The Greek Mystery Cults

The following has been taken from Will Durant, The Life of Greece , vol. 2 of The Story of Civilization , Simon and Schuster, 1966, 188-92.

By the time of the Periclean Enlightenment the most vigorous element in Greek religion was the mystery. In the Greek sense, a mystery was a secret ceremony in which sacred symbols were revealed, symbolic rites were performed, and only initiates were the worshipers. Usually the rites represented, or commemorated, in semi-dramatic form, the suffering, death, and resurrection of a god, pointed back to old vegetation themes and magic, and promised the initiate a personal immortality.

THE ELEUSIAN MYSTERIES:

Iliad

Odyssey

THE ORPHIC CULT:

The creed was essentially the affirmation of the passion (suffering), death, and resurrection of the divine son of Dionysus, and resurrection of all men into a future of reward and punishment. Since the Titans, who had slain Dionysus, were believed to have been the ancestors of man, a taint of original sin rested upon all humanity; and in punishment for this the soul was inclosed in the body as in a prison or a tomb. But man might console by knowing that the Titans had eaten Dionysus, and that therefore every man harbored, in his soul, a particle of indestructible divinity In a mystic sacrament of communion the ORPHIC worshipers ate the raw flesh of a bull as a symbol of Dionysus to commemorate the slaying and eating of the god, and to absorb the divine essence anew. After death, according to Orphic theology, the soul goes down to Hades, and must face judgment by the gods of the underworld; the Orphic hymns and ritual instructed the faithful in the act of preparing for this comprehensive and final examination. If the verdict was guilty, there would be severe punishment. One form of the doctrine conceived this punishment as eternal, and transmitted to later theology the notion of hell. Another form adopted the idea of transmigration: the soul was reborn again and again into lives happier or bitterer than before according to the purity or impurity of its former existence; and this wheel of rebirth would turn until complete purity was achieved, and the soul was admitted to the Islands of the Blest. Another variant offered hope that the punishment in Hades might be ended through penances performed in advance by the individual, or, after his death, by his friends. In the way a doctrine of purgatory and indulgences arose. And thus there were in Orphism trends that culminated in the morals and monasticism of Christianity. The reckless looseness of the Olympians was replaced by a strict code of conduct; a conception of sin and conscience, a dualistic view of the body as evil and of the soul as divine, entered into Greek thought; subjugation of the flesh became a main purpose of religion, as a condition of release for the soul.

The influence of the sect was extensive and enduring. Perhaps it was here that Pythagoreans took their diet, their dress, and their theory transmigration; Plato, though he rejected much of Orphism, accepted its opposition of body and soul, its puritan tendency, its hope of immortality. Part of the pantheism and asceticism of Stoicism may be traced to an Orphic origin. The Neo-Platonists of Alexandria possessed a large collection of Orphic writings, and based upon them much of their theology and their mysticism. The doctrines of hell, purgatory, and heaven, of the body versus the soul, of the divine son slain and reborn, as well as the sacramental eating of the body and the blood and divinity of the god, directly or deviously influenced Christianity, which was itself a mystery religion of atonement and hope, of mystic union and release. The basic ideas and ritual of the Orphic cult are alive and flourishing amongst us today.