MYSTERIES (Tà mystèria). — From the Greek μύστος = to close (the eyes or the mouth), whence μύω = to initiate (into secret rites) and μύστης = initiate. M. is the name, always written in the plural, of particular festivals during which initiation (τὰ στάς μυστήρια, initia) into cults not communicable (ἀφήγητα) to the uninitiated took place. The mysteries have a character of their own corresponding to two stages in religious development: the initial stage proper to agrarian rites aimed at renewing the forces of nature, exhausted after the toil of germination, through rites of a sacred-magical nature accompanied by dances, the use of masks, shouts, and sexually licentious acts; and the stage to which some of them attained by sublimating their meaning in harmony with the cultural and sacred development of the group, transferring it from the renewal 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 patron deity of the mystery should not be taken in the precise sense in which one speaks of the Resurrection of the Lord and that of Lazarus, but in the analogous sense in which Origen, and after him St. Jerome, explain, referring to the same pagans, the death and resurrection of Adonis as
the sowing of the seeds in the earth and their sprouting in the new spring.
This concern for the fate of the soul, which the state religion does not address, being concerned solely with the religious-social discipline of public worship, awakens with the progress of civilization and culture, which favors the development of individualism in the fields of thought and conscience, and finds suitable satisfaction in those conventional religious practices born in primitive environments, unchanged in ritual but stripped of their initial magical-agrarian meaning and brought into line, in language and spiritual vision, with the civilization of the time.
All the mysteries require preparation that must place the individual in a state of ritual purity, through: a) exorcisms, ablutions, various purgations with water, fire, sulfur, ventilation (negative purification, ἀγνίται); b) sexual abstinence because pollution is a miasma that stains and weakens the individual while abstinence strengthens him; penances, mortifications, fasts, abstinence from foods (positive purification, καθάρματα) insofar as foods, by burdening the body, can take strength from the spirit and prevent those visions (hallucinations) that render it capable of receiving revelation; and finally c) dances, sacred formulas, and invocations that place the individual, now purified, in a state to receive the manifestation of the god and enroll in his service.
The actual initiation takes place through a rite (τὰ δρώμενα, action) preceded or accompanied by the appropriate instruction (τὰ λεγόμενα) that brings about the mystical union of the initiate with the god of the mystery. This union can be, according to the nature of the rite, understood as a relationship of sonship (Eleusis, Sabazius), of marriage (Attis), or of friendship (Mithras). And since the mysteries are originally agrarian rites, or at least, like Mithraism, contain elements of them, the entire ritual refers to the cycle of the seasons, which is a cycle of death and rebirth, with the immediate effect of strengthening the individual’s earthly life and nourishing in him the hope of a blessed fate in the afterlife.
The initiatory rite includes the revelation and performance of a sacred rite that remains secret to the uninitiated and unfolds through phases that are not the same for all mysteries, but all express the concept of the renewal of the individual. There is the touching of sacred objects; the recitation of formulas attesting to the cultic acts performed; the vision or contemplation of objects capable of ecstatic rapture and of giving the initiate the assurance of future blessedness; the enthusiasm (enthousiasmos) obtained through dance, which produces a fascinating force, to the sound of deafening noises—dance capable, if any, of exciting all the individual’s powers, estranging him from the sensible world (ἐκστάσις), giving him the sense of being possessed by a god (κατάγομαι) to the point of applying to himself the very name of the divinity (Sabol Babich) of Attis. Another means of expressing union with the deity is the sacred meal, which, while effecting the union of the individual with the god, also conveys, if taken in common, the social bond that unites the initiates. Originally intended to incorporate, through the ingestion of the sacrificed animal’s soul, the sacred forces contained within it (mysteries of Dionysus), it later comes to signify a renewal of life (mysteries of Attis), finally assuming the meaning of a banquet intended to seal the union of the initiates among themselves and with the patron deity of the community (mysteries of Mithras).
ESCHATOLOGY. — The fundamental aim of the mysteries is salvation (σωτηρία, salus) through assimilation to the patron deity of the mystery. This salvation is not merely liberation from physical evils, from which even the gods of Olympus could deliver and for which they therefore bore the epithets of beneficent (συμβαται) and savior (σωτῆρες), and the gift of good health; it is spiritual salvation, the certainty, that is, of attaining blessed immortality in likeness to the god. It is understood that, even when the mystery has attained a high spiritual level, this salvation will be understood more or less nobly according to the moral capacity of the initiate. The crude man will take pleasure in the coarse orgiastic rites that excite his senses and place him in a state of vulgar intoxication; the superstitious man will attribute to the mystery ritual a sacromagical value that guarantees his salvation; the philosopher will see in the myths and rites of the mysteries symbols of truths dear to his speculative spirit; the initiate will seek, through the rite, union with the deity.
MYSTERIES AND CHRISTIANITY. — Christianity presents certain characteristics that bring it close to the mysteries; indeed, it too has a program of universal salvation, it too has an initiatory rite (Baptism) that aggregates the initiate to the community and a rite of communion (Eucharist) that unites the initiates to one another and to their head and Savior Jesus; it too attributes salvific value to the sacrifice accomplished on the Cross by the divine founder; it too employs terminology in use in the mystery religions: “mystery of the kingdom of God” (Mk. 4:11); “mystery of the Gospel” (Eph. 6:19); “mystery of Christ” (Col. 4:3); “perfect man” (τέλειος) in Christ” (Col. 1:28).
But in the face of these analogies, Christianity presents such peculiarities as to make it an original religion. First of all, its founder is not a mythical being, like Dionysus, Osiris, Attis, Mithras, but a person of divine and human nature, who lived in the light of history and was put to death by a Roman procurator, whose name the Christian faith takes care to record as a guarantee of historicity. — 2) Its sacrifice is not tied to the rhythm of the seasons, but is understood as an act of supernatural justice offered 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 takes its roots not from the soil of paganism, but from the tenacious ground of the Jewish religion, surpassing sacrificial ritualism and emphasizing the strictly religious aspect relating to the love of the Heavenly Father and the realization of a kingdom of good accessible to all. — 4) The mystery religions have a pantheistic vision of the divinity, in keeping with the tendency of all paganism to identify God with nature; whereas Christianity, with its conception of a transcendent and creative God, sees union with Him as an act of love springing from the free will of man. — 5) In the mystery religions and, in general, in the religious philosophy of the imperial age, salvation is essentially a conquest of the intellect; in Christianity, salvation is a free gift of God, a guarantee earned for man by the saving death of Christ. — 6) The attainment of salvation and the consequent happiness is, in the mystery religions, an exclusively individual matter; in Christianity, on the other hand, all adherents are united in the hope of the Kingdom of God proclaimed by the founder. It is a vision of collective happiness, of incomparable efficacy, adumbrated in the Didache by the eucharistic food scattered like grains of wheat on the hills and gathered and made one in the form of bread.
For descriptions of individual mystery religions: see the entries ADONE; CIBELE; DIONISO; ELEUSINI, M.; ISIDE; MITHRA E MITHRAISMO; SAMOTRACIA, M. di. For mystery religions as medieval sacred representations, see TEATRO.