IV. MAGNA MATER
The earliest invader from the East of the sober decorum of old Roman religion, and almost the last to succumb, was Magna Mater of Pessinus. There is no pagan cult which S. Augustine, and many of the Fathers before him, assail with such indignant contempt as hers.(2811) And indeed it was long regarded with suspicion by old Romans of the cultivated class. For generations after her reception on the Palatine, no Roman was permitted to enter her official service. But there was something in that noisy and bloody ritual, and in the cruel, ascetic sacrifice of its devotees, which exercised an irresistible power over the imagination of the vulgar; and even Lucretius felt a certain imaginative awe of the tower-crowned figure drawn by lions and adored by the cities of many lands.(2812) Varro, who probably had no great love for the un-Roman ritual, found a place for the Phrygian goddess in his théodicée.(2813) Her baptism of blood in the taurobolium was a rite of such strange enthralling influence that it needed all the force of the Christian Empire to abolish it. And on many of the last inscriptions of the fourth century the greatest names in the Roman aristocracy leave the record of their cleansing in the curious phrase renatus in aeternum.(2814) In his youth S. Augustine had seen processions of effeminate figures with dripping locks, painted faces, and soft womanish bearing, passing along the streets of Carthage, and begging alms of the crowd. His horror at the memory of the scene probably springs almost as much from the manly instincts of the Roman as from the detestation of the Christian moralist for a debasing superstition.(2815)
But S. Augustine knew well the power of the superstition. For more than 600 years the Great Mother had been enthroned on the Palatine; for more than 300 years she had captivated the remotest provinces of the West.(2816) In the terror of the Second Punic War, 204 B.C., she had been summoned by solemn embassy from her original home at Pessinus in Galatia. In obedience to a sibylline command, the Roman youth with purest hands, together with the Roman matrons, had welcomed her at Ostia.(2817) The ship which bore her up the Tiber,(2818) when it grounded on a shoal, had been sent forward on its way, to vindicate her calumniated virtue, by the touch of a virgin of the Claudian house.(2819) A decree of the Senate in 191 B.C. had given the strange goddess a home on the Palatine, hard by the shrine of Apollo; and the great Megalesian festival in April was founded.(2820) But the foreign character of the cult was long maintained. It was a time when the passion for religious excitement was in the air, and when its excesses had to be restrained by all the forces of the State. No Roman was permitted to accept the Phrygian priesthood for a century after the coming of the Great Mother.(2821) But towards the end of the Republic, the goddess had captured all imaginations, and her priests and symbols meet us in all the poets of the great age.(2822) Augustus restored her temple; some of his freedmen were among her priests;(2823) Livia is pictured with the crown of towers upon her brow.(2824) Then came a long interval, till the death of Nero, during which the Phrygian goddess is hardly heard of.(2825) With the accession of the Flavians the eastern cults finally entered on a long and unchallenged reign. Vespasian restored the temple of the Great Mother at Herculaneum, which had been thrown down by an earthquake.(2826) In the reign of Trajan her worship had penetrated to the Spanish peninsula,(2827) and she is found, along with other Eastern deities, in the towns of the new province of Dacia.(2828) The first glimpses of the taurobolium appear before the middle of the second century, and the goddess figures on the coins of Antoninus Pius.(2829) A taurobolium for that emperor was offered “with intention” at Lyons in 160 A.D.,(2830) and there are several dedications to Magna Mater in the same reign made by colleges of the Dendrophori at Ostia.(2831) Tertullian tells how a high priest of Cybele vainly offered his blood for the safety of M. Aurelius, seven days after the Emperor had died in his quarters on the Danube.(2832) It does not fall within the scope of our present inquiry to trace the immense popularity of the worship under the princes of the third century. That was the period of the great triumph of the spiritual powers of the East. At the end of the fourth century the Great Mother and Mithra were in the van of the pagan resistance to the religious revolution of Theodosius and his sons.(2833)
The worship of Cybele, coming from the same regions as the Trojan ancestors of Rome, was at first a patrician cult.(2834) Members of the proudest houses bore a part in welcoming her to a place in the Roman pantheon.(2835) Yet, as we have seen, Romans were for generations forbidden to enrol themselves among her effeminate priesthood. By a curious contradiction of sentiment, people were fascinated by the ritual, while they despised the celebrants. The legend which was interpreted by Stoic and Neoplatonist as full of physical or metaphysical meanings,(2836) had also elements of human interest which appealed to the masses, always eager for emotional excitement. The love of the Great Mother for a fair youth, his unfaithfulness, and penitential self-mutilation under the pine-tree; the passionate mourning for lost love, and then the restoration of the self-made victim, attended by a choir of priests for ever, who had made the same cruel sacrifice(2837)—all this, so alien to old Roman religious sentiment, triumphed over it in the end by novelty and tragic interest. The legend was developed into a drama, which, at the vernal festival of the goddess, was produced with striking, if not artistic, effect. On the first day the Dendrophori bore the sacred tree, wreathed with violets, to the temple. There was then a pause for a day, and, on the third, the priests, with frantic gestures and dishevelled hair, abandoned themselves to the wildest mourning, lacerating their arms and shoulders with wounds, from which the blood flowed in torrents. Severe fasting accompanied these self-inflicted tortures. Then came a complete change of sensation. On the day called Hilaria the votaries gave themselves up to ecstasies of joy, to celebrate the restoration of Attis. On the last day of the festival a solemn procession took its way to the brook Almon, to bathe the goddess in its waters.(2838) The sacred stone, brought originally from her home in Asia, and the most sacred symbol of the worship, wrapped in robes, was borne upon a car with chants and music, and that gross, unabashed naturalism which so often shocks and surprises us in pagan ritual till we trace it to its source.
The government long treated the cult of Cybele as a foreign worship.(2839) The title of its great festival is Greek. Yet before the close of the Republic, Romans are found enrolled in its priesthoods and sacred colleges, and long lists of these official votaries can be gathered from the inscriptions of the imperial period. The archigallus, or high priest, appears often on the Italian and provincial monuments. He is found at Merida, Capua, Ostia, and Lyons, in Numidia and Portugal.(2840) He must have performed his part at many a taurobolium, crowned with laurel wreaths, wearing his mitre and ear-rings and armlets, with the image of Attis on his breast.(2841) The names of the ordinary priests abound, from the freedman of the house of Augustus to the great nobles of the reign of Theodosius and Honorius.(2842) The priesthood was sometimes held for life, or for a long term of years. A priest at Salonae in Dalmatia had punctually performed the sacred offices for seventeen years.(2843) Women were naturally admitted to the priesthood of a cult whose central interest was a woman’s love and grief. Sometimes they are lowly freedwomen with Greek names, sometimes they bear the proudest names in the Roman aristocracy.(2844) The Dendrophori, who on festive days bore the sacred tree, formed a religious college, and their record appears on many monuments of Italian and provincial towns—Como, Ostia, and Cumae, Caesarea (Afr.), Valentia, and Lyons.(2845) Other colleges were the Cannophori and Cernophori, the keepers of the mystic symbols.(2846) The chanters, drummers, and cymbal players were indispensable at great ceremonial scenes, such as the taurobolium,(2847) and were arranged in graded ranks. Of a lower degree were the vergers and apparitors, who watched over the chapels of the goddess.(2848) And, lastly, there were the simple worshippers, who also formed themselves into guilds, with all the usual officers of such corporations. This cult, like so many others, existed not only for ceremonial rite, but for fellowship and social exhilaration, and, through its many gradations of religious privilege, it must have drawn vast numbers into the sacred service in the times of the Empire.
But the pages of Apuleius, and other authorities, show us that, beside the official clergy and collegiate members, there were, as happens to all popular religions, a mass of unlicensed camp followers and mere disreputable vagrants, who used the name of the Great Mother to exploit the ignorant devotion and religious excitability of the rustic folk. The romance of Apuleius, as Dr. Mahaffy has suggested, is probably derived from earlier sources, and dressed up to titillate the prurient tastes of a degraded society.(2849) Yet its pictures of country life in Thessaly, although they may not be always locally accurate, can hardly be purely imaginative. The scenes may not be always Thessalian, but that they are in the main true pictures of country life in the Antonine age may be proved from other authorities. Apuleius was too careful an artist to sever himself altogether from the actual life of his time. And what a picture it is! The air positively thrills with daemonic terror and power. Witches and lewd sorceresses abound; the solitary inn has its weird seductions; the lonely country cottage has its tragedy of lawless love or of chaste devotion to the dead. Brigands in mountain fastnesses divide their far-gathered spoil, and hold debate on plans of future lawless adventure. Mountain solitudes, and lonely villages or castles among the woods, are aroused by the yelping hounds, who start the boar from his lair, while the faithless traitor places his friend at its mercy. We meet the travelling cheese merchant, and the noble exile on his way to Zacynthus. We watch the raid on the banker’s house at Thebes, and the peasants setting their dogs on the passing traveller; the insolence of the wandering legionary; the horrors of the slave prison, with its wasted, starved, and branded forms; the amours of buxom wives, and the comic concealment or discovery of lovers, in the manner of Boccaccio. It is only too certain that the vileness and superstition which Apuleius has depicted may easily find a parallel on the Roman stage, or in the pages of Martial.
In all this social panorama, romantic, amusing, or disgusting, there is no more repulsive, and probably no truer scene than that in which the wandering priests of the Syrian goddess appear. That deity, like many others of Eastern origin, was often identified with the Great Mother. Apuleius probably confounded them; the rites of their worships were often the same, and the picture in Apuleius may be taken to represent the orgies of many a wandering troop of professed devotees of the Great Mother in the age of the Antonines.(2850) The leader is an old eunuch, with wild straggling locks—a man of the foulest morals, carrying about with him an image of the goddess, and levying alms from the superstition of the rustics. He is attended by a crew worthy of him, wretches defiled with all the worst vices of the ancient world, and shamelessly parading their degradation. But they combine a shrewd eye to business with this wild licence. They know all the arts to catch the fancy of the mob of clowns, whose grey dull lives and inbred superstition make them eager for any display which will intoxicate them with the novelty of a violent sensation. These people are on that level where lust and the passion for blood and suffering readily league themselves with religious excitement. After a night of moral horrors, the foul brotherhood go forth in various costume to win the largesses of the countryside. With painted cheeks and robes of white or yellow, crossed with purple stripes, their arms bared to the shoulder, and carrying swords or axes, they dance along wildly to the sound of the flute.(2851) With obscene gesticulation and discordant shrieks they madly bite their arms or lacerate them with knives. One of the band, as if seized with special inspiration, heaving and panting under the foul afflatus, shrieks out the confession of some sin against the holy rites, and claims the penalty from his own hands.(2852) With hard knotted scourge he belabours himself, while the blood flows in torrents. At last the cruel frenzy exhausts itself, and obtains its reward in the offerings of the spectators. Fine flour and cheese, milk and wine, coins of copper and silver, are eagerly showered upon the impostors, and as eagerly gathered in.(2853) Surprised in frightful orgies of vice, the scoundrels have at last to retreat before the outraged moral sense of the villagers. They decamp during the night, and on the morrow once more find comfortable quarters in the house of a leading citizen who is devoted to the service of the gods, and blind to the imposture of their professing ministers.(2854)
The episode in Apuleius suggests some curious questions as to the moral effect of these emotional cults. That in their early stages they had no elevating moral influence,—nay, that their votaries might combine a strict conformity to rite with great looseness of life,—is only too certain. The Delias and Cynthias of the poets, who kept the fasts of Isis, were assuredly not models of virtue. The assumption of the tonsure and linen habit by a debauchee like Commodus does not reassure us. Yet princes of high character in the second and the third centuries lent the countenance of imperial power to the worships of the East.(2855) And the Mother of the Gods found her last and most gallant defenders among great nobles of high repute and sincere pagan piety in the last years of heathenism in the West. It was a strange transformation. Yet the problem is not perhaps insoluble. A religion may deteriorate as its authority over society becomes more assured with age. But, in times of moral renovation, and in the face of powerful spiritual rivalries, a religion may purge itself of the impurities of youth. Religious systems may also be elevated by the growing moral refinement of the society to which they minister. It is only thus that we can explain the undoubted fact that the Phrygian and Egyptian worships, originally tainted with the grossness of naturalism, became vehicles of a warm religious emotion, and provided a stimulus to a higher life. The idealism of humanity, by a strange alchemy, can marvellously transform the most unpromising materials. And he would make a grave mistake who should treat the Isis and Osiris, the Mater Deum or the Attis, of the reign of Augustus as representing the same ideals in the reign of Gratian. But these Eastern cults contained a germ, even in their earliest days, of their great future development and power. The old religion of Latium, along with much that was sound and grave and fortifying to character, was also hard and cold and ceremonial. It could mould and consecrate a militant and conquering state; it did little to satisfy the craving for moral regeneration or communion with a Higher Power. It could not appease the sense of error and frailty by ghostly comfort and sacramental absolution. It was, moreover, wanting in that warmth of interest and sympathy, linking the human and Divine, which has helped to make Christianity the religion of Western civilisation, and which in a feeble adumbration made the paganism of the East a momentary rival of the Church. These Eastern cults, often originating in gross symbolism of the alternations and recurring processes of nature,(2856) often arousing a dangerous excitability and an unregulated emotion, yet contained the germ of a religious spirit far more akin to ours than the old austere Latin creed. A divine death and restoration, the alternation of joy and sorrow at a divine event, instinct with human interest, calming expiation and cleansing from the sins which burdened the conscience,—above all, the hope of a coming life, stamped on the imagination by symbol and spectacle,—these were the elements which, operating on imperious religious yearnings, gave a fresh life to paganism, and prepared or deferred the victory of the Church. The religion of the Great Mother seems at first sight to offer the poorest promise of any moral message or spiritual support. It expressed at first the feelings of rude rustics at the recurring mortality and resurrection of material life in the order of the seasons. The element of human feeling which it contained was grossly expressed in bloody rites of mutilation. This cult was often defiled and disgraced by a crew of effeminate and lustful impostors. Yet the Thessalian villagers in Apuleius, who chased these vagabonds from their fields, evidently expected something better from them. They despised the foul hypocrites, but they did not cease to believe in their religion. The spiritual instinct of humanity triumphed, as it has so often done, over the vices of a historical system, extracted the good in it, rejected the evil, and made it an organ of some sort of spiritual life. Thus the Great Mother became the Mother of all, enthroned beside the Father of gods and men. She wears the chaste honours of the Virgin Goddess. Attis and her love for Attis are similarly transformed. In the syncretism of the age, which strove to gather up all the forces of heathenism and make them converge towards a spiritual unity, Magna Mater and Attis leagued their forces with the conquering Mithra.(2857) In the taurobolium there was developed a ritual, in which, coarse and materialistic as it was, paganism made, in however imperfect form, its nearest approach to the religion of the Cross.
The greatest and most impressive rite in the worship of Cybele was the taurobolium. There was none which so excited the suspicion and indignation of the Christian apologists, from Tertullian to Prudentius, because in its ceremony of the cleansing blood, and in its supposed effects in moral regeneration and remission of sins, it seemed invented by the ingenuity of daemons to be a travesty of the sacrifice on Calvary.(2858) It is possible that the last champions of the ancient cults may have had some such defiant purpose when they inscribed, in the record of their cleansing, the words “in aeternum renatus.” But in its origin there can be no doubt that the rite was purely heathen. Its appearance in the Phrygian ceremonial is comparatively late. The worship of Magna Mater was essentially an orgiastic cult, and theologically arid. But the syncretism of the second and third centuries came to its support. And the worships of Persia, Syria, and Phrygia were ready to coalesce, and to borrow from one another symbols and doctrines which gave satisfaction to the spiritual wants of the time. The taurobolium, with its ideas of cleansing and immortality, passed in the Antonine age from the worship of Anaitis of Cappadocia to the worship of Magna Mater, and gave the Great Mother a new hold upon the religious consciousness. In the earlier votive tablets the name of the rite is tauropolium. Anaitis had been identified with the Artemis Tauropolus of Brauron, whose legend, by popular etymology, came to be identified, as Milesian exploration spread in the Euxine, with the cult of the cruel goddess of the Tauric Chersonese.(2859) And by another etymological freak and the change of a letter, we arrive at the bull-slaughtering rite of the later Empire. Whether the taurobolium ever became part of the service of Mithra is a disputed point.(2860) Certainly the syncretistic tendency of the age, the fact that the most popular Mithraist symbol was the slaying of the mystic bull, and the record of the taurobolium on so many inscriptions dedicated to Mithra, would prepare us for the conclusion that the rite was in the end common to the Persian and the Phrygian deities. Whatever may be the truth on this point, the two worships, in the last ages of heathenism in the West, were close allies. Attis tended more and more to become a solar deity in the age which culminated in the sun-worship of Julian.(2861) Heliolatry, the last refuge of monotheism in heathendom, which refused to accept the religion of Galilee, swept all the great worships of strong vitality into its system, softened their differences, accentuated their similarities, by every effort of fancy, false science, or reckless etymology, and in the end, “Sol invictus” and Mithra were left masters of the field. But Magna Mater, however originally unworthy, shared in the victory. If she could lend the support of an accredited clergy, recognised for ages by the State, and the impressive rite of the bloody baptism, Mithra, on the other hand, had a moral and spiritual message, an assurance of a future life, and an enthralling force of mystic and sacramental communion, which made his alliance even more valuable. The Great Mother, indeed, admitted women to the ranks of her clergy, while the rites of Mithra probably excluded them.(2862) And thus a Fabia Aconia Paulina, while her husband, Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, could inscribe himself “pater patrum,” had no Mithraist grade which she could place beside her consecration to Hecate and the Eleusinian goddesses.(2863) But the pair were united in the sacrament of the taurobolium. And the Great Mother probably never had purer or sincerer devotees.
When the taurobolium was first introduced into the West is uncertain.(2864) The earliest monument belongs to A.D. 134 in the reign of Hadrian, when the ceremony seems to be connected with the Celestial Venus. The most famous inscription, which connects the rite with the Great Mother, is of the year 160 A.D., when one L. Aemilius Carpus, an Augustalis, and a member of the college of the Dendrophori at Lyons, had the ceremony performed “for the safety” of Antoninus Pius and the imperial house.(2865) The rite was celebrated at the command of the goddess, or on the inspired advice of the priest.(2866) It took place generally in early spring, and was often prolonged over three or four days.(2867) It was a costly rite, and the expense was sometimes borne by the community, who made an offertory for the purpose.(2868) The ceremony was superintended by the xvviri, and attended by a great concourse of the people, with the magistrates at their head. It is needless to describe again the scene, so well known from the verses of Prudentius, in which the consecrated bull is with solemn forms slaughtered on a high-raised platform, and bathes with the streams of his blood the votary placed in a trench below.(2869) The rite was believed to impart some sort of strength and purification, the effect of which lasted for twenty years, when the sacrament was often renewed. It was, as we have seen, sometimes performed “with intention,” for the reigning emperor and his house,(2870) and furnishes another example of the manner in which religion was employed to buttress the power of the Caesars. A considerable number of monuments in Italy and the provinces commemorate, in a phrase perhaps borrowed from the Church, the gratitude of one “born again to eternal life.” It is probable that the coarse ritual often expressed only an external and materialistic conception of religious influence. On the other hand, following upon, or closely connected with initiation into the mysteries of Mithra, it may easily have become a symbol of moral and spiritual truth, or at any rate a record of moral aspiration.
For, indeed, in the syncretism and monotheistic drift of the age, the more powerful worships lost the hardness of their original lines and tended to absorption and assimilation. There was little strife or repulsion among these cults; they borrowed freely legends and ritual practice from one another; even characteristic insignia were interchanged. The legend and tone of the Cybele worship naturally linked her with others sprung from the same region, such as the Syrian goddess, Celestial Venus, and Bellona.(2871) Fanaticism, self-mutilation, expiation by blood, were the common bond between them. The fierce goddess of Cappadocia, who had visited Sulla in a dream, was probably first introduced to Roman devotion in his time. Her dark-robed priests and priestesses were familiar figures in the Augustan age, gashing themselves like the Galli of Magna Mater, catching the blood in shields, and dashing it over their train of followers who believed in its powers of expiation. But Magna Mater, as her name promises, assumed a milder character, and was identified sometimes with Maia, Ops, and Minerva; sometimes with Demeter, Bona Dea, and Fauna, as Attis was identified with Hercules.(2872) In the last age the great goddess became the universal Mother, full of tenderness and grace, and giving peace through her cleansing rites. Hers is, along with the cults of Isis and Mithra, which will next claim our attention, an example of the process of Divine evolution, by which, in the painful progress of humanity, the crude efforts of religious symbolism are purged and elevated. It is an example of the way in which the human spirit, refusing to break with its past, sometimes succeeds, if only for a time, in putting new wine into old bottles.
V. ISIS AND SERAPIS
The worship of Isis and Serapis, reckoning from the day when it established itself in the port of Athens, had a reign of more than seven centuries over the peoples of Europe. Its influence in the western provinces of the Empire and in the capital may be roughly said to cover a period of 500 years. It was not, indeed, the old native worship of the valley of the Nile which won such an empire over cultivated intellects from Chaeronea to the Thames. The ancient Egyptian worship underwent vast transformations in the crucible of all creeds at Alexandria. It was captured and utilised for political purposes by the Ptolemies.(2873) It was linked with the most spiritual forces of Hellenic piety at Eleusis and Delphi;(2874) it was transformed by the subtle syncretism of later Greek philosophy; and, through the secretaries of embassies, and the Egyptian slaves and merchants who poured into the ports of southern Italy in the second century B.C., it stole or forced itself into the chapels of great houses at Rome, till, in the end, emperors were proud to receive its tonsure, to walk in the processions, and to build and adorn Egyptian temples.(2875)
The Isiac worship had conquered the Greek world before it became a power in Italy. In the fourth century B.C. traders from the Nile had their temple of Isis at the Peiraeus;(2876) in the third century the worship had been admitted within the walls of Athens.(2877) About the same time the goddess had found a home at Ceos, and Delos, at Smyrna and Halicarnassus, and on the coasts of Thrace.(2878) She was a familiar deity at Orchomenus and Chaeronea for generations before Plutarch found in her legends a congenial field for the exposition of his concordat between philosophy and myth. Nor need we wonder at his choice of the Egyptian cults. For the Isis and Osiris of Greek and Italian lands were very different objects of devotion from the gods who bore those names in Egyptian legend.(2879) From the seventh century B.C. Greeks from the Asiatic coast had been securely settled at the mouth of the Nile.(2880) Greek mercenaries had served in the Egyptian armies in the southern deserts; and Greek half-breeds had long amused and cajoled travellers from Miletus or Halicarnassus, as interpreters and guides to the scenes of immemorial interest. When Herodotus visited the country, the identity of Greek and Egyptian gods was a long accepted fact.(2881) From the fifth century B.C. the Egyptian Trinity of Isis, Osiris, and Horus had found counterparts in Demeter, Dionysus, and Apollo. The campaign of the Athenian fleet in 460 probably hastened and confirmed the process of syncretism,(2882) and crowds of travellers, steeped in Orphic and Pythagorean mysticism, returned from the valley of the Nile to spread the doctrine of a common faith. After the foundation of Alexandria the theory became a propaganda. The first Ptolemy strove to unite the two races under his sway by an eclecticism of which Alexandria was the focus for seven centuries. He found skilful allies in Manetho, the Egyptian priest who had written a treatise on the inner meaning of the myths, and in Timotheus, a scion of the Eumolpidae of Eleusis.(2883) The Orphic and Dionysiac mysticism was leagued with the Isiac worship. The legend of Egypt was recast. A new deity was introduced, who was destined to have a great future in all lands under the Roman sway. The origin of Serapis is still a mystery(2884) and the latest critic may have to acquiesce in the confused or balanced judgment of Tacitus.(2885) Egyptian archaeologists claimed him as indigenous at Rhacotis or Memphis, and construed his name as a compound of Osiris and that of his earthly incarnation, the bull Apis.(2886) The more popular tale was that the first Ptolemy, after repeated visions of the night, sent envoys to bring him from Sinope, where he was identified with Pluto, god of the under world. Other traditions connected him with Seleucia in Cappadocia, or with Babylon.(2887) It may be that a false etymology, confounding a hill near Memphis with the name of Sinope, was the source of the tale in Tacitus.(2888) However this may be, Serapis takes the place of Osiris; they never appear together in inscriptions. The infant Horus received the Greek sounding name Harpocrates, and Serapis, Isis, and Harpocrates became the Egyptian Trinity for Graeco-Roman Society. Anubis, the minister of the Trinity, was easily identified with Hermes, “the conductor of souls” in Greek legend.
Syncretism and mysticism were great forces at Eleusis, from which Ptolemy’s adviser Timotheus came. And there all interest centred in the future life, and in preparation for it by sacerdotal ritual and moral discipline. The Orphic and Pythagorean mysticism which traced itself to Egypt or the remoter East, returned to its sources, to aid in moulding the cults of Egypt into a worship for the world. A crowd of ingenious theologians set to work, by means of physical explanation, wild etymology, and fanciful analogies, to complete the syncretism. And the final results of their efforts, preserved in the famous treatise of Plutarch on Isis, is a trinitarian monotheism, with an original dualism of the good and evil principles.(2889) But the idea of God, although limited in one sense by the recognition of a co-ordinate evil power, tends on the other to become more all-embracing. Serapis is constantly linked with Jupiter and Sol Invictus in the inscriptions.(2890) In the orations of Aristides he becomes the centre of the universe.(2891) Isis of the “myriad names” tends to absorb all other deities, and was addressed by her votaries as “Thou who art all.”(2892) The Isis of the dream of Lucius in Apuleius is the universal mother, creator of all things, queen of the world of shades, first of the inhabitants of heaven, in whom all gods have their unchanging type.(2893) She is also pre-eminently the power who can cleanse and comfort, and impart the hope of the life everlasting.
The Isiac worship arrived in Italy probably through the ports of Campania. Puteoli, in particular, was the great entrepôt for the trade with Alexandria. Foreign merchants, sailors, and slaves were arriving there every day, and, in the century between 204 and 100 B.C., more than ten embassies passed between the Ptolemies and the Roman Senate, with a crowd of secretaries and servants attached to them.(2894) There was probably a temple of Serapis at Puteoli as early as 150 B.C., and the old temple of Isis at Pompeii, which was thrown down by the earthquake of 63 A.D., may probably be referred to the year 105 B.C.(2895) But the erection of temples must have been preceded by a period of less formal and more obscure worship, and we may perhaps conclude that Isis had established herself in Southern Italy, at all events early in the second century B.C. Thus, although it was generations before the worship won its way, in the face of fierce persecution, to an assured place at Rome, its first appearance coincides with the decay of the old religion, the religious excitement in the beginning of the second century B.C., and the immense popular craving for a more emotional form of worship.
The years at the end of the third and the beginning of the second century B.C. were in Italy years of strange religious excitement. In 204 the great goddess was brought from Pessinus.(2896) In 186 the decree for the suppression of the Bacchanalian scandal was passed.(2897) Magna Graecia and Etruria were the first points assailed by the invasion of the orgiastic rites. But they soon crept into the capital, with results which alarmed and shocked old Roman sentiment. At first, an appearance of asceticism disguised the danger. But the rites soon gave an opportunity for the wildest licence and for political intrigue. 7000 men and women were found to be implicated, in one way or another, in the movement.(2898) Within five years after the great scandal, the apocryphal books of Numa were unearthed in the grounds of Cn. Terentius on the Janiculum. The forgery was soon detected, and they were burnt publicly in the Comitium by the praetor L. Petilius.(2899) But it was a suspicious circumstance that the rolls were of Egyptian papyrus, which had been till then unknown to the Roman world, and that they contained the dogmas of a Pythagorean lore which was equally strange. It is almost certain that, in the same years in which the Dionysiac fanaticism arrived at Ostia, the Egyptian cults had been brought by merchants and sailors to Puteoli. Osiris and Dionysus had long been identified by the Alexandrian theologians; both were the patrons of mystic rites which, in their form and essence, had much in common, and the Pythagorean system, combining so many influences of philosophy and religion in the East and West, was the natural sponsor of the new worships. It was perhaps some eclectic Alexandrian, half Platonist, half Buddhist, devoted to the Isiac worship, yet ready to connect it with the Dionysiac legends of Delphi, Cithaeron, and Eleusis, who penned the secret scrolls, and buried them in the garden on the Janiculum. The movement was setting in which, so often repulsed by the force of government and conservative feeling, was destined to have enormous influence over the last three centuries of paganism in the West.
It has been plausibly suggested that the ease and completeness with which the Bacchanalian movement was suppressed in 186 B.C. was due to the diversion of religious interest to the Egyptian mysteries. The cult of Isis had indeed very various attractions for different minds. But for the masses, slaves, freedmen, and poor working people, its great fascination lay in the pomp of its ritual, and the passionate emotion aroused by the mourning for the dead Osiris, and his joyful restoration. It is this aspect of the worship which is assailed and ridiculed by the Christian apologists of the reign of Alexander Severus and of the reign of Constantine.(2900) The goddess, one of whose special functions was the care of mothers in childbirth, appealed especially to female sensibility. As in the cult of Magna Mater, women had a prominent place in her services and processions, and records of these sacred dignities appear on the monuments of great Roman ladies down to the end of the Western Empire. The history of the Isiac cult at Rome from Sulla to Nero is really the history of a great popular religious movement in conflict with a reactionary conservatism, of cosmopolitan feeling arrayed against old Roman sentiment.
It is significant of the popularity of Isis that the reactionary Sulla, who restored the election of chief pontiff to the sacred college, was forced to recognise the Isiac guild of the Pastophori in 80 B.C.(2901) Four times in the decade 58-48 B.C., the fierce struggle was renewed between the government and those who wished to place Isis beside the ancient gods; and in the year 50 B.C. the consul, when unable to find a workman to lay hands upon her shrine, had to unrobe and use the axe himself.(2902) The victory of conservatism was only temporary and apparent. Within five years from the renewed fierce demolition of 48 B.C.,(2903) the white robe and tonsure and the mask of Anubis must have been a common sight in the streets, when the aedile M. Volusius, one of those proscribed by the triumvirs, was able to make his escape easily in this disguise.(2904) The influence of Cleopatra over Julius Caesar overcame his own prejudices and probably hastened the triumph of the popular cult. The triumvirs had to conciliate public feeling by erecting a temple of Isis in 42 B.C.(2905) Priestesses and devotees of Isis are henceforth found among the freedwomen of great houses and the mistresses of men of letters of the Augustan age.(2906) And, although the reaction following upon the battle of Actium, in which the gods of Latium and the Nile were arrayed against one another,(2907) banished Isis for a time beyond the pomoerium,(2908) the devotion of the masses to her seems never to have slackened, and her tonsured, white stoled priests were to be seen everywhere. In the reign of Tiberius a serious blow fell on the Eastern worships. According to Josephus, a great lady named Paulina, was, with the collusion of the priest, seduced in an Isiac temple by a libertine lover in the guise of Anubis, and the crime was sternly punished by the emperor.(2909) Tacitus and Suetonius seem to be ignorant of this particular scandal, but they record the wholesale banishment to Sardinia of persons of the freedmen class, who were infected with Judaic or Egyptian superstition. In the grotto of Cagliari there is to be seen the record of an obscure romance and tragedy which may have been connected with this persecution. Atilia Pomptilla, who bore also the significant name of Benedicta, in some great calamity had followed her husband Cassius Philippus into exile. Their union had lasted for two-and-forty years when the husband was stricken with disease in that deadly climate. Like another Alcestis, Atilia by her vows and devotion offered her life for his. The husband repaid the debt in these inscriptions, and the pair lie united in death under the sculptured serpent of the goddess whom they probably worshipped.(2910)
Thenceforth under the emperors Isis met with but little opposition. Claudius struck hard at the Jewish and Druidic rites, but on the other hand he was ready to transport those of Eleusis to Rome.(2911) He was probably equally tolerant to the rites of Egypt. And in his reign dedications were made to Isis by freedmen of great consular houses.(2912) Nero despised all religions except that of the Syrian goddess; yet Isis had probably little to fear from a prince who had been touched by the charm and mystery of the East, and who at the last would have accepted the prefecture of Egypt.(2913) Otho was, however, the first Roman emperor who openly took part in the Egyptian rites.(2914) The Flavians had all come under the spell of Eastern superstition. Vespasian had had a solitary vigil in the temple of Serapis; in obedience to a dream from the god he had consented to perform miracles of healing.(2915) In the fierce civil strife of 69 A.D., when the Capitol was stormed and burnt by the Vitellians, the service of Isis was actually going on, and Domitian, disguised in her sacred vestments, escaped among the crowd of priests and acolytes.(2916) He repaid the debt by rebuilding the temple of Isis in the Campus Martius, in 92 A.D., on a magnificent scale.(2917) The sarcasms of Juvenal on the “shaven, linen-clad herd,” and the pious austerities of female worshippers of Isis, reveal the powerful hold which the goddess had obtained in his day, even on the frivolous and self-indulgent. Hadrian, of course, had the gods of the Nile in the Canopus of his cosmopolitan villa at Tibur.(2918) Commodus walked in procession with shaven head and an image of Anubis in his arms.(2919) The triumph of Isis in the Antonine age was complete.
The Serapeum at Alexandria was to the Egyptian cult what the Temple was to the religion of Israel.(2920) And the world-wide trade and far-spreading influence of what was then the second city in the Empire might have given a wide diffusion even to a religion less adapted to satisfy the spiritual wants of the time. Slaves and freedmen were always the most ardent adherents and apostles of foreign rites. Names of persons of this class appear on many monuments as holders of Isiac office or liberal benefactors. A little brotherhood of household slaves at Valentia in Spain were united in the worship.(2921) Petty traders from Alexandria swarmed in the ports of the Mediterranean, and especially in those of Campania, and near the Nolan gate of Pompeii the humble tombs of a little colony of these emigrants have been discovered.(2922) The sailors and officers of the corn fleets from Africa also helped to spread the fame of Isis and Osiris. In the reign of Septimius Severus, their chief officer, C. Valerius Serenus, was neocorus of Serapis.(2923) Alexandria also sent forth a crowd of artists, philosophers, and savants to the West. Several men of Egyptian origin filled high places in the imperial household, as librarians or secretaries in the first and second centuries. Chaeremon, who had been librarian at Alexandria, and who had composed a theological treatise on Isis and Osiris, became Nero’s tutor.(2924) Chaeremon’s pupil, Dionysius, was librarian and imperial secretary in the reign of Trajan. And Julius Vestinus, who held these offices under Hadrian, is described in an inscription as chief pontiff of Egypt and Alexandria,—a combination of dignities which probably enabled him to throw his powerful protection around the Isiac rites at Rome.(2925) An influence so securely seated on the Palatine was sure to extend to the remotest parts of the Empire. If Isis could defy all the force of the Republican Government, what might she not do when emperors were enrolled in her priesthood, and imperial ministers, in correspondence with every prefecture from Britain to the Euphrates, were steeped in her mystic lore?
Already in Nero’s reign, Lucan could speak of Isis and Osiris as not only welcomed in the shrines of Rome, but as deities of all the world.(2926) Plutarch and Lucian, from very different points of view, are witnesses to the same world-wide movement. The judgment will be confirmed by even a casual inspection of the religious records of the inscriptions. Although Isis and Serapis were not peculiarly soldiers’ gods, like Mithra and Bellona, yet they had many votaries among the legions on distant frontiers. A legate of the Legion Tertia Augusta, who was probably of Egyptian birth, introduced the rites into the camp of Lambaesis, and a temple to Isis and Serapis was built by the labour of many pious hands among his soldiers.(2927) Serapis appears often on the African monuments, sometimes leagued or identified with Jupiter or Pluto.(2928) In Dacia and Pannonia the cults of Egypt were probably not as popular as that of Mithra, but they have left traces in all the great centres of population.(2929) In several inscriptions(2930) Isis is called by a native name such as Noreia, and we find on others the instructive blending of the strata of four mythologies. Tacitus thought he had discovered the counterpart of Isis in the forests of Germany.(2931) She is certainly found in Holland, and at Cologne.(2932) Officers of the sixth Legion worshipped her at York.(2933) French antiquaries have followed the traces of the Egyptian gods in nearly all the old places of importance in their own country, at Fréjus, Nîmes, and Arles, at Lyons, Clermont, and Soissons.(2934) Shrines of Isis have been explored in Switzerland and at the German spas.(2935) The scenes which were so common at Rome or Pompeii or Corinth, the procession of shaven, white-robed priests and acolytes, marching to the sound of chants and barbaric music, with the sacred images and symbols of a worship which had been cradled on the Nile ages before the time of Romulus, and transmuted by the eclectic subtlety of Platonic theologians into a cosmopolitan religion, were reproduced in remote villages on the edge of the Sahara and the Atlantic, in the valleys of the Alps or the Yorkshire dales.
What was the secret of this power and fascination in the religion of a race whose cult of the dog and cat had so often moved the ridicule of the satirist and comic poet? No single answer can be given to that question. The great power of Isis “of myriad names” was that, transfigured by Greek influences, she appealed to many orders of intellect, and satisfied many religious needs or fancies. To the philosopher her legends furnished abundant material for the conciliation of religion and pseudo-science, for the translation of myth into ancient cosmic theory, or for the absorption of troublesome mythologies into a system which perhaps tended more than any other, except that of Mithra, to the Platonic idea of the unity of God. The mystic who dreamt of an ecstasy of divine communion, in which the limits of sense and personality might be left behind in a vague rapture of imaginative emotion, found in the spectacle of her inner shrine a strange power far surpassing the most transporting effects of Eleusis. Women especially saw in the divine mother and mourner a glorified type of their sex, in all its troubles and its tenderness, such as their daughters in coming ages were destined to find in the Virgin Mother.(2936) The ascetic impulse, which has seldom been far from the deepest religious feeling, derived comfort and the sense of atonement in penitential abstinence and preparation for the holy mysteries. The common mass, who are affected chiefly by the externals of a religion, had their wants amply gratified in the pomp and solemnity of morning sacrifice and vespers, in those many-coloured processions, such as that which bore in spring-time the sacred vessel to the shore, with the sound of hymn and litany.(2937) And in an age when men were everywhere banding themselves together in clubs and colleges for mutual help and comfort, the sacred guilds of Isis had evidently an immense influence. That evil, as in nearly all heathen worships, often lurked under her solemn forms cannot be denied, though there was also groundless calumny.(2938) Yet there must have been some strange power in a religion which could for a moment lift a sensualist imagination like that of Apuleius almost to the height and purity of Eckhart and Tauler.(2939)
The triumph of Isis and Serapis in the Western world is an instructive episode in the history of religion. It is, like that of Mithra, a curious example of the union of conservative feeling with a purifying and transforming influence of the growing moral sense. A religion has a double strength and fascination which has a venerable past behind it. The ancient symbolism may be the creation of an age of gross conceptions of the Divine, it may be even grotesque and repulsive, at first sight, to the more refined spiritual sense of an advanced moral culture. Yet the religious instinct will always strive to maintain its continuity with the past, however it may transfigure the legacy of ruder ages. Just as Christian theologians long found anticipations of the Gospel among patriarchs and warrior kings of Israel, so pagan theologians like Plutarch or Aristides could discover in the cults of Egypt all their highest cosmic theories, and satisfaction for all their spiritual wants.(2940) With unwavering faith, Plutarch and his kind believed that under all the coarse mythic fancy of early ages there was veiled a profound insight into the secrets of nature and the spiritual needs of humanity. The land of the Nile, with its charm of immemorial antiquity, was long believed to have been the cradle of all that was best and deepest in the philosophic or religious thought of Hellas. The gods of the classic pantheon were identified with the gods of Egypt.(2941) Pythagoras and the Orphic mystics had derived their inspiration from the same source.(2942) The conquests of Alexander and the foundation of Alexandria had drawn to a focus the philosophical or the religious ideas of East and West, of India, Palestine, Persia, and Greece. At Alexandria were blended and transformed all the philosophies and mythologies by the subtle dialectic of Greece. The animal cult of Egypt, indeed, was always a stumbling-block to Greek and Roman.(2943) It moved the contempt and ridicule of comedian and satirist.(2944) It was an easy mark for the sneers of the crowd. Yet even the divinised dog or ibis could find skilful, if not convinced, defenders among the Greek eclectics, who lent all the forces of Hellenic ingenuity to the cause of antiquarianism in religion.(2945) Their native mythology was not without traces of zoolatry. Their own god of healing, who became so popular in all lands, was always connected in art and legend with the serpent. The serpent of the Acropolis, which daily ate the holy wafer, was the immemorial companion of the tutelary goddess of Athens.(2946) Had not Zeus, in his many amours, found an easy access to the fair victims of his love in animal forms? The Divine virtues are only faintly imaged in animals which have their uses in the world. If all religion is only symbolism, why should not the multiform beneficence of the unseen Powers be expressed in the form of creatures who give their service and companionship to man, as fitly as in lifeless bronze or marble?
But although men might try to reconcile theology even to a worship of animal forms, it was by very different spiritual influences that Isis and Serapis won the devotion of the rustics of remote villages in Spain and Britain. The dog-headed Anubis might perhaps be borne in processions.(2947) The forms of sacred animals might be portrayed, along with those of Io and Andromeda, on the frescoes of Herculaneum or Pompeii.(2948) But the monuments of the Western provinces are, as a rule, singularly free from the grossness of early Egyptian zoolatry.(2949) And there is hardly a hint of it in the famous picture of the initiation of Lucius in the Metamorphoses of Apuleius. In that fascinating scene, Isis is the universal mother, Nature, queen of the worlds of light and darkness, the eternal type of all lesser divinities. And on inscriptions she appears as the Power who “is all in all.”(2950) Whatever her special functions may be, goddess of the spring, or of the sailor on the sea, guardian of women in the pangs of motherhood, the “Queen of peace,”(2951) guide and saviour of souls in the passage to the world beyond the tomb, she remains the Supreme Power, invoked by many names, with virtues and graces as various as her names. And Serapis, in the later theology, is not the president of any provincial territory in the universe. He is not the lord of sea or earth or air only; he is lord of all the elements, the dispenser of all good, the master of human life. It is thus that Aristides hails him after his rescue from the perils of the sea.(2952) But although Serapis in many a monument is enthroned beside Jupiter, Queen Isis is also supreme in the world both of the living and the dead.
Yet, although there is a very decided tendency to monotheism in the Alexandrian religion, a tendency which appealed strongly to minds like Plutarch, it did not succeed in altogether breaking with polytheism and its attendant superstitions. The attempted alliance of religion and philosophy was far from complete. Philosophy, indeed, had substituted abstract theory for the poetry of legend. It struggled hard to assert the essential unity of the Divine nature. And Plutarch, in his treatise on Isis, declares that God is one and the same in all lands under whatever names He may be worshipped.(2953) But the treatise shows at the same time how vague and unsettled still was the theology of Alexandria, and how hard it found the task of wedding Platonism to the haunting tradition of old idolatry. Physics, metaphysics, etymology, are all employed with infinite ingenuity to recover the secret meaning which it is assumed that ancient wisdom had veiled under the forms of legend. But arbitrary fancy plays far too large a part in these random guesses, and system there is none, to bridge the gulf between the Platonist eclectic and the superstitious masses. Isis worship was in practice linked with all the reigning superstitions, with divination, magic, astrology, oneiromancy. Manetho, who was one of the founders of the worship of Serapis, wrote a treatise for the Greek world on the influence of the stars on human destiny.(2954) Egyptian astrologists were always in great demand. The emperors Otho and M. Aurelius carried them in their train.(2955) Many Roman ladies in sickness would not take food or medicine till the safe hour had been determined by inspecting the Petosiris.(2956) The Isiac devotee was an enthusiastic believer in dreams sent by his favourite deities. On many inscriptions the record may be read of these warnings of the night.(2957) In the syncretism of the time, Serapis came to be identified with the Greek god of healing, and patients sleeping in Egyptian temples received in dreams inspired prescriptions for their maladies.(2958) Sometimes the deity vouchsafed to confer miraculous powers of cure on a worshipper. The sceptical good sense of Vespasian was persuaded by medical courtiers at Alexandria to try the effect of his touch on the blind and paralytic, who had a divine monition to seek the aid of the emperor.(2959) The cultivated Aristides had a firm faith in these heaven-sent messages. He even believed that Serapis could call back the dead to life.(2960)
Yet Aristides, in his prose hymn to Serapis, gives us a glimpse of the better side of that religion. After all, the superstitions which clustered round it were the universal beliefs of the age, prevalent among the most cultivated and the most ignorant. The question for the modern student is whether these Alexandrian worships provided real spiritual sustenance for their devotees. And, in spite of many appearances to the contrary, the impartial inquirer must come to the conclusion that the cult of the Egyptian deities, through its inner monotheism, its ideal of ascetic purity, its vision of a great judgment and a life to come, was a real advance on the popular religion of old Greece and Rome. Isis and Serapis, along with Mithra, were preparing the Western world for the religion which was to appease the long travail of humanity by a more perfect vision of the Divine. It is impossible for a modern man to realise the emotion which might be excited by a symbolism like that of Demeter, or Mithra, or Isis, with its roots in a gross heathen past. But no reader of Apuleius, Plutarch, or Philostratus should fail to realise the surging spiritual energy which, in the second and third centuries, was seeking for expression and appeasement. It struck into strange devious tracks, and often was deluded by phantasms of old superstition glorified by a new spirit. But let us remember the enduring strength of hereditary piety and ancient association, and, under its influence, the magical skill of the religious consciousness to maintain the link between widely severed generations, by purifying the grossness of the past and transforming things absurd and offensive into consecrated vehicles of high spiritual sentiment. No one, who has read in Apuleius the initiation of Lucius in the Isiac mysteries, can doubt that the effect on the votary was profound and elevating. Pious artistic skill was not wanting to heighten emotion in Isis worship, as it is not disdained in our Christian churches. But the prayer of thanksgiving offered by Lucius might, mutatis mutandis, be uttered by a new convert at a camp-meeting, or a Breton peasant after her first communion. It is the devout expression of the deep elementary religious feelings of awe and gratitude, humility and joy, boundless hope and trust. In the same tone, Aristides sings his prose canticle to Serapis. There is not a memory of the brute gods of the Nile. The Alexandrian god is now the equal or counterpart of Zeus, the lord of life and death, who cares for mortal men, who comforts, relieves, sustains. He is indeed a most awful power, yet one full of loving-kindness, tenderness, and mercy.(2961) In Plutarch we reach perhaps an even more spiritual height. Osiris, who in old legend represented the Nile, or the coarse fructifying powers of nature, passes into the Eternal Love and Beauty, pure, passionless, remote from any region of change or death, unapproachable in His ethereal splendour, save, as in moments of inspired musing, we may faintly touch Him as in a dream.
In the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, the goddess who appears in a vision to Lucius promises that, when his mortal course is run, he shall find her illumining the Stygian gloom. And, next to the maternal love with which she embraced her votaries in this life, the great attraction of her cult was the promise of a blessed future, through sacramental grace, which she offered for the world to come. Serapis, too, is from the beginning a god of the under world, a “guide of souls,” as he is also their judge at the Great Assize.(2962) The Orphic lore, the mysteries of the Eleusinian goddesses and Dionysus, had for ages taught a dim doctrine of immortality, under the veil of legend, through the scenic effects of their dramatic mysteries. They first revealed to the Greek race that the life to come was the true life, for which the present was only a purgatorial preparation. They taught, in whatever rude fashion, that future beatitude could only be secured by a purification from the stains of time.(2963) The doctrine may have been drawn from Egypt, and Egypt once more gave it fresh meaning and force. The Alexandrian worship came with a deeper faith and more impressive ritual, with dreams and monitory visions, with a mystic lore, and the ascetic preparation for the holy mysteries, with the final scene in the inner sanctuary, when the votary seemed borne far beyond the limits of space and time into ethereal distances.(2964) The soul might, indeed, have to pass through many bodies and mortal lives before it reached the life eternal. But the motto of the Isiac faith, inscribed on many tombs, was εὐψύχει, “be of good courage,” “may Osiris give the water of refreshment.”(2965) Everywhere the lotus, image of immortality, in its calix opening at every dawn, appears on symbols of the worship. And Harpocrates, the god who has triumphed over death, appears as the child issuing from the mystic flower. The Roman practice of burning the dead might seem to separate for ever the fate of the body from the spirit, although it is really a question of more or less rapid resolution of the mortal frame into its original elements. But, as we have seen, the man of the early Empire became more and more anxious to preserve undisturbed the “handful of white dust” rescued from the pyre, and would invoke the wrath of Isis against the desecrator.(2966) The great object of many of the colleges was to secure their humble members a niche in the columbarium. The Alexandrine faith in immortality, by the grace of Isis and Serapis, probably did not inquire too curiously into the manner of the resurrection.
Undoubtedly another secret of the popularity of the Egyptian worships lay in their impressive ritual, the separation of their clergy from the world, and in the comradeship of the guilds in which their votaries were enrolled. Apuleius has left us, in the initiation of Lucius at Cenchreae, and again at Rome, a priceless picture of the Isiac ritual. Everything in the ceremonial tends to kindle pious enthusiasm. Sophocles and Pindar had extolled the blessedness of those who had seen the mystic vision.(2967) The experience of Lucius would seem to confirm the testimony of the Greek poets. When the goddess has promised him deliverance from brutish form, and pledged him to strict obedience, Lucius is inspired with the utmost ardour to join in “the holy warfare.” He takes up his abode in the sacred precincts, he begs to be admitted to full communion. But the venerable pontiff requires him to await the sign of the divine will. Lucius continues in fasting and prayer till the sign at last comes; when it comes he hastens to the morning sacrifice. The scrolls, covered with symbols of ancient Egypt, are brought in, and then, before a crowd of the faithful, he is plunged in the sacred font. Returning to the temple, as he lies prostrate before the image of the goddess in prayer, he has whispered to him “the unutterable words.” Ten days more are spent in strictest retreat and abstinence from pleasures of the flesh; and then came the crowning rite, the solemn vigil in the inner sanctuary. There, as at Eleusis, a vivid drama of a divine death and resurrection probably passed before his eyes, in flashing radiance and awful visions, amid gloom and the tones of weird music. But the tale of what he saw and heard could never be fully unfolded to mortal ear.
There indeed are some sordid and suspicious traits in the history of this worship. As in the case of the taurobolium,(2968) the mysteries of Isis and Serapis could not be enjoyed without a considerable outlay. And Lucius found a difficulty in meeting the expense.(2969) But, whether in heathendom or Christendom, a regular priesthood and an elaborate ritual cannot be supported without the offerings of the faithful. There has probably never been a religion in which the charge of venality has not been levelled against the priests. But Lucius finds here no stumbling-block. No material offering can repay the goodness and love of the goddess. He feels towards her not only reverence and gratitude, but the love of a son to a Divine mother. Ascetic isolation has produced the natural result of imaginative ecstasy and mystic exaltation. The long, quiet hours of rapt devotion before the sacred figure in the stillness of the shrine, the spectral visions of the supreme hour of revelation, made a profound impression on a soul which was deeply tainted by other visions of old-world sin.
The daily ritual of Isis, which seems to have been as regular and complicated as that of the Catholic Church, produced an immense effect on the Roman mind. Every day there were two solemn offices, at which white-robed, tonsured priests, with acolytes and assistants of every degree, officiated.(2970) The morning litany and sacrifice was an impressive service. The crowd of worshippers thronged the space before the chapel at the early dawn. The priest, ascending by a hidden stair, drew apart the veil of the sanctuary,(2971) and offered the holy image to their adoration. He then made the round of the altars, reciting the litany, and sprinkling the holy water “from the secret spring.” At two o’clock in the afternoon the passers by could hear from the temple in the Campus Martius the chant of vespers.(2972) A fresco of Herculaneum gives us a picture of the service. It is the adoration of the holy water, representing in symbol the fructifying and deathless power of Osiris. A priest, standing before the holy place, raises breast high a sacred urn for the adoration of the crowd. The sacrifice is smoking on the altar, and two choirs are chanting to the accompaniment of the seistron and the flute.(2973) Another fresco from Herculaneum exhibits a bearded, dark-skinned figure, crowned with the lotus, in the attitude of dancing before a throng of spectators to the sound of music. It is plausibly conjectured that we have here a pantomimic representation of the passion of Osiris and its joyful close.(2974) There was much solemn pomp and striking scenic effect in this public ceremonial. But it is clear from Apuleius, that an important part of worship was also long silent meditation before the image of the goddess. The poets speak of devotees seated thus before the altar, and in the temple at Pompeii a bench has been found which, from its position, was probably occupied by such silent worshippers.(2975)
The great festivals of the Egyptian worship were the blessing of the sacred vessel on the fifth of March, and the celebration of the quest and finding of Osiris in November. The anniversary of the death and rising again of the god was strictly observed by large numbers, especially among women. Pagan and Christian writers have alike ridiculed the theatrical grief and joy for a god so often found, so often lost.(2976) The death of Osiris at the hands of Typhon, the rending of the divine form, and the dispersion of the lacerated remains, were passionately lamented in sympathy with the mourning Isis. With effusive grief the devotees beat their breasts and lacerated their arms, and followed in eager search. When on the third day the god had been found and restored, the joyful event was hailed with extravagant gladness, and celebrated by a banquet of the initiated. For some of these holy days the rubrics prescribed a long preparation of fasting and ascetic restraint. But that a general strictness of life was not required of the Isiac votary, at least under the early Empire, may be inferred from the fact that the frail Cynthias and Delias in Propertius and Tibullus were among the most regular in ritual observance.(2977) The festival of the holy vessel of Isis, which marked the opening of navigation, and received the benediction of the goddess, was, in the early Empire, observed with solemn pomp and enthusiasm by the coast towns of the Mediterranean. A brilliantly vivid description of such a scene at Cenchreae has been left by Apuleius. It was a great popular carnival, in which a long procession, masquerading in the most fantastic and various costumes, conducted the sacred ship to the shore. Women in white robes scattered flowers and perfumes along the way. A throng of both sexes bore torches and tapers, to symbolise the reign of the Mother of the stars. The music of flute and pipe meanwhile filled the air with sacred symphonies, and a band of youths in snow-white vestments chanted a hymn. Wave upon wave came the throng of those who had been admitted to full communion, all clad in linen, and the men marked with the tonsure. They were followed by the priests, each bearing some symbol of the many powers and virtues of the goddess, the boat-shaped lamp, the “altars of succour,” the palm of gold, the wand of Mercury. In a pix were borne the holy mysteries, and, last of all, the most venerable symbol, a small urn of shining gold and adorned in subtle workmanship with figures of Egyptian legend.(2978) This holy vase, containing the water of the sacred river, which was an emanation from Osiris,(2979) closed the procession. Arrived at the margin of the sea, the chief priest consecrated the sacred vessel with solemn form and litany, and named it with the holy name. Adorned with gold and citrus wood and pictures of old legend, it spread its white sails to the breeze, and bore into the distance the vows and offerings of the faithful for the safety of those upon the deep.
The oriental religions of the imperial period were distinguished from the native religion of Latium by the possession of a numerous and highly organised priesthood, and an intensely sacerdotal spirit.(2980) In an age of growing religious faith, this characteristic gave them enormous power. The priest became a necessary medium of intercourse with God. It is also one of the many traits in the later paganism, which prepared and softened the transition to the reign of the mediaeval Church. It would be tedious and unprofitable to enumerate the various grades of the Isiac priesthood. There were high priests of conspicuous dignity, who were also called prophetae.(2981) But ordinary priests could perform many of their functions.(2982) There were interpreters of dreams, dressers and keepers of the sacred wardrobe of the goddess,(2983) whose duties must have been onerous, if we may judge from the list of robes and jewels and sacred furniture preserved in inscriptions or recovered from the ruins of Isiac shrines.(2984) It has been remarked that the roaming Visigoths in southern Gaul must have had a rare spoil if they had the fortune to light on one of the great temples of Isis. The scribe of the Pastophori, in Apuleius, is also an important officer. He summons the sacred convocation, and recites the “bidding prayer” for the Emperor and all subjects, in their several places and stations.(2985) Music took a large part in the ritual; there was hymn-singing to the sound of flutes, harp, and cymbal; and the chanters and paeanists of Serapis formed an order by themselves.(2986) The prayer which Lucius offers to the goddess, in Apuleius, has been arranged as a metrical litany.(2987) Women often appear in inscriptions and in our texts as priestesses, and had a prominent place in all solemn ritual.(2988) And it is evident that, with all its sacerdotalism, the worship gave full recognition to devout worshippers of every degree and sex. All who are devoted to the service have their place and function. The initiated might even wear the tonsure in the ordinary lay life. To do this, indeed, needed some courage, in the face of Roman ridicule. But the religious were, from the earliest times in Greece and Italy, associated for mutual support in sacred guilds, designated by various names, Isiaci or Pastophori or Anubiaci. In the third century B.C., such societies are found in Ceos and Peiraeus.(2989) On the walls of Pompeii they have left their appeals to the electors to vote on behalf of candidates for the aedileship.(2990) They were organised on the usual lines of the ancient colleges, divided into decuries, with a director and a treasurer, a “father” or a “mother,” or a patron at their head.(2991) The Isiac guilds must have had a powerful influence in the diffusion of the religion of Alexandria. But they also were probably one cause of the suspicion so long entertained for that worship by the Republican government, and they only asserted their full strength in the second century, when the colleges in general received the tacit sanction of the emperors. That the emperors felt little fear of these foreign sacred corporations became clear when an emperor actually took the tonsure of Isis.(2992)
The Isiac system was energetic and self-assertive, but it can hardly be called dangerous or revolutionary. It threw many of the old gods into the shade, but its syncretism also found a place for many of them. Its inner monotheism, after the fashion of those days, had open arms of charity for all the ancient gods. One of the priests of Isis might be called Iacchagogus or Mithra;(2993) statues of Dionysus and Venus and Priapus stood in the court of the Isium at Pompeii.(2994) The Isis of Apuleius proclaims her identity with nearly all the great powers of classical legend, and gathers them into herself. But Isis identifies only to conquer and absorb. And her priesthood formed an aggressive and powerful caste. The sacerdotal colleges of the Latin religion were never, except in the case of the Vestals, separated from ordinary life. The highest pontificate was held by busy laymen, by consuls or emperors or great soldiers. After the performance of his part in some great rite, the Roman priest returned to his civic place and duties. And in Greece, in the third and second centuries B.C., even the Isiac priesthood was held only for a year, or even for a month; and the sacred processions at one time needed the authorisation of the local council at Samos.(2995) But when we come to the days of Apuleius, all this is changed. The chief priest at Cenchreae is evidently a great ecclesiastic, bearing the sacred Eastern name of Mithra.(2996) He has given up ordinary civic life, and has probably abandoned his Greek name to take a new name “in religion.” Every day two solemn services at least have to be performed in the temple, besides the private direction of souls, which had evidently become a regular part of the priestly functions. Attached to the great temples, and close to the altar, there is a “clergy house” where the ministers are lodged. It is called the Pastophorion, and its chambers have been traced in the débris of the temple at Pompeii.(2997) One of these presbyteries was the scene of the seduction which convulsed the religious world in the reign of Tiberius, and which sent so many pious exiles to the solitudes of Sardinia. The ministers of Isis and Serapis are marked off by the tonsure and the Isiac habit, which meet us in the pages of poets from Tibullus to Juvenal,(2998) and in the frescoes of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The abstinence, which was required as a preparation for communion in ordinary votaries, was a lifelong obligation on the priest. The use of woollen garments, of wine, pork, fish, and certain vegetables, was absolutely forbidden to them.(2999) Chastity was essential in the celebrant of the holy mysteries, and even Tertullian holds up the priests of Isis as a reproachful example of continence to professing followers of Christ. The priesthood is no longer a secondary concern; it absorbs a man’s whole life, sets him apart within the sanctuary as the dispenser of sacred privileges, with the awful power of revealing the mystery of eternity, and preparing souls to meet the great ordeal.
It does not need much imagination to understand the fascination of Isis and Serapis for a people who had outgrown a severe and sober, but an uninspiring faith. They came to the West at the crisis of a great spiritual and political revolution, with the charm of foreign mystery and the immemorial antiquity of a land whose annals ran back to ages long before Rome and Athens were even villages. But with antique charm, the religion combined the moral and spiritual ideas of generations which had outgrown the gross symbolism of Nature worship. The annual festivals might preserve the memory of the myth, which in its grossness and brutal tragedy once pictured the fructifying influence of the mysterious river on the lands which awaited his visitations, or the waning force of vegetative power and solar warmth. But Serapis, the new god of the Ptolemies, became the lord of life and death, the guide and saviour of souls, the great judge of all in the other world, an awful power, yet more inclined to mercy than to judgment.(3000) And Isis rose to equally boundless sway, and one of greater tenderness. Powers above and powers below alike wait on her will: she treads Tartarus under her feet, and yet she embraces all, and specially the weak and miserable, in the arms of her charity.(3001) Above all, she has the secret of the unseen world, and can lighten for her worshipper the Stygian gloom. But the Isiac, like the Orphic revelation, while it gave a blessed promise for the life to come, attached grave conditions to the pledge. In this brief time of probation, the soul must prepare itself under ghostly guidance for the great trial. Sacrament and mystery lent their aid to fortify the worshipper in the face of death, but, to derive their full virtue, he must exercise himself in temperance, abjure the pleasures of the senses, and purify himself for the vision of God.(3002) The sacred ritual of the Egyptian might captivate the senses and imagination by its pomp and music, its steaming altars, and many-coloured symbolism. But in the stillness of the sanctuary the worshipper was trained to find his moments of purest and most exalted devotion in silent meditation before the Queen of heaven and the shades. The lonely, the weak, and the desolate found in the holy guilds succour and consolation, with a place in the ritual of her solemn seasons, which bound each to each in the love of a Divine Mother.