piety posse

Selections from Franz Cumont’s After Life in Roman Paganism:

The Oriental mysteries, propagated in the West, united in the promise of securing holiness in this life and felicity in the next, while they imparted to their initiates the knowledge of certain rites and required submission to certain precepts. Instead of the fluctuating and disputable beliefs of philosophers as to destiny in the Beyond, these religions gave certainty founded on divine revelation and on the faith of countless generations attached to them. The truth, which the mysticism of the thinkers looked to find in direct communication with heaven, was here warranted by a venerable tradition and by the daily manifestations of the gods adored. The belief in life beyond the grave, which had in ancient paganism been so vague and melancholy, was transformed into confident hope in a definite beatitude. Participation in the occult ceremonies of the sect was an infallible means of finding salvation. (p.33)

The salvation ensured by the mysteries was conceived as identification with the god venerated in them. By virtue of this union the initiate was reborn, like this god, to new life after he had perished, or, like him, escaped from the fatal law of death which weighs on humanity. He was “deified” or “immortalised,” after he had taken part, as actor, in a liturgical drama reproducing the myth of the god whose lot was thus assimilated to his own. Purifications, lustrations and unctions, participation in a sacred banquet, revelations, apparitions and ecstasies— a complicated series of ceremonies and instructions helped to bring about this metamorphosis of the faithful whom a higher power absorbed or penetrated with its energy. We shall return to this sacramental operation which made pious souls equal to the divinity. (p.34)

Among the mysteries propagated in the West, the most ancient were those of the Thraco-Phrygian gods, Dionysos and Sabazios, who were indeed looked upon as identical. We know that in 186 B. C. a senatus consultum forbade the celebration of the Bacchanalia in Italy, and in 139 some sectaries of Jupiter Sabazius, who identified this god with the Jahve-Sabaoth of the Jews, were expelled from Rome by the praetor at the same time as the “Chaldeans.“ The cult practised by the votaries of Bacchus or Liber Pater, whose confraternities were maintained until the end of paganism, differed profoundly from the Dionysos worship of ancient Greece: a number of Oriental elements had been introduced into it; in particular, the relations between Dionysos and Osiris, which go back to a very remote period, had become singularly close in Egypt. However, many reliefs on tombstones and the celebrated paintings found in the catacombs of Praetextatus prove that the cults of the Thraco-Phrygian gods remained faithful to the old idea of a future life. The shade went down into the bowels of the earth, never again to leave them. If judged worthy, it took part in an eternal banquet, of which the initiate received a foretaste on earth, in the feasts of the mysteries. Sacred drunkenness, a divine exaltation, was the pledge of the joyous intoxication which the god of wine would grant in Hades to the faithful who had united themselves to him. (p.35)

No religious ceremony was more universally performed in the most diverse regions of the Empire than this cult of the grave. At every hour of every day families met in some tomb to celebrate there an anniversary by eating the funeral meal. Peoples remained strongly attached to practices the omission of which would have seemed to them dangerous as well as impious, for the spirits of the dead were powerful and vindictive. It is therefore not surprising that these practices persisted in the Christian era in spite of the efforts of the clergy to suppress them. St. Augustine reprimands those who, like pagans, “drink intemperately above the dead” —these are his words—”and who, while serving meals to corpses, bury themselves with these buried bodies, making a religion of their greed and their drunkenness.” (p.55-56)

The idea that the ancestors become the tutelary spirits of their descendants who were faithful to their duty to them, goes back to the remotest antiquity and probably lies at the foundation of the cult of the Lares. But the field of action of these genii was multiple, since they were a multitude, and their functions underwent a further development when they were considered to be the equivalents of the demons of the Greeks. “The souls of the dead,” Maximus of Tyre tells us, “mingle with all kinds of men, with every destiny, thought and pursuit of man; they support the good, succour the oppressed and punish the criminal.” Plotinus, recalling the universal custom of paying cult to those who have gone, adds: “Many souls which belonged to men do not cease to do good to men when they have left the body. They come to their aid especially in granting them revelations.” (p.61)

Who could more justly deserve a share in the felicity of the gods than those who on the earth had lived in their company and known their designs? He who had thus been in communication with the godhead and learnt his secrets was raised above the condition of humanity. This sacred knowledge, this gift of prophecy, this “gnosis,” which was inseparable from piety, transformed him who had obtained it, set him free even in life from the condemnation of fate; and after death he went to the immortals whose confidant he had been here below. The philosophers and theologians who treated of the nature of the Divine Being shared the blessed lot of the priests and soothsayers who interpreted His will. Their doctrine came to them by inspiration from on high, or at least so they readily believed. (p. 114)