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Jan N. Bremmer Initiation Into the Mysteries of the Ancient World

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Jan N. Bremmer Initiation Into the Mysteries of the Ancient World Jan N. Bremmer Initiation into the Mysteries of the Ancient World Unauthenticated | 176.92.32.227 Download Date | 7/28/14 8:56 PM Münchner Vorlesungen zu Antiken Welten Herausgegeben vom Münchner Zentrum für Antike Welten (MZAW) Band 1 Unauthenticated | 176.92.32.227 Download Date | 7/28/14 8:56 PM Jan N. Bremmer Initiation into the Mysteries of the Ancient World Unauthenticated | 176.92.32.227 Download Date | 7/28/14 8:56 PM ISBN 978-3-11-029929-8 e-ISBN 978-3-11-029955-7 ISSN 2198-9664 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston The book ist published with open access at www.degruyter.com. Typesetting: jürgen ullrich typosatz, Nördlingen Printing: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Unauthenticated | 176.92.32.227 Download Date | 7/28/14 8:56 PM Contents Preface VII Acknowledgments XV Conventions and Abbreviations XVII I Initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries: A ‘Thin’ Description 1 1 Qualifications and preparations for initiation 2 2 The myêsis 5 3 The epopteia 11 4 The aftermath 16 II Mysteries at the Interface of Greece and Anatolia: Samothracian Gods, Kabeiroi and Korybantes 21 1 The Mysteries of Samothrace 22 2 The Kabeiroi 37 3 The Korybantes 48 4 Conclusion 54 III Orpheus, Orphism and Orphic-Bacchic Mysteries 55 1 Orpheus 56 2 Orphism 58 3 The Orphic-Bacchic Mysteries 70 4 Conclusions 79 IV Greek Mysteries in Roman Times 81 1 Local Greek Mysteries 82 2 The Dionysiac Mysteries 100 V The Mysteries of Isis and Mithras 110 1 Isis 110 2 Mithras 125 3 Conclusions 138 VI Did the Mysteries Influence Early Christianity? 142 1 The Mysteries around 1900 and during the Enlightenment 143 2 The Mysteries in the post-Reformation era 145 3 The Mysteries and emerging Christianity 147 Unauthenticated | 176.92.32.227 Download Date | 7/28/14 8:57 PM VI Contents 4 The pagan Mysteries in the earlier empire 154 5 Christian reactions to pagan Mysteries 156 6 Christian appropriation of the Mysteries in Late Antiquity 161 7 Conclusions 164 Appendix 1: Demeter and Eleusis in Megara 166 1 The temples of Demeter 166 2 The Thesmophoria 170 3 Demeter Malophoros 177 4 Conclusion 179 Appendix 2: The Golden Bough: Orphic, Eleusinian and Hellenistic-Jewish Sources of Virgil’s Underworld in Aeneid VI 180 1 The area between the upper world and the Acheron (268–416) 182 2 Between the Acheron and Tartarus/Elysium (417–547) 185 3 Tartarus (548–627) 187 4 The Palace and the Bough (628–636) 193 5 Elysium (637–678) 196 6 Anchises and the Heldenschau (679–887) 199 7 Conclusions 202 Bibliography 205 Index of Names, Subjects and Passages 243 Unauthenticated | 176.92.32.227 Download Date | 7/28/14 8:57 PM Preface Whoever takes the trouble to google the term ‘mysterious’, will get approximately 42 million hits, and the term ‘mystery’ will give more than 114 million: there can be little doubt that people all over the world like mysteries.1 However, in the course of its long existence, the word has undergone several changes in meaning: its present connotation of ‘secret’ is not found before the New Testament (Ch. VI.3). In the 1930s and 1940s, ‘mystery’ became associated with comics and Trivialliteratur in the USA about detectives battling monsters,2 and it was this that eventually led to ‘mystery’ being used to denote a detective story. Mystery originally appeared in Greek in the plural, Mystêria, as the name of the festival that we currently call the Eleusinian Mysteries (Ch. I), just as other names of Greek festivals are in the plural, such as Anthesteria, Thargelia and Dionysia. For obscure reasons, the Romans used the term initia, also plural, to translate Mysteria, and this usage became the basis of our term initiation,3 whereas Latin mysterium, eventually, became our ‘mystery’.4 Unfortunately, the etymology of mystêrion is not wholly clear. Generations of scholars have connected mystêrion with the Greek verb myô, which means ‘to close the lips or eyes’, and they have explained it as referring to Demeter’s commandment in her Homeric Hymn (478–479) to keep the rites secret. This assumption may be correct if mystêrion contains a secondary -s-, like many other Greek words. More recently, Hittite scholars have explained the Greek term from the Hittite verb munnae, meaning ‘to conceal, to hide, to shut out of sight’, rather than ‘keep secret, be silent about’.5 If we take into account that some of the oldest Mysteries, those of Eleusis and of the Kabeiroi, probably devel- 1 Google, accessed 20 December 2013. 2 J. Symons, Bloody Murder. From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History (London, 1972) 134–142; H. Shpayer-Makov, The Ascent of the Detective. Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England (Oxford, 2011). 3 ThLL s.v. initio, initium;H. Wagenvoort, Studies in Roman Literature, Culture and Religion (Leiden, 1956) 150–168 (‘Initia Cereris’, first published in 1948), to be added to P. Borgeaud, ‘Les mystères’,inL. Bricault and C. Bonnet (eds), Panthée: Religious Transformations in the Graeco- Roman Empire (Leiden, 2013) 131–144 at 138–140. 4 But note that ‘mystery’ in the expression ‘mystery play’ derives from Latin ministerium not mysterium. 5 N. Oettinger, Die Stammbildung des hethitischen Verbums (Nuremberg, 1979) 161–162; J. Puh- vel, ‘Secrecy in Hittite: munnai- vs. sanna-’, Incontri linguistici 27 (2004) 101–104 and Hittite Etymological Dictionary, M (Berlin and New York, 2004) 188–192; A. Kloekhorst, Etymological Dictionary of the Hittite Inherited Lexicon (Leiden, 2008) 587–588; R. Beekes, Etymological Dic- tionary of Greek, 2 vols (Leiden, 2010) 2.988. I am most grateful to Norbert Oettinger for advice regarding the etymology. ©2014, Jan N. Bremmer. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. Unauthenticated | 176.92.32.227 Download Date | 7/28/14 8:57 PM VIII Preface oped out of ancient rites of tribal initiation,6 their secrecy may well be the factor that distinguished them from other rites, for all over the world rites of initiation are highly secret. As we will also see shortly (Ch. I.4), the historical Greeks gave a different interpretation to the secrecy of the Mysteries, but the fact that the second stage of the Eleusinian initiation was called Epopteia, ‘Viewing’ (Ch. I.3), may mean that (some?) Greeks themselves interpreted the first stage, the Myêsis,as‘Closing the eyes’. We simply do not know. In ancient Greece, religion was very much controlled by the city, the polis,to such an extent that in the last few decades scholars preferred to speak of polis religion.7 Yet this focus on the city as the all-controlling authority in ancient Greek religion certainly goes too far; it has been pointed out very recently that there were areas, such as magic and eschatology, where the influence of the city must have been minimal.8 Another of these areas was the special type of cult that the Greeks called ‘Mysteries’.9 They thus gave the name that had originally denoted only the Eleusinian Mysteries also to other cults in other places, although terms, such as teletê and orgia, the ancestor of our ‘orgies’, were used as well.10 The modern study of and collection of evidence for the ancient Mysteries, in particular the Eleusinian Mysteries, started in the early seventeenth century with- 6 Eleusis: Bremmer, Greek Religion (Oxford, 19992)85=La religion grecque (Paris, 2012) 128; 4 R. Gordon, ‘Mysterienreligion’,inRGG 5 (2002) 1638–1640. Kabeiroi: this volume, Ch. II.2. The connection was exaggerated by earlier students of the Mysteries, such as K.H.E. de Jong, Das antike Mysterienwesen in religionsgeschichtlicher, ethnologischer und psychologischer Beleuchtung (Lei- 2 den, 1909, 1919 ) and R. Pettazzoni, I misteri (Bologna, 1924, repr. Cosenza, 1997). For the former, see J.J. Poortman, ‘Karel Hendrik Eduard de Jong (Biebrich, 9 februari 1872 – Zeist, 27 december 1960)’, Jaarboek van de Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde te Leiden 1960–1961, 89–93. For the latter (1883–1959), see G. Casadio, ‘Introduzione: Raffaele Pettazzoni a cinquant’anni dalla morte’, SMSR 77 (2011) 27–37 and ‘Raffaele Pettazzoni ieri, oggi, domani: la formazione di uno storico delle religioni e il suo lascito intellettuale’, in G.P. Basello et al. (eds), Il mistero che rivelato ci divide e sofferto ci unisce (Milan, 2012) 221–240. 7 Although it has become popular through the influence of Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood (1945–2007) and Robert Parker, the term seems to have appeared first in R. Reitzenstein, Die hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen (Leipzig and Berlin, 19101)3(‘Polis-Religion’). 8 Bremmer, ‘Manteis, Magic, Mysteries and Mythography: Messy Margins of Polis Religion?’, Kernos 23 (2010) 13–35; E. Eidinow, ‘Networks and Narratives: A Model for Ancient Greek Reli- gion’, Kernos 24 (2011) 9–38; J. Rüpke, ‘Lived Ancient Religion: Questioning “Cults” and “Polis Religion”’, Mythos ns 5 (2011) 191–204; J. Kindt, Rethinking Greek Religion (Cambridge, 2012). 9 For collections of sources, see N. Turchi, Fontes historiae mysteriorum aevi hellenistici (Rome, 1923); P. Scarpi, Le religioni dei misteri, 2 vols (Milan, 2002).
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