Hellenistic Mystery Religions

Greek Religion

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...Hellenism original: Griechentum. This refers to Greek culture and identity. may consist only in the fact that the language and concepts, or the philosophical interpretation and justification, were taken from it. On the other hand, certain ideas and moods currently pressing in from the Orient might already be demonstrable in a much earlier epoch of Hellenism; indeed, in many cases, the Orient may have only provided the impulse for a revival.² Greek religion had lost its power of resistance against the onset of speculation and the Enlightenment original: Aufklärung. In this context, it refers to the 5th-century BC intellectual movement in Greece where traditional myths were questioned by reason. quite early, precisely because of its artistic and therefore anthropomorphic representing gods in human form development. In that artistic form, it had been seized by the city-state of the fifth and fourth centuries and turned into a political entity—a Polis-religion a religion focused on the civic identity of the city-state (polis) rather than individual spirituality—for which the faith of the individual citizen did not mean very much.

Polis-religion on one side and the Enlightenment on the other pushed the elements of popular or mystically-deepened piety into the lower classes in most places. Even if a Plato were to take from the latter his thoughts of sublime religiosity, neither he nor his immediate successors—who partially connected back to folk beliefs—exercised any great influence in this regard at first. Plato's religious language continued to influence only through artistic creation. It was only with the rise of the monarchies referring to the Hellenistic kingdoms established after Alexander the Great that a systematic consideration of the religious feelings of the broader masses began—a move that was already a political necessity on Oriental soil from the very beginning. Stoic philosophy adapted to this effort, created the literary genre of apologetics a formal defense of a religious or philosophical system, and—by interpreting the gods as concepts or natural forces and explaining the myths allegorically—arrived first at the Greek, and soon also the orienta-