites, music, and dramas that we ought at least to be able to view historically as spectators. But no; there were plenty of people who said they were giving us descriptions of what was going on in those caves or temples, but they were not initiates themselves. The members of the cults were so scrupulously secret that we have only indirect evidence to go by. So that evidence has been gathered and sifted, sometimes by those who had a grudge against the cults and so deliberately described disreputable rites. Now in _Mystery Cults of the Ancient World_ (Princeton University Press), classics scholar Hugh Bowden looks at what we can know about the cults, especially those at Eleusis, the Bacchic cults, and the Mithraic one. This is a fine-looking book, beautifully produced, with many more pictures and plates than accompany the usual academic treatise, and Bowden's lucid descriptions of what we can know about the cults, or reasonably speculate about them, represent a welcome interpretation of a murky subject.
The main ancient religions were overtly practiced, with ceremonies and sacrifices in the open, during the day. The cults explored here, however, secreted themselves away for their practices which were often held at night. The ceremonies for the main religions certainly did not concentrate on disorientation and fear, but such feelings were relied upon during the cult rites, with their loud music and other noise, bright lights, and blindfolds. Participants might achieve a state of ecstatic disorientation and high emotion, a single transformative religious experience contrasted with routine or regular meeting ceremonies. They had the capacity during these rites to experience the divine directly. Bowden explains that previous scholarship has concentrated on the eschatological function of the cults, but he downplays this: "Compared to the certainty and intensity of the immediate experience of initiation or Bacchic ecstasy, the hope of a better experience in the uncertain world beyond death must have weighed little." The Eleusinian Mysteries, about which we have the best and yet meager understanding, had their main celebrations in a sanctuary near Athens. There were sacrifices, processions, and fasting beforehand, but the rites themselves remain obscure. There was probably a dramatic performance recreating the Persephone story, blindfolds, sounding of gongs, and so on. It is, quite appropriately, very mysterious, and it might have been that to the participants, too. Bowden goes on to compare and contrast the mystery cults at Samothrace and Cyzicus, as well as the more widespread cults of Dionysus and Mithras.
Christianity itself may have been a mystery cult in the beginning, or at least was influenced by such cults; this is a common scholastic view, but Bowden suggests that there was little contact between mystery cults and Christianity. There are ritual analogues in both, such as baptism or communion, but there is not evidence that Christianity borrowed the practices. Once Christianity became the state supported religion, mystery cults no longer were a feature in the Mediterranean world. There was still ecstatic religious experience, but religious frenzy by large groups was discouraged. In his final pages Bowden says that the closest current analogue to mystery cults is the snake handling sects. This is not because they handle snakes just as some of the mystery cults handled snakes, but because of the possessive and ecstatic nature of the experience snake handlers have described, and also because the experience is fundamentally incapable of being fully explained or communicated to outsiders. In the same way, there is too much of a gap between our world and that of 1,600 years ago when the mystery cults flourished. "We just don't know" is the theme of many of the pages here, but Bowden's summary helps limn the borders of the knowable within a strange religious tradition.
67 of 88 people found the following review helpful.
CAVEAT EMPTOR
By G. Beke
Warning: This book seriously misrepresents aspects of the Mystery cults it claims to elucidate.
Pg. 47-48: "There is also the importance of Persephone at Eleusis. She is Queen of the Underworld... We have already seen in the Introduction that the references to a happy afterlife do not imply that the Eleusinian Mysteries were explicitly concerned with the afterlife... We can also see that the Queen of the Underworld had little to do with the Mysteries either."
WHAT...!!?? The Queen of the Underworld, abducted by Hades (Death), had little to do with the afterlife or the Eleusinian Mysteries...??? Please read the 'Homeric Hymn to Demeter' for yourself, and explore the amazing iconography on the 4-foot tall vase in the New York Metropolitan Museum.
Pg. 161: "Isis was at times accompanied not by Osiris but by the god Sarapis. Scholars debate the origins of Sarapis, whose name is derived from Apis, a god who took the form of a bull..."
HUHHH...?!!! The name Serapis comes from Osir-Apis, with Osiris, the Egyptian king of the dead (equivalent to the Greek Hades), incarnating as the oracular bull Apis. Serapis was the Greek amalgam of Osiris and Hades, and his 3-headed dog Cerberus also guarded the gate to the afterlife, as shown on coins of the Roman emperors Trajan, Hadrian (see 'customer images'), Caracalla, etc. In other words, Serapis = Osiris = Hades (Pluto).
The hero Heracles was said to have been initiated at Eleusis before his trip to the underworld to bring back the 3-headed hellhound Cerberus. Why would Heracles need the Eleusinian Mysteries for his trip to the world beyond unless they were "explicitly concerned with the afterlife?"
And why would a book on the "Mystery Cults of the Ancient World" fail to mention that Heracles, the great hero and inspiration of the ancient world, was initiated in the Mysteries of Eleusis, a ritual that was open to ALL who spoke Greek over hundreds of years, and later to ALL citizens of the Roman Empire?
The answer to this puzzling question pops up on pg. 208:
"Christian rituals are referred to as 'mysteria' because, like everything else to do with Christianity, they were once secret, known only to God and hinted at by the prophets in the Hebrew Bible, but later revealed to all through Jesus. Indeed, by revealing God's mysteries to all, Christ is doing the opposite of what would be expected from those involved in mystery cults."
There we have it. Bowden's Christian bias reveals his evangelical agenda (stripping the pagan Mysteries of any relevant spiritual value), which of course negates any possible claim to scholarly objectivity.
But still, nice pictures.
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Dry, scholarly overview of mystery cults
By Captain Texas
Dr. Bowden's book covers several mystery cults from the Greco-Roman era. Although this book certainly rounds up the existing rather scanty material on these cults, it does not give a good sense of how these rites fit into people's lives. Frequently it was not clear to me whether it was men, women, or both who took part in them, poor or rich, married or unmarried. Nor was it easy to see how these cults fit in with the larger societies and religions around them. There are copious photos and maps, which help break up the dry test.
In his introduction, Bowden discusses two types of religious experience, the imagistic and the doctrinal. The imagistic experience involves infrequent, dramatic, ecstatic events, such as might occur at a voudun ceremony (my example, not his), where the doctrinal approach involves more regular, repetitive rituals, such as going to a synagogue or a mainstream christian church every week. He places mystery cults firmly in the former category. But he does not ever really expand on this overall theme. Instead he just presents a series of mystery cults and their practices, as far as they were known. (Eleusinian, the Great Gods of Samothrace, other assorted littler cults of Greece and Asia Minor and some minor independent practioners, the Magna Mater, Dionysius, Isis, and Mithras). In the last chapter he again refers briefly to these two types of religious experiences and discusses Pentecostal churches which practice snake-handling as modern day examples of a mystery cult.
The book's last paragraph is a quote from a journalist reporting on his experience in a snake-handling church. And with that quote Dr. Bowden comes closer to capturing a sense of the actual people who participated in these cults than he does in the whole rest of the book.
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