Public cults
Suppose that we view the Roman empire of the first four centuries AD as a market in which assorted religions competed for business. In business, enterprising firms raid each other for useful ideas and marketing strategies.
Did the upstart Christian firm borrow from pagan salesmanship, or vice versa, or was there a two-way flow of borrowings? Or did the rival firms not compete, but rather follow different strategies independently?
This article will survey the field, gradually narrowing the focus to the most plausible candidate for a source of pagan influence on Christianity (or vice versa) — Mithraism, or, as its contemporaries called this religious cult - the ‘Mysteries of Mithras’.
'The prime method of keeping the gods ‘onside’ was blood sacrifice.'
We’ll begin with the big picture, retaining the metaphor of businesses competing for custom. We could see competing pagan firms as the innumerable cults of the gods and goddesses across the empire.
But in fact almost all those cults were not in competition at all. They are better seen as complementary enterprises - the locally controlled branches of a multi-national.
The firm’s function was twofold: (1) to secure and retain the goodwill of the gods and thereby the wellbeing of the empire and its communities; and (2) to preserve the socio-political order through appropriate activities, principally the festivities of the local religious calendars.
The prime method of getting (and keeping) the gods ‘onside’ was blood sacrifice. The glue which kept each level of society in its proper place was the system by which imperial and local élites fed and entertained the masses (the famous ‘bread and circuses’) in return for respect and acquiescence in the divinely sanctioned order of things.
It is not difficult to see how emperor-worship, a franchise for which rival cities competed avidly, fits into this picture: the emperor’s powers of benefaction were of an order that seemed to eclipse those of mere mortals.
Published: 2006-09-07
Bookmark with:
What are these?