be buried with the defunct, as an amulet that might protect him from the dangers of his journey through the under-world and open to him the gates of Paradise. The verses have the power of an incantation. The initiated soul proclaims its divine descent: “I am the son of Earth and Heaven”; “I am perishing with thirst, give me to drink of the waters of memory”; “I come from the pure”; “I have paid the penalty of unrighteousness”; “I have flown out of the weary, sorrowful circle of life.” His reward is assured him: “O blessed and happy one, thou hast put off thy mortality and shalt become divine.” The strange formula ἔριφος ἐς γάλ’ ἔπετον, “I a kid fell into the milk,” has been interpreted by Dieterich (Eine Mithras—Liturgie, p. 174) with great probability as alluding to a conception of Dionysus himself as ἐρίφιος the divine kid, and to a ritual of milk-baptism in which the initiated was born again.
We discern, then, in these mystic brotherhoods the germs of a high religion and the prevalence of conceptions that have played a great part in the religious history of Europe. And as late as the days of Plutarch they retained their power of consoling the afflicted (Consol. ad uxor., c. 10).
The Phrygian-Sabazian mysteries, associated with Attis, Cybele and Sabazius, which invaded later Greece and early imperial Rome, were originally akin to these and contained many concepts in common with them. But their orgiastic ecstasy was more violent, and the psychical aberrations to which the votaries were prone through their passionate desire for divine communion were more dangerous. Emasculation was practised by the devotees, probably in order to assimilate themselves as far as possible to their goddess by abolishing the distinction of sex, and the high-priest himself bore the god’s name. Or communion with the deity might be attained by the priest through the bath of blood in the taurobolion (q.v.), or by the gashing of the arm over the altar. A more questionable method which lent itself to obvious abuses, or at least to the imputation of indecency, was the simulation of a sacred marriage, in which the catechumen was corporeally united with the great goddess in her bridal chamber (Dieterich, op. cit. pp. 121–134). Prominent also in these Phrygian mysteries were the conception of rebirth and the belief, vividly impressed by solemn pageant and religious drama, in the death and resurrection of the beloved Attis. The Hilaria in which these were represented fell about the time of our Easter; and Firmicus Maternus reluctantly confesses its resemblance to the Christian celebration.[1]
The Eleusinian mysteries are far more characteristic of the older Hellenic mind. These later rites breathe an Oriental spirit, and though their forms appear strange and distorted they have more in common with the subsequent religious phenomena of Christendom. And the Orphic doctrine may have even contributed something to the later European ideals of private and personal morality.[2]
Literature.—For citation of passages in classical literature bearing on Greek mysteries in general see Lobeck’s Aglaophamus (1829); and the collection of material for Demeter mysteries in L. R. Farnell, Cults of the Greek States (1906), iii. 343–367. For general theory and discussion see Dr Jevons, Introduction to the Study of Religion; Farnell, Cults of the Greek States, iii. 127–213; Dyer’s The Gods of Greece (1891), ch. v.; M. P. Foucart, Les Grands mystères d’Eleusis (1900); Andrew Lang, Myth, Ritual and Religion (1887), pp. 264–276; Goblet d’Alviella, Eleusinia (1903). See further articles Dionysus; Great Mother of the Gods; Demeter. (L. R. F.)
MYSTICISM (from Gr. μýειν, to shut the eyes; μύστης, one
initiated into the mysteries), a phase of thought, or rather
perhaps of feeling, which from its very nature is hardly susceptible
of exact definition. It appears in connexion with the
endeavour of the human mind to grasp the divine essence or
the ultimate reality of things, and to enjoy the blessedness of
actual communion with the Highest. The first is the philosophic
side of mysticism; the second, its religious side. The first effort
is theoretical or speculative; the second, practical. The
thought that is most intensely present with the mystic is that
of a supreme, all-pervading, and indwelling power, in whom
all things are one. Hence the speculative utterances of
mysticism are always more or less pantheistic in character. On
the practical side, mysticism maintains the possibility of direct intercourse
with this Being of beings—intercourse, not through any
external media such as an historical revelation, oracles, answers
to prayer, and the like, but by a species of ecstatic transfusion
or identification, in which the individual becomes in very truth
“partaker of the divine nature.” God ceases to be an object
to him and becomes an experience. In the writings of the
mystics, ingenuity exhausts itself in the invention of phrases
to express the closeness of this union. Mysticism differs, therefore,
from ordinary pantheism in that its inmost motive is
religious; but, whereas religion is ordinarily occupied with a
practical problem and develops its theory in an ethical reference,
mysticism displays a predominatingly speculative bent,
starting from the divine nature rather than from man and his
surroundings, taking the symbolism of religious feeling as
literally or metaphysically true, and straining after the present
realization of an ineffable union. The union which sound
religious teaching represents as realized in the submission of
the will and the ethical harmony of the whole life is then reduced
to a passive experience, to something which comes and goes
in time, and which may be of only momentary duration.
Mysticism, it will be seen, is not a name applicable to any
particular system. It may be the outgrowth of many differing
modes of thought and feeling. Most frequently it appears
historically, in relation to some definite system of belief, as a
reaction of the spirit against the letter. When a religion begins
to ossify into a system of formulas and observances, those who
protest in the name of heart-religion are not unfrequently
known by the name of mystics. At times they merely bring
into prominence again the ever-fresh fact of personal religious
experience; at other times mysticism develops itself as a
powerful solvent of definite dogmas.
A review of the historical appearances of mysticism will serve to show how far the above characteristics are to be found, separately or in combination, in its different phases.
In the East, mysticism is not so much a specific phenomenon as a natural deduction from the dominant philosophic systems, and the normal expression of religious feeling in the lands in which it appears. Brahmanic pantheism and Buddhistic nihilism alike teach the unreality of the seeming world, and preach mystical absorption as the Eastern Systems. highest goal; in both, the sense of the worth of human personality is lost. India consequently has always been the fertile mother of practical mystics and devotees. The climate itself encourages to passivity, and the very luxuriance of vegetable and animal life tends to blunt the feeling of the value of life. Silent contemplation and the total deadening of consciousness by perseverance for years in unnatural attitudes are among the commonest forms assumed by this mystical asceticism. But the most revolting methods of self-torture and self-destruction are also practised as a means of rising in sanctity. The sense of sin can hardly be said to enter into these exercises—that is, they are not undertaken as penance for personal transgression. They are a despite done to the principle of individual or separate existence.
The so-called mysticism of the Persian Sufis is less intense and practical, more airy and literary in character. Sufism (q.v.) appears in the 9th century among the Mahommedans of Persia as a kind of reaction against the rigid monotheism and formalism of Islam. It is doubtless to be regarded as a revival of ancient habits of thought and feeling among a people who had adopted the Koran, not by affinity, but by compulsion. Persian literature after that date, and especially Persian poetry, is full of an ardent natural pantheism, in which a mystic apprehension of the unity and divinity of all things heightens the delight in natural and in human beauty. Such is the poetry of Hafiz and Saadi, whose verses are chiefly devoted to the praises of wine and women. Even the most licentious of these have been fitted by Mahommedan theologians with a mystical interpretation.
