Gods and Mysteries: The Revival of Paganism and the Remaking of Mythography through the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

F v rom 1800 to the 1920s, the evolution of mythography both informed and was informed by wider cultural developments: the great and difficult project of replacing that Christian mythos that for so long formed the imaginative core of Western culture; the struggle between the drive toward transcendence and a reviving reverence for the material world and its seasonal cycles; the brief but culturally significant dominance of pessimism and, in reaction, the celebration of fertility and the life force. The pressure of these very nineteenth-century concerns redefined the study of ancient Greek religion in this era. Throughout the period, we find a recurrent insistence that the mythology of the ancient Greeks (specifically, that of Homer) is less deeply, less truly religious than the Mystery cults of the chthonian deities Persephone, Dionysos, and Adonis. To trace the variations on this theme through the mythography and literature of the period is to see the era's religious attitudes in the very process of formation. We shall begin with a specifically Romantic approach to Hellenic religion. The gods of Greek mythology were denigrated as finite in form, limited in sympathy with mortal suffering, and separate from humanity in their inhuman beauty and immortal joy-altogether inadequate, therefore, to a Romantic religious sensibility. By contrast, the Greek Mysteries were assumed to have satisfied the religious sensibility because they connected celebrants with one another, with nature, and with the infinite. This opposition between myth and Mystery (which may not seem characteristic of ancient Greek religion as we now perceive it) grew out of Christian and Romantic concepts of spiritual