Mysteries of Isis · Lablypedia

Many texts from the Roman Empire refer to the Isis mysteries, but the only source to describe them is a work of fiction, the novel The Golden Ass, written in the second century CE by Apuleius. In it, the initiate undergoes elaborate ritual purification before descending into the innermost part of Isis's temple, where he experiences a symbolic death and rebirth and has an intense religious experience, seeing the gods in person.

Some aspects of the mysteries of Isis and of other mystery cults, particularly their connection with the afterlife, resemble important elements of Christianity. The question of whether they influenced Christianity is controversial and the evidence is unclear; some scholars today attribute the similarities to a shared cultural background rather than direct influence. In contrast, Apuleius's account has had direct effects in modern times. Through his description, the mysteries of Isis have influenced many works of fiction and modern fraternal organizations, as well as a widespread belief that the ancient Egyptians themselves had an elaborate system of mystery initiations.

Origins

Greek and Egyptian precedents

Greco-Roman mysteries were voluntary, secret initiation rituals. They were dedicated to a particular deity or group of deities, and used a variety of intense experiences, such as nocturnal darkness interrupted by bright light, or loud music or noise, that induced a state of disorientation and an intense religious experience. Some of them involved cryptic symbols. Initiates were not supposed to discuss the details of what they experienced, and modern understanding of these rites is limited by this secrecy. The most prestigious mysteries in the Greek world were the Eleusinian initiations dedicated to the goddess Demeter, which were performed at Eleusis near Athens, from at least the sixth century BCE to the end of the fourth century CE. They centered on Demeter's search for her daughter Persephone. Eleusinian initiates passed into a dark hall, the Telesterion, and were subjected to terrifying sights before entering a room brightly lit by fire. There the hierophant who presided over the ceremony shouted a cryptic announcement that may have alluded to the birth of the god Ploutos and displayed objects that represented Demeter's power over fertility, such as a sheaf of wheat.

In the mysteries of the god Dionysus, which were performed in many places across the Greek world, participants drank and danced in frenzied nocturnal celebrations. Dionysian celebrations were connected in some way with Orphism, a group of mystical beliefs about the nature of the afterlife.

Isis was originally a goddess in ancient Egyptian religion, which did not include Greek-style mysteries, although it did contain elements that resembled those in later Greek mysteries. Pharaohs underwent a consecration, related to their coronation rites, in which they were said to have close contact with the gods. Priests may have also undergone a consecration ceremony of some kind, connected with the specialized religious knowledge or training required for their positions. Ancient Egyptian funerary texts contained knowledge about the Duat, or underworld, that was characterized as profoundly secret and was believed to allow deceased souls to reach a pleasant afterlife. Some Egyptologists, such as Jan Assmann, have suggested some funerary texts were also used in priestly consecration rituals; Assmann argues that "initiation into the temples and cults of Egypt anticipated and prefigured the ultimate initiation into the mysteries of the realm of the dead." Other Egyptologists contest the idea that funerary texts were ever used in rituals by the living.

An element of Greek mysteries that did not exist in Egypt was the opportunity for ordinary individuals to undergo initiation. The most sacred rituals in Egyptian temples were performed by high-ranking priests out of public view, and festivals formed the main opportunity for commoners to participate in formal ceremonies. Some of these festivals reenacted events from Egyptian mythology, notably the Khoiak Festival in honor of Osiris, the god of the afterlife and the mythological husband of Isis, in which Osiris's mythological death, dismemberment, and restoration to life were played out in public view. Greek writers called these Egyptian rites "mysteries". Herodotus, a Greek historian writing in the fifth century BCE, was the first to do so. He used the term for the Khoiak Festival, likening it to the mysteries of Dionysus with which he was familiar, because both took place at night and involved a myth in which the god in question was dismembered. He further said that the Greek worship of Dionysus was influenced by the worship of Osiris in Egypt.

Greek writers who came after Herodotus viewed Egypt and its priests as the source of all mystical wisdom. They claimed that many elements of Greek philosophy and culture, including their own mystery rites, came from Egypt. The classicist Walter Burkert and the Egyptologist Francesco Tiradritti both argue that there is a grain of truth in these claims, as the oldest Greek mysteries developed in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, at the same time that Greece was developing closer contacts with Egyptian culture. The imagery of the afterlife found in those mysteries may thus have been influenced by that in Egyptian afterlife beliefs.

Spread of the Isis cult

Isis was one of many non-Greek deities whose cults diffused beyond their home lands and became part of Greek and Roman religion during the Hellenistic period (323–30 BCE), when Greek people and culture spread to lands across the Mediterranean and most of those same lands were conquered by the Roman Republic. Under the influence of Greco-Roman tradition, some of these cults, including that of Isis, developed their own mystery rites. Much of Isis's cult involved activities that were far more public than the mystery rites, such as the adoration of cult statues within her temples, or outdoor festivals such as the Navigium Isidis, yet scholars often regard the mysteries as one of the most characteristic features of her cult.

The Isis cult developed its mysteries in response to the widespread belief that the Greek mystery cults had originated with Isis and Osiris in Egypt. As the classicist Miguel John Verlsuys puts it, "For the Greeks, the image of Egypt as old and religious was so strong that they could not but imagine Isis as a mystery goddess." Isis's devotees may have adapted aspects of Egyptian ritual to fit the model of the Eleusinian mysteries, perhaps incorporating Dionysian elements as well. The end product would have seemed to the Greeks like an authentic Egyptian precursor to Greek mysteries. Many Greco-Roman sources claim that Isis herself devised these rites.

Scholars disagree on whether the mysteries developed before the time of the Roman Empire, as the evidence about them from the Hellenistic period is ambiguous. Yet they could have emerged as far back as the early third century BCE, after the Greek Ptolemaic dynasty had taken control of Egypt. The Ptolemies promoted the cult of the god Serapis, who incorporated traits of Osiris and of Greek deities like Dionysus and the underworld god Pluto. Isis's cult was conjoined with that of Serapis. She too was reinterpreted to resemble Greek goddesses, particularly Demeter, while retaining many of her Egyptian characteristics. The mysteries of Isis, modeled on those in Demeter's honor at Eleusis, could have been developed at the same time. According to the Greek historian Plutarch and the Roman historian Tacitus, a man named Timotheus, a member of the Eumolpid family that oversaw the Eleusinian mysteries, helped establish Serapis as a patron god in the court of the Ptolemies. The classicist Jaime Alvar Ezquerra suggests that Timotheus could have introduced elements of the Eleusinian mysteries into the worship of Isis at the same time. Another possibility is that the mysteries emerged in Greece itself, sometime after the Isis cult became established there and came into direct contact with Demeter's rites at Eleusis.

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Significance

Deities and religious symbolism

Most mystery rites were connected with myths about the deities on which they focused, and claimed to convey to initiates details about the myths that were not generally known. Several Greco-Roman writers produced theological and philosophical interpretations. Spurred by the fragmentary evidence, modern scholars have often tried to discern what the mysteries may have meant to their initiates. The classicist Hugh Bowden argues that there may have been no single, authoritative interpretation of the rites and that "the desire to identify a lost secret—something that, once it is correctly identified, will explain what a mystery cult was all about—is bound to fail." He regards the effort to meet the gods directly, exemplified by the climax of Lucius's initiation in The Golden Ass, as the most important feature of the rites. The notion of meeting the gods face to face contrasted with classical Greek and Roman beliefs, in which seeing the gods, though it might be an awe-inspiring experience, could be dangerous and even deadly. In Greek mythology, for example, the sight of Zeus's true form incinerated the mortal woman Semele. Yet Lucius's meeting with the gods fits with a trend, found in several religious groups in Roman times, toward a closer connection between the worshipper and the gods.

The "elements" that Lucius passes through in the first initiation may refer to the classical elements of earth, air, water and fire that were believed to make up the world, or to regions of the cosmos. The religious studies scholar Panayotis Pachis suggests the word refers specifically to the planets in Hellenistic astrology. Astrological themes appeared in many other cults in the Roman Empire, including another mystery cult, dedicated to Mithras. In the Isis cult, Pachis writes, astrological symbols may have alluded to the belief that Isis governed the movements of the stars and thus the passage of time and the order of the cosmos, beliefs that Lucius refers to when praying to the goddess.

Ancient Egyptian beliefs are one possible source for understanding the symbolism in the mysteries of Isis. J. Gwyn Griffiths, an Egyptologist and classical scholar, extensively studied Book 11 of The Golden Ass and its possible Egyptian background in 1975. He pointed out similarities between the first initiation in The Golden Ass and Egyptian afterlife beliefs, saying that the initiate took on the role of Osiris by undergoing symbolic death. In his view, the imagery of the initiation refers to the Egyptian underworld, the Duat. Griffiths argued that the sun in the middle of the night, in Lucius's account of the initiation, might have been influenced by the contrasts of light and dark in other mystery rites, but it derived mainly from the depictions of the underworld in ancient Egyptian funerary texts. According to these texts, the sun god Ra passes through the underworld each night and unites with Osiris to emerge renewed, just as deceased souls do. The five scholars who authored a 2015 commentary on Book 11 caution that the solar and underworld imagery could be based solely on Greek and Roman precedents, and they doubt Griffiths's assertion that Lucius undergoes a mystical union with Osiris.

In the course of the book, as Valentino Gasparini puts it, "Osiris explicitly snatches out of Isis's hands the role of Supreme Being" and replaces her as the focus of Lucius's devotion. Osiris's prominence in The Golden Ass is in keeping with other evidence about the Isis cult in Rome, which suggests that it adopted themes and imagery from Egyptian funerary religion and gave increasing prominence to Osiris in the late first and early second centuries CE. In contrast, Serapis, whose identity largely overlapped with that of Osiris and who was frequently worshipped jointly with Isis, is mentioned only once in the text, in the description of the festival procession. Jaime Alvar considers the text to treat Serapis and Osiris as distinct figures, whereas the authors of the 2015 commentary doubt that Apuleius meant to sharply distinguish the two. They point out that Lucius refers to Osiris using epithets that were often given to Serapis. Gasparini argues that the shift in focus in the book reflects a belief that Osiris was the supreme being and Isis was an intermediary between him and humanity. This interpretation is found in the essay On Isis and Osiris by Plutarch, which analyzes the Osiris myth based on Plutarch's own Middle Platonist philosophy, and Gasparini suggests that Apuleius shared Plutarch's views. Stephen Harrison suggests that the sudden switch of focus from Isis to Osiris is simply a satire of grandiose claims of religious devotion.

Commitment to the cult

Because not all local cults of Isis held mystery rites, not all her devotees would have undergone initiation. Both Apuleius's story and Plutarch's On Isis and Osiris, which briefly refers to initiates of Isis, suggest that initiation was considered part of the larger process of joining the cult and dedicating oneself to the goddess.

The Isis cult, like most in the Greco-Roman world, was not exclusive; worshippers of Isis could continue to revere other gods as well. Devotees of Isis were among the very few religious groups in the Greco-Roman world to have a distinctive name for themselves, loosely equivalent to "Jew" or "Christian", that might indicate they defined themselves by their exclusive devotion to the goddess. However, the word—Isiacus or "Isiac"—was rarely used, and the level of commitment it implied seems to have varied according to the circumstances. Many priests of Isis officiated in other cults as well. Several people in late Roman times, such as the aristocrat Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, joined multiple priesthoods and underwent several initiations dedicated to different gods. Mystery initiations thus did not require devotees to abandon whatever religious identity they originally had, and they would not qualify as religious conversions under a narrow definition of the term. Some of these initiations did involve smaller changes in religious identity, such as joining a new community of worshippers or strengthening devotees' commitment to a cult of which they were already part, that would qualify as conversions in a broader sense. Many ancient sources, both written by Isiacs and by outside observers, suggest that many of Isis's devotees considered her the focus of their lives and that the cult emphasized moral purity, self-denial, and public declarations of devotion to the goddess. Joining Isis's cult was therefore a sharper change in identity than in some other mystery cults, such as the cult dedicated to Dionysus. The account in The Golden Ass suggests that initiation may have been classifiable as a mystical conversion, characterized by visionary experiences, intense emotions, and a dramatic change in the convert's behavior, whereas, for instance, the evidence about Mithraism suggests the process of joining it was less mystical and more intellectual.

The Golden Ass does not say how initiation may have affected a devotee's rank within the cult. After going through his third initiation, Lucius becomes a pastophoros, a member of a particular class of priests. If the third initiation was a requirement for becoming a pastophoros, it is possible that members moved up in the cult hierarchy by going through the series of initiations. Apuleius refers to initiates and to priests as if they are separate groups within the cult. Initiation may have been a prerequisite for a devotee to become a priest but not have automatically made him or her into one.

Connection with the afterlife

Many pieces of evidence suggest that the mysteries of Isis were connected in some way to salvation and the guarantee of an afterlife. The Greek conception of the afterlife included the paradisiacal Elysian Fields, and philosophers developed ideas about the immortality of the soul, but Greeks and Romans expressed uncertainty about what would happen to them after death. In both Greek and Roman traditional religion, no god was thought to guarantee a pleasant afterlife to his or her worshippers. The gods of some mystery cults may have been exceptions, but evidence about those cults' afterlife beliefs is vague. Apuleius's account, if it is accurate, provides stronger evidence for Isiac afterlife beliefs than is available for the other cults. The book says Isis's power over fate, which her Greek and Roman devotees frequently mentioned, gives her control over life and death. According to the priest who initiates Lucius, devotees of Isis "who had finished their life's span and were already standing on the threshold of light’s end, if only they could safely be trusted with the great unspoken mysteries of the cult, were frequently drawn forth by the goddess' power and in a manner reborn through her providence and set once more on the course of renewed life." In another passage, Isis herself says that when Lucius dies he will be able to see her shining in the darkness of the underworld and worship her there.

Some scholars are skeptical that the afterlife was a major focus of the cult. The historian Ramsay MacMullen says that when characters in The Golden Ass call Lucius "reborn", they refer to his new life as a devotee and never call him renatus in aeternam, or "eternally reborn", which would refer to the afterlife. The classicists Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price say The Golden Ass shows that "the cult of Isis had implications for life and death, but even so more emphasis is placed on extending the span of life than on the after-life—which is pictured in fairly undifferentiated terms."

Some funerary inscriptions provide evidence of Isiac afterlife beliefs outside Apuleius's work. They show that some of Isis's followers thought she would guide them to a better afterlife, but also suggest the Isis cult had no firm picture of the afterlife and that its members drew upon both Greek and Egyptian precedents to envision it. Some inscriptions say that devotees would benefit from Osiris's enlivening water, while others refer to the Fortunate Isles of Greek tradition. None of them make specific reference to mystery rites, although the inscription of Meniketes asserts that he is blessed in part because of his work furnishing the ritual beds. Initiation may not have been considered necessary for receiving Isis's blessing.

The ancient Egyptians believed that Osiris lived on in the Duat after death, thanks in part to Isis's help, and that after their deaths they could be revived like him with the assistance of other deities, including Isis. These beliefs may have carried over into the Greco-Roman Isis cult, although the myth of Osiris's death was rarely referred to in the Greco-Roman Isis cult and may not have played a major role in its belief system, even if the nocturnal union of Osiris and Ra did so. If the symbolism in Lucius's first initiation was a reference to the sun in the Egyptian underworld, that would indicate that it involved Osirian afterlife beliefs, even though Osiris is not mentioned in the description of the rite. As the classicist Robert Turcan put it, when Lucius is revealed to the crowd after his initiation he is "honoured almost like a new Osiris, saved and regenerated through the ineffable powers of Isis. The palms radiating from his head were the signs of the Sun triumphing over death."

Influence on other traditions

Possible influence on Christianity

The mysteries of Isis, like those of other gods, continued to be performed into the late fourth century CE. Toward the end of the century, Christian emperors increasingly restricted the practice of non-Christian religions. Mystery cults died out near the start of the fifth century. They existed alongside Christianity for centuries before their extinction, and some elements of their initiations resembled Christian beliefs and practices. As a result, the possibility has often been raised that Christianity was directly influenced by the mystery cults. Evidence about interactions between Christianity and the mystery cults is poor, making the question difficult to resolve.

Most religious traditions in the Greco-Roman world centered on a particular city or ethnic group and did not require personal devotion, only public ritual. In contrast, the cult of Isis, like Christianity and some other mystery cults, was made up of people who joined voluntarily, out of their personal commitment to a deity that many of them regarded as superior to all others. Furthermore, if Isiac initiates were thought to benefit in the afterlife from Osiris's death and resurrection, this belief would parallel the Christian belief that the death and resurrection of Jesus make salvation available to those who become Christians.

Some scholars have specifically compared baptism with the Isiac initiation. Before the early fourth century CE, baptism was the culmination of a long process, in which the convert to Christianity fasted for the forty days of Lent before being immersed at Easter in a cistern or natural body of water. Thus, like the mysteries of Isis, early Christian baptism involved a days-long fast and a washing ritual. Both fasting and washing were common types of ritual purification found in the religions of the Mediterranean, and Christian baptism was specifically derived from the baptism of Jesus and Jewish immersion rituals. Therefore, according to Hugh Bowden, these similarities are likely to come from the shared religious background of Christianity and the Isis cult, not from the influence of one tradition upon the other.

Similarly, the sacred meals shared by the initiates of many mystery cults have been compared with the Christian rite of communion. For instance, the classicist R. E. Witt called the banquet that concluded the Isiac initiation "the pagan Eucharist of Isis and Sarapis". Feasts in which worshippers ate the food that had been sacrificed to a deity were a nearly universal practice in Mediterranean religions and do not prove a direct link between Christianity and the mysteries of Isis. The most distinctive trait of Christian communion—the belief that the god himself was the victim of the sacrifice—was not present in the cult, or in any other mystery cults.

Bowden doubts that afterlife beliefs were a very important aspect of mystery cults and therefore thinks their resemblance to Christianity was small. Jaime Alvar, in contrast, argues that the mysteries of Isis, along with those of Mithras and Cybele, did involve beliefs about salvation and the afterlife that resembled those in Christianity. But they did not become similar by borrowing directly from each other, only by adapting in similar ways to the Greco-Roman religious environment. He says: "Each cult found the materials it required in the common trough of current ideas. Each took what it needed and adapted these elements according to its overall drift and design."

Influence in modern times

Motifs from Apuleius's description of the Isiac initiation have been repeated and reworked in fiction and in esoteric belief systems in modern times, and they form an important part of the Western perception of ancient Egyptian religion. People reusing these motifs often assume that mystery rites were practiced in Egypt long before Hellenistic times.

An influential example is the 1731 novel Life of Sethos by a French cleric and classicist, Jean Terrasson. He claimed to have translated this book from an ancient Greek work of fiction that was based on real events. The book was actually his own invention, inspired by ancient Greek sources that assumed Greek philosophers had derived their wisdom from Egypt. In his novel, Egypt's priests run an elaborate education system like a European university. To join their ranks, the protagonist, Sethos, undergoes an initiation presided over by Isis, taking place in hidden chambers beneath the Great Pyramid of Giza. Based on Lucius's statement in The Golden Ass that he was "borne through all the elements" during his initiation, Terrasson describes the initiation as an elaborate series of ordeals based on the classical elements: running over hot metal bars for fire, swimming a canal for water, and swinging through the air over a pit.

The Divine Legation of Moses, a treatise by the Anglican theologian William Warburton published from 1738 to 1741, included an analysis of ancient mystery rites that drew upon Sethos for much of its evidence. Assuming that all mystery rites derived from Egypt, Warburton argued that the public face of Egyptian religion was polytheistic, but the Egyptian mysteries were designed to reveal a deeper, monotheistic truth to elite initiates. One of them, Moses, learned the elite belief system during his Egyptian upbringing and developed Judaism to reveal monotheism to the entire Israelite nation.

Freemasons developed many pseudohistorical origin myths tracing their history back to ancient times. Egypt was among the civilizations that Masons claimed had influenced their traditions. After Sethos was published, several Masonic lodges developed rites based on those in the novel. Late in the eighteenth century, Masonic writers, still assuming that Sethos was an ancient story, used the resemblance between their rites and the initiation of Sethos as evidence of Freemasonry's supposedly ancient origin. Many works of fiction from the 1790s to the 1820s reused and modified the signature traits of Terrasson's Egyptian initiation: trials by three or four elements, often taking place under the pyramids. The best-known of these works is the 1791 opera The Magic Flute by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Emanuel Schikaneder, in which the main character, Tamino, undergoes a series of trials overseen by priests who invoke Isis and Osiris.

Karl Leonhard Reinhold, a philosopher and Freemason writing in the 1780s, drew upon and modified Warburton's claims in an effort to reconcile Freemasonry's traditional origin story, which traces Freemasonry back to ancient Israel, with its enthusiasm for Egyptian imagery. He claimed that the sentence "I am that I am", spoken by the Jewish God in the Book of Exodus, had a pantheistic meaning. He compared it with an Egyptian inscription on a veiled statue of Isis recorded by the Roman-era authors Plutarch and Proclus, which said: "I am all that is, was, and shall be," and argued that Isis was a personification of Nature. According to Reinhold, it was this pantheistic belief system that Moses imparted to the Israelites, so that Isis and the Jewish and Christian conception of God shared a common origin.

Others treated the pantheistic Isis as superior to Christianity. In 1790, the poet Friedrich Schiller wrote an essay based on Reinhold's work that treated the mystery rite as a meeting with the awe-inspiring power of nature. He argued that Moses's people were not prepared to grasp such an understanding of divinity, and thus the Jewish and Christian conception of God was a compromised version of the truth devised for public consumption. Throughout the eighteenth century, the veiled Isis was used as a symbol of modern science, which hoped to uncover nature's secrets. In the wake of the dechristianization of France during the French Revolution, Isis was treated as a symbol of opposition to the clergy and to Christianity in general, as she represented both scientific knowledge and the mystical wisdom of the mystery rites, which offered an alternative to traditional Christianity.

Scholars abandoned the concept of Egyptian mysteries in the early nineteenth century as the emergence of Egyptology undermined old assumptions about ancient Egyptian society, but the concept lingered among Freemasons and esotericists. Several esoteric organizations that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as the Theosophical Society and the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, repeated the belief that Egyptians underwent initiation within the pyramids and that Greek philosophers were initiates who learned Egypt's secret wisdom. Writers influenced by Theosophy, such as Reuben Swinburne Clymer in his book The Mystery of Osiris (1909) and Manly Palmer Hall in Freemasonry of the Ancient Egyptians (1937), wrote of an age-old Egyptian mystery tradition. An elaborate example of such beliefs is the 1954 book Stolen Legacy by George G. M. James. Stolen Legacy asserts that Greek philosophy was built on knowledge taken from the Egyptian school of initiates, and it was an influence on the Afrocentrist movement, which asserts that ancient Egyptian civilization was more sophisticated and more closely connected to other African civilizations than mainstream scholars believe it to have been. James envisioned the mystery school in terms reminiscent of Freemasonry and believed it was a grandiose organization with branches on several continents, including the Americas, so that the purported system of Egyptian mysteries extended across the world.