The Mystery-Religions: A Study in the Relgious Background of by S. Angus

What is the unusual fascination of the Mystery-Religions for the traditional global and at the present time, a few 2,000 years later, for moderns? Why are those colourful old cults so little identified, all information regarding them suppressed or distorted by way of centuries of reputable faith in Europe? What did those historical ideals have that exacted the honor of Socrates, Plato, Virgil, Apuleius, and different nice males of the classical age? was once the faith that stamped them out, Christianity, itself initially a Mystery-Religion, with mystery teachings that in basic terms initiates may well understand and mental suggestions now not usually revealed?
This quantity, in most cases thought of the main worthy unmarried paintings in English at the topic, makes an attempt to respond to such questions, whereas even as supplying a legitimate, sturdy history within the quite a few kinds of spiritual adventure which are grouped jointly below the time period Mystery-Religions. From the Eleusinian mysteries of historical Greece throughout the Asiatic cults of Cybele, the Magna Mater, and Attis; the unusual rompings of the Dionysian teams; Orphics with their influence on Greek philosophy; the Mysteries emergent from Egypt — Hermes Trismegistos, the Pymander, Isis, and Osiris; on as much as the faith that swept the close to East and Europe, carried through the Roman legions, and that just about turned principal for us at the present time — Mithraism.
Each of those religions provided whatever to its devotees that the older ethnic and kingdom religions couldn't: a feeling of the worth of the person; heightened parts of expertise, even to the manipulations of sensory adventure; mental insights which are basically now being liked. but all of them died out inside a few centuries of the Christian period, Gnosticism (apart from a couple of vestigial teams within the close to East and Europe) subsuming their background last.