LOOSE FICTIONS AND FRIVOLOUS FABRICATIONS’: ANCIENT FICTION AND THE MYSTERY RELIGIONS OF THE EARLY IMPERIAL ERA by GERHARDUS ADRIAAN VAN DEN HEEVER
LOOSE FICTIONS AND FRIVOLOUS FABRICATIONS’:
ANCIENT FICTION AND THE MYSTERY RELIGIONS
OF THE EARLY IMPERIAL ERA
by
GERHARDUS ADRIAAN VAN DEN HEEVER, 2005
University of South Africa
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/43164983.pdf
‘Constantine succeeded in making Christianity a Greco-Roman civic religion.’4 And although he reinforced his edicts against pagan religion with an expansive building programme of churches, he nevertheless maintained civic cults of Rhea and Tyche, complete with temples and rituals, and instituted public ceremonies celebrating him and Tyche Constantinopolis, and issued coins with Helios (the Sun) and other pagan symbols.
And yet one should caution against a hasty conclusion about the ‘demise’ of the mysteries. As cultural practices and social discourses they were so deeply woven into the warp and woof of (mainly Greek-speaking) Mediterranean societies from preclassical Antiquity onwards – even beyond the Middle Ages to the present day – that they, arguably, continued to leave their mark on the religions of the region: the veneration of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of Christ, originated from the well-known ‘mothers of the gods’ of the mysteries (Isis, Cybele/Magna Mater, Rhea, Demeter);8 the iconography of Mary cradling the baby Christ directly imitates Isis with the baby Horus/Harpocrates on the lap; and the infant Dionysus sitting on the lap of Hermes9 (the latter evidence of a two-way street, really, with early Christian conceptuality and late Antique Dionysiac mystery imagery intermingling),10 and then there is, of course, the contentious issue of possible mystery influence on Christian rituals such as baptism and eucharist
Roughly contemporary to this triumphal procession of Isis through the Mediterranean world (so Versnel), we find the same upward mobility in the Persian god Mithras, newly metamorphosed into a mystery deity: Mithras as deus invictus, aeternus, augustus, dominus, genitor, incorruptus, megas, omnipotens, sanctus, summus. 19 Also from the East, among the oriental dieties marching triumphant on Rome we find another – Iuppiter Dolichenus – acclaimed as sanctus, hypsistos, aeternus, exsuperantissimus, kyrios, megistos, conservator totius mundi. 20 And yet another divine confrater of the Dolichean, Iuppiter Heliopolitanus: augustus, despotēs, kyrios, hypatos, rex deorum.
The term ‘religious mentality’ does not denote privately held beliefs or assent to doctrinal formulae, what is commonly (and unthinkingly) referred to as ‘religious belief’, but rather the collective construction of a worldview,21 with the added aspect of the social and ideological ‘generatedness’ of such a worldview, and thus of its public, social, and political significance and function, that is, as a discursive formation
these developments constitute an index of the inroads made by oriental gods (hierarchical, ‘vertical cults’ – so Pleket)25 and orientalised Greek dieties in the Graeco-Roman world in a dual hierarchisation process – the institutionalisation of autocratic government with an intensified stratification of power relationships, and as its mirror image, the institutionalisation of a set of religious discourses of imperialised gods as tyrants, kings, and exercisers of power (that is, as veritable powermongers)
What united both sides of the hierarchisation process was the glorification of power. The pairing of imperial power and divine power was a perfect marriage made in heaven and on earth.2
The mysteries created networks of relationships for the celebration of power and its benefits, and by doing so, helped to undergird imperial society.2
the mysteries played a significant yet rarely recognized role. On the other hand, the recognized function of mysteries, namely the celebration of well-being, whether this be participation in festive banquets and confraternities, extreme experiences, soothing of maladies and allaying fears, was also the hallmark of the early imperial era – as the decree of the koinon of Asia from 9 B.C.E. had it: the beginning of good tidings, the fresh start to everything
p 20 by a Foucaultian understanding of power.
p 23 mystery religions are conventionally understood to be ‘secret religious cults’ that flourished in the GraecoRoman period, being first attested for the classical mysteries of Eleusis near Athens, then others in the Greek world (the Andanian, Dionysian, and Samothracian mysteries), eventually to include other wide-spread and important mysteries derived from Hellenised ‘oriental’ deities and cults (Isis and Sarapis, Mithras, Magna Mater and Attis, Sabazios, Jupiter Dolichenus, and other ‘normal’ or traditional religions and cults that developed mysteries, like that of Artemis and of course, the imperial mysteries). In contrast to traditional national, city and civic cults that were celebrated in public, and into which one was born or participated in by virtue of being included in the particular society, the mysteries were ‘elective cults’ – that is one became a member by choice (or by divine calling) and by consequent initiation. The process of initiation implied dramatic rituals (‘things performed’, drōmena, or a mime pageant called a drama mystikon), extreme experiences,43 the showing and touching of cult
objects (‘things shown’, deiknymena, in the case of the Eleusinian mysteries an ear of grain, in the case of the Dionysian mysteries a phallus and female genitals), and may have included some ‘instruction’ in the founding myth or hieros logos (‘things recited’, legomena; but this is a hugely contentious issue in the scholarship – on how to conceive of this ‘myth’ see below). So the mysteries had simultaneously a public side (parades and processions, performances of music, dance and mime) and a private, ‘secret’ side, where cult meetings and meals/banquets and initiations took place.4
The Greek words for mysteries reveal something of the social function of the rituals. The word ‘mystery’ can be understood to be derived from either myeein (to initiate) or myein (to close), the latter referring to the practice of ‘maintaining closed lips in order not to reveal the holy secret to outsiders.’45 An initiated person is a mystēs. Mostly, the word ‘mystery’ occurs as a plural noun mystēria, celebrations of festive initiations and recurrent participation in cult pageant and dramatic presentation. Related is telein (to initiate, to celebrate), teletē (festival, ritual, initiation), telestēs (initiation priest), and telestērion (initiation hall). Synonymous is the term orgia (ritual) which draws attention to the ritual aspect of the celebration.46 To put it in different language: the mysteries, by manipulating images, relating stories (‘myths’), staging pageants of mime, dancing, and emotional experience, created societies within societies.4
what is common to this kind of conception of the mysteries are in the first instance their individualism, that is, their character as receptacles for alienated individuals; in the second place, their offering of salvation, conceived as (mostly but not exclusively) the overcoming of death; in the third place, union with divinity; and finally, their character as irrational, enthusiastic (or charismatic), and superstitious.work, delineated the ‘religious meaning’ of the mystery cults thus: the goal of the mysteries is the attainment of sōtēria guaranteed by the initiation rite, and this sōtēria consists of ‘blessed immortality’ in the afterlife, as well as a new life on earth in union with and under the protection of the particular deity;74 next in importance to immortality is the idea of purification (Entsühnung/Kathartik) effected in a wide variety of rituals from water lustrations to blood baptisms like the taurobolium and kriobolium; 75 essential to the initiation into the mystery is the fact that the mysteries do not only effect a subjective experience of unity with the divine, but the rite also effects the objective attainment of the realities constituting the sōtēria, so that the mystēs has now received the character indelebilis of sacratus, renatus, and tauroboliatus; 76 the benefits accrued from initiation into a mystery do not preclude multiple initiation into other mysteries, the reason being the increasingly magicalsuperstitious view taken of the mysteries, which prompted the initiands to seek ever more secure guarantees for the sōtēria in multiple initiations and purifications;77 and lastly, the development of religious, mystery communities as societies within society.
p 37 This was the context against which the work of figures such as J. G. Frazer95 and Otto Pfleiderer96 gain in significance. Both traced the origins of Mediterranean and oriental religions (and thus the mysteries) to an origin in vegetative religion of a dyingand rising god as the expression of seasonal cycles of nature, and this view was hugely influential due to the influence of the Pan-Babylonian School at the beginning of the twentieth century.
p 40 Reinhold Merkelbach was not the first to draw attention to the relationship of ancient fiction to ancient and late antique religion. In his Die griechisch-orientalische Romanliteratur in religionsgeschichtlicher Beleuchtung (Tübingen, 1927) Karl Kerenyi argued for an origin for the ancient novel in religion, based on his reading of the Romanfiguren (the characters populating the novels) – the passivity characterizing their understanding of self and world, as well as the tremendous influence of Egyptian-Anatolian gods together with superstition on the actions of these characters, led Kerenyi to posit a religious origin for the ancient novel.101 To be sure, the utopian travel novels, the Alexander novels and the Trojan novels did not count among the true novels that provided the grounds for Kerenyi’s theory, so the theory worked for the so-called ‘true’ or ‘ideal’ novel romance.102 According to him the various elements of the novel should be analyzed and interpreted religio-historically, which means that the Egyptian myths provided the prototypes and models for the travels and
travails of the loving couples of the novels, in particular the myths about Isis and those concerning the death and ‘resurrection’ of Osiris, and in this view, furthermore, the novels represent the accounts of the sufferings of these gods
Merkelbach took up the project of a religio-historical interpretation of the ancient novel and in the process went one step further to include not only the Isiac mystery cult, but all the major mystery cults of the early empire. Not only do the novels present the reader in narrative format with Egyptian myths,104 but also with Mithraic,105 Dionysiac,106 Pythagorean,107 and Helios108 myths, but the narrative texts themselves are mystery texts, or are themselves mythologies. Since the origins of epic, lyric and drama should be sought in religion, it follows that the same should hold for the novel.109 ‘The ancient romances are intimately connected to the mysteries of antiquity in decline, namely the cults of Isis, Mithras, Dionysus, and the sun god.
p 63 The problem of truth vs. fiction is exactly indicated by the opposition of myth and history, mythos and logos. These two terms originally denoted the same reality, namely ‘word’ or ‘story’. In the ancient world a mythologos was a storyteller, but when later Greek philosophers and historians started to question the traditional tales regarding the gods and heroes in the period of ‘sophistic enlightenment’ the word mythos came to mean ‘implausible story’ (Herodotus 2.23.1) or ‘mere fabulous tale telling’ as opposed to true history (Thucydides 1.22.4), or popular but false stories and even outright lies opposed to logos. 172 What should not be forgotten is the fact that the historical questioning of myth is not in the first instance an indication of the possibility of determining truth vs. falsehood, but of a redefinition of society via its defining and identity giving stories, at the very least a contest as to whose stories will count as definitive, as is clear from the polemics in Plato’s Republic (398a; also 605c and 568a-c): while his own myths sound very much like … myths, what is at stake in his repudiation of the ‘stories of the poets’ is the contest for the right to define the proper constitution of the state, the right to define the proper constitution of ‘the good’, ‘the true’ and ‘the just.’
p 76 To conclude: fiction (and by extension, the novel) is not just fiction. It is a social discourse and it makes a world of difference to read the ancient novels or love romances in this way.
p 104 Refictionalizing and Remythologizing the Roman Empire It is in this context that the large-scale refictionalizing and remythologizing characteristic of the period should be understood. If in earlier times Thucydides, and during the transition to the Roman period, Polybius, wrote histories stripped of fable, myth, and fantasy to provide examples and paradigms for the exercise of civic and political responsibility in the context of the polis (i.e. ‘political history’), in the late Hellenistic period and in the empire, history once again embraced divine and heroic genealogies, mythic and legendary accounts of pre-history, and generally all kinds of exotic and fantastic tales.289 History thus became a handmaiden to myth and tall tales, following the expansion of geographical and cultural horizons resulting from the
conquests of Alexander and the interest generated by the strange, miraculous, and far away exotic recounted by the new generation of geographers and historians – ‘an enormous paradoxographical literature reflects one of the central concerns of middlebrow culture in the Hellenistic and Roman periods.’290 When the problem of the credibility of recounted phenomena or facts is not countenanced, then the boundaries separating history and fiction get blurred to such an extent that history itself becomes fiction, just as fiction, in this case the novels, started off life as history-like writings.
p 115 Already at the beginning of this study322 it was announced after previewing the history of the scholarly study of the mysteries/mystery religions, and subsequently after surveying ‘the career path of the mysteries’ in the history of religions,323 that the mysteries/mystery religions are, literally, the creations of scholars’ studies – the discursive artifact that arises from the juxtaposition of Zeitgeist, cultural and theological presuppositions, interpretation traditions, and theory of religion on to the ‘raw data’ for the mysteries.
p 119 Strictly speaking, one should differentiate between three orders of language, ‘first’ second order religious language which is not accessible to the student of religious phenomena, being pre-reflective, unorganized and unlanguaged ‘pre-experience experience’; ‘second’ second order language, which is what is found in religious texts from oral exclamation to imperial dictate, being experience as it is conceptualized and presented or proposed; and third order language, that is the language of the scholar in the endeavour of comparison and redescription (itself not without its ideological and rhetorical thrust).\p 136 To study religion as social formation is to pay attention to the social forces that generate the specific religion(s) as active and ongoing social processes, as well as the social institutions that result from this interaction.389 In this sense, social formation refers to a ‘specific and coordinated system of beliefs, acts, and institutions that construct the necessary conditions for shared identities.’390 Mythmaking refers to the way in which images, stories, and exempla from the past (ancestors, events, concatenated strings of events as history) are configured and used to construct and shape a collective imagination about the present and to make a world in which to live.
ANCIENT MYSTERIES AND SOCIAL FORMATION IN THE EARLY IMPERIAL ERA 2.1 Imperial Phenomena
Mystery Cults as Social Discourse
University of South Africa
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/43164983.pdf
‘Constantine succeeded in making Christianity a Greco-Roman civic religion.’4 And although he reinforced his edicts against pagan religion with an expansive building programme of churches, he nevertheless maintained civic cults of Rhea and Tyche, complete with temples and rituals, and instituted public ceremonies celebrating him and Tyche Constantinopolis, and issued coins with Helios (the Sun) and other pagan symbols.
And yet one should caution against a hasty conclusion about the ‘demise’ of the mysteries. As cultural practices and social discourses they were so deeply woven into the warp and woof of (mainly Greek-speaking) Mediterranean societies from preclassical Antiquity onwards – even beyond the Middle Ages to the present day – that they, arguably, continued to leave their mark on the religions of the region: the veneration of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of Christ, originated from the well-known ‘mothers of the gods’ of the mysteries (Isis, Cybele/Magna Mater, Rhea, Demeter);8 the iconography of Mary cradling the baby Christ directly imitates Isis with the baby Horus/Harpocrates on the lap; and the infant Dionysus sitting on the lap of Hermes9 (the latter evidence of a two-way street, really, with early Christian conceptuality and late Antique Dionysiac mystery imagery intermingling),10 and then there is, of course, the contentious issue of possible mystery influence on Christian rituals such as baptism and eucharist
Roughly contemporary to this triumphal procession of Isis through the Mediterranean world (so Versnel), we find the same upward mobility in the Persian god Mithras, newly metamorphosed into a mystery deity: Mithras as deus invictus, aeternus, augustus, dominus, genitor, incorruptus, megas, omnipotens, sanctus, summus. 19 Also from the East, among the oriental dieties marching triumphant on Rome we find another – Iuppiter Dolichenus – acclaimed as sanctus, hypsistos, aeternus, exsuperantissimus, kyrios, megistos, conservator totius mundi. 20 And yet another divine confrater of the Dolichean, Iuppiter Heliopolitanus: augustus, despotēs, kyrios, hypatos, rex deorum.
The term ‘religious mentality’ does not denote privately held beliefs or assent to doctrinal formulae, what is commonly (and unthinkingly) referred to as ‘religious belief’, but rather the collective construction of a worldview,21 with the added aspect of the social and ideological ‘generatedness’ of such a worldview, and thus of its public, social, and political significance and function, that is, as a discursive formation
these developments constitute an index of the inroads made by oriental gods (hierarchical, ‘vertical cults’ – so Pleket)25 and orientalised Greek dieties in the Graeco-Roman world in a dual hierarchisation process – the institutionalisation of autocratic government with an intensified stratification of power relationships, and as its mirror image, the institutionalisation of a set of religious discourses of imperialised gods as tyrants, kings, and exercisers of power (that is, as veritable powermongers)
What united both sides of the hierarchisation process was the glorification of power. The pairing of imperial power and divine power was a perfect marriage made in heaven and on earth.2
The mysteries created networks of relationships for the celebration of power and its benefits, and by doing so, helped to undergird imperial society.2
the mysteries played a significant yet rarely recognized role. On the other hand, the recognized function of mysteries, namely the celebration of well-being, whether this be participation in festive banquets and confraternities, extreme experiences, soothing of maladies and allaying fears, was also the hallmark of the early imperial era – as the decree of the koinon of Asia from 9 B.C.E. had it: the beginning of good tidings, the fresh start to everything
p 20 by a Foucaultian understanding of power.
p 23 mystery religions are conventionally understood to be ‘secret religious cults’ that flourished in the GraecoRoman period, being first attested for the classical mysteries of Eleusis near Athens, then others in the Greek world (the Andanian, Dionysian, and Samothracian mysteries), eventually to include other wide-spread and important mysteries derived from Hellenised ‘oriental’ deities and cults (Isis and Sarapis, Mithras, Magna Mater and Attis, Sabazios, Jupiter Dolichenus, and other ‘normal’ or traditional religions and cults that developed mysteries, like that of Artemis and of course, the imperial mysteries). In contrast to traditional national, city and civic cults that were celebrated in public, and into which one was born or participated in by virtue of being included in the particular society, the mysteries were ‘elective cults’ – that is one became a member by choice (or by divine calling) and by consequent initiation. The process of initiation implied dramatic rituals (‘things performed’, drōmena, or a mime pageant called a drama mystikon), extreme experiences,43 the showing and touching of cult
objects (‘things shown’, deiknymena, in the case of the Eleusinian mysteries an ear of grain, in the case of the Dionysian mysteries a phallus and female genitals), and may have included some ‘instruction’ in the founding myth or hieros logos (‘things recited’, legomena; but this is a hugely contentious issue in the scholarship – on how to conceive of this ‘myth’ see below). So the mysteries had simultaneously a public side (parades and processions, performances of music, dance and mime) and a private, ‘secret’ side, where cult meetings and meals/banquets and initiations took place.4
The Greek words for mysteries reveal something of the social function of the rituals. The word ‘mystery’ can be understood to be derived from either myeein (to initiate) or myein (to close), the latter referring to the practice of ‘maintaining closed lips in order not to reveal the holy secret to outsiders.’45 An initiated person is a mystēs. Mostly, the word ‘mystery’ occurs as a plural noun mystēria, celebrations of festive initiations and recurrent participation in cult pageant and dramatic presentation. Related is telein (to initiate, to celebrate), teletē (festival, ritual, initiation), telestēs (initiation priest), and telestērion (initiation hall). Synonymous is the term orgia (ritual) which draws attention to the ritual aspect of the celebration.46 To put it in different language: the mysteries, by manipulating images, relating stories (‘myths’), staging pageants of mime, dancing, and emotional experience, created societies within societies.4
what is common to this kind of conception of the mysteries are in the first instance their individualism, that is, their character as receptacles for alienated individuals; in the second place, their offering of salvation, conceived as (mostly but not exclusively) the overcoming of death; in the third place, union with divinity; and finally, their character as irrational, enthusiastic (or charismatic), and superstitious.work, delineated the ‘religious meaning’ of the mystery cults thus: the goal of the mysteries is the attainment of sōtēria guaranteed by the initiation rite, and this sōtēria consists of ‘blessed immortality’ in the afterlife, as well as a new life on earth in union with and under the protection of the particular deity;74 next in importance to immortality is the idea of purification (Entsühnung/Kathartik) effected in a wide variety of rituals from water lustrations to blood baptisms like the taurobolium and kriobolium; 75 essential to the initiation into the mystery is the fact that the mysteries do not only effect a subjective experience of unity with the divine, but the rite also effects the objective attainment of the realities constituting the sōtēria, so that the mystēs has now received the character indelebilis of sacratus, renatus, and tauroboliatus; 76 the benefits accrued from initiation into a mystery do not preclude multiple initiation into other mysteries, the reason being the increasingly magicalsuperstitious view taken of the mysteries, which prompted the initiands to seek ever more secure guarantees for the sōtēria in multiple initiations and purifications;77 and lastly, the development of religious, mystery communities as societies within society.
p 37 This was the context against which the work of figures such as J. G. Frazer95 and Otto Pfleiderer96 gain in significance. Both traced the origins of Mediterranean and oriental religions (and thus the mysteries) to an origin in vegetative religion of a dyingand rising god as the expression of seasonal cycles of nature, and this view was hugely influential due to the influence of the Pan-Babylonian School at the beginning of the twentieth century.
p 40 Reinhold Merkelbach was not the first to draw attention to the relationship of ancient fiction to ancient and late antique religion. In his Die griechisch-orientalische Romanliteratur in religionsgeschichtlicher Beleuchtung (Tübingen, 1927) Karl Kerenyi argued for an origin for the ancient novel in religion, based on his reading of the Romanfiguren (the characters populating the novels) – the passivity characterizing their understanding of self and world, as well as the tremendous influence of Egyptian-Anatolian gods together with superstition on the actions of these characters, led Kerenyi to posit a religious origin for the ancient novel.101 To be sure, the utopian travel novels, the Alexander novels and the Trojan novels did not count among the true novels that provided the grounds for Kerenyi’s theory, so the theory worked for the so-called ‘true’ or ‘ideal’ novel romance.102 According to him the various elements of the novel should be analyzed and interpreted religio-historically, which means that the Egyptian myths provided the prototypes and models for the travels and
travails of the loving couples of the novels, in particular the myths about Isis and those concerning the death and ‘resurrection’ of Osiris, and in this view, furthermore, the novels represent the accounts of the sufferings of these gods
Merkelbach took up the project of a religio-historical interpretation of the ancient novel and in the process went one step further to include not only the Isiac mystery cult, but all the major mystery cults of the early empire. Not only do the novels present the reader in narrative format with Egyptian myths,104 but also with Mithraic,105 Dionysiac,106 Pythagorean,107 and Helios108 myths, but the narrative texts themselves are mystery texts, or are themselves mythologies. Since the origins of epic, lyric and drama should be sought in religion, it follows that the same should hold for the novel.109 ‘The ancient romances are intimately connected to the mysteries of antiquity in decline, namely the cults of Isis, Mithras, Dionysus, and the sun god.
p 63 The problem of truth vs. fiction is exactly indicated by the opposition of myth and history, mythos and logos. These two terms originally denoted the same reality, namely ‘word’ or ‘story’. In the ancient world a mythologos was a storyteller, but when later Greek philosophers and historians started to question the traditional tales regarding the gods and heroes in the period of ‘sophistic enlightenment’ the word mythos came to mean ‘implausible story’ (Herodotus 2.23.1) or ‘mere fabulous tale telling’ as opposed to true history (Thucydides 1.22.4), or popular but false stories and even outright lies opposed to logos. 172 What should not be forgotten is the fact that the historical questioning of myth is not in the first instance an indication of the possibility of determining truth vs. falsehood, but of a redefinition of society via its defining and identity giving stories, at the very least a contest as to whose stories will count as definitive, as is clear from the polemics in Plato’s Republic (398a; also 605c and 568a-c): while his own myths sound very much like … myths, what is at stake in his repudiation of the ‘stories of the poets’ is the contest for the right to define the proper constitution of the state, the right to define the proper constitution of ‘the good’, ‘the true’ and ‘the just.’
p 76 To conclude: fiction (and by extension, the novel) is not just fiction. It is a social discourse and it makes a world of difference to read the ancient novels or love romances in this way.
p 104 Refictionalizing and Remythologizing the Roman Empire It is in this context that the large-scale refictionalizing and remythologizing characteristic of the period should be understood. If in earlier times Thucydides, and during the transition to the Roman period, Polybius, wrote histories stripped of fable, myth, and fantasy to provide examples and paradigms for the exercise of civic and political responsibility in the context of the polis (i.e. ‘political history’), in the late Hellenistic period and in the empire, history once again embraced divine and heroic genealogies, mythic and legendary accounts of pre-history, and generally all kinds of exotic and fantastic tales.289 History thus became a handmaiden to myth and tall tales, following the expansion of geographical and cultural horizons resulting from the
conquests of Alexander and the interest generated by the strange, miraculous, and far away exotic recounted by the new generation of geographers and historians – ‘an enormous paradoxographical literature reflects one of the central concerns of middlebrow culture in the Hellenistic and Roman periods.’290 When the problem of the credibility of recounted phenomena or facts is not countenanced, then the boundaries separating history and fiction get blurred to such an extent that history itself becomes fiction, just as fiction, in this case the novels, started off life as history-like writings.
p 115 Already at the beginning of this study322 it was announced after previewing the history of the scholarly study of the mysteries/mystery religions, and subsequently after surveying ‘the career path of the mysteries’ in the history of religions,323 that the mysteries/mystery religions are, literally, the creations of scholars’ studies – the discursive artifact that arises from the juxtaposition of Zeitgeist, cultural and theological presuppositions, interpretation traditions, and theory of religion on to the ‘raw data’ for the mysteries.
p 119 Strictly speaking, one should differentiate between three orders of language, ‘first’ second order religious language which is not accessible to the student of religious phenomena, being pre-reflective, unorganized and unlanguaged ‘pre-experience experience’; ‘second’ second order language, which is what is found in religious texts from oral exclamation to imperial dictate, being experience as it is conceptualized and presented or proposed; and third order language, that is the language of the scholar in the endeavour of comparison and redescription (itself not without its ideological and rhetorical thrust).\p 136 To study religion as social formation is to pay attention to the social forces that generate the specific religion(s) as active and ongoing social processes, as well as the social institutions that result from this interaction.389 In this sense, social formation refers to a ‘specific and coordinated system of beliefs, acts, and institutions that construct the necessary conditions for shared identities.’390 Mythmaking refers to the way in which images, stories, and exempla from the past (ancestors, events, concatenated strings of events as history) are configured and used to construct and shape a collective imagination about the present and to make a world in which to live.
ANCIENT MYSTERIES AND SOCIAL FORMATION IN THE EARLY IMPERIAL ERA 2.1 Imperial Phenomena
Mystery Cults as Social Discourse
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