For many years now, at the latest since W. Burkert's Ancient Mystery Cults (1987), older conceptions of the significance of ancient mysteries, along with their siblings the ‘oriental cults’, have been under threat from varied efforts at re-historicisation and critical re-contextualisation. A significant marker here was the international project ‘Les religions orientales dans le monde grec et romain’ directed by C. Bonnet, J. Rüpke and P. Scarpi (2004–2009), whose primary aim, under the rubric of religious pluralism and cultural appropriation, was to re-evaluate F. Cumont's strangely successful grand narrative of 1906. One of the two editors of the volume under review, Belayche, played a significant part in this project and has pursued the topic in various ways ever since.
The present volume, based on a conference at the Fondation Hardt in 2017, is just one of an ongoing series of co-edited publications issuing from the collaborative research project ‘Les cultes à mystères (mustêria, teletai, orgia etc.) et leurs acteurs spécialisés’ at the École Pratique (2014–18), which seems now to have segued into a much larger international project, CHRONOS, devoted to religious changes between the late Hellenistic period and the second century ce. The first of these (in: Mètis n.s. 14 [2016], 5–132), under the stimulus of J. Bremmer's Munich lectures (Initiation into the Mysteries of the Ancient World [2014]), aimed to develop theoretical approaches and methods for studying the historical and geographical modulations of mystery cults through analysis of specific cases. Two flanking volumes were likewise published in 2021, one on the visual language of mystery cults (N. Belayche and F. Massa [edd.], Mystery Cults in Visual Representation in Graeco-Roman Antiquity; see CR 72 [2022], xxx), the other on the extension of ‘mystérisation’, that is, language and imagery appropriated from mystery-cults into widely different cultic and discursive contexts, mainly during the second century ce (eidem / P. Hoffmann [edd.], Les mystères au IIe siècle de notre ère: un tournant). An analogous collection on Latin texts is due to appear shortly in an issue of Mnemosyne (F. Massa and D. Nelis [edd.], Mystery Cults in Latin Texts).
The main aim of the conference at Vandœuvres was to propose that discursive resort to mystery themes and language in philosophical writing in the Hellenistic and Roman periods cannot be disentangled from the religious behaviour of the members of philosophical schools or groups, insofar as this included familiarity with mysteries, above all those of Eleusis. This connection is held to exist both at the substantive and at the cognitive level: these philosophical schools, like mysteries, sought to transmit a specific type of knowledge, which can be summarised as a ‘theo-logy’; while the non-discursive ‘illumination’ offered by mysteries is analogous to the intuitive leap required to understand key philosophical claims. A sub-theme is the thesis of a ‘mysteric’ turn in the second century ce.
At several points it is plausibly suggested that contemporary awareness of the cultic aspects of ancient philosophy has been effectively suppressed by the dominance of analytic approaches in modern departments of ancient philosophy in their bid to take the Hellenistic schools and Neoplatonism seriously as philosophy rather than as guides to living. It must, however, be admitted that exemplification of the central theses here has been hampered by two contingent factors: the publication in 2016 of a volume focusing mainly on the influence of mystery cults (Eleusis and Orphic-Bacchism) on select Platonic dialogues and then Neoplatonism (M.J. Martín Velasco and M.J. García Blanco, Greek Philosophy and Mystery Cults), and the fact that no less than three important contributions to the conference, on Philo, Iamblichus and Proclus, were withdrawn from this volume, leaving regrettably large gaps in the coverage.
Arranging the seven contributions that did come in cannot have been easy. They can perhaps be divided roughly into two groups, the ‘assimilationist’ and the ‘exclusivist’, though that is not the editors’ guiding principle. The first starts from the premise that philosophical schools viewed themselves as offering a form of insight into truth comparable, albeit superior, to that offered by mysteries, open to all-comers, such that there is an elective affinity between them; the second emphasises a different aspect of Eleusis, that the rites were ἄρρητα ἱερά and thus offered privileged knowledge, exclusivity, glimpses into ‘secret things’. Philosophy, of course, is characterised by an analogous tension.
The main representatives of an assimilationist position are the two contributions by P. Vesperini. The first starts by rejecting Bremmer's phenomenological list of ‘mysteric’ features – nocturnal celebrations, preliminary purification, payment, marginality to the astu, free admittance – and urges that we should prioritise ‘unintended’ or implicit ancient definitions, such as Athenaeus’ description of teletai as religious festivals that include the ‘transmission (παράδοσις) of restricted knowledge’ about the gods (2.12, 40d). On this implicitly ‘majority view’, clearly based on Eleusis (cf. Paus. 10.31.11), mysteries are part of social life, not separate from it, and associated with life-affirmation and joy (e.g. Strabo 10.3.9, 467C), but also with a variety of different types of knowledge, discursive, visions, trances … Vesperini is thus inclined to disparage recent alternative approaches that emphasise emotional experience and/or personal or individual religion. What philosophy took from the mysteries was above all the idea of transmission of knowledge, extended to all literate knowledge, ethics and theologia (cf. e.g. Plut. Stoic. repugn. 1035a–b). His second contribution rebuts recent tendencies (e.g. J. Bremmer, in: C. Riedweg [ed.], Philosophia in der Konkurrenz von Schulen, Wissenschaften und Religionen [2017], pp. 99–126) to limit the topic to the Neoplatonists, and proposes the idea of a continual ‘confluence in competition’ between philosophy and mysteries in the classical and the Hellenistic periods, on the grounds that the former traditionally aimed at ‘becoming a god’, and then works through the Schools, starting with the Academy and ending (somewhat lamely) with the Stoa, adducing in each case the evidence for ritual practices typical of Greek associations, notably among the Epicureans. Whether this amounts to a demonstration of a substantive – what Vesperini calls a ‘non-metaphorical’ – connection specifically between mysteries and philosophy may, however, be doubted.
Whether the Orphic Hymns count as ‘philosophy’ can likewise be doubted, though they certainly claim to be the work of a ‘mysteric’ group, surely in western Asia Minor, despite the absence of a clear eschatology. D. Bonanno treats them as drawing upon a widespread philosophico-literary tradition, one of whose sources is Plato, while another is a ‘wisdom’ tradition expressed for example in the Delphic maxims. The paper focuses on the hymn to Nemesis (no. 61), one of a group of four hymns connected with justice. Of these, Nemesis represents preventative justice, which controls ‘excessive’ thoughts: the final prayer is for a sound capacity (ἀγαθὴ διάνοια) to reflect upon one's aims and restrain all hateful thoughts – one of the major virtues required in a small religious group. The implicit question thus arises, is moral education a necessary precondition for ‘true’ initiation?
D. Jaillard takes on Marinus’ description of Proclus as ‘hierophant of the cosmos’, acknowledging that in late antiquity ‘hierophant’ was understood in a purely metaphorical sense and that Marinus’ Life contains almost no allusions to mysteries or ‘mysteric’ language except with reference to the philosophic life. Jaillard sees Proclus’ religion as an example of J. Scheid's ‘quand faire, c'est croire’ (2005): Proclus, who observed the Egyptian ominous days (ἀφράδαι, perhaps in fact the five epagomenal days of the Alexandrian calendar) and the festivals ‘of all peoples’, is a strict ritualist, for whom ancestral rites had greater authority, in the Christian world, than nomoi. In such a context ‘hierophant of the cosmos’ has no reference to Eleusis but connotes the superior ritualist, whose competence extends to all the dimensions of the divine implied by pragmatic performance. His exile in Lydian Adrotta, where he was confronted with a number of different shrines and rituals whose attribution and interpretation were disputed among the inhabitants (Life §32), thus presented him with a knotty problem.
We can deal with the ‘exclusivist’ view more briefly, as it is more obvious. H. Seng does his best with ‘mysteric’ language in the Chaldaean Oracles, while rightly warning that, since almost all the relevant fragments are taken from Proclus’ Exegesis, it is difficult to disentangle the ‘original’ meaning from Proclus’ interpretations. He points to one or two fragments apparently implying ritual performances, such as purification with salt-water (OC §133), practised by Proclus, breathing techniques and the need to remember the passwords (συνθήματα) imparted by the Father's Nous. Nevertheless, it remains impossible to decide whether the enigmatic language refers to ritual preparations for theurgic ascent, contemplation or predictions of the post-mortem ascent.
F. Jourdan provides a convincing account of a text roughly contemporary with the OC, Numenius’ well-known fr. 1 des Places, devoted to the teachings of the ‘wise nations’, here for the first time including Judeans. She rightly stresses that these teachings, about which Numenius was clearly not well informed, are not understood as giving rise to Plato's theology but as indigenous ritual traditions used to support or explicate Numenius’ Pythagorean interpretation of Plato. The bulk of the paper (pp. 66–88) is devoted to a careful account of what Numenius might have known about these traditions.
In a brief afterword P. Hoffmann reminds us that Platonist Eleusis was a major vector of late-antique Hellenism, constituting Plato as the προηγέμων of true initiation. His main concern is to cast doubt on Proclus’ knowledge of the Eleusinian mysteries: what he mainly learned from Asklepigeneia, the daughter of Plutarch of Athens, was the teaching of the Chaldean Oracles (Marinus, Life §28).
Overall, the volume is rather a missed opportunity. The contributions hardly establish the claim that there was a more substantial, non-metaphorical, connection between philosophy and mysteries than C. Riedweg was prepared to admit in his foundational Mysterienterminologie bei Platon, Philon und Klemens von Alexandrien (1987). Although it is helpful to be reminded of the Schools’ ritual practices, they cannot be shown to have a special connection to Eleusis. The isomorphism between mysteries and the aims of philosophy proposed is extremely narrow: the unfortunate absence of papers on Philo, Plutarch, Iamblichus and (in effect) Proclus leaves irreplaceable gaps in the coverage. As for ‘mystérisation’, the editors’ correlative volume on the ‘tournant’ offers a much wider and more convincing range of cases, albeit not primarily ‘philosophical’. Moreover, given that A.-F. Jaccottet contributed to the Mètis volume, where she argued for viewing the Dionysiac mysteries as a model for cultic ‘mystérisation’, it is strange that the focus here is largely on Eleusis.
The volume is well-produced, has a useful consolidated bibliography and a good index of sources cited.
