Mithras and the Roman World

For the satisfaction of their religious feelings, the ancients needed not only the chilly, familiar calm of “classical” sculpture but the irrational excitement of “mysteries”—sacred cults to which only initiates were admitted. Long before Mithras came west, there was Demeter. At the town of Eleusis, Athenian from the seventh century B.C., was celebrated yearly the elaborate, secret ritual of this Earth Goddess; and, despite some fragmentary evidence, the secret has, in the main, been kept. There was probably a kind of miracle play, a cult-drama, telling of the annual reunion of Pluto’s victim, the Corn-Maiden Persephone, with her Mother—symbolizing man’s sacred deliverance. At Eleusis there were three grades of mystai. Initiation may have been pre-Greek in origin. Or it may have arisen from selective admissions by the paterfamilias to Greek family worship. At all events, it was an institution that bestowed a higher status, offered a greater closeness to the divinity, and promised some sort of privilege in the after-life.