Mysteries (Τὰ Μυστήρια)

MYSTERIES (Τὰ Μυστήρια). - From the Greek μύειν = to close (the eyes or the mouth), whence μυεῖν = to initiate (into secret cults) and μύστης = initiate. M. is the name, always written in the plural, of particular festivals during which there took place the initiation (τελετή, μύσεις, initia) into cults that could not be communicated (ἄρρητα) to the profane. The m. have a physiognomy of their own corresponding to two moments of religious development: the initial one proper to agrarian rites directed at renewing the forces of nature, exhausted after the labor of germination, by means of rites of a sacred-magical character accompanied by dances, use of masks, cries and sexually licentious acts; and the one to which some of them have attained by sublimating their meaning in harmony with the cultural and sacral development of the group, transferring it from the awakening of nature to that of the soul through a natural association of ideas that finds a spontaneous analogy between nature, which renews itself every spring, and the fate of the human soul. It is understood that this rebirth or resurrection of the god patron of the mystery is not to be taken in the precise sense in which one speaks of the Resurrection of the Lord and that of Lazarus the four-days-dead, but in the analogical sense in which Origen, and after him St. Jerome, explain, referring to the pagans themselves, the death and resurrection of Adonis as the deposition of seeds in the earth and their turning green again in the new spring.

This concern for the fate of the soul, of which the religion of the State does not think, intent as it is solely on the religious-social discipline of public worship, awakens with the progress of civilization and culture that favors the development of individualism in the fields of thought and conscience, and finds its suitable satisfaction in those religious conventicles that arose in primitive environments, remaining unchanged in ritual, but emptied of their initial magical-agrarian meaning and brought up to the level, in language and spiritual vision, of the civilization of the time.

All the m. require a preparation that must place the individual in a condition of ritual purity, by means of a) exorcisms, ablutions, various purgations, with water, fire, sulfur, ventilation (negative purification, ἁγνεία); b) sexual abstinences because pollution is a miasma that stains and weakens the individual while abstinence strengthens him; penances, mortifications, fasts, abstinences from foods (positive purification, καθαρμός) insofar as foods can, by burdening the body, take strength away from the spirit and prevent those visions (hallucinations) that render it fit to receive the revelation; and finally c) dances, formulas, sacred invocations that place the individual, now purged, in a condition to receive the manifestation of the god and to enroll in his militia.

The initiation proper takes place by means of a rite (τὰ δρώμενα, action) preceded or accompanied by the due instruction (τὰ λεγόμενα) that effects the mystic union of the initiate with the god of the mystery. This union can be, according to the quality of the rite, understood as a relationship either of sonship (Eleusis, Sabazius) or of marriage (Attis) or of friendship (Mithra). And since the m. are in origin agrarian rites, or at least, like Mithraism, contain elements of them, the whole of the ritual refers to the cycle of the seasons, which is a cycle of death and rebirth, with the immediate effect of strengthening the earthly life of the individual and of nourishing in him the hope of a blessed fate in the afterlife.

The initiatory rite comprises the revelation and the performance of a sacred rite that remains a secret for the profane and unfolds through phases that are not the same for all the m., but that all express the concept of a renewal of the individual. There is the touching of sacred objects; the recitation of formulas attesting the cultic acts performed; the vision or contemplation of objects capable of enrapturing the beholder and of giving him the guarantee of future beatitude; the enthusiasm (becoming god) obtained by means of the dance, producer of fascinating force, to the sound of deafening noises, a dance capable, if ever any was, of exciting all the powers of the individual, estranging him from the sensible world (ἔκστασις) and giving him the sense of being possessed by a god (κατεχόμενος) to the point of applying to himself the very name of the divinity (Saboi! Bakhoi! Attis!). Another means of expressing union with the divinity is the sacred meal which, while it effects the union of the individual with the god, makes felt, if taken in common, the social bond that makes the adherents brothers. Directed in origin at incorporating, by the ingestion of the sacrificed animal, the sacred forces enclosed within it (m. of Dionysus), it later comes to signify a renewal of life (m. of Attis), to assume finally the meaning of a banquet directed at sealing the union of the adherents among themselves and with the divinity patron of the brotherhood (m. of Mithra).

ESCATOLOGIA

The fundamental objective of the mysteries is salvation (σωτήρια, salus) through assimilation to the patron god of the mystery. This salvation is not merely liberation from physical evils, from which even the gods of Olympus knew how to liberate and therefore bore the epithet of benefactors (εὐεργέται) and saviors (σωτῆρες) and the gift of good health; but it is spiritual salvation, that is, the certainty of attaining blessed immortality in the likeness of the god. It is understood that, even when the mystery has reached a high spiritual degree, this salvation will be understood more or less nobly according to the moral capacity of the adept. The crude man will take pleasure in the coarse orgiastic rites that excite his senses and place him in a state of vulgar drunkenness; the superstitious man will attribute to the mystery ritual a sacro-magical value that guarantees him salvation; the philosopher will see in the myths and rites of the mysteries the symbols of the truths dear to his speculative spirit; the mystic will intend to reach through the rite union with the divinity.

MYSTERIES AND CHRISTIANITY

Christianity presents certain characteristics that bring it close to the m.; indeed it too has a program of universal salvation, it too has a rite of initiation (Baptism) that joins the initiate to the community and a rite of communion (Eucharist) that makes the initiates brothers among themselves and to their head and Savior Jesus; it too attaches a value of salvation to the sacrifice accomplished on the Cross by the divine founder; it too employs the terminology in use in the mystery religions: "m. of the kingdom of God" (Mk. 4:11); "m. of the Gospel" (Eph. 6:19); "m. of Christ" (Col. 4:3); "perfect man (τέλειος) in Christ" (Col. 1:28).

But in the face of these analogies Christianity presents peculiarities such that they make it an original religion. 1) First of all, its founder is not a mythical being, like Dionysus, Osiris, Attis, Mithra, but a person of divine and human nature, who lived in the full light of history and was put to death by the work of a Roman procurator whose name the Christian formula of faith takes care to give as a guarantee of historicity. - 2) His sacrifice does not depend on the seasonal rhythm, but is understood as an act of supernatural justice owed to God in expiation for the sins of humanity: a profound ethical meaning capable of directing the adherents of the new religion along a path of high moral perfection. - 3) Christianity sinks its roots not in the soil of paganism, but in the tenacious soil of the Jewish religion, surpassing its sacrificial ritualism and bringing out its strictly religious side relating to the love of the Heavenly Father and to the establishment of a kingdom of good accessible to all. - 4) The m. have a pantheistic vision of the divinity, in conformity with the tendency of all paganism, which identifies God with nature; Christianity, on the other hand, with its conception of a transcendent and creator God, feels union with him as an act of love that springs from the free will of man. - 5) In the m., and generally in the religious philosophy of the imperial age, salvation is, in substance, a conquest of the intellect; in Christianity salvation is a free gift of God, a guarantee merited for man by the saving death of Christ. - 6) The attainment of salvation and of the consequent happiness is in the m. an exclusively individual fact; in Christianity, on the other hand, all the adherents feel made brothers in the hope of the Kingdom of God foretold by the founder. It is a vision of collective happiness, with incomparable efficacy shadowed forth in the Didache by the eucharistic food scattered like a grain of wheat on the hills and gathered and made one in the form of bread.

For the description of the individual m.: v. the entries ADONE; CIBELE; DIONISO; ELEUSINI, M.; ISIDE; MITHRA E MITHRAISMO; SAMOTRACIA, M. di. For the m. as medieval sacred representations, v. TEATRO.

Nicola Turchi