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Transcriber's note: A few typographical errors have been corrected: they are listed at the end of the text.

Some short Greek renderings in the main text were printed as page footnotes. To avoid confusion with the links to the scholarly notes, these have been moved to parentheses next to the English renderings.

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The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism

Franz Cumont

With an Introductory Essay by Grant Showerman

Authorized Translation

Chicago The Open Court Publishing Company

London Agents Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co.

1911

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TO MY TEACHER AND FRIEND

CHARLES MICHEL

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{iii}

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION.--The Significance of Franz Cumont's Work, By Grant Showerman ... v

PREFACE ... xv

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION ... xxv

I. ROME AND THE ORIENT ... 1

Superiority of the Orient, 1.--Its Influence on Political Institutions, 3.--Its Influence on Civil Law, 5.--Its Influence on Science, 6.--Its Influence on Literature and Art, 7.--Its Influence on Industry, 9.--SOURCES: Destruction of Pagan Rituals, 11.--Mythographers, 12.--Historians, 13.--Satirists, 13.--Philosophers, 14.--Christian Polemicists, 15.--Archeological Documents, 16.

II. WHY THE ORIENTAL RELIGIONS SPREAD ... 20

Difference in the Religions of the Orient and the Occident, 20.--Spread of Oriental Religions, 22.--Economic Influences, 23.--Theory of Degeneration, 25.--Conversions are of Individuals, 27.--Appeal of the Oriental Religions to the Senses, 28.--Appeal to the Intelligence, 31.--Appeal to the Conscience, 35.--Inadequacy of the Roman Religion, 35.--Skepticism, 37.--Imperial Power, 38.--The Purification of Souls, 39.--Hope of Immortality, 42.--Conclusion, 43.

III. ASIA MINOR ... 46

Arrival of Cybele at Rome, 46.--Her Religion in Asia Minor, 47.--Religion at Rome under the Republic, 51.--Adoption of the Goddess Ma-Bellona, 53.--Politics of Claudius, 55.--Spring Festival, 56.--Spread of the Phrygian Religion in the Provinces, 57.--Causes of Its Success, 58.--Its Official Recognition, 60.--ARRIVAL OF OTHER CULTS: Mèn, 61.--Judaism, 63.--Sabazius, 64.--Anahita, 65.--The Taurobolium, 66.--Philosophy, 70.--Christianity, 70.--Conclusion, 71.

IV. EGYPT ... 73

Foundation of Serapis Worship, 73.--The Egyptian Religion Hellenized, 75.--Diffusion in Greece, 79.--Adoption at Rome, 80.--Persecutions, 82.--Adoption Under Caligula, 84.--Its History, 85.--Its Transformation, 86.--Uncertainty in Egyptian Theology, 87.--Insufficiency of Its Ethics, 90.--Power of Its Ritual, 93.--Daily Liturgy, 95.--Festivals, 97.--Doctrine of Immortality, 99.--The _Refrigerium_, 101.

{iv} V. SYRIA ... 103

The Syrian Goddess, 103.--Importation of New Gods by Syrian Slaves, 105.--Syrian Merchants, 107.--Syrian Soldiers, 112.--Heliogabalus and Aurelian, 114.--Value of Semitic Paganism, 115.--Animal Worship, 116.--Baals, 118.--Human Sacrifice, 119.--Transformation of the Sacerdotal Religion, 120.--Purity, 121.--Influence of Babylon, 122.--Eschatology, 125.--THEOLOGY: God is Supreme, 127.--God is Omnipotent, 129.--God is Eternal and Universal, 130.--Semitic Syncretism, 131.--Solar Henotheism, 133.

VI. PERSIA ... 135

Persia and Europe, 135.--Influence of the Achemenides, 136.--Influence of Mazdaism, 138.--Conquests of Rome, 139.--Influence of the Sassanides, 140.--Origin of the Mysteries of Mithra, 142.--Persians in Asia Minor, 144.--The Mazdaism of Anatolia, 146.--Its Diffusion in the Occident, 149.--Its Qualities, 150.--Dualism, 151.--The Ethics of Mithraism, 155.--The Future Life, 158.--Conclusion, 159.

VII. ASTROLOGY AND MAGIC ... 162

Prestige of Astrology, 162.--Its Introduction in the Occident, 163.--Astrology Under the Empire, 164.--Polemics Powerless Against Astrology, 166.--Astrology a Scientific Religion, 169.--The Primitive Idea of Sympathy, 171.--Divinity of the Stars, 172.--Transformation of the Idea of God, 174.--New Gods, 175.--Big Years, 176.--Astrological Eschatology, 177.--Man's Relation to Heaven, 178.--Fatalism, 179.--Efficacy of Prayer, 180.--Efficacy of Magic, 182.--Treatises on Magic, 182.--Idea of Sympathy, 183.--Magic a Science, 184.--Magic is Religious, 185.--Ancient Italian Sorcery, 186.--Egypt and Chaldea, 187.--Theurgy, 188.--Persian Magic, 189.--Persecutions, 191.--Conclusion, 193.

VIII. THE TRANSFORMATION OF ROMAN PAGANISM ... 196

Paganism Before Constantine, 196.--Religion of Asia Minor, 197.--Religion of Egypt and Syria, 198.--Religion of Persia, 199.--Many Pagan Religions, 200.--Popular Religion and Philosophy, 201.--Christian Polemics, 202.--Roman Paganism Become Oriental, 204.--Mysteries, 205.--Nature Worship, 206.--Supreme God, 207.--Sidereal Worship, 208.--The Ritual Given a Moral Significance, 209.--The End of the World, 209.--Conclusion, 210.

NOTES ... 213

Preface, 213.--I. Rome and the Orient, 214,--II. Why the Oriental Religions Spread, 218.--III. Asia Minor, 223.--IV. Egypt, 228.--V. Syria, 241.--VI. Persia, 260.--VII. Astrology and Magic, 270.--VIII. The Transformation of Paganism, 281.

INDEX ... 289

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INTRODUCTION.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF FRANZ CUMONT'S WORK.

Franz Cumont, born January 3, 1868, and educated at Ghent, Bonn, Berlin, and Paris, resides in Brussels, and has been Professor in the University of Ghent since 1892. His monumental work, _Textes et monuments figurés relatifs aux mystères de Mithra_, published in 1896 and 1899 in two volumes, was followed in 1902 by the separate publication, under the title _Les Mystères de Mithra_, of the second half of Vol. I, the _Conclusions_ in which he interpreted the great mass of evidence contained in the remainder of the work. The year following, this book appeared in the translation of Thomas J. McCormack as _The Mysteries of Mithra_, published by the Open Court Publishing Company. M. Cumont's other work of prime interest to students of the ancient faiths, _Les religions orientales dans le paganisme romain_, appeared in 1906, was revised and issued in a second edition in 1909, and is now presented in English in the following pages.

M. Cumont is an ideal contributor to knowledge in his chosen field. As an investigator, he combines in one person Teutonic thoroughness and Gallic intuition. As a writer, his virtues are no less pronounced. Recognition of his mastery of an enormous array of detailed learning followed immediately on the publication {vi} of _Textes et monuments_, and the present series of essays, besides a numerous series of articles and monographs, makes manifest the same painstaking and thorough scholarship; but he is something more than the mere _savant_ who has at command a vast and difficult body of knowledge. He is also the literary architect who builds up his material into well-ordered and graceful structure.

Above all, M. Cumont is an interpreter. In _The Mysteries of Mithra_ he put into circulation, so to speak, the coin of the ideas he had minted in the patient and careful study of _Textes et Monuments_; and in the studies of _The Oriental Religions_ he is giving to the wider public the interpretation of the larger and more comprehensive body of knowledge of which his acquaintance with the religion of Mithra is only a part, and against which as a background it stands. What his book _The Mysteries of Mithra_ is to his special knowledge of Mithraism, _The Oriental Religions_ is to his knowledge of the whole field. He is thus an example of the highest type of scholar--the exhaustive searcher after evidence, and the sympathetic interpreter who mediates between his subject and the lay intellectual life of his time.

And yet, admirable as is M. Cumont's presentation in _The Mysteries of Mithra_ and _The Oriental Religions_, nothing is a greater mistake than to suppose that his popularizations are facile reading. The few specialists in ancient religions may indeed sail smoothly in the current of his thought; but the very nature of a subject which ramifies so extensively and so intricately into the whole of ancient life, concerning itself with practically all the manifestations of ancient {vii} civilization--philosophy, religion, astrology, magic, mythology, literature, art, war, commerce, government--will of necessity afford some obstacle to readers unfamiliar with the study of religion.

It is in the hope of lessening somewhat this natural difficulty of assimilating M. Cumont's contribution to knowledge, and above all, to life, that these brief words of introduction are undertaken. The presentation in outline of the main lines of thought which underlie his conception of the importance of the Oriental religions in universal history may afford the uninitiated reader a background against which the author's depiction of the various cults of the Oriental group will be more easily and clearly seen.

M. Cumont's work, then, transports us in imagination to a time when Christianity was still--at least in the eyes of Roman pagans--only one of a numerous array of foreign Eastern religions struggling for recognition in the Roman world, and especially in the city of Rome. To understand the conditions under which the new faith finally triumphed, we should first realize the number of these religions, and the apparently chaotic condition of paganism when viewed as a system.

"Let us suppose," says M. Cumont, "that in modern Europe the faithful had deserted the Christian churches to worship Allah or Brahma, to follow the precepts of Confucius or Buddha, or to adopt the maxims of the Shinto; let us imagine a great confusion of all the races of the world in which Arabian mullahs, Chinese scholars, Japanese bonzes, Tibetan lamas and Hindu pundits should all be preaching fatalism and {viii} predestination, ancestor-worship and devotion to a deified sovereign, pessimism and deliverance through annihilation--a confusion in which all those priests should erect temples of exotic architecture in our cities and celebrate their disparate rites therein. Such a dream, which the future may perhaps realize, would offer a pretty accurate picture of the religious chaos in which the ancient world was struggling before the reign of Constantine."

But it is no less necessary to realize, in the second place, that, had there not been an essential solidarity of all these different faiths, the triumph of Christianity would have been achieved with much less difficulty and in much less time. We are not to suppose that religions are long-lived and tenacious unless they possess something vital which enables them to resist. In his chapter on "The Transformation of Roman Paganism," M. Cumont thus accounts for the vitality of the old faiths: "The mass of religions at Rome finally became so impregnated by neo-Platonism and Orientalism that paganism may be called a single religion with a fairly distinct theology, whose doctrines were somewhat as follows: adoration of the elements, especially the cosmic bodies; the reign of one God, eternal and omnipotent, with messenger attendants; spiritual interpretation of the gross rites yet surviving from primitive times; assurance of eternal felicity to the faithful; belief that the soul was on earth to be proved before its final return to the universal spirit, of which it was a spark; the existence of an abysmal abode for the evil, against whom the faithful must keep up an unceasing struggle; the destruction of the universe, {ix} the death of the wicked, and the eternal happiness of the good in a reconstructed world."[1]

If this formulation of pagan doctrine surprises those who have been told that paganism was "a fashion rather than a faith," and are accustomed to think of it in terms of Jupiter and Juno, Venus and Mars, and the other empty, cold, and formalized deities that have so long filled literature and art, it will be because they have failed to take into account that between Augustus and Constantine three hundred years elapsed, and are unfamiliar with the very natural fact that during all that long period the character of paganism was gradually undergoing change and growth. "The faith of the friends of Symmachus," M. Cumont tells us, "was much farther removed from the religious ideal of Augustus, although they would never have admitted it, than that of their opponents in the senate."

To what was due this change in the content of the pagan ideal, so great that the phraseology in which the ideal is described puts us in mind of Christian doctrine itself? First, answers M. Cumont, to neo-Platonism, which attempted the reconciliation of the antiquated religions with the advanced moral and intellectual ideas of its own time by spiritual interpretation of outgrown cult stories and cult practices. A second and more vital cause, however, wrought to bring about the same result. This was the invasion of the Oriental religions, and the slow working, from the advent of the Great Mother of the Gods in B. C. 204 to the downfall of paganism at the end of the fourth {x} century of the Christian era, of the leaven of Oriental sentiment. The cults of Asia and Egypt bridged the gap between the old religions and Christianity, and in such a way as to make the triumph of Christianity an evolution, not a revolution. The Great Mother and Attis, with self-consecration, enthusiasm, and asceticism; Isis and Serapis, with the ideals of communion and purification; Baal, the omnipotent dweller in the far-off heavens; Jehovah, the jealous God of the Hebrews, omniscient and omnipresent; Mithra, deity of the sun, with the Persian dualism of good and evil, and with after-death rewards and punishments--all these, and more, flowed successively into the channel of Roman life and mingled their waters to form the late Roman paganism which proved so pertinacious a foe to the Christian religion. The influence that underlay their pretensions was so real that there is some warrant for the view of Renan that at one time it was doubtful whether the current as it flowed away into the Dark Ages should be Mithraic or Christian.

The vitalization of the evidence regarding these cults is M. Cumont's great contribution. His perseverance in the accurate collection of material is equalled only by his power to see the real nature and effect of the religions of which he writes. Assuming that no religion can succeed merely because of externals, but must stand on some foundation of moral excellence, he shows how the pagan faiths were able to hold their own, and even to contest the ground with Christianity. These religions, he asserts, gave greater satisfaction first, to the senses and passions, secondly, to the intelligence, finally, and above all, to the conscience. "The spread of the Oriental religions"--again I quote {xi} a summary from _Classical Philology_--"was due to merit. In contrast to the cold and formal religions of Rome, the Oriental faiths, with their hoary traditions and basis of science and culture, their fine ceremonial, the excitement attendant on their mysteries, their deities with hearts of compassion, their cultivation of the social bond, their appeal to conscience and their promises of purification and reward in a future life, were personal rather than civic, and satisfied the individual soul.... With such a conception of latter-day paganism, we may more easily understand its strength and the bitter rivalry between it and the new faith, as well as the facility with which pagan society, once its cause was proved hopeless, turned to Christianity." The Oriental religions had made straight the way. Christianity triumphed after long conflict because its antagonists also were not without weapons from the armory of God. Both parties to the struggle had their loins girt about with truth, and both wielded the sword of the spirit; but the steel of the Christian was the more piercing, the breastplate of his righteousness was the stronger, and his feet were better shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace.

Nor did Christianity stop there. It took from its opponents their own weapons, and used them; the better elements of paganism were transferred to the new religion. "As the religious history of the empire is studied more closely," writes M. Cumont, "the triumph of the church will, in our opinion, appear more and more as the culmination of a long evolution of beliefs. We can understand the Christianity of the fifth century with its greatness and weaknesses, its spiritual exaltation and its puerile superstitions, if we {xii} know the moral antecedents of the world in which it developed."

M. Cumont is therefore a contributor to our appreciation of the continuity of history. Christianity was not a sudden and miraculous transformation, but a composite of slow and laborious growth. Its four centuries of struggle were not a struggle against an entirely unworthy religion, else would our faith in its divine warrant be diminished; it is to its own great credit, and also to the credit of the opponents that succumbed to it, that it finally overwhelmed them. To quote Emil Aust: "Christianity did not wake into being the religious sense, but it afforded that sense the fullest opportunity of being satisfied; and paganism fell because the less perfect must give place to the more perfect, not because it was sunken in sin and vice. It had out of its own strength laid out the ways by which it advanced to lose itself in the arms of Christianity, and to recognize this does not mean to minimize the significance of Christianity. We are under no necessity of artificially darkening the heathen world; the light of the Evangel streams into it brightly enough without this."[2]

Finally, the work of M. Cumont and others in the field of the ancient Oriental religions is not an isolated activity, but part of a larger intellectual movement. Their effort is only one manifestation of the interest of recent years in the study of universal religion; other manifestations of the same interest are to be seen in the histories of the Greek and Roman religions by {xiii} Gruppe, Farnell, and Wissowa, in the anthropological labors of Tylor, Lang, and Frazer, in the publication of Reinach's _Orpheus_, in the study of comparative religion, and in such a phenomenon as a World's Parliament of Religions.

In a word, M. Cumont and his companion ancient Orientalists are but one brigade engaged in the modern campaign for the liberation of religious thought. His studies are therefore not concerned alone with paganism, nor alone with the religions of the ancient past; in common with the labors of students of modern religion, they touch our own faith and our own times, and are in vital relation with our philosophy of living, and consequently with our highest welfare. "To us moderns," says Professor Frazer in the preface to his _Golden Bough_, "a still wider vista is vouchsafed, a greater panorama is unrolled by the study which aims at bringing home to us the faith and the practice, the hopes and the ideals, not of two highly gifted races only, but of all mankind, and thus at enabling us to follow the long march, the slow and toilsome ascent, of humanity from savagery to civilization.... But the comparative study of the beliefs and institutions of mankind is fitted to be much more than a means of satisfying an enlightened curiosity and of furnishing materials for the researches of the learned. Well handled, it may become a powerful instrument to expedite progress...."

It is possible that all this might disquiet the minds of those who have been wont to assume perfection in the primitive Christian church, and who assume also that present-day Christianity is the ultimate form of the Christian religion. Such persons--if there are {xiv} such--should rather take heart from the whole-souled devotion to truth everywhere to be seen in the works of scholars in ancient religion, and from their equally evident sympathy with all manifestations of human effort to establish the divine relation; but most of all from their universal testimony that for all time and in all places and under all conditions the human heart has felt powerfully the need of the divine relation. From the knowledge that the desire to get right with God--the common and essential element in all religions--has been the most universal and the most potent and persistent factor in past history, it is not far to the conviction that it will always continue to be so, and that the struggle toward the divine light of religion pure and undefiled will never perish from the earth.

GRANT SHOWERMAN.

THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN.

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Notes to Introduction.

[1] This summary of M. Cumont's chapter is quoted from my review of the first edition of _Les religions orientales_ in _Classical Philology_, III, 4, p. 467.

[2] _Die Religion der Römer_, p. 116. For the significance of the pagan faiths, see an essay on "The Ancient Religions in Universal History," _American Journal of Philology_, XXIX, 2. pp. 156-171.

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PREFACE.

In November, 1905, the Collège de France honored the writer by asking him to succeed M. Naville in opening the series of lectures instituted by the Michonis foundation. A few months later the "Hibbert Trust" invited him to Oxford to develop certain subjects which he had touched upon at Paris. In this volume have been collected the contents of both series with the addition of a short bibliography and notes intended for scholars desirous of verifying assertions made in the text.[1] The form of the work has scarcely been changed, but we trust that these pages, intended though they were for oral delivery, will bear reading, and that the title of these studies will not seem too ambitious for what they have to offer. The propagation of the Oriental religions, with the development of neo-Platonism, is the leading fact in the moral history of the pagan empire. May this small volume on a great subject throw at least some light upon this truth, and may the reader receive these essays with the same kind interest shown by the audiences at Paris and Oxford.

The reader will please remember that the different chapters were thought out and written as lectures. They do not claim to contain a debit and credit account of what the Latin paganism borrowed from or loaned to the Orient. Certain well-known facts have been {xvi} deliberately passed over in order to make room for others that are perhaps less known. We have taken liberties with our subject matter that would not be tolerated in a didactic treatise, but to which surely no one will object.

We are more likely to be reproached for an apparently serious omission. We have investigated only the internal development of paganism in the Latin world, and have considered its relation to Christianity only incidentally and by the way. The question is nevertheless important and has been the subject of celebrated lectures as well as of learned monographs and widely distributed manuals.[2] We wish to slight neither the interest nor the importance of that controversy, and it is not because it seemed negligible that we have not entered into it.

By reason of their intellectual bent and education the theologians were for a long time more inclined to consider the continuity of the Jewish tradition than the causes that disturbed it; but a reaction has taken place, and to-day they endeavor to show that the church has borrowed considerably from the conceptions and ritualistic ceremonies of the pagan mysteries. In spite of the prestige that surrounded Eleusis, the word "mysteries" calls up Hellenized Asia rather than Greece proper, because in the first place the earliest Christian communities were founded, formed and developed in the heart of Oriental populations, Semites, Phrygians and Egyptians. Moreover the religions of those people were much farther advanced, much richer in ideas and sentiments, more striking and stirring than the Greco-Latin anthropomorphism. Their liturgy always derives its inspiration from generally accepted beliefs {xvii} about purification embodied in certain acts regarded as sanctifying. These facts were almost identical in the various sects. The new faith poured its revelation into the hallowed moulds of earlier religions because in that form alone could the world in which it developed receive its message.

This is approximately the point of view adopted by the latest historians.