The Age of the Great Classics
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Great Rome: 500 B.C. - 500 A.D.
The Celtic Province
Caesar’s Gallic wars, starting in 58 B.C., opening Europe to the empire of Rome as Pompey’s wars had opened the Levant, broke the power of the Celts, who for centuries had been harassing the cities of the south. The earliest matrix of the Celtic culture complex was the Alpine and South German area. The centuries of its development were those of the early Iron Age in Europe, in two phases: 1. The Halstatt Culture (about 900 – 400 B.C.), and 2. La Tène (about 550 – 15 B.C.).
The Halstatt Culture, named after the site Halstatt near Salzburg in Austria, was characterized at the outset by a gradual introduction of iron tools among bronze, fashioned by a class of itinerant smiths, who in later mythic lore appear as dangerous wizards (like in the German legend of Weyland the Smith). The Arthurian theme of the sword drawn from the stone suggests the sense of magic inspired by their art of producing iron from its ore. A leading idea of the mythology around this theme was of the stone as a mother rock and the iron, the iron weapon, as her child, brought forth by the art of the forge.
The type site of La Téne, the second Iron Age of Central and Western Europe, is in Switzerland, close to the town of Neuchâtel. In the late fifth century B.C. the Rhineland and Elbe areas were occupied, and in the early fourth the Channel was crossed, bearing the tribes known as Brythons to what is now known as England, and the Goidels to Ireland. – who then, by invasion, entered Scotland, Cornwall and Wales. Gaul and Spain also were occupied by tribal groups of the La Tène complex. Until Caesar, in the year 52 B.C., defeated Vercingetorix and the Helvetic confederacy, a vigorous common civilization flourished throughout the European north and west, bearing influences from Etruria, Greece, and the centers of the Near East, but, in the main, of a barbaric brilliance of its own.
Since there is no Celtic literature from the Halstatt, La Tène, or even Roman periods, we have to rely on the accounts of Caesar, and other Romans. In addition, clues can be found from the late Celtic literatures of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, to which the fairy lore of modern Ireland and the basically Celtic Wonderland of Arthurian romance are to be added. There are affinities of Druidic thought with Hinduism, Pythagoreanism, and the later philosophy of the Irish Neoplatonist Scotus Erigena (died around 875 A.D.).
The philosophy is a form rather of pan-wizardism than of developed mystical theology. It is closer to shamanistic practice, but can be readily developed into the realm of the yogi and the realization of one’s self as the cosmic Self, and therewith the essence of all things. It is not possible to separate categorically the shaman from the mystic. From primitive shamanism to the highest orders of archaic and Oriental thought, where microcosm and macrocosm unite and are transcended, there is not so great a step as from these to the way of thought of the man for whom God is without and apart.
The mythic people Tuatha De Danann (the People – Tuatha – of the goddess Dana) of Ireland are thought by some to have been the Celts. Having been conquered by invaders, they withdrew from view into fairy hills, invisible as glass, where they dwell throughout Ireland to this day. A few of the outstanding traits of their colourful mythology, may be noted here.
There is a constellation of goddesses who in many ways are counterparts to greater and lesser goddesses of Greece. Dana (genitive Danann), who gives her name to the entire group, is called the mother of gods and is the counterpart of Gaea – the Earth Mother. Birgit (or Brig), the patroness of poetry and knowledge, represents another aspect of the goddess and was the Celtic Minerva named by Caesar. The popular cult of Saint Brigit, which carried her worship into Christian times, was represented in Kildare by a sacred fire that was not to be approached by any male and was watched daily by nineteen vestal nuns in turn and on the twentieth day by the saint herself. It is assumed that she must have originated in the period when the Celts worshipped goddesses rather than gods.
The great father figure of this pantheon was the underworld god Cernunnos, equated with Hades. In Irish epics he is called the Dagda (the good god). The Dagda possessed a caldron from which no company ever went unthankful, whose contents both restored the dead and produced poetic inspiration. Such a caldron suggests derivation from a goddess, and the assignment to Dagda of the fatherhood of the goddesses indicates the appropriation by a patriarchal deity of matriarchal themes – in the manner of the victories of Zeus, Apollo, and Perseus over the Bronze Age goddesses and priestesses of the Aegean. It is therefore not surprising to learn that on a certain day the Dagda met and lay with the great war goddess Morrigan, the same who in later romance was to become the fateful sister of King Arthur, Fata Morgana, Morgane la Fée. However, the pre-Celtic goddesses, though subjugated in Ireland, were by no means out of power – as witnessed by the myth of the meeting between Cuchullin and Morrigan. The goddess of the Fairy Hill is ultimately analogous with the great goddesses of the nuclear Near East, while the Celtic warrior heroes, with Cuchullin as supreme example, carry in their mythic deeds motifs that have come down from the old Bronze Age serpent-son and consort of the Great Mother, Dumuzi-Tammuz.
Etruria
On the plain of Tuscany west of the Appennines, situated between the Celts of the north and the rising power of Rome, were the twelve autonomous cities of the old Etruscan Confederation, symbolically centered around the sacred lake Bolsena. The origins of their culture date from the Villanova period, about 1100 – 700 B.C., which overlaps the northern Hallstatt and represents in the south about the same level of development. The high period of the confederation of cities of Tuscany extended from about 700 B.C. to the year 88 B.C., which they themselves regarded as their last. They were repeatedly harried from the north by the barbaric La Tène Celts, and gradually undone from the south by the growing power of Rome.
The number twelve of the cities of their confederation was a holy, symbolic sum, determined by religious, not practical considerations. Like constellations round the Pole Star these hallowed places grouped themselves around the grove of the god Voltumna, the site of which lay in the territory of Bolsena, called Volsinii by the Romans and Velzna by the Etruscans themselves. The god of this grove, Voltumna, was androgynous – beyond the pairs of opposites. Annually, at a festival celebrated in the grove amid the usual Classical festival events of athletic and artistic competition, the Year Nail was driven into the wall of the temple of the goddess Nortia (Fortuna), symbolizing the inevitability of fate.
The Disciplina Etrusca continued to a late date the spirit of the old Bronze Age cosmology of the ever-revolving, irreversible cycles: The image of space was also of the orthodox traditions: four quarters and the points between, each presided over by a deity, with a ninth, supreme Tinia, the lord of heaven, whom the Romans equated with Jupiter. The kings of the separate cities, who were Tinia incarnate, each wore a cloak symbolizing heaven, embroidered with stars. Each colored his face red, bore a scepter topped by an eagle, and rode in a chariot drawn by white steeds. As among the Celts, the king may have been sacrificed at the expiration of a term of eight or twelve years. The magnitude of the tumuli of these kings, and the luxury of the furnishings bear witness to a royal death cult.
With the fall of the city of Veii to Rome in 396 B.C., the fate of Etruria was sealed. The people of Etruria was offered Roman citizenship in 88 B.C., but authority in priestly affairs nevertheless remained with the old Etruscan masters. As late as 408 A.D. Etruscan conjurers offered their advice and aid to the Romans, when they were being threatened by Alaric and his Goths. There is even a report that Pope Innocent I, who was then bishop of the city, allowed them to give a public demonstration of their skill in the conjuring of lightning. “This,” wrote the Roman Stoic Seneca, “is what distinguishes us from the Tuscans, masters in the observation of lightning. We think that lightning arises because clouds bump against each other; they on the other hand hold the belief that the clouds bump only in order that lightning may be caused. For as they connect everything with God they have the notion that lightning is not significant on account of its appearance as such, but only appears at all because it has to give divine signs.”
The Augustan Age
Plutarch relates of Romulus and Remus that they were twins of a young virgin of the royal line of Aeneas. She was about to become a Vestal Virgin when she was found to be with child. She would have been buried alive had not her cousin, the daughter of the king, pleaded for her life. The twins were, upon birth, set afloat on the Tiber. They arrive under a wild fig tree, and a she-wolf came and nursed them and a woodpecker brought them food. The two creatures, being holy to Mars, gave credit - as Plutarch states – to the mother’s claim that Mars had been their father. When the twins grew up to be men, they had a quarrel – and Remus was slain by Romulus. When Romulus set about to develop his city (Rome), he stocked his city with women through his raid and rape of the Sabines.
As in Japan, so in early Rome: the living universe was regarded, both in its great and in its lesser aspects, with a sense of wonder before its sheer existence. The mysterious immanent forces, termed numina, were several. Most important of them were those of the home, where the leading celebrant was the pater familias. The family cult was concerned, first, with the mystery of its own continuity in time, as represented in rituals honoring the ancestors and in festivals of the general dead. The numina of the household were also revered: those of the larder (penates) and of household effects (lares). The guardian of the hearth, Vesta, was personified as a goddess, and that of the door, Janus, as a god. There was the idea also of a numen of the procreating power of each male, his genius, and of the conceiving and bearing power of the female, her juno. Genius and juno came into being and expired with the individual. Under Greek influence the power of the juno later became developed into the goddess Juno, as the guardian of childbirth and motherhood, who was identified with the Greek Hera. A series of other numina were also celebrated.
Some numina, of more constant presence, acquired more substantial character, as Jupiter, lord of the heavens and of storm, later identified with Zeus. Mars, the war god, equated with Ares; Neptune with Poseidon; Faunus, the patron of animal life; Silvanus, god of the woods. Comparably, of the female forces, Ceres became identified with Demeter; Tellus Mater with Gaea; Venus, originally a market goddess, with the Cyprian Aphrodite; and Fortuna with Moira. We hear too of Flora, goddess of flowers; Pomona, goddess of fruits; Carmenta, a goddess of springs and birth; Mater Matuta, first a goddess of dawn, then of birth.
In the larger sphere of the cult of the state, the counterpart of the pater familias was the king, originally a god-king. His palace was the chief sanctuary and his queen was his goddess spouse. In the larger family of the state, the numen of the hearth was Vesta. The same holy principle was honored throughout the history of pagan Rome in a circular temple, where a pure flame was attended by six highly revered women. The flame was extinguished at the end of each year and relighted in the primitive way, with firesticks. The dress of the Vestal Virgins resembled the gown of a Roman bride; and on assuming her vow, the dedicated nun was solemnly clasped by the Pontifex Maximus, the chief priest of the city, who said to her: “Te amato, capio” (“My beloved, I take possession of thee”). The two were symbolically man and wife. And if the Vestal broke her vow of chastity, she was buried alive. The correspondence of this Vestal Fire context with the rites of the regicide and relighting of the holy fire in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, is clear.
In the latter part of the sixth century B.C. an Etruscan royal house, the Tarquins of Tarquinia (now Corneto) governed Rome. They were expelled about 509 B.C. and it was then that the process of the Hellenization of the Roman religion began – thus bringing its local, archaic customs into accord with the new humanism of the rapidly growing chief centers of civilization. In the decades of Etruscan rule temples had been constructed and cult images fashioned of stucco; but for stone, Rome had to wait for the coming of Greek artisans in the second century B.C., at which time the Sibylline Books also arrived from Cumae in the south, an ancient holy site, some twelve miles west of Naples, founded by the Greeks as early as the eighth century B.C.
About the year 100 B.C. the Roman Pontifex Maximus, Q. Mucius Scaevola, proposed a theory of a threefold order of gods: the gods of poets, of philosophers, and of statesmen; of which the first two were unfit for the popular mind and only the second true. However, a fourth and far more potent order of gods than any of those of which he had taken thought was already becoming known to Rome in his day: those of the Near East, whose appeal was, in the Greek sense, neither poetic nor philosophic, and whose force, furthermore, would ultimately effect not the preservation but the undoing of the moral order of Rome and its civilization. The first occasion for the introduction of these highly charged alien powers had occurred in 204 B.C., when the Carthaginian army of Hannibal was still a threat in Italy. Repeated storms and hail had produced the impression that the gods themselves, for some reason, were at odds with the people of Rome, and the Sibylline Books were consulted. Their reply was that the enemy would be expelled only when the cult of the Great Goddess of the Phrygian city of Pessinus was introduced into Rome. This Magna Mater was Cybele, the mother-bride of the ever-dying, ever-resurrected savior Attis; and these two were simply the local forms of the pair Inanna and Dumuzi, Ishtar an Tammuz. All these formerly local cults had in the Hellenistic age been syncretized with the related Greek traditions of the Dionysian, Orphic, and Pythagorean movements – to which a modicum of late Chaldean-Hellenistic astrology had been added, to form a compound of macro-microcosmic lore that was to remain dominant in the Occident, one way or another, until the science of the Renaissance undid the old cosmology of a geocentric universe and opened marvels beyond anything dreamed of by the sages of the ancient mystic ways.
The Risen Christ
The earliest Christian documents to come down to us are Paul’s letters, 51 to 64 A.D., written to his converts in the busy Hellenistic market towns to which he had introduced the new faith. In these, the fundamental mythic image of the Fall by the Tree and Redemption by the Cross was already firmly defined. The Christian legend also took to itself a motif already well known both in Greek mythology – as in the myths of Leda and the Swan, Danaë and the shower of gold – and in the Zoroastrian myth of Saoshyant, namely the virgin birth. The present custom of celebrating the Nativity on December 25 seems not to have been instituted until the year 353 or 354 A.D., under Pope Liberius, possibly to absorb the festival of the birth of Mithra that day, from the mother rock. December 25 marked in those days the winter solstice: so that Christ, now, like Mithra and the Emperor of Rome, could be recognized as the risen sun.
The Feast of the Visit of the Magi is celebrated on January 6, which was the date of the festival in Egyptian Alexandria of the birth of the new Aion (a syncretistic personification of Osiris) from Kore (“the Maiden”) who was then identified with Isis, of whom the bright star Sirius (Sothis) rising on the horizon had been for millenniums the watched-for sign. The rising of the star announced the rising of the flood waters of the Nile, through which the world renewing grace of the dead and resurrected lord Osiris was to be poured over the land.
Thus we have two myths and two dates of the Nativity scene, December 25 and January 6, with associations pointing on one hand to the Persian and on the other to the old Egyptian sphere.
A rich environment of mythic lore was diffused with the neolithic arts of agriculture and settled village life across the whole face of the earth, from which elements have been drawn everywhere for the fashioning of hero myths, whether in Mexico of Quetzalcoatl, in Egypt of Osiris, in India of Krishna and the Buddha, in the Near East of Abraham and of Christ. Zoroaster, Buddha, and Christ are held to be historic characters, while some of the others may not have been. Whether fictional or historical, the names and figures of the great and little heroes of the world act irresistibly as magnets to those floating filaments of myth that are everywhere in the air.
The Cross-fertilization of Cults
It is clear that, whether accurate or not as to biographical detail, the moving legend of the Crucified and Risen Christ was fit to bring a new warmth, immediacy and humanity to the old motifs of the beloved Tammuz, Adonis, and Osiris cycles. Indeed, it was those early myths, filling the atmosphere of the whole eastern Mediterranean, that had furnished the ambient of readiness within which the Christian legend so rapidly grew and spread.
The pagan mythologies and their cults were, at that time, themselves in a phase of burgeoning transformation. The Hellenistic concept of “humanity” as a totality, transcending all racial, national, tribal, and sectarian forms, was operating everywhere to effect a cross-fertilization of cults. And a massive shift in social emphasis from rural to cosmopolitan populations had, centuries before, converted the old, beloved field divinities into intimately personal, psychologically effective spiritual guides, appearing in elite as well as in popular rites of initiation.
The high flowering time of these movements may have been around the middle of the second century, notably that period of the Antonines – Antoninus Pius (ruled 138 – 161) and Marcus Aurelius (ruled 161 – 180) – which Edward Gibbon marked as the apogee of the glory of the Roman Empire. This was when the various modes of worship that prevailed in the known world “ were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful,” so that “toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious accord. Rome gradually became the common temple of all her subjects; and the freedom of the city was bestowed on all the gods of mankind.” (Edward Gibbon).
The Fall of Rome
In the year 167 A.D., the sixth in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, Germanic hordes from the north broke through the Roman wall between the upper Rhine and Danube, swarming into northern Italy. Since they could not be repulsed, they were allowed to settle as farmers on assigned lands within the frontier. Marcus Aurelius died in 180. His dissolute son Commodus succeeded, and revolts erupted in Germany, Gaul, Britain, Northwest Africa, and Judaea. A conspiracy in Rome itself was suppressed in 183, but nine years later the emperor was slain. His successor, Pertinax, was overthrown the following year by a mutiny of the guard, and the great catastrophe of the empire began.
The Germans represented only one of the three great pressures to which the civilization of Rome was then being subjected. The second lay beyond the Tigris, in the ill-protected East, in the form of the new Persian dynasty of the Sassanids, who had overthrown the Parthians in 226 A.D. Whereas the German danger was only physical, representing in a sense a barbarization and a rejuvenation of the European spirit itself, the new Persian threat was rather a danger to the spirit in itself. Diocletian (ruled 284 – 305) moved his Roman court to Asia (Nicomedia) to meet the Persians. Although he matched their military force, he was no match at all for the seduction of the oriental mythology of his foe. The Sassanids were Zoroastrians, and a state church came to flower under a powerful Magian clergy. The openness of the West to Persian religious ideas can be judged from the rapid spread of Mithraism throughout the Roman Empire from the reign of Vespasian (ruled 69 – 79).
The Roman Empire itself was transformed into an Oriental machine state, where heavy taxation was followed by a collapse of the middle class, and by severe rules forbidding people to change occupation. The peasant class had long since been devastated by the wars. The Germans on one hand, the Orient on the other, had brought into being this Rome, into which Christianity now was to enter as a third transforming force. Diocletian dealt harshly with the Christians, recognizing them as enemies of the state, but Galerius, his successor (ruled 304 – 311), issued an edict of toleration on the good old pagan principle that every god is entitled to the worship of its own people.
In the course of the complicated interludes of murder, palace intrigue, open wars, and massacre that bridged the years between Galerius’ death and Constantine’s accession (311 – 324), the issue of the Christian cause hung precariously in the balance. This lasted until – as the famous legend goes, on the word of Constantine himself to his biographer Eusebius – in the course of his preparation for the crucial battle with Maxenius (his chief rival for the crown, who was inimical to the Christians), the still pagan Constantine beheld in the sky a shining cross, and his army saw it too. In a dream the following night, Christ appeared and bade him adopt that sign for his standard, which he did and, victory won, his loyalty thereafter was to the cross.
In the reign of Constantine, Christianity was accorded equal status with the pagan religions of the Empire, but half a century later, in the reign of Theodosius the Great (ruled 379 – 395), it was declared to be the only religion allowed. Theodosius the Great died in 395 A.D., and fifteen years later the Visigoths, under Alaric, ravaged Rome. Saint Augustine (354 – 430 A.D.) wrote his great work “The City of God” to answer the argument that though the city had flourished for a millennium under its own gods, when it turned to Christ it perished. Invasions by Huns into Europe, Vandals to Spain and Africa, Visigoths to Spain, Germanic Jutes, Angles and Saxons to Britain, and Franks to Gaul, combined with weak puppet emperors set up by Germanic officers transformed Europe until Charlemagne was crowned emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in 800 A.D.
Caesar’s Gallic wars, starting in 58 B.C., opening Europe to the empire of Rome as Pompey’s wars had opened the Levant, broke the power of the Celts, who for centuries had been harassing the cities of the south. The earliest matrix of the Celtic culture complex was the Alpine and South German area. The centuries of its development were those of the early Iron Age in Europe, in two phases: 1. The Halstatt Culture (about 900 – 400 B.C.), and 2. La Tène (about 550 – 15 B.C.).
The Halstatt Culture, named after the site Halstatt near Salzburg in Austria, was characterized at the outset by a gradual introduction of iron tools among bronze, fashioned by a class of itinerant smiths, who in later mythic lore appear as dangerous wizards (like in the German legend of Weyland the Smith). The Arthurian theme of the sword drawn from the stone suggests the sense of magic inspired by their art of producing iron from its ore. A leading idea of the mythology around this theme was of the stone as a mother rock and the iron, the iron weapon, as her child, brought forth by the art of the forge.
The type site of La Téne, the second Iron Age of Central and Western Europe, is in Switzerland, close to the town of Neuchâtel. In the late fifth century B.C. the Rhineland and Elbe areas were occupied, and in the early fourth the Channel was crossed, bearing the tribes known as Brythons to what is now known as England, and the Goidels to Ireland. – who then, by invasion, entered Scotland, Cornwall and Wales. Gaul and Spain also were occupied by tribal groups of the La Tène complex. Until Caesar, in the year 52 B.C., defeated Vercingetorix and the Helvetic confederacy, a vigorous common civilization flourished throughout the European north and west, bearing influences from Etruria, Greece, and the centers of the Near East, but, in the main, of a barbaric brilliance of its own.
Since there is no Celtic literature from the Halstatt, La Tène, or even Roman periods, we have to rely on the accounts of Caesar, and other Romans. In addition, clues can be found from the late Celtic literatures of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, to which the fairy lore of modern Ireland and the basically Celtic Wonderland of Arthurian romance are to be added. There are affinities of Druidic thought with Hinduism, Pythagoreanism, and the later philosophy of the Irish Neoplatonist Scotus Erigena (died around 875 A.D.).
The philosophy is a form rather of pan-wizardism than of developed mystical theology. It is closer to shamanistic practice, but can be readily developed into the realm of the yogi and the realization of one’s self as the cosmic Self, and therewith the essence of all things. It is not possible to separate categorically the shaman from the mystic. From primitive shamanism to the highest orders of archaic and Oriental thought, where microcosm and macrocosm unite and are transcended, there is not so great a step as from these to the way of thought of the man for whom God is without and apart.
The mythic people Tuatha De Danann (the People – Tuatha – of the goddess Dana) of Ireland are thought by some to have been the Celts. Having been conquered by invaders, they withdrew from view into fairy hills, invisible as glass, where they dwell throughout Ireland to this day. A few of the outstanding traits of their colourful mythology, may be noted here.
There is a constellation of goddesses who in many ways are counterparts to greater and lesser goddesses of Greece. Dana (genitive Danann), who gives her name to the entire group, is called the mother of gods and is the counterpart of Gaea – the Earth Mother. Birgit (or Brig), the patroness of poetry and knowledge, represents another aspect of the goddess and was the Celtic Minerva named by Caesar. The popular cult of Saint Brigit, which carried her worship into Christian times, was represented in Kildare by a sacred fire that was not to be approached by any male and was watched daily by nineteen vestal nuns in turn and on the twentieth day by the saint herself. It is assumed that she must have originated in the period when the Celts worshipped goddesses rather than gods.
The great father figure of this pantheon was the underworld god Cernunnos, equated with Hades. In Irish epics he is called the Dagda (the good god). The Dagda possessed a caldron from which no company ever went unthankful, whose contents both restored the dead and produced poetic inspiration. Such a caldron suggests derivation from a goddess, and the assignment to Dagda of the fatherhood of the goddesses indicates the appropriation by a patriarchal deity of matriarchal themes – in the manner of the victories of Zeus, Apollo, and Perseus over the Bronze Age goddesses and priestesses of the Aegean. It is therefore not surprising to learn that on a certain day the Dagda met and lay with the great war goddess Morrigan, the same who in later romance was to become the fateful sister of King Arthur, Fata Morgana, Morgane la Fée. However, the pre-Celtic goddesses, though subjugated in Ireland, were by no means out of power – as witnessed by the myth of the meeting between Cuchullin and Morrigan. The goddess of the Fairy Hill is ultimately analogous with the great goddesses of the nuclear Near East, while the Celtic warrior heroes, with Cuchullin as supreme example, carry in their mythic deeds motifs that have come down from the old Bronze Age serpent-son and consort of the Great Mother, Dumuzi-Tammuz.
Etruria
On the plain of Tuscany west of the Appennines, situated between the Celts of the north and the rising power of Rome, were the twelve autonomous cities of the old Etruscan Confederation, symbolically centered around the sacred lake Bolsena. The origins of their culture date from the Villanova period, about 1100 – 700 B.C., which overlaps the northern Hallstatt and represents in the south about the same level of development. The high period of the confederation of cities of Tuscany extended from about 700 B.C. to the year 88 B.C., which they themselves regarded as their last. They were repeatedly harried from the north by the barbaric La Tène Celts, and gradually undone from the south by the growing power of Rome.
The number twelve of the cities of their confederation was a holy, symbolic sum, determined by religious, not practical considerations. Like constellations round the Pole Star these hallowed places grouped themselves around the grove of the god Voltumna, the site of which lay in the territory of Bolsena, called Volsinii by the Romans and Velzna by the Etruscans themselves. The god of this grove, Voltumna, was androgynous – beyond the pairs of opposites. Annually, at a festival celebrated in the grove amid the usual Classical festival events of athletic and artistic competition, the Year Nail was driven into the wall of the temple of the goddess Nortia (Fortuna), symbolizing the inevitability of fate.
The Disciplina Etrusca continued to a late date the spirit of the old Bronze Age cosmology of the ever-revolving, irreversible cycles: The image of space was also of the orthodox traditions: four quarters and the points between, each presided over by a deity, with a ninth, supreme Tinia, the lord of heaven, whom the Romans equated with Jupiter. The kings of the separate cities, who were Tinia incarnate, each wore a cloak symbolizing heaven, embroidered with stars. Each colored his face red, bore a scepter topped by an eagle, and rode in a chariot drawn by white steeds. As among the Celts, the king may have been sacrificed at the expiration of a term of eight or twelve years. The magnitude of the tumuli of these kings, and the luxury of the furnishings bear witness to a royal death cult.
With the fall of the city of Veii to Rome in 396 B.C., the fate of Etruria was sealed. The people of Etruria was offered Roman citizenship in 88 B.C., but authority in priestly affairs nevertheless remained with the old Etruscan masters. As late as 408 A.D. Etruscan conjurers offered their advice and aid to the Romans, when they were being threatened by Alaric and his Goths. There is even a report that Pope Innocent I, who was then bishop of the city, allowed them to give a public demonstration of their skill in the conjuring of lightning. “This,” wrote the Roman Stoic Seneca, “is what distinguishes us from the Tuscans, masters in the observation of lightning. We think that lightning arises because clouds bump against each other; they on the other hand hold the belief that the clouds bump only in order that lightning may be caused. For as they connect everything with God they have the notion that lightning is not significant on account of its appearance as such, but only appears at all because it has to give divine signs.”
The Augustan Age
Plutarch relates of Romulus and Remus that they were twins of a young virgin of the royal line of Aeneas. She was about to become a Vestal Virgin when she was found to be with child. She would have been buried alive had not her cousin, the daughter of the king, pleaded for her life. The twins were, upon birth, set afloat on the Tiber. They arrive under a wild fig tree, and a she-wolf came and nursed them and a woodpecker brought them food. The two creatures, being holy to Mars, gave credit - as Plutarch states – to the mother’s claim that Mars had been their father. When the twins grew up to be men, they had a quarrel – and Remus was slain by Romulus. When Romulus set about to develop his city (Rome), he stocked his city with women through his raid and rape of the Sabines.
As in Japan, so in early Rome: the living universe was regarded, both in its great and in its lesser aspects, with a sense of wonder before its sheer existence. The mysterious immanent forces, termed numina, were several. Most important of them were those of the home, where the leading celebrant was the pater familias. The family cult was concerned, first, with the mystery of its own continuity in time, as represented in rituals honoring the ancestors and in festivals of the general dead. The numina of the household were also revered: those of the larder (penates) and of household effects (lares). The guardian of the hearth, Vesta, was personified as a goddess, and that of the door, Janus, as a god. There was the idea also of a numen of the procreating power of each male, his genius, and of the conceiving and bearing power of the female, her juno. Genius and juno came into being and expired with the individual. Under Greek influence the power of the juno later became developed into the goddess Juno, as the guardian of childbirth and motherhood, who was identified with the Greek Hera. A series of other numina were also celebrated.
Some numina, of more constant presence, acquired more substantial character, as Jupiter, lord of the heavens and of storm, later identified with Zeus. Mars, the war god, equated with Ares; Neptune with Poseidon; Faunus, the patron of animal life; Silvanus, god of the woods. Comparably, of the female forces, Ceres became identified with Demeter; Tellus Mater with Gaea; Venus, originally a market goddess, with the Cyprian Aphrodite; and Fortuna with Moira. We hear too of Flora, goddess of flowers; Pomona, goddess of fruits; Carmenta, a goddess of springs and birth; Mater Matuta, first a goddess of dawn, then of birth.
In the larger sphere of the cult of the state, the counterpart of the pater familias was the king, originally a god-king. His palace was the chief sanctuary and his queen was his goddess spouse. In the larger family of the state, the numen of the hearth was Vesta. The same holy principle was honored throughout the history of pagan Rome in a circular temple, where a pure flame was attended by six highly revered women. The flame was extinguished at the end of each year and relighted in the primitive way, with firesticks. The dress of the Vestal Virgins resembled the gown of a Roman bride; and on assuming her vow, the dedicated nun was solemnly clasped by the Pontifex Maximus, the chief priest of the city, who said to her: “Te amato, capio” (“My beloved, I take possession of thee”). The two were symbolically man and wife. And if the Vestal broke her vow of chastity, she was buried alive. The correspondence of this Vestal Fire context with the rites of the regicide and relighting of the holy fire in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, is clear.
In the latter part of the sixth century B.C. an Etruscan royal house, the Tarquins of Tarquinia (now Corneto) governed Rome. They were expelled about 509 B.C. and it was then that the process of the Hellenization of the Roman religion began – thus bringing its local, archaic customs into accord with the new humanism of the rapidly growing chief centers of civilization. In the decades of Etruscan rule temples had been constructed and cult images fashioned of stucco; but for stone, Rome had to wait for the coming of Greek artisans in the second century B.C., at which time the Sibylline Books also arrived from Cumae in the south, an ancient holy site, some twelve miles west of Naples, founded by the Greeks as early as the eighth century B.C.
About the year 100 B.C. the Roman Pontifex Maximus, Q. Mucius Scaevola, proposed a theory of a threefold order of gods: the gods of poets, of philosophers, and of statesmen; of which the first two were unfit for the popular mind and only the second true. However, a fourth and far more potent order of gods than any of those of which he had taken thought was already becoming known to Rome in his day: those of the Near East, whose appeal was, in the Greek sense, neither poetic nor philosophic, and whose force, furthermore, would ultimately effect not the preservation but the undoing of the moral order of Rome and its civilization. The first occasion for the introduction of these highly charged alien powers had occurred in 204 B.C., when the Carthaginian army of Hannibal was still a threat in Italy. Repeated storms and hail had produced the impression that the gods themselves, for some reason, were at odds with the people of Rome, and the Sibylline Books were consulted. Their reply was that the enemy would be expelled only when the cult of the Great Goddess of the Phrygian city of Pessinus was introduced into Rome. This Magna Mater was Cybele, the mother-bride of the ever-dying, ever-resurrected savior Attis; and these two were simply the local forms of the pair Inanna and Dumuzi, Ishtar an Tammuz. All these formerly local cults had in the Hellenistic age been syncretized with the related Greek traditions of the Dionysian, Orphic, and Pythagorean movements – to which a modicum of late Chaldean-Hellenistic astrology had been added, to form a compound of macro-microcosmic lore that was to remain dominant in the Occident, one way or another, until the science of the Renaissance undid the old cosmology of a geocentric universe and opened marvels beyond anything dreamed of by the sages of the ancient mystic ways.
The Risen Christ
The earliest Christian documents to come down to us are Paul’s letters, 51 to 64 A.D., written to his converts in the busy Hellenistic market towns to which he had introduced the new faith. In these, the fundamental mythic image of the Fall by the Tree and Redemption by the Cross was already firmly defined. The Christian legend also took to itself a motif already well known both in Greek mythology – as in the myths of Leda and the Swan, Danaë and the shower of gold – and in the Zoroastrian myth of Saoshyant, namely the virgin birth. The present custom of celebrating the Nativity on December 25 seems not to have been instituted until the year 353 or 354 A.D., under Pope Liberius, possibly to absorb the festival of the birth of Mithra that day, from the mother rock. December 25 marked in those days the winter solstice: so that Christ, now, like Mithra and the Emperor of Rome, could be recognized as the risen sun.
The Feast of the Visit of the Magi is celebrated on January 6, which was the date of the festival in Egyptian Alexandria of the birth of the new Aion (a syncretistic personification of Osiris) from Kore (“the Maiden”) who was then identified with Isis, of whom the bright star Sirius (Sothis) rising on the horizon had been for millenniums the watched-for sign. The rising of the star announced the rising of the flood waters of the Nile, through which the world renewing grace of the dead and resurrected lord Osiris was to be poured over the land.
Thus we have two myths and two dates of the Nativity scene, December 25 and January 6, with associations pointing on one hand to the Persian and on the other to the old Egyptian sphere.
A rich environment of mythic lore was diffused with the neolithic arts of agriculture and settled village life across the whole face of the earth, from which elements have been drawn everywhere for the fashioning of hero myths, whether in Mexico of Quetzalcoatl, in Egypt of Osiris, in India of Krishna and the Buddha, in the Near East of Abraham and of Christ. Zoroaster, Buddha, and Christ are held to be historic characters, while some of the others may not have been. Whether fictional or historical, the names and figures of the great and little heroes of the world act irresistibly as magnets to those floating filaments of myth that are everywhere in the air.
The Cross-fertilization of Cults
It is clear that, whether accurate or not as to biographical detail, the moving legend of the Crucified and Risen Christ was fit to bring a new warmth, immediacy and humanity to the old motifs of the beloved Tammuz, Adonis, and Osiris cycles. Indeed, it was those early myths, filling the atmosphere of the whole eastern Mediterranean, that had furnished the ambient of readiness within which the Christian legend so rapidly grew and spread.
The pagan mythologies and their cults were, at that time, themselves in a phase of burgeoning transformation. The Hellenistic concept of “humanity” as a totality, transcending all racial, national, tribal, and sectarian forms, was operating everywhere to effect a cross-fertilization of cults. And a massive shift in social emphasis from rural to cosmopolitan populations had, centuries before, converted the old, beloved field divinities into intimately personal, psychologically effective spiritual guides, appearing in elite as well as in popular rites of initiation.
The high flowering time of these movements may have been around the middle of the second century, notably that period of the Antonines – Antoninus Pius (ruled 138 – 161) and Marcus Aurelius (ruled 161 – 180) – which Edward Gibbon marked as the apogee of the glory of the Roman Empire. This was when the various modes of worship that prevailed in the known world “ were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful,” so that “toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious accord. Rome gradually became the common temple of all her subjects; and the freedom of the city was bestowed on all the gods of mankind.” (Edward Gibbon).
The Fall of Rome
In the year 167 A.D., the sixth in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, Germanic hordes from the north broke through the Roman wall between the upper Rhine and Danube, swarming into northern Italy. Since they could not be repulsed, they were allowed to settle as farmers on assigned lands within the frontier. Marcus Aurelius died in 180. His dissolute son Commodus succeeded, and revolts erupted in Germany, Gaul, Britain, Northwest Africa, and Judaea. A conspiracy in Rome itself was suppressed in 183, but nine years later the emperor was slain. His successor, Pertinax, was overthrown the following year by a mutiny of the guard, and the great catastrophe of the empire began.
The Germans represented only one of the three great pressures to which the civilization of Rome was then being subjected. The second lay beyond the Tigris, in the ill-protected East, in the form of the new Persian dynasty of the Sassanids, who had overthrown the Parthians in 226 A.D. Whereas the German danger was only physical, representing in a sense a barbarization and a rejuvenation of the European spirit itself, the new Persian threat was rather a danger to the spirit in itself. Diocletian (ruled 284 – 305) moved his Roman court to Asia (Nicomedia) to meet the Persians. Although he matched their military force, he was no match at all for the seduction of the oriental mythology of his foe. The Sassanids were Zoroastrians, and a state church came to flower under a powerful Magian clergy. The openness of the West to Persian religious ideas can be judged from the rapid spread of Mithraism throughout the Roman Empire from the reign of Vespasian (ruled 69 – 79).
The Roman Empire itself was transformed into an Oriental machine state, where heavy taxation was followed by a collapse of the middle class, and by severe rules forbidding people to change occupation. The peasant class had long since been devastated by the wars. The Germans on one hand, the Orient on the other, had brought into being this Rome, into which Christianity now was to enter as a third transforming force. Diocletian dealt harshly with the Christians, recognizing them as enemies of the state, but Galerius, his successor (ruled 304 – 311), issued an edict of toleration on the good old pagan principle that every god is entitled to the worship of its own people.
In the course of the complicated interludes of murder, palace intrigue, open wars, and massacre that bridged the years between Galerius’ death and Constantine’s accession (311 – 324), the issue of the Christian cause hung precariously in the balance. This lasted until – as the famous legend goes, on the word of Constantine himself to his biographer Eusebius – in the course of his preparation for the crucial battle with Maxenius (his chief rival for the crown, who was inimical to the Christians), the still pagan Constantine beheld in the sky a shining cross, and his army saw it too. In a dream the following night, Christ appeared and bade him adopt that sign for his standard, which he did and, victory won, his loyalty thereafter was to the cross.
In the reign of Constantine, Christianity was accorded equal status with the pagan religions of the Empire, but half a century later, in the reign of Theodosius the Great (ruled 379 – 395), it was declared to be the only religion allowed. Theodosius the Great died in 395 A.D., and fifteen years later the Visigoths, under Alaric, ravaged Rome. Saint Augustine (354 – 430 A.D.) wrote his great work “The City of God” to answer the argument that though the city had flourished for a millennium under its own gods, when it turned to Christ it perished. Invasions by Huns into Europe, Vandals to Spain and Africa, Visigoths to Spain, Germanic Jutes, Angles and Saxons to Britain, and Franks to Gaul, combined with weak puppet emperors set up by Germanic officers transformed Europe until Charlemagne was crowned emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in 800 A.D.