(intriguing harpsichord music) (intriguing harpsichord music continues) - How do you do?

It's very good to be with you.

You have been looking at Isis, the mother goddess of Egypt, the mother goddess of the Nile, Isis and her baby Horus.

And today we shall discuss the great mystery religions of the first three centuries after Christ were to be, of course, the competitors of Christianity.

And at times it looked as if they might be the overwhelming competitors and of emerging Christianity.

In the course of the first three centuries, Rome, the most eclectic empire in the world, had introduced the Hellenism coming out of your conquests of Alexander, this universal political, philosophical, religious concept and spread it across the Mediterranean.

You could hear Greek everywhere from Syria all the way to Britain.

Greek and Latin were the predominant languages.

There were universities and great universities in every parts of this empire.

And the students and professors moved as they moved today across this empire from university to university, a migrant student group working from one great teacher to another.

There were universities, for example, at Bordeaux, Burdigala.

There was a university at Massilia, modern Marseille, a university naturally at Rome, a university at Milan, a great university at Carthage, a university naturally at Athens, the center of all your learning of the ancient world, where the great schools of Plato and Aristotle and Zeno the Stoic, and Epicurus, Epicureanism still were in existence at this time.

There was a university later at Constantinople, a university at Smyrna here on the west coast of Asia Minor, a university at Antioch, a university at Beirut, Berytus, and a great university and library here in Alexandria.

Great universities, great teachers, students moving from university to university, professors moving with their students or ahead of the students, wandering priests, wandering merchants.

And as we'll talk about later, soldiers stationed from one part of the empire to the next, listening, hearing, adopting, adapting, as the case might be, the concepts, the religions, the beliefs of a whole empire.

Now the finest craftsmen, the finest artists, the finest sculptors came from the East and they came to Rome, and they came to Massilia, and they came to Britain.

They went all over the empire.

So Rome turned to the East for her fine craftsmanship, her fine art.

And progressively in a sense, I suppose you could say the Roman Empire became partially Orientalized as it became partially Hellenized.

Or shall we say Orientalism came through Hellenism via the path of Hellenism to influence the development of the Roman Empire and thus our own world today.

And of course, with this movement of thoughts and concepts, with this universal empire where the roads were excellent and the garrisons held the frontiers and ships moved across the Mediterranean and Black Sea and up around the Atlantic to Britain, while the rivers held a river traffic, also the religions came with this particular movement that you find here on the empire, this overall movement.

Now, you also find at this time, this has been said, that the first 300 years of Christianity, particularly your third century, your 200s and up into the fourth were movements or centuries of religious concepts, religious movement.

The world was becoming very gray.

Although the first two centuries of the principate, as they called it, the first two centuries of the empire, the first two centuries after Christ were to be brilliant centuries, it is a last brilliance, a last florescence.

And after that, you find the long dying and the reawakening, the re-emergence of the medieval world and thus the modern world out of this ancient background.

And through this period where men turned at times disgusted, apathetic, torn by the world in which they lived toward religion, you find these religions of salvation, religions ready to aid.

The Greek word is (speaks Greek), ready to aid, religions which the ancient religions could not satisfy any longer the people.

The religions of Zeus and Hera and Jupiter and Juno, the state religions, the goddess Roma had become merely form.

And these religions of salvation, how could man escape from the world in which he lived?

How could he attain salvation?

How could he attain identification with a God or goddess?

Well, probably through some sort of consecratium, some sort of baptism or confirmation, some sort of, if you wish, communion service.

And they all had them or most of them had a similitude to your later Christian Communion service or simultaneous Christian Communion service as to how much these religions influence Christianity or Christianity these religions remains a moot point.

Various scholars say various things.

You have different ideas and we haven't time to go into that today, but the point is there was an interchange here.

These are religions, including Judaism and Christianity and Zoroastrianism of Persia, these are religions of salvation, religions by which a man or a woman might save him or herself from the world in which they lived, religions which promised a future life, religions which promised a better life than the one in which men lived today.

And coupled with these were the great ethical philosophies still existing.

Stoicism, teachings of Zeno the Stoic, pre-Christian but still continuing.

Marcus Aurelius, the great second-century emperor was a Stoic.

Stoicism which preached the brotherhood of man and the existence of a God, rather an impersonal God, a spark of life, a spark of creation, but still a God.

Epicureanism which preached the absence of pain as pleasure.

No God or if the gods existed, they were far away and apart from man, a sort of religion or philosophy where men and women, high ideals, high concepts could walk together in a garden talking philosophy one gathers while the legions held the frontiers, a philosophy of negativism, not a philosophy of movement.

There were other philosophies from the East.

There were other religions from the East as I say.

We've talked about Isis, Horus, Osiris.

Through Hellenism in your first and second centuries after Christ and the century before Christ from Egypt via Hellenism, civilized and made sophisticated by Hellenism through the medium of Greek, the worship of Isis, Horus, Osiris, the mother goddess whose color was blue like the Virgin Mary, who was the patron goddess of women in childbirth like the Virgin Mary later was to become in Christian concept whose consort, Osiris, died and was raised from the dead by the magical arts of Isis herself.

Isis and her baby Horus.

Isis which became a worship all over the empire, Isis worship in which you had a priesthood dressed in vestments who tonsured their heads like the later medieval monks, who had a communion service, a mystical draft of wine, which had a consecratium, a baptism if you like, an initiation into the rites of Isis, which all the people would welcome the initiate, in which the initiate identified with the goddess and thus gained eternal life.

This is one of the religions, religions of salvation ready to aid by which man could escape.

A worship of course originally a fertility worship.

Isis, the goddess of the Nile, but made the mother goddess of all men.

And you find Isis worshipers, Isiaci as they were called, all the way up into Britain and along the frontiers of the empire.

The great processions which moved through the narrow streets of your Roman cities are the worshipers of Isis, which attracted, well, Apuleius in his "Metamorphoses" writes about his initiation, though he doesn't tell the most secret mysteries of course, his initiation as an Isiaci or Isiaci into the Isis worship concept.

A Roman gentleman initiated into Isis worship, a very provocative, very appealing concept which was to dominate in the first centuries greatly.

You have other worships in some ways far more terrible, the dreadful worship of the Magna Mater of Cybele, the earth goddess of Asia Minor with her Galli, her eunuch priests, self-mutilated priests who coming from here were to wander the streets of Rome, the people were afraid of the Galli, and yet eventually it is an earth ceremony, the turn of your seasons, your Cybele with her consort, Attis, who was to die and rise again, your mother goddess with her eunuch priests, her service again, her initiation, her consecratium, her procession at the time of the Hilaria in March, which is more or less the time of our Easter, the Day of Blood, the Dies Sanguinis, like your Good Friday.

And finally of course, the re-emergence, the rebirth of her consort Attis.

And Cybele, of course, brought to her Lavatio, brought down through the streets of Rome to the final, the great ceremony of nature reborn in the spring is what of course it must be.

You have the Dea Syria, the Syrian goddess, the Dea Syria with her consort Hadad, worshiped in the East but worshiped all over the empire with her temple prostitution and her more than hints of human sacrifice as authorities say unhappily.

The Dea Syria, not as popular as Cybele of the Magna Mater.

Sorry, not as popular as Cybele or Isis.

Cybele of course was the Magna Mater, but still one of the great worships coming out of the East.

You also have probably the most important, you have the worship of Mithras.

Now Mithras worship is to come from, of course, your Zoroastrian religion of the Persians, your dualistic concept of light versus dark, good versus evil, the great God Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord opposed to darkness, Ahriman, the demon of darkness, the fallen angel if you like.

Mithras was the angel of light, the archangel of light.

Mithras is the Gabriel of Zoroastrianism.

And Mithras is to become in the West one of the most dominant religions, so much so that Justin Martyr, one of your first great Christian apologists, is to suspect that somehow Mithraism and some of the other religions were, shall we say, sustained by the devil because they copied Christianity so closely.

Mithras who was born from a rock and angels watched his coming into the earth, as did shepherds when he was born from the rock.

Mithras who went to heaven in his chariot and the sun chariot to visit the sun god.

So, Mithras and his tauroctonus, the killing of the sacred bull, which you see here, the sacred bull from whose blood came across the crops of the world, the fertility of the world.

Mithras, the stern soldiers' cult, which you find all the way up into Britain and along the frontiers on the Roman Wall.

They just discovered rather recently in the last few years a Mithras temple in London, the old Londinium of your Romans when they were excavating for the foundations of a new modern building.

They discovered a Mithras shrine there.

Mithras, whose followers were called soldiers.

This was a sacred war who after they accepted Mithraism would never wear a wreath at a banquet again and said, "Mithras is my wreath," and refused to wear a wreath.

A religion for men only, although there may be some exceptions, we're not quite sure where women were of course initiated into Mithraism.

This is possible.

We don't think so.

There is some proof.

But Mithraism a soldier's religion, a soldier's religion of high morality where men were constrained to be completely honorable and completely brave.

It almost dominated, if you wish, Christianity and for a while was the greatest antagonist of Christianity.

Mithraism with its warrior founder, its warrior miraculous founder Mithras.

And then of course you have that most interesting of all, that last summation of philosophy where paganism makes its last stand against Christianity in your third century after Christ in Neoplatonism.

Neoplatonism, which takes Plato from the firm level of ethical philosophy where Plato had his philosophy, Plato and Aristotle, and takes it into the realm of metaphysical speculation, takes it into the realm of magic, of theurgy.

Neoplatonism founded by an Easterner, Plotinus, Plotinus, an Egyptian and his followers, his great successors, Iamblichus and chiefly Porphyry, Porphyry who'd been a Christian and became a Neoplatonist.

Now Neoplatonism was a strange combination of religion, philosophy, the summation of all your philosophical thinking in this last desperate effort of an ethical paganism, even a monotheistic paganism to fight against Christianity, which your Hellenistic philosophers, your Hellenistic upper class, considered to be, as has been said, the formless darkness mastering the world.

Neoplatonism which says in effect, if all things seen and unseen are emanations from ultimate being, from the creative principle from God, which comes down from ultimate being into the earth, into the world of seen, things seen, then everything is a part of the circle because it must return the way of return, the circle, back to ultimate being again.

All gods have their place in this.

Your cultivated Hellenist, as has been said, could be a Neoplatonist without injuring the feelings of his pagan neighbors.

Your magician could practice magic.

Your ancient religionist, your traditionalist in Rome or Athens still worshiping the official gods, Roma and Jupiter and Juno could do so.

Christ could have had a place within Neoplatonism somewhere between possibly Dionysus and Isis, if you wish, in your pantheon of all your gods.

Christianity could be accepted within this.

And Neoplatonism, with its concept of ethics, it was a high philosophy, an ethical philosophy, a monotheistic philosophy, ultimate being, the ultimate reason was God in which all beauty was considered and yet Christianity was its greatest opponent.

Porphyry is to write against the Christians, expressing quite frankly, the belief of your highly cultivated ex-Christian, highly educated ex-Christian against the rising power of the Christian religion.

And yet the one religion which could not be overwhelmed in all this tremendous conjury, this tremendous collection of mystery concepts, these religions of salvation by which men could save themselves from a world grown increasingly gray.

Swinburne, the poet says, "Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean, the world has grown gray with Thy breath."

Thinking back, of course, I suppose, to the statues of Phidias and Praxiteles, Athens and its glory and the rest of it, but by the third century after Christ, paganism also was gray and Christianity far less gray.

You read the great writers of the later period there, you read Boethius, you read the others writing the last of your pagan writers, the shades are coming down, the shades are coming down and all that a man has left his philosophy, the consolation of philosophy.

Yet you read the Christian writers who see beyond the darkness, who see across and through the veil to the world which is to come.

It's a very interesting contrast here between Augustine, between Augustine and shall we say Boethius, between Ambrose and Jerome and the last of your pagan writers like Symmachus and others, Macrobius expressing these last pagan concepts.

And yet the Christian religion, Christianity, the third nation, the despised cult founded by an obscure prophet in one of the most obscure corners of the empire in Palestine all the way over here in the eastern part of the Mediterranean is destined by the end of the fourth century under Theodosius the Great to be the official religion of the empire.

Out of all this welter of thinking, out of all these attempts to find salvation somehow to find a way, a way of return, the soma sema concept, soma the body, sema the tomb, the body is the tomb and the soul is the true reality and must find release somehow in some sort of religious expression.

Out of all this, the Christian religion is to come because, after all, in Christianity you have one concept none of these others had.

You could, to use a vulgar phrase, hedge your bets for salvation among the other religions.

A man could be a Mithraist or a woman, for example, could be a worshiper of Isis and a worshiper of Cybele and a worshiper of the Dea Syria.

So could a man.

You could be any one of half a dozen of these mystical and mystery religions and even go through part of the Cybele worship and other worships to the terrible taurobolium, which Julian, the last of your pagan emperors, the reborn pagan, is to undergo as part of his initiation, we'll talk about later, the taurobolium where you go down into a pit and a bull, naked, and a bull is led over the pit and its throat cut so that the blood flows all over you in the pit and you're cleansed by the blood of the bull.

You're cleansed and become clean again through this baptism of the essence of life, disgusting to us, but a part of these religious concepts which toward the end became more fanatical, not less, moved more toward fanaticism and magic as Christianity rose and these declined a very interesting concept out in the fourth century because Christianity had one great strength none of these had.

Christianity was the one and only religion.

Its very exclusiveness was its strength.

"Thou shalt have none of the gods but Me," out of the Old Testament.

And God was Christ and Christ was God and through Christ and God came salvation and the Christian Church in these strange centuries, eclectic itself as the empire did was to adopt the organization of the empire, the political organization, take from the mystery religions, undoubtedly, certain aspects of those religions, become in essence a mystery religion itself and the most appealing of all the mystery religions and eventually win.

"Thou shalt have none other gods but Me."

Its very exclusiveness was to be its victory.

The very fact that you had to be a Christian and nothing else so that in the long run, this is to be the dominant religion.

The minor religion, the minor cult coming out of a minor area in an obscure corner of the empire was to win the imagination of the empire and be recognized at the end of the fourth century as the official religion of the empire.

And yet it is out of this period that you find the influences coming.

St.

Augustine, who wrote "The City of God" was a Neoplatonist before he became a Christian.

He'd been a Manichee, another one of your great mystery religions which we haven't had time to discuss today.

He'd been a Manichee.

He'd come out of Manichaeism, a dualistic religion also developed out of Zoroastrianism to be a Neoplatonist and then to be a Christian to become one of the great bishops of the Christian Church, one of the great theological writers of the Christian Church.

Neoplatonism, while antagonistic to Christianity, its very concepts, its very metaphysical concepts and philosophical concepts and delta they used to influence the early Church profoundly.

Synesius of Cyrene, one of my favorite bishops, who was made a bishop of Cyrene.

He was a millionaire sportsman while he was still a Neoplatonist.

He wasn't even a Christian apparently when he was made a bishop.

Became a Christian, he was perfectly willing to give up his hunting dogs to become a bishop, but he didn't want to give up his wife.

It's a very interesting, very human overtone here.

And down in Cyrene, Synesius, the ex-Neoplatonist, was to organize his diocese, the millionaire sportsman once soldier into a defense enclave and lead his own people against the desert raiders, one of the great fighting figures of early Christianity.

Synesius, Augustine, many others.

Boethius who wrote "The Consolation of Philosophy," which comes pretty close to Christianity.

So close that many people in the medieval world thought him to be a Christian when he was not.

People attempting in this time of grayness, of despair, after the first two brilliant centuries of the principate of the empire, with the barbarian forces pressing in on all sides, with peoples were coming out of the vortex of Central Asia and out of the forest areas to the north with Berbers up from the Sahara, with your Bedouin Arabs now pressing on the frontiers, not yet Islam but pressing on the frontiers, with a surging Persian empire, the Sassanian Persians pressing in from the East, a great civilized empire, during this time of an empire under siege, of an empire with tight communications, road, ship, an empire which now shared a common civilization.

But scholars, as I have said, and teachers and soldiers and merchants were to move from end of the empire to the other, bringing with them their ideas and spreading Christianity as well as the great mystery religions which we have discussed today.

A time of change, a time of turmoil, a time of movement, a time when we see through the veils here the beginnings of our Christian world.

And yet, how much do we owe to these mystery religions?

How much background in our own concepts of the modern Christian world stem back to them?

It's very difficult to say.

We know of course that there was influence, that there was a movement, a trans-seeding across between the religions, but we don't know how much.

And yet this is the period which probably is the most formative period in the empire.

This is the period out of which Christianity is to take its form to emerge in the fourth century by the time of the Council of Nicaea out of the last great persecutions of your third century to emerge as the dominant force intellectually, the dominant force religiously, to be the river, the river through which all of these ideas of ethics, concepts of morals are to flow down to the modern world, to be the river of civilization out of these 300 years of religious speculation and turmoil and difficulty in exchange of ideas, a man turned to religion once again, as people do in times of trial and stress.

(intriguing harpsichord music) (intriguing harpsichord music continues)