ISIS AND SERAPIS
The worship of Isis and Serapis, reckoning from the day when it
established itself in the port of Athens, had a reign of more than seven
centuries over the peoples of Europe. Its influence in the western
provinces of the Empire and in the capital may be roughly said to cover a
period of 500 years. It was not, indeed, the old native worship of the
valley of the Nile which won such an empire over cultivated intellects
from Chaeronea to the Thames. The ancient Egyptian worship underwent vast
transformations in the crucible of all creeds at Alexandria. It was
captured and utilised for political purposes by the Ptolemies.(2873) It
was linked with the most spiritual forces of Hellenic piety at Eleusis and
Delphi;(2874) it was transformed by the subtle syncretism of later Greek
philosophy; and, through the secretaries of embassies, and the Egyptian
slaves and merchants who poured into the ports of southern Italy in the
second century B.C., it stole or forced itself into the chapels of great
houses at Rome, till, in the end, emperors were proud to receive its
tonsure, to walk in the processions, and to build and adorn Egyptian
temples.(2875)
The Isiac worship had conquered the Greek world before it became a power
in Italy. In the fourth century B.C. traders from the Nile had their
temple of Isis at the Peiraeus;(2876) in the third century the worship had
been admitted within the walls of Athens.(2877) About the same time the
goddess had found a home at Ceos, and Delos, at Smyrna and Halicarnassus,
and on the coasts of Thrace.(2878) She was a familiar deity at Orchomenus
and Chaeronea for generations before Plutarch found in her legends a
congenial field for the exposition of his concordat between philosophy and
myth. Nor need we wonder at his choice of the Egyptian cults. For the Isis
and Osiris of Greek and Italian lands were very different objects of
devotion from the gods who bore those names in Egyptian legend.(2879) From
the seventh century B.C. Greeks from the Asiatic coast had been securely
settled at the mouth of the Nile.(2880) Greek mercenaries had served in
the Egyptian armies in the southern deserts; and Greek half-breeds had
long amused and cajoled travellers from Miletus or Halicarnassus, as
interpreters and guides to the scenes of immemorial interest. When
Herodotus visited the country, the identity of Greek and Egyptian gods was
a long accepted fact.(2881) From the fifth century B.C. the Egyptian
Trinity of Isis, Osiris, and Horus had found counterparts in Demeter,
Dionysus, and Apollo. The campaign of the Athenian fleet in 460 probably
hastened and confirmed the process of syncretism,(2882) and crowds of
travellers, steeped in Orphic and Pythagorean mysticism, returned from the
valley of the Nile to spread the doctrine of a common faith. After the
foundation of Alexandria the theory became a propaganda. The first Ptolemy
strove to unite the two races under his sway by an eclecticism of which
Alexandria was the focus for seven centuries. He found skilful allies in
Manetho, the Egyptian priest who had written a treatise on the inner
meaning of the myths, and in Timotheus, a scion of the Eumolpidae of
Eleusis.(2883) The Orphic and Dionysiac mysticism was leagued with the
Isiac worship. The legend of Egypt was recast. A new deity was introduced,
who was destined to have a great future in all lands under the Roman sway.
The origin of Serapis is still a mystery(2884) and the latest critic may
have to acquiesce in the confused or balanced judgment of Tacitus.(2885)
Egyptian archaeologists claimed him as indigenous at Rhacotis or Memphis,
and construed his name as a compound of Osiris and that of his earthly
incarnation, the bull Apis.(2886) The more popular tale was that the first
Ptolemy, after repeated visions of the night, sent envoys to bring him
from Sinope, where he was identified with Pluto, god of the under world.
Other traditions connected him with Seleucia in Cappadocia, or with
Babylon.(2887) It may be that a false etymology, confounding a hill near
Memphis with the name of Sinope, was the source of the tale in
Tacitus.(2888) However this may be, Serapis takes the place of Osiris;
they never appear together in inscriptions. The infant Horus received the
Greek sounding name Harpocrates, and Serapis, Isis, and Harpocrates became
the Egyptian Trinity for Graeco-Roman Society. Anubis, the minister of the
Trinity, was easily identified with Hermes, “the conductor of souls” in
Greek legend.
Syncretism and mysticism were great forces at Eleusis, from which
Ptolemy’s adviser Timotheus came. And there all interest centred in the
future life, and in preparation for it by sacerdotal ritual and moral
discipline. The Orphic and Pythagorean mysticism which traced itself to
Egypt or the remoter East, returned to its sources, to aid in moulding the
cults of Egypt into a worship for the world. A crowd of ingenious
theologians set to work, by means of physical explanation, wild etymology,
and fanciful analogies, to complete the syncretism. And the final results
of their efforts, preserved in the famous treatise of Plutarch on Isis, is
a trinitarian monotheism, with an original dualism of the good and evil
principles.(2889) But the idea of God, although limited in one sense by
the recognition of a co-ordinate evil power, tends on the other to become
more all-embracing. Serapis is constantly linked with Jupiter and Sol
Invictus in the inscriptions.(2890) In the orations of Aristides he
becomes the centre of the universe.(2891) Isis of the “myriad names” tends
to absorb all other deities, and was addressed by her votaries as “Thou
who art all.”(2892) The Isis of the dream of Lucius in Apuleius is the
universal mother, creator of all things, queen of the world of shades,
first of the inhabitants of heaven, in whom all gods have their unchanging
type.(2893) She is also pre-eminently the power who can cleanse and
comfort, and impart the hope of the life everlasting.
The Isiac worship arrived in Italy probably through the ports of Campania.
Puteoli, in particular, was the great entrepôt for the trade with
Alexandria. Foreign merchants, sailors, and slaves were arriving there
every day, and, in the century between 204 and 100 B.C., more than ten
embassies passed between the Ptolemies and the Roman Senate, with a crowd
of secretaries and servants attached to them.(2894) There was probably a
temple of Serapis at Puteoli as early as 150 B.C., and the old temple of
Isis at Pompeii, which was thrown down by the earthquake of 63 A.D., may
probably be referred to the year 105 B.C.(2895) But the erection of
temples must have been preceded by a period of less formal and more
obscure worship, and we may perhaps conclude that Isis had established
herself in Southern Italy, at all events early in the second century B.C.
Thus, although it was generations before the worship won its way, in the
face of fierce persecution, to an assured place at Rome, its first
appearance coincides with the decay of the old religion, the religious
excitement in the beginning of the second century B.C., and the immense
popular craving for a more emotional form of worship.
The years at the end of the third and the beginning of the second century
B.C. were in Italy years of strange religious excitement. In 204 the great
goddess was brought from Pessinus.(2896) In 186 the decree for the
suppression of the Bacchanalian scandal was passed.(2897) Magna Graecia
and Etruria were the first points assailed by the invasion of the
orgiastic rites. But they soon crept into the capital, with results which
alarmed and shocked old Roman sentiment. At first, an appearance of
asceticism disguised the danger. But the rites soon gave an opportunity
for the wildest licence and for political intrigue. 7000 men and women
were found to be implicated, in one way or another, in the movement.(2898)
Within five years after the great scandal, the apocryphal books of Numa
were unearthed in the grounds of Cn. Terentius on the Janiculum. The
forgery was soon detected, and they were burnt publicly in the Comitium by
the praetor L. Petilius.(2899) But it was a suspicious circumstance that
the rolls were of Egyptian papyrus, which had been till then unknown to
the Roman world, and that they contained the dogmas of a Pythagorean lore
which was equally strange. It is almost certain that, in the same years in
which the Dionysiac fanaticism arrived at Ostia, the Egyptian cults had
been brought by merchants and sailors to Puteoli. Osiris and Dionysus had
long been identified by the Alexandrian theologians; both were the patrons
of mystic rites which, in their form and essence, had much in common, and
the Pythagorean system, combining so many influences of philosophy and
religion in the East and West, was the natural sponsor of the new
worships. It was perhaps some eclectic Alexandrian, half Platonist, half
Buddhist, devoted to the Isiac worship, yet ready to connect it with the
Dionysiac legends of Delphi, Cithaeron, and Eleusis, who penned the secret
scrolls, and buried them in the garden on the Janiculum. The movement was
setting in which, so often repulsed by the force of government and
conservative feeling, was destined to have enormous influence over the
last three centuries of paganism in the West.
It has been plausibly suggested that the ease and completeness with which
the Bacchanalian movement was suppressed in 186 B.C. was due to the
diversion of religious interest to the Egyptian mysteries. The cult of
Isis had indeed very various attractions for different minds. But for the
masses, slaves, freedmen, and poor working people, its great fascination
lay in the pomp of its ritual, and the passionate emotion aroused by the
mourning for the dead Osiris, and his joyful restoration. It is this
aspect of the worship which is assailed and ridiculed by the Christian
apologists of the reign of Alexander Severus and of the reign of
Constantine.(2900) The goddess, one of whose special functions was the
care of mothers in childbirth, appealed especially to female sensibility.
As in the cult of Magna Mater, women had a prominent place in her services
and processions, and records of these sacred dignities appear on the
monuments of great Roman ladies down to the end of the Western Empire. The
history of the Isiac cult at Rome from Sulla to Nero is really the history
of a great popular religious movement in conflict with a reactionary
conservatism, of cosmopolitan feeling arrayed against old Roman sentiment.
It is significant of the popularity of Isis that the reactionary Sulla,
who restored the election of chief pontiff to the sacred college, was
forced to recognise the Isiac guild of the Pastophori in 80 B.C.(2901)
Four times in the decade 58-48 B.C., the fierce struggle was renewed
between the government and those who wished to place Isis beside the
ancient gods; and in the year 50 B.C. the consul, when unable to find a
workman to lay hands upon her shrine, had to unrobe and use the axe
himself.(2902) The victory of conservatism was only temporary and
apparent. Within five years from the renewed fierce demolition of 48
B.C.,(2903) the white robe and tonsure and the mask of Anubis must have
been a common sight in the streets, when the aedile M. Volusius, one of
those proscribed by the triumvirs, was able to make his escape easily in
this disguise.(2904) The influence of Cleopatra over Julius Caesar
overcame his own prejudices and probably hastened the triumph of the
popular cult. The triumvirs had to conciliate public feeling by erecting a
temple of Isis in 42 B.C.(2905) Priestesses and devotees of Isis are
henceforth found among the freedwomen of great houses and the mistresses
of men of letters of the Augustan age.(2906) And, although the reaction
following upon the battle of Actium, in which the gods of Latium and the
Nile were arrayed against one another,(2907) banished Isis for a time
beyond the pomoerium,(2908) the devotion of the masses to her seems never
to have slackened, and her tonsured, white stoled priests were to be seen
everywhere. In the reign of Tiberius a serious blow fell on the Eastern
worships. According to Josephus, a great lady named Paulina, was, with the
collusion of the priest, seduced in an Isiac temple by a libertine lover
in the guise of Anubis, and the crime was sternly punished by the
emperor.(2909) Tacitus and Suetonius seem to be ignorant of this
particular scandal, but they record the wholesale banishment to Sardinia
of persons of the freedmen class, who were infected with Judaic or
Egyptian superstition. In the grotto of Cagliari there is to be seen the
record of an obscure romance and tragedy which may have been connected
with this persecution. Atilia Pomptilla, who bore also the significant
name of Benedicta, in some great calamity had followed her husband Cassius
Philippus into exile. Their union had lasted for two-and-forty years when
the husband was stricken with disease in that deadly climate. Like another
Alcestis, Atilia by her vows and devotion offered her life for his. The
husband repaid the debt in these inscriptions, and the pair lie united in
death under the sculptured serpent of the goddess whom they probably
worshipped.(2910)
Thenceforth under the emperors Isis met with but little opposition.
Claudius struck hard at the Jewish and Druidic rites, but on the other
hand he was ready to transport those of Eleusis to Rome.(2911) He was
probably equally tolerant to the rites of Egypt. And in his reign
dedications were made to Isis by freedmen of great consular houses.(2912)
Nero despised all religions except that of the Syrian goddess; yet Isis
had probably little to fear from a prince who had been touched by the
charm and mystery of the East, and who at the last would have accepted the
prefecture of Egypt.(2913) Otho was, however, the first Roman emperor who
openly took part in the Egyptian rites.(2914) The Flavians had all come
under the spell of Eastern superstition. Vespasian had had a solitary
vigil in the temple of Serapis; in obedience to a dream from the god he
had consented to perform miracles of healing.(2915) In the fierce civil
strife of 69 A.D., when the Capitol was stormed and burnt by the
Vitellians, the service of Isis was actually going on, and Domitian,
disguised in her sacred vestments, escaped among the crowd of priests and
acolytes.(2916) He repaid the debt by rebuilding the temple of Isis in the
Campus Martius, in 92 A.D., on a magnificent scale.(2917) The sarcasms of
Juvenal on the “shaven, linen-clad herd,” and the pious austerities of
female worshippers of Isis, reveal the powerful hold which the goddess had
obtained in his day, even on the frivolous and self-indulgent. Hadrian, of
course, had the gods of the Nile in the Canopus of his cosmopolitan villa
at Tibur.(2918) Commodus walked in procession with shaven head and an
image of Anubis in his arms.(2919) The triumph of Isis in the Antonine age
was complete.
The Serapeum at Alexandria was to the Egyptian cult what the Temple was to
the religion of Israel.(2920) And the world-wide trade and far-spreading
influence of what was then the second city in the Empire might have given
a wide diffusion even to a religion less adapted to satisfy the spiritual
wants of the time. Slaves and freedmen were always the most ardent
adherents and apostles of foreign rites. Names of persons of this class
appear on many monuments as holders of Isiac office or liberal
benefactors. A little brotherhood of household slaves at Valentia in Spain
were united in the worship.(2921) Petty traders from Alexandria swarmed in
the ports of the Mediterranean, and especially in those of Campania, and
near the Nolan gate of Pompeii the humble tombs of a little colony of
these emigrants have been discovered.(2922) The sailors and officers of
the corn fleets from Africa also helped to spread the fame of Isis and
Osiris. In the reign of Septimius Severus, their chief officer, C.
Valerius Serenus, was neocorus of Serapis.(2923) Alexandria also sent
forth a crowd of artists, philosophers, and savants to the West. Several
men of Egyptian origin filled high places in the imperial household, as
librarians or secretaries in the first and second centuries. Chaeremon,
who had been librarian at Alexandria, and who had composed a theological
treatise on Isis and Osiris, became Nero’s tutor.(2924) Chaeremon’s pupil,
Dionysius, was librarian and imperial secretary in the reign of Trajan.
And Julius Vestinus, who held these offices under Hadrian, is described in
an inscription as chief pontiff of Egypt and Alexandria,—a combination of
dignities which probably enabled him to throw his powerful protection
around the Isiac rites at Rome.(2925) An influence so securely seated on
the Palatine was sure to extend to the remotest parts of the Empire. If
Isis could defy all the force of the Republican Government, what might she
not do when emperors were enrolled in her priesthood, and imperial
ministers, in correspondence with every prefecture from Britain to the
Euphrates, were steeped in her mystic lore?
Already in Nero’s reign, Lucan could speak of Isis and Osiris as not only
welcomed in the shrines of Rome, but as deities of all the world.(2926)
Plutarch and Lucian, from very different points of view, are witnesses to
the same world-wide movement. The judgment will be confirmed by even a
casual inspection of the religious records of the inscriptions. Although
Isis and Serapis were not peculiarly soldiers’ gods, like Mithra and
Bellona, yet they had many votaries among the legions on distant
frontiers. A legate of the Legion Tertia Augusta, who was probably of
Egyptian birth, introduced the rites into the camp of Lambaesis, and a
temple to Isis and Serapis was built by the labour of many pious hands
among his soldiers.(2927) Serapis appears often on the African monuments,
sometimes leagued or identified with Jupiter or Pluto.(2928) In Dacia and
Pannonia the cults of Egypt were probably not as popular as that of
Mithra, but they have left traces in all the great centres of
population.(2929) In several inscriptions(2930) Isis is called by a native
name such as Noreia, and we find on others the instructive blending of the
strata of four mythologies. Tacitus thought he had discovered the
counterpart of Isis in the forests of Germany.(2931) She is certainly
found in Holland, and at Cologne.(2932) Officers of the sixth Legion
worshipped her at York.(2933) French antiquaries have followed the traces
of the Egyptian gods in nearly all the old places of importance in their
own country, at Fréjus, Nîmes, and Arles, at Lyons, Clermont, and
Soissons.(2934) Shrines of Isis have been explored in Switzerland and at
the German spas.(2935) The scenes which were so common at Rome or Pompeii
or Corinth, the procession of shaven, white-robed priests and acolytes,
marching to the sound of chants and barbaric music, with the sacred images
and symbols of a worship which had been cradled on the Nile ages before
the time of Romulus, and transmuted by the eclectic subtlety of Platonic
theologians into a cosmopolitan religion, were reproduced in remote
villages on the edge of the Sahara and the Atlantic, in the valleys of the
Alps or the Yorkshire dales.
What was the secret of this power and fascination in the religion of a
race whose cult of the dog and cat had so often moved the ridicule of the
satirist and comic poet? No single answer can be given to that question.
The great power of Isis “of myriad names” was that, transfigured by Greek
influences, she appealed to many orders of intellect, and satisfied many
religious needs or fancies. To the philosopher her legends furnished
abundant material for the conciliation of religion and pseudo-science, for
the translation of myth into ancient cosmic theory, or for the absorption
of troublesome mythologies into a system which perhaps tended more than
any other, except that of Mithra, to the Platonic idea of the unity of
God. The mystic who dreamt of an ecstasy of divine communion, in which the
limits of sense and personality might be left behind in a vague rapture of
imaginative emotion, found in the spectacle of her inner shrine a strange
power far surpassing the most transporting effects of Eleusis. Women
especially saw in the divine mother and mourner a glorified type of their
sex, in all its troubles and its tenderness, such as their daughters in
coming ages were destined to find in the Virgin Mother.(2936) The ascetic
impulse, which has seldom been far from the deepest religious feeling,
derived comfort and the sense of atonement in penitential abstinence and
preparation for the holy mysteries. The common mass, who are affected
chiefly by the externals of a religion, had their wants amply gratified in
the pomp and solemnity of morning sacrifice and vespers, in those
many-coloured processions, such as that which bore in spring-time the
sacred vessel to the shore, with the sound of hymn and litany.(2937) And
in an age when men were everywhere banding themselves together in clubs
and colleges for mutual help and comfort, the sacred guilds of Isis had
evidently an immense influence. That evil, as in nearly all heathen
worships, often lurked under her solemn forms cannot be denied, though
there was also groundless calumny.(2938) Yet there must have been some
strange power in a religion which could for a moment lift a sensualist
imagination like that of Apuleius almost to the height and purity of
Eckhart and Tauler.(2939)
The triumph of Isis and Serapis in the Western world is an instructive
episode in the history of religion. It is, like that of Mithra, a curious
example of the union of conservative feeling with a purifying and
transforming influence of the growing moral sense. A religion has a double
strength and fascination which has a venerable past behind it. The ancient
symbolism may be the creation of an age of gross conceptions of the
Divine, it may be even grotesque and repulsive, at first sight, to the
more refined spiritual sense of an advanced moral culture. Yet the
religious instinct will always strive to maintain its continuity with the
past, however it may transfigure the legacy of ruder ages. Just as
Christian theologians long found anticipations of the Gospel among
patriarchs and warrior kings of Israel, so pagan theologians like Plutarch
or Aristides could discover in the cults of Egypt all their highest cosmic
theories, and satisfaction for all their spiritual wants.(2940) With
unwavering faith, Plutarch and his kind believed that under all the coarse
mythic fancy of early ages there was veiled a profound insight into the
secrets of nature and the spiritual needs of humanity. The land of the
Nile, with its charm of immemorial antiquity, was long believed to have
been the cradle of all that was best and deepest in the philosophic or
religious thought of Hellas. The gods of the classic pantheon were
identified with the gods of Egypt.(2941) Pythagoras and the Orphic mystics
had derived their inspiration from the same source.(2942) The conquests of
Alexander and the foundation of Alexandria had drawn to a focus the
philosophical or the religious ideas of East and West, of India,
Palestine, Persia, and Greece. At Alexandria were blended and transformed
all the philosophies and mythologies by the subtle dialectic of Greece.
The animal cult of Egypt, indeed, was always a stumbling-block to Greek
and Roman.(2943) It moved the contempt and ridicule of comedian and
satirist.(2944) It was an easy mark for the sneers of the crowd. Yet even
the divinised dog or ibis could find skilful, if not convinced, defenders
among the Greek eclectics, who lent all the forces of Hellenic ingenuity
to the cause of antiquarianism in religion.(2945) Their native mythology
was not without traces of zoolatry. Their own god of healing, who became
so popular in all lands, was always connected in art and legend with the
serpent. The serpent of the Acropolis, which daily ate the holy wafer, was
the immemorial companion of the tutelary goddess of Athens.(2946) Had not
Zeus, in his many amours, found an easy access to the fair victims of his
love in animal forms? The Divine virtues are only faintly imaged in
animals which have their uses in the world. If all religion is only
symbolism, why should not the multiform beneficence of the unseen Powers
be expressed in the form of creatures who give their service and
companionship to man, as fitly as in lifeless bronze or marble?
But although men might try to reconcile theology even to a worship of
animal forms, it was by very different spiritual influences that Isis and
Serapis won the devotion of the rustics of remote villages in Spain and
Britain. The dog-headed Anubis might perhaps be borne in
processions.(2947) The forms of sacred animals might be portrayed, along
with those of Io and Andromeda, on the frescoes of Herculaneum or
Pompeii.(2948) But the monuments of the Western provinces are, as a rule,
singularly free from the grossness of early Egyptian zoolatry.(2949) And
there is hardly a hint of it in the famous picture of the initiation of
Lucius in the _Metamorphoses_ of Apuleius. In that fascinating scene, Isis
is the universal mother, Nature, queen of the worlds of light and
darkness, the eternal type of all lesser divinities. And on inscriptions
she appears as the Power who “is all in all.”(2950) Whatever her special
functions may be, goddess of the spring, or of the sailor on the sea,
guardian of women in the pangs of motherhood, the “Queen of peace,”(2951)
guide and saviour of souls in the passage to the world beyond the tomb,
she remains the Supreme Power, invoked by many names, with virtues and
graces as various as her names. And Serapis, in the later theology, is not
the president of any provincial territory in the universe. He is not the
lord of sea or earth or air only; he is lord of all the elements, the
dispenser of all good, the master of human life. It is thus that Aristides
hails him after his rescue from the perils of the sea.(2952) But although
Serapis in many a monument is enthroned beside Jupiter, Queen Isis is also
supreme in the world both of the living and the dead.
Yet, although there is a very decided tendency to monotheism in the
Alexandrian religion, a tendency which appealed strongly to minds like
Plutarch, it did not succeed in altogether breaking with polytheism and
its attendant superstitions. The attempted alliance of religion and
philosophy was far from complete. Philosophy, indeed, had substituted
abstract theory for the poetry of legend. It struggled hard to assert the
essential unity of the Divine nature. And Plutarch, in his treatise on
Isis, declares that God is one and the same in all lands under whatever
names He may be worshipped.(2953) But the treatise shows at the same time
how vague and unsettled still was the theology of Alexandria, and how hard
it found the task of wedding Platonism to the haunting tradition of old
idolatry. Physics, metaphysics, etymology, are all employed with infinite
ingenuity to recover the secret meaning which it is assumed that ancient
wisdom had veiled under the forms of legend. But arbitrary fancy plays far
too large a part in these random guesses, and system there is none, to
bridge the gulf between the Platonist eclectic and the superstitious
masses. Isis worship was in practice linked with all the reigning
superstitions, with divination, magic, astrology, oneiromancy. Manetho,
who was one of the founders of the worship of Serapis, wrote a treatise
for the Greek world on the influence of the stars on human destiny.(2954)
Egyptian astrologists were always in great demand. The emperors Otho and
M. Aurelius carried them in their train.(2955) Many Roman ladies in
sickness would not take food or medicine till the safe hour had been
determined by inspecting the Petosiris.(2956) The Isiac devotee was an
enthusiastic believer in dreams sent by his favourite deities. On many
inscriptions the record may be read of these warnings of the night.(2957)
In the syncretism of the time, Serapis came to be identified with the
Greek god of healing, and patients sleeping in Egyptian temples received
in dreams inspired prescriptions for their maladies.(2958) Sometimes the
deity vouchsafed to confer miraculous powers of cure on a worshipper. The
sceptical good sense of Vespasian was persuaded by medical courtiers at
Alexandria to try the effect of his touch on the blind and paralytic, who
had a divine monition to seek the aid of the emperor.(2959) The cultivated
Aristides had a firm faith in these heaven-sent messages. He even believed
that Serapis could call back the dead to life.(2960)
Yet Aristides, in his prose hymn to Serapis, gives us a glimpse of the
better side of that religion. After all, the superstitions which clustered
round it were the universal beliefs of the age, prevalent among the most
cultivated and the most ignorant. The question for the modern student is
whether these Alexandrian worships provided real spiritual sustenance for
their devotees. And, in spite of many appearances to the contrary, the
impartial inquirer must come to the conclusion that the cult of the
Egyptian deities, through its inner monotheism, its ideal of ascetic
purity, its vision of a great judgment and a life to come, was a real
advance on the popular religion of old Greece and Rome. Isis and Serapis,
along with Mithra, were preparing the Western world for the religion which
was to appease the long travail of humanity by a more perfect vision of
the Divine. It is impossible for a modern man to realise the emotion which
might be excited by a symbolism like that of Demeter, or Mithra, or Isis,
with its roots in a gross heathen past. But no reader of Apuleius,
Plutarch, or Philostratus should fail to realise the surging spiritual
energy which, in the second and third centuries, was seeking for
expression and appeasement. It struck into strange devious tracks, and
often was deluded by phantasms of old superstition glorified by a new
spirit. But let us remember the enduring strength of hereditary piety and
ancient association, and, under its influence, the magical skill of the
religious consciousness to maintain the link between widely severed
generations, by purifying the grossness of the past and transforming
things absurd and offensive into consecrated vehicles of high spiritual
sentiment. No one, who has read in Apuleius the initiation of Lucius in
the Isiac mysteries, can doubt that the effect on the votary was profound
and elevating. Pious artistic skill was not wanting to heighten emotion in
Isis worship, as it is not disdained in our Christian churches. But the
prayer of thanksgiving offered by Lucius might, _mutatis mutandis_, be
uttered by a new convert at a camp-meeting, or a Breton peasant after her
first communion. It is the devout expression of the deep elementary
religious feelings of awe and gratitude, humility and joy, boundless hope
and trust. In the same tone, Aristides sings his prose canticle to
Serapis. There is not a memory of the brute gods of the Nile. The
Alexandrian god is now the equal or counterpart of Zeus, the lord of life
and death, who cares for mortal men, who comforts, relieves, sustains. He
is indeed a most awful power, yet one full of loving-kindness, tenderness,
and mercy.(2961) In Plutarch we reach perhaps an even more spiritual
height. Osiris, who in old legend represented the Nile, or the coarse
fructifying powers of nature, passes into the Eternal Love and Beauty,
pure, passionless, remote from any region of change or death,
unapproachable in His ethereal splendour, save, as in moments of inspired
musing, we may faintly touch Him as in a dream.
In the _Metamorphoses_ of Apuleius, the goddess who appears in a vision to
Lucius promises that, when his mortal course is run, he shall find her
illumining the Stygian gloom. And, next to the maternal love with which
she embraced her votaries in this life, the great attraction of her cult
was the promise of a blessed future, through sacramental grace, which she
offered for the world to come. Serapis, too, is from the beginning a god
of the under world, a “guide of souls,” as he is also their judge at the
Great Assize.(2962) The Orphic lore, the mysteries of the Eleusinian
goddesses and Dionysus, had for ages taught a dim doctrine of immortality,
under the veil of legend, through the scenic effects of their dramatic
mysteries. They first revealed to the Greek race that the life to come was
the true life, for which the present was only a purgatorial preparation.
They taught, in whatever rude fashion, that future beatitude could only be
secured by a purification from the stains of time.(2963) The doctrine may
have been drawn from Egypt, and Egypt once more gave it fresh meaning and
force. The Alexandrian worship came with a deeper faith and more
impressive ritual, with dreams and monitory visions, with a mystic lore,
and the ascetic preparation for the holy mysteries, with the final scene
in the inner sanctuary, when the votary seemed borne far beyond the limits
of space and time into ethereal distances.(2964) The soul might, indeed,
have to pass through many bodies and mortal lives before it reached the
life eternal. But the motto of the Isiac faith, inscribed on many tombs,
was _εὐψύχει_, “be of good courage,” “may Osiris give the water of
refreshment.”(2965) Everywhere the lotus, image of immortality, in its
calix opening at every dawn, appears on symbols of the worship. And
Harpocrates, the god who has triumphed over death, appears as the child
issuing from the mystic flower. The Roman practice of burning the dead
might seem to separate for ever the fate of the body from the spirit,
although it is really a question of more or less rapid resolution of the
mortal frame into its original elements. But, as we have seen, the man of
the early Empire became more and more anxious to preserve undisturbed the
“handful of white dust” rescued from the pyre, and would invoke the wrath
of Isis against the desecrator.(2966) The great object of many of the
colleges was to secure their humble members a niche in the _columbarium_.
The Alexandrine faith in immortality, by the grace of Isis and Serapis,
probably did not inquire too curiously into the manner of the
resurrection.
Undoubtedly another secret of the popularity of the Egyptian worships lay
in their impressive ritual, the separation of their clergy from the world,
and in the comradeship of the guilds in which their votaries were
enrolled. Apuleius has left us, in the initiation of Lucius at Cenchreae,
and again at Rome, a priceless picture of the Isiac ritual. Everything in
the ceremonial tends to kindle pious enthusiasm. Sophocles and Pindar had
extolled the blessedness of those who had seen the mystic vision.(2967)
The experience of Lucius would seem to confirm the testimony of the Greek
poets. When the goddess has promised him deliverance from brutish form,
and pledged him to strict obedience, Lucius is inspired with the utmost
ardour to join in “the holy warfare.” He takes up his abode in the sacred
precincts, he begs to be admitted to full communion. But the venerable
pontiff requires him to await the sign of the divine will. Lucius
continues in fasting and prayer till the sign at last comes; when it comes
he hastens to the morning sacrifice. The scrolls, covered with symbols of
ancient Egypt, are brought in, and then, before a crowd of the faithful,
he is plunged in the sacred font. Returning to the temple, as he lies
prostrate before the image of the goddess in prayer, he has whispered to
him “the unutterable words.” Ten days more are spent in strictest retreat
and abstinence from pleasures of the flesh; and then came the crowning
rite, the solemn vigil in the inner sanctuary. There, as at Eleusis, a
vivid drama of a divine death and resurrection probably passed before his
eyes, in flashing radiance and awful visions, amid gloom and the tones of
weird music. But the tale of what he saw and heard could never be fully
unfolded to mortal ear.
There indeed are some sordid and suspicious traits in the history of this
worship. As in the case of the taurobolium,(2968) the mysteries of Isis
and Serapis could not be enjoyed without a considerable outlay. And Lucius
found a difficulty in meeting the expense.(2969) But, whether in
heathendom or Christendom, a regular priesthood and an elaborate ritual
cannot be supported without the offerings of the faithful. There has
probably never been a religion in which the charge of venality has not
been levelled against the priests. But Lucius finds here no
stumbling-block. No material offering can repay the goodness and love of
the goddess. He feels towards her not only reverence and gratitude, but
the love of a son to a Divine mother. Ascetic isolation has produced the
natural result of imaginative ecstasy and mystic exaltation. The long,
quiet hours of rapt devotion before the sacred figure in the stillness of
the shrine, the spectral visions of the supreme hour of revelation, made a
profound impression on a soul which was deeply tainted by other visions of
old-world sin.
The daily ritual of Isis, which seems to have been as regular and
complicated as that of the Catholic Church, produced an immense effect on
the Roman mind. Every day there were two solemn offices, at which
white-robed, tonsured priests, with acolytes and assistants of every
degree, officiated.(2970) The morning litany and sacrifice was an
impressive service. The crowd of worshippers thronged the space before the
chapel at the early dawn. The priest, ascending by a hidden stair, drew
apart the veil of the sanctuary,(2971) and offered the holy image to their
adoration. He then made the round of the altars, reciting the litany, and
sprinkling the holy water “from the secret spring.” At two o’clock in the
afternoon the passers by could hear from the temple in the Campus Martius
the chant of vespers.(2972) A fresco of Herculaneum gives us a picture of
the service. It is the adoration of the holy water, representing in symbol
the fructifying and deathless power of Osiris. A priest, standing before
the holy place, raises breast high a sacred urn for the adoration of the
crowd. The sacrifice is smoking on the altar, and two choirs are chanting
to the accompaniment of the seistron and the flute.(2973) Another fresco
from Herculaneum exhibits a bearded, dark-skinned figure, crowned with the
lotus, in the attitude of dancing before a throng of spectators to the
sound of music. It is plausibly conjectured that we have here a pantomimic
representation of the passion of Osiris and its joyful close.(2974) There
was much solemn pomp and striking scenic effect in this public ceremonial.
But it is clear from Apuleius, that an important part of worship was also
long silent meditation before the image of the goddess. The poets speak of
devotees seated thus before the altar, and in the temple at Pompeii a
bench has been found which, from its position, was probably occupied by
such silent worshippers.(2975)
The great festivals of the Egyptian worship were the blessing of the
sacred vessel on the fifth of March, and the celebration of the quest and
finding of Osiris in November. The anniversary of the death and rising
again of the god was strictly observed by large numbers, especially among
women. Pagan and Christian writers have alike ridiculed the theatrical
grief and joy for a god so often found, so often lost.(2976) The death of
Osiris at the hands of Typhon, the rending of the divine form, and the
dispersion of the lacerated remains, were passionately lamented in
sympathy with the mourning Isis. With effusive grief the devotees beat
their breasts and lacerated their arms, and followed in eager search. When
on the third day the god had been found and restored, the joyful event was
hailed with extravagant gladness, and celebrated by a banquet of the
initiated. For some of these holy days the rubrics prescribed a long
preparation of fasting and ascetic restraint. But that a general
strictness of life was not required of the Isiac votary, at least under
the early Empire, may be inferred from the fact that the frail Cynthias
and Delias in Propertius and Tibullus were among the most regular in
ritual observance.(2977) The festival of the holy vessel of Isis, which
marked the opening of navigation, and received the benediction of the
goddess, was, in the early Empire, observed with solemn pomp and
enthusiasm by the coast towns of the Mediterranean. A brilliantly vivid
description of such a scene at Cenchreae has been left by Apuleius. It was
a great popular carnival, in which a long procession, masquerading in the
most fantastic and various costumes, conducted the sacred ship to the
shore. Women in white robes scattered flowers and perfumes along the way.
A throng of both sexes bore torches and tapers, to symbolise the reign of
the Mother of the stars. The music of flute and pipe meanwhile filled the
air with sacred symphonies, and a band of youths in snow-white vestments
chanted a hymn. Wave upon wave came the throng of those who had been
admitted to full communion, all clad in linen, and the men marked with the
tonsure. They were followed by the priests, each bearing some symbol of
the many powers and virtues of the goddess, the boat-shaped lamp, the
“altars of succour,” the palm of gold, the wand of Mercury. In a pix were
borne the holy mysteries, and, last of all, the most venerable symbol, a
small urn of shining gold and adorned in subtle workmanship with figures
of Egyptian legend.(2978) This holy vase, containing the water of the
sacred river, which was an emanation from Osiris,(2979) closed the
procession. Arrived at the margin of the sea, the chief priest consecrated
the sacred vessel with solemn form and litany, and named it with the holy
name. Adorned with gold and citrus wood and pictures of old legend, it
spread its white sails to the breeze, and bore into the distance the vows
and offerings of the faithful for the safety of those upon the deep.
The oriental religions of the imperial period were distinguished from the
native religion of Latium by the possession of a numerous and highly
organised priesthood, and an intensely sacerdotal spirit.(2980) In an age
of growing religious faith, this characteristic gave them enormous power.
The priest became a necessary medium of intercourse with God. It is also
one of the many traits in the later paganism, which prepared and softened
the transition to the reign of the mediaeval Church. It would be tedious
and unprofitable to enumerate the various grades of the Isiac priesthood.
There were high priests of conspicuous dignity, who were also called
_prophetae_.(2981) But ordinary priests could perform many of their
functions.(2982) There were interpreters of dreams, dressers and keepers
of the sacred wardrobe of the goddess,(2983) whose duties must have been
onerous, if we may judge from the list of robes and jewels and sacred
furniture preserved in inscriptions or recovered from the ruins of Isiac
shrines.(2984) It has been remarked that the roaming Visigoths in southern
Gaul must have had a rare spoil if they had the fortune to light on one of
the great temples of Isis. The scribe of the Pastophori, in Apuleius, is
also an important officer. He summons the sacred convocation, and recites
the “bidding prayer” for the Emperor and all subjects, in their several
places and stations.(2985) Music took a large part in the ritual; there
was hymn-singing to the sound of flutes, harp, and cymbal; and the
chanters and paeanists of Serapis formed an order by themselves.(2986) The
prayer which Lucius offers to the goddess, in Apuleius, has been arranged
as a metrical litany.(2987) Women often appear in inscriptions and in our
texts as priestesses, and had a prominent place in all solemn
ritual.(2988) And it is evident that, with all its sacerdotalism, the
worship gave full recognition to devout worshippers of every degree and
sex. All who are devoted to the service have their place and function. The
initiated might even wear the tonsure in the ordinary lay life. To do
this, indeed, needed some courage, in the face of Roman ridicule. But the
religious were, from the earliest times in Greece and Italy, associated
for mutual support in sacred guilds, designated by various names, Isiaci
or Pastophori or Anubiaci. In the third century B.C., such societies are
found in Ceos and Peiraeus.(2989) On the walls of Pompeii they have left
their appeals to the electors to vote on behalf of candidates for the
aedileship.(2990) They were organised on the usual lines of the ancient
colleges, divided into decuries, with a director and a treasurer, a
“father” or a “mother,” or a patron at their head.(2991) The Isiac guilds
must have had a powerful influence in the diffusion of the religion of
Alexandria. But they also were probably one cause of the suspicion so long
entertained for that worship by the Republican government, and they only
asserted their full strength in the second century, when the colleges in
general received the tacit sanction of the emperors. That the emperors
felt little fear of these foreign sacred corporations became clear when an
emperor actually took the tonsure of Isis.(2992)
The Isiac system was energetic and self-assertive, but it can hardly be
called dangerous or revolutionary. It threw many of the old gods into the
shade, but its syncretism also found a place for many of them. Its inner
monotheism, after the fashion of those days, had open arms of charity for
all the ancient gods. One of the priests of Isis might be called
Iacchagogus or Mithra;(2993) statues of Dionysus and Venus and Priapus
stood in the court of the Isium at Pompeii.(2994) The Isis of Apuleius
proclaims her identity with nearly all the great powers of classical
legend, and gathers them into herself. But Isis identifies only to conquer
and absorb. And her priesthood formed an aggressive and powerful caste.
The sacerdotal colleges of the Latin religion were never, except in the
case of the Vestals, separated from ordinary life. The highest pontificate
was held by busy laymen, by consuls or emperors or great soldiers. After
the performance of his part in some great rite, the Roman priest returned
to his civic place and duties. And in Greece, in the third and second
centuries B.C., even the Isiac priesthood was held only for a year, or
even for a month; and the sacred processions at one time needed the
authorisation of the local council at Samos.(2995) But when we come to the
days of Apuleius, all this is changed. The chief priest at Cenchreae is
evidently a great ecclesiastic, bearing the sacred Eastern name of
Mithra.(2996) He has given up ordinary civic life, and has probably
abandoned his Greek name to take a new name “in religion.” Every day two
solemn services at least have to be performed in the temple, besides the
private direction of souls, which had evidently become a regular part of
the priestly functions. Attached to the great temples, and close to the
altar, there is a “clergy house” where the ministers are lodged. It is
called the Pastophorion, and its chambers have been traced in the débris
of the temple at Pompeii.(2997) One of these presbyteries was the scene of
the seduction which convulsed the religious world in the reign of
Tiberius, and which sent so many pious exiles to the solitudes of
Sardinia. The ministers of Isis and Serapis are marked off by the tonsure
and the Isiac habit, which meet us in the pages of poets from Tibullus to
Juvenal,(2998) and in the frescoes of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The
abstinence, which was required as a preparation for communion in ordinary
votaries, was a lifelong obligation on the priest. The use of woollen
garments, of wine, pork, fish, and certain vegetables, was absolutely
forbidden to them.(2999) Chastity was essential in the celebrant of the
holy mysteries, and even Tertullian holds up the priests of Isis as a
reproachful example of continence to professing followers of Christ. The
priesthood is no longer a secondary concern; it absorbs a man’s whole
life, sets him apart within the sanctuary as the dispenser of sacred
privileges, with the awful power of revealing the mystery of eternity, and
preparing souls to meet the great ordeal.
It does not need much imagination to understand the fascination of Isis
and Serapis for a people who had outgrown a severe and sober, but an
uninspiring faith. They came to the West at the crisis of a great
spiritual and political revolution, with the charm of foreign mystery and
the immemorial antiquity of a land whose annals ran back to ages long
before Rome and Athens were even villages. But with antique charm, the
religion combined the moral and spiritual ideas of generations which had
outgrown the gross symbolism of Nature worship. The annual festivals might
preserve the memory of the myth, which in its grossness and brutal tragedy
once pictured the fructifying influence of the mysterious river on the
lands which awaited his visitations, or the waning force of vegetative
power and solar warmth. But Serapis, the new god of the Ptolemies, became
the lord of life and death, the guide and saviour of souls, the great
judge of all in the other world, an awful power, yet more inclined to
mercy than to judgment.(3000) And Isis rose to equally boundless sway, and
one of greater tenderness. Powers above and powers below alike wait on her
will: she treads Tartarus under her feet, and yet she embraces all, and
specially the weak and miserable, in the arms of her charity.(3001) Above
all, she has the secret of the unseen world, and can lighten for her
worshipper the Stygian gloom. But the Isiac, like the Orphic revelation,
while it gave a blessed promise for the life to come, attached grave
conditions to the pledge. In this brief time of probation, the soul must
prepare itself under ghostly guidance for the great trial. Sacrament and
mystery lent their aid to fortify the worshipper in the face of death,
but, to derive their full virtue, he must exercise himself in temperance,
abjure the pleasures of the senses, and purify himself for the vision of
God.(3002) The sacred ritual of the Egyptian might captivate the senses
and imagination by its pomp and music, its steaming altars, and
many-coloured symbolism. But in the stillness of the sanctuary the
worshipper was trained to find his moments of purest and most exalted
devotion in silent meditation before the Queen of heaven and the shades.
The lonely, the weak, and the desolate found in the holy guilds succour
and consolation, with a place in the ritual of her solemn seasons, which
bound each to each in the love of a Divine Mother.