Hellenistic religion

Hellenistic religion

Introduction

      any of the various systems of beliefs and practices of eastern Mediterranean peoples from 300 BC to AD 300.

      The period of Hellenistic influence, when taken as a whole, constitutes one of the most creative periods in the history of religions. It was a time of spiritual revolution in the Greek (Greek religion) and Roman (Roman religion) empires, when old cults died or were fundamentally transformed and when new religious movements came into being.

Nature and significance
      The historical Hellenistic Age is defined as the period from the death of the Greco-Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great (323 BC) to the conquest of Egypt by Rome (30 BC), but the influence of the Hellenistic religions extended to the time of Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor (d. AD 337); these religions are confined to those that were active within the Mediterranean world. The empire of Alexander and his successors created a great world community which, whether in Macedonian, Greco-Roman, or its later Christian form, established a cultural unity that was destined to be broken only 1,000 years later with the advent of Muslim imperialism (beginning in 7th century AD). This empire was so vast as truly to stagger the imagination. Extending from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Indus River, from the forests of Germany and the steppes of Russia to the Sahara Desert and the Indian Ocean, it took in an area of some 1.5 million square miles (3.9 million square kilometres; most of Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Africa, Persia, and the borderlands of India) and had a total population of more than 54 million.

      The study of Hellenistic religions is a study of the dynamics of religious (religious syncretism) persistence and change in this vast and culturally varied area. Almost every religion in this period occurred in both its homeland and in diasporic centres—the foreign cities in which its adherents lived as minority groups. For example, Isis (Egypt), Baal (Syria), the Great Mother (Phrygia), Yahweh (Palestine), and Mithra (Kurdistan) were worshiped in their native lands as well as in Rome and other cosmopolitan centres. With few exceptions, each of these religions, originally tied to a specific geographic area and people, had traditions extending back centuries before the Hellenistic period. In their homeland they were inextricably tied to local loyalties and ambitions. Each persisted in its native land with little perceptible change save for its becoming linked to nationalistic (nationalism) or messianic (messiah) movements (centring on a deliverer figure) seeking to overthrow Greco-Roman political and cultural domination. Indeed, many of these native religions underwent a conscious archaism during this period, attempting to recover earlier forms and practices. Old texts in native languages (especially those related to relevant themes such as kingship) were recopied, national temples were restored, and old, mythic traditions were revived. From Palestine to Persia one may trace the rise of Wisdom literature (the teachings of a sage concerning the hidden purposes of the deity) and apocalyptic (apocalypticism) traditions (referring to a belief in the dramatic intervention of a god in human and natural events) that represent these central concerns—i.e., national destiny, the importance of traditional lore, the saving power of kingship, and the revival of mythic images. Each of these native traditions likewise underwent hellenization (modifications based on Greek cultural ideas), but in a manner frequently different from their diasporic counterparts.

      Each of these native religions also had diasporic centres that exhibited marked change during the Hellenistic period. There was a noticeable lessening of concern on the part of the members of the dispersed religious group for the destiny and fortunes of the native land and also a relative severing of the traditional ties between religion and the land. Certain cult centres remained sites of pilgrimage or objects of sentimental attachment; but the old beliefs in national deities and the inextricable relationship of the deity to certain sacred places was weakened. Rather than a god who dwelt in his temple, the diasporic traditions evolved complicated techniques for achieving visions, epiphanies (manifestations of a god), or heavenly (mysticism) journeys to a transcendent god. This led to a change from concern for a religion of national prosperity to one for individual salvation, from focus on a particular ethnic group to concern for every human. The prophet or saviour replaced the priest and king as the chief religious figure. In the diasporic centres, as is generally characteristic of immigrant groups, there were two circles. The first (or inner circle) was composed of devout, full-time adherents of the cult for whom the deity retained a separate and decisive identity (e.g., those of Yahweh, Zeus Serapis, and Isis). Its membership was drawn from the ethnic group for whom the deity was indigenous, and the group tended to continue to speak the native language. The second (or outer circle) was composed of either second- and third-generation immigrants or converts from groups for whom the religion was not native. These individuals tended to speak Greek, and this began the lengthy process of reinterpretation of the archaic religion. Ancient sacred books were translated or paraphrased into Greek—e.g., the 4th–3rd-century-BC Babylonian priest Berosus' version of Babylonian materials, the 4th–3rd-century-BC Egyptian priest Manetho's Egyptian accounts, the Jewish Septuagint (Greek version of the Old Testament), or the 1st-century-AD Jewish historian Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews, and the ethnic histories of the 1st-century-BC Greek writer Alexander Polyhistor. In each case the material was reinterpreted both in light of common Hellenistic ideals and in accord with the special traditions and needs of the diasporic community. Both the inner and outer circles fostered esotericism (secrets to be known only by initiates)—the former by its use of native language and its oral recollection of traditions from the homeland; the latter by its use of allegory and other similar methods to radically reinterpret the sacred texts. The difference between these groups was responsible for many shifts in the character of the religion. Most notable was the shift from elements characteristic of native religion in its definition of religion (e.g., local tradition and custom, informal knowledge orally transmitted, and birth) to formulated dogma (doctrine and dogma), creeds, law codes, and rules for conversion and admission that were characteristic of diasporic religion. It was a shift from “birthright” to “convinced” religion.

      The history of Hellenistic religions is rarely the history of genuinely new religions. Rather it is best understood as the study of archaic Mediterranean religions in their Hellenistic phase within both their native and diasporic settings. It is usually by concentrating on the diaspora that the Hellenistic character of a cult has been described.

History

Religion from the death of Alexander to the reformation of Augustus: 323–27 BC
      The conquests of Alexander opened the way for religious interchange between East and West; the political structures left behind by Alexander and continued by his successors provided strong incentives for the hellenization of native religions. Characteristic of this first period of Hellenistic religious history were the following developments: (1) the introduction of Oriental cults into the West, especially those associated with female deities who were either worshiped in frenzied rites of self-mutilation (e.g., the Phrygian Cybele, brought to Rome in 204 BC; the Syrian Atargatis; or the Cappadocian Ma-Bellona) or in adoring contemplation of their beneficence and gentle rites of divine rebirth (e.g., the Egyptian Isis, whose cult was widespread in the Greco-Roman world by the middle of the 2nd century BC); (2) the hellenization of native cults (most famously that of the archaic Egyptian god Serapis whose Greek form was promulgated by Ptolemy I, the founder of the Egyptian Ptolemaic dynasty in 305 BC); (3) the development of the ideology of divine kingship (sacred kingship) based on Oriental kingship traditions; and (4) the rise of nationalistic and messianic movements directed against internal and external hellenization; e.g., the Maccabean rebellion led by Judas Maccabeus (Maccabeus, Judas) and his brothers against Jewish hellenizing parties and the Syrian overlords in 167–142 BC, and the numerous Egyptian rebellions, especially that led by the Egyptian independence leader Harmakhis in Thebais in 207/6 BC.

Religion from the Augustan reformation to the death of Marcus Aurelius: 27 BC–AD 180
      Oriental cults underwent their most significant expansion westward during this period. Particularly noticeable was the success of a variety of prophets, magicians, and healers—e.g., John the Baptist, Jesus, Simon Magus, Apollonius of Tyana, Alexander the Paphlagonian, and the cult of the healer Asclepius—whose preaching corresponded to the activities of various Greek and Roman philosophic missionaries. A developing tension between these “new” Eastern religions and the archaic Greco-Roman traditions was expressed internally in the attempt by the emperor Augustus to revive traditional Roman religious practices. Attempts were made to expel foreigners or to suppress foreign worship—e.g., the suppression of the Bacchic mysteries (salvation cults devoted to the god Dionysus, or Bacchus) in Rome in 186 BC, or the numerous attempts to prohibit the worship of the Egyptian goddess Isis in Rome, beginning in 59 BC. The Augustan reformation also restored Roman sacred books and Greek temples.

      Externally, the developing tension was expressed in wars, riots, and persecutions, such as the Jewish–pagan riots in Alexandria in AD 38 and 115–116, the Jewish–Roman wars of AD 66–70 and 132–135, and the beginning of the persecution of Christians under the Roman emperor Nero in AD 64. Another cause of tension was the elaboration of a full-blown cult of “emperor worship,” beginning with the deification of Augustus (Sept. 17, AD 14) shortly after his death.

Religion from Commodus to Theodosius I: AD 180–395
      After the death of the “philosopher-king” Marcus Aurelius in AD 180, his son Commodus became emperor, and a period of political instability began. The dominant feature of the concluding period of Hellenistic influence—and shortly thereafter—was the rapid growth of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire, culminating in the conversion to Christianity of the emperor Constantine (Constantine I) in 313 and the religious legislation of the emperor Theodosius (Theodosius I) affirming in 380 the dogmas of the Christian Council of Nicaea (Nicaea, Council of)—which had been convened in 325 under the auspices of Constantine—and prohibiting paganism in a decree of 392. In this period the various Hellenistic cults were victims of active hostilities, which were expressed through prohibition, acts of violence, and theological polemics between “pagans” and Christians (e.g., the pagan philosophers Maximus of Tyre and Celsus, and the Christian philosophical theologians Irenaeus, Tertullian, and St. Clement of Alexandria, all of the 2nd century); but there were also brief periods of Hellenistic revitalization. The Neoplatonic (Neoplatonism) school (based on a complicated system of levels of reality) of the 3rd-century philosophers Plotinus and Porphyry represented the culmination of Hellenistic religious philosophy. The Syrian solar cults of Sol Invictus (the “Unconquered Sun”) and Jupiter Dolichenus played an important role under the emperors Antoninus Pius, the Severans—Septimius, and Alexander—and Elagabalus and these were hailed as the supreme deities of Rome under Aurelian, whose Sun temple was dedicated in 274. From Parthia, the dualistic and spiritual teachings of the 2nd-century Iranian prophet Mani were widely disseminated throughout the Empire. The Persian cult of the ancient Iranian god of light, Mithra, spread rapidly throughout the western and northern Empire during the 3rd through 5th centuries. Although these various traditions enjoyed brief imperial patronage under Julian, they eventually were subsumed under the political and religious hegemony of Christianity (see below The influence of Hellenistic religions (Hellenistic religion)).

Beliefs, practices, and institutions
      The archaic religions of the Mediterranean world were primarily religions of etiquette. At the centre of these religions were complex systems governing the interrelationships between gods and humans, individuals and the state, and living people and their ancestors. The entire cosmos was conceived as a vast network of relationships, each component of which, whether divine or human, must know its place and fulfill its appointed role. The model for this all-encompassing system was the divine society of the gods, and the map of this system was the order of the planets and stars. Through astrology, divination, and oracles, people discerned the unalterable patterns of destiny and sought to bring their world (the microcosm) into harmony with the divine cosmos (the macrocosm; see also astrology).

      This archaic pattern of affirming and celebrating the order of the cosmos was expressed in the typical creation myth of the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean world, which consisted of a creation by combat between the forces of order and chaos. Order was understood to be something won in the beginning by the gods, and it was this primordial act of salvation that was renewed and reexperienced in the cult.

      In the Hellenistic period a new religious world was experienced that required new religious expressions. The old religions of conformity and place no longer spoke to this new religious situation and its questions. What if the law and order of the cosmos was no longer seen as the creative expression of limits and the delineation of roles, but rather as an evil, perverse, confining structure from which man and the cosmos must escape? Rather than the archaic structures of celebration and conformity to place, the new religious mood spoke of escape and liberation from place and of salvation from an evil, imprisoned world. The characteristic religion of the Hellenistic period was dualistic (dualism). People sought to escape from the despotism of this world and its rulers (exemplified by the seven planetary spheres) and to ascend to another world of freedom. Hellenistic people saw themselves as exiles from their true home, the Beyond, and they sought for ways to return. They strove to regain their place in the world beyond this world where they truly belonged, to encounter the god beyond the god of this world who was the true god, and to awaken that part of themselves (their souls (soul) or spirits) that had descended from the heavenly realm by stripping off their bodies, which belonged to this world. The questions that the religions of the Hellenistic period sought to answer may be seen in a fragment from the 2nd-century Anatolian Gnostic teacher Theodotus (Theodotus The Gnostic): “What liberates is the knowledge of who we were [before our earthly existence] and what we have become [on earth]; where we were [the Beyond] and the place to which we have been thrown [the world]; where we are going and from what are we redeemed; what is birth and what is rebirth” (preserved in Clement of Alexandria, Excerpta ex Theodoto, 78.2).

The gods
      In the Greco-Roman world during the Hellenistic period, archaic deities were transformed in part because of the new spirit of the age and in part by foreign influences. A number of the old chthonic (underworld) and agricultural (fertility) gods and the old agricultural mysteries (corporate renewal religions related to fertility concepts) fundamentally altered their character. Rather than an expression of the alternation of life and death, of fertility and sterility, and a celebration of the promise of renewal for the land and the people, the seasonal drama was homologized to a soteriology (salvation concept) concerning the destiny, fortune, and salvation of the individual after death. The collective agricultural rite became a mystery, a salvific experience reserved for the elect (such as the Greek mystery religion of Eleusis). Other traditions even more radically reinterpreted the ancient figures. The cosmic or seasonal drama was interiorized to refer to the divine soul within man that must be liberated. Such cults were dualistic mysteries distinguishing sharply between the body and soul. They taught that it is the soul alone that was initiated by passing through death or the Underworld, or by being dismembered so that it might be freed from the body and regain its rightful mode of spiritual existence (such as the Orphic (Orphic religion)—mystical—reinterpretation of the role of the agricultural god Dionysus). In the gnostic (Gnosticism) mysteries (the esoteric dualistic cults that viewed matter as evil and the spirit as good), this process was carried further through the identification of the experiences of the soul that was to be saved with the vicissitudes of a divine but fallen soul, which had to be redeemed by cultic activity and divine intervention. This view is illustrated in the concept of the paradoxical figure of the saved saviour, salvator salvandus.

      Other deities, who had previously been associated with national destiny (e.g., Zeus, Yahweh, and Isis), were raised to the status of transcendent, supreme deities whose power and ontological status (relating to being or existence) far surpassed the other gods, who were understood as their servants or antagonists. The religious person sought to make contact with, or to stand before, this one, true god of the Beyond. The piety of the individual was directed either toward preparing himself to ascend up through the planetary spheres to the realm of the transcendent god or toward calling the transcendent god down that he might appear to him in an epiphany or vision (theophany). These techniques for achieving ascent or a divine epiphany make up the bulk of the material that has usually been termed magical (magic), theurgic (referring to the art of persuading a god to reveal himself and grant salvation, healing, and other requests), or astrological (astrology) and that represents the characteristic expression of Hellenistic religiosity.

      The cosmogonies (dealing with the origins of the world) and cosmologies (dealing with the ordering of the world) of the Hellenistic period centred around the problem of accounting for the distance between this world and the Beyond, or on accounting for the evil nature of this world and its gods. Many mythic (myth) schema were employed regarding the origin and ordering of this world. It was viewed as being: the result of the conscious or unconscious emanation from the transcendent realm; the result of the fall of a deity from the Beyond; the creation of a hostile, ignorant, or evil deity; or a joke or mistake. The purpose of this speculation was both pragmatic and soteriological: if one could determine how this creation came into being, one could reverse it or overcome it and be saved.

Religious organization
      The temples and cult institutions of the various Hellenistic religions were repositories of the knowledge and techniques necessary for salvation and were the agents of the public worship of a particular deity. In addition, they served an important sociological role. In the new, cosmopolitan ideology that followed Alexander's conquests, the old nationalistic and ethnic boundaries had broken down and the problem of religious and social identity had become acute. The Hellenistic Age was characterized by the rapid growth of private religious societies (thiasoi). Though some were organized according to national origin or trade, the majority were dedicated to the worship of a particular deity. In many instances these groups began as immigrant associations (e.g., an Egyptian association of devotees of Amon was chartered in Athens at the beginning of the 3rd century BC); but they often transcended these origins and became a new form of religious organization in which citizens of various countries, freemen and slaves, could be united by their common devotion and share in a common religious heritage. Admission to such groups was voluntary (in contradistinction to the archaic national or familial religious organizations) and demanded the payment of dues, submission to collective authority, and the acceptance of strict codes of morality. Most of these groups had regular meetings for a communal meal that served the dual role of sacramental (sacrament) participation (referring to the use of material elements believed to convey spiritual benefits among the members and with their deity) and the social function of fellowship; i.e., the security of membership in a group and a shared sense of identity.

The influence of Hellenistic religions
      The archaic gods worshiped during the Hellenistic period possessed a remarkable longevity. The Eleusinian Mysteries, founded in the 15th century BC, ceased in the 4th century AD; Dionysus, whose name first appears on tablets dated to c. 1400 BC, was last celebrated in the beginning of the 6th century AD; the last temple of Isis, whose cult extended back to the 2nd millennium BC in Egypt, was closed in AD 560. Yet even after these ceased as objects of devotion in the post-Constantinian period, they continued to exercise their influence. Hellenistic philosophy (Stoicism, Cynicism, Neo-Aristotelianism, Neo-Pythagoreanism, and Neoplatonism) provided key formulations for Jewish (Judaism), Christian (Christianity), and Muslim (Arabic philosophy) philosophy, theology, and mysticism through the 18th century. Hellenistic magic, theurgy, astrology, and alchemy remained influential until modern times in both East and West. Theosophy and other forms of the occult (occultism), especially since the Renaissance, drew their inspiration from the Hellenistic mystery cults, Hermeticism (Greco-Egyptian astrological, magical, and occultic movement), and Gnosticism. Various Jewish, Christian, and Muslim sectarian groups continued the theologies of many of the Hellenistic religions (especially dualistic modes of thought). Hellenistic sacred art and architecture has remained a basis of Christian and Jewish iconography and architecture to the present day. Figures such as Alexander the Great inspired a vast body of religious literature, especially in the Middle Ages. Many of the symbols and legends associated with Hellenistic deities persisted in folk literature and hagiography (stories of saints and “holy” persons). The basic forms of worship of both the Jewish and Christian communities were heavily influenced in their formative period by Hellenistic practices, and this remains fundamentally unchanged to the present time. Finally, the central religious literature of both traditions—the Jewish Talmud (Talmud and Midrash) (an authoritative compendium of law, lore, and interpretation), the New Testament, and the later patristic literature of the early Church Fathers—are characteristic Hellenistic documents both in form and content.

Jonathan Z. Smith

Additional Reading
The most useful cultural and political history containing valuable discussions of controversial issues with full bibliography is Robert Cohen, La Grèce et l'hellénisation du monde antique, new ed. (1948). W.W. Tarn, Hellenistic Civilisation, 3rd ed. rev. by Tarn and G.T. Griffith (1952, reissued 1975); and M. Rostovtzeff, The Social & Economic History of the Hellenistic World, 3 vol. (1941, reissued 1986), remain the standard English works. Karl Prümm, Religionsgeschichtliches Handbuch für den Raum der altchristlichen Umwelt: Hellenistisch-römisch Geistesströmungen und Kulte mit Beachtung des Eigenlebens der Provinzen (1943, reissued 1954), is indispensable for its rich bibliography. The magnificent encyclopaedia now in progress, Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum (1950– ), will be, when completed, the best single resource for the study of Hellenistic and early Christian religion.Important general interpretations include Paul Wendland, Die hellenistisch-römische Kultur in ihren Beziehungen zu Judentum und Christentum, 4th enlarged ed. (1972); Harold R. Willoughby, Pagan Regeneration: A Study of Mystery Initiations in the Graeco-Roman World (1929, reprinted 1974); A.J. Festugière, L'Idéal religieux des Grècs et l'Évangile (1932, reissued 1981), and Personal Religion Among the Greeks (1954, reprinted 1984); Erwin R. Goodenough, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period, 13 vol. (1953–68); Samuel K. Eddy, The King Is Dead: Studies in the Near Eastern Resistance to Hellenism, 334–31 B.C. (1961); Arnold Toynbee (ed.), The Crucible of Christianity: Judaism, Hellenism, and the Historical Background to the Christian Faith (1969); and Luther H. Martin, Hellenistic Religions: An Introduction (1987). In addition to these works (all of which contain full bibliographies), see the individual volumes in the important series Études préliminaires aux religions orientales dans l'Empire romain.Jonathan Z. Smith

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