The World Cultus Paradigm

The Question

What if the study of religion had originated within Greco-Roman scholasticism around the time of Christianity’s beginnings?

Definitions

Mystiriology (Mystirios + logos) – the study of mystery cultuses, cultic expression, and cultic practitioners.

The World Cultus Paradigm – a framework of Greco-Roman scholasticism understanding cultuses as requiring aspects of initiation, community, ritual, and mystery.

Cultus – an initiatory community utilizing ritual, dramatic, and mythical elements for the purpose of unveiling the mysteries of the self, humanity, life, death, and/or the cosmos.

The Cultuses

The world cultuses are recognized as the Eleusinian, the Dionysian, the Pythagoreans, the Mithraic, the Jewish, and the Osirian.  These cultuses are acknowledged due to their importance in Greco-Roman society and their descriptive compatibility with the definition of cultus.  The World Cultus Paradigm is willing to include new cultuses into study should mystery cults be discovered in other cultures.  Initiation, community, ritual, and mystery were developed due to the scholar’s recognition of general family resemblance on those levels.  While the specificities of those cultuses were not the same, the categories of experience they were exploring were similar enough to be studied comparatively.  The cultural self-reflection to study the aspects of their cultic life likely arose due the contrast between their own cultuses and the developing cultuses of Christianity and Gnosticism. 

Emperor Cults and Cults of Popular Devotion are on the periphery and included under study, but their place within the world cultus paradigm is debated since they do not emphasize the revelation of mystery and are primarily fields of devotion. 

Characteristics of the World Cultus Paradigm

The World Cultus Paradigm affirms religious plurality understanding various mysteries as being mutually valid without the problem of exclusivity though this does not mean that scholars and practitioners do not consider some cultuses supreme over others.  The World Cultus paradigm has a tendency to classify foreign Gods as either different names for their own Gods or as separate distinct entities, ie Gods amongst Gods.  While this benefits polytheistic cultuses, monotheistic cultuses are seldom represented in their own perspective and are sometimes ignored entirely.

The field of Mystiriology seeks to understand what practitioners of mystery cults understand themselves to be doing, what ritual organizers understand their traditions to be revealing, what the symbolism of ritual and myth reveals about the mysteries in question, and what affect these cultuses has on their practitioners in relation to practitioners of other cultuses and non-practitioners.  Comparative cultic research is prevalent with scholarly arguments becoming intense over which cults are referring to similar, the same, or distinct mysteries and Gods.

The field of Mystiriology seeks to understand what practitioners of mystery cults understand themselves to be doing, what ritual organizers understand their traditions to be revealing, what the symbolism of ritual and myth reveals about the mysteries in question, and what affect these cultuses has on their practitioners in relation to practitioners of other cultuses and non-practitioners.  Comparative cultic research is prevalent with scholarly arguments becoming intense over which cults are referring to similar, the same, or distinct mysteries and Gods.

What is not included, what is not considered

The barbarian spiritualities of northern Europe were not included due to their lack of delving into the mysteries of the cosmos.  While ancient in their own right, they are not sufficiently advanced so as to be considered authentic forms of cultic expression and thus are not under the study of Mystiriology.

Philosophical traditions like Stoicism, Epicureanism, while important and dealing with questions of ethics, piety, and the manner one’s life should be spent, do not initiate their followers, possess formal ritualistic communities, or endeavor to unveil the mysteries of the world and thus do not meet the criterion to be included under the study of Mystiriology.

            The Christian and Gnostic cultuses, while genuinely communities of initiation delving into their own mysteries still do not come from the depths of time and are recent innovations, so while some may consider them valid subjects of study, they are not considered mainstream communities studied by Mystiriologists.

Analysis

            Like with most constructed fields of study, definitions and categories are applied inconsistently.  For example, Emperor Cults and Cults of Popular Devotion are included under study as legitimate, though still debated, cultuses despite their lacking emphasis on mystery.  Their inclusion can be understood as political power coming into play with scholars wanting to please the populace and the emperor or as the bias of the scholars seeing religious devotion from their own culture as being legitimate or assumed in ways that they would not recognize in other cultures.  Additionally, Christian and Gnostic Cultuses were left out due to the prevailing cultural assumption of the Greco-Romans that for cultuses to be legitimate or respected they must be ancient, despite this not being in the formal definition agreed upon by scholars in the field.  Despite not allowing initiation of members not already Jewish, the Jewish

            The World Cultus Paradigm diverges from much of commonly assumed ideas of religion by not including an ethical or doctrinal dimension of religion and by emphasizing experiential and ritualistic dimensions of religion.

            While displayed as a multicultural and open-minded religious perspective, the World Cultus Paradigm still leaves out proper representations of monotheistic cultures and would likely consider them odd, deviant, or even debased and unsophisticated.  Additionally, this perspective would be unlikely to decrease a society’s engagement in intercultural violence, as seen historically in the capture of enemy relics to place in home temples and the entire appropriation of cultuses like the Mithraic cultus. 

            In God is not One, we see notions of viewing religion via the approach of family resemblance, and this approach still operates within the World Cultus Paradigm even though the specific traditions and family had changed (Prothero 11-12).  Similarly to the summary of The Power of Ritual, the World Cultus Paradigm recognizes ritual action as deeply important though the World Cultus Paradigm puts it into the spiritual heart of religion while Kuile views it as simply a part of the human experience and not to be categorized as religious.  In regard to the analysis of how cultus affects the activities and life of their practitioners, the World Cultus Paradigm would likely recognize the manner in which storytelling and mythmaking can be used to organize humans in large groups in a similar way as described in Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind with religion being understood as a means of social organizing and construction of mental maps of reality (Harari).

Meta-Analysis

I wonder how this perspective of the study of religion would have shaped the development religion in the West.  Would Christianity have risen to the unique prominence that it has, or would it be another cultus among mystery cults each delving into their own mysteries, communities, and rituals?  The scholarly or scientific perspective on a human phenomenon can so easily be internalized to the point of almost self-colonization, i.e., the erasure of one’s culture in favor of observance of a perceived “rational.”  It seems to me that if the field of religious studies had happened around the origin of Christianity from the perspective of Greco-Roman scholars that none of the religions or cultures of the West would be remotely similar as they are in their current forms.  Not only is there intellectual pressure to conform to the perceived and accepted reasonable of a given day, but there is also socio-political pressure and the necessity of new cults and religious movements to survive in an intellectual climate where new religions were deviant and ancient religions were honorable.  This grasp for survivability can be seen in our own history with many early Christians’ emphasis on the Old Testament and their ancient heritage with Judaism, and this emphasis is likely the reason why even the mild toleration of Christians existed and is part of what allowed them to flourish and become a world power.  Religion does not exist in a vacuum and neither does Western history, if even this little minute detail of Greco-Roman scholastic life had played out differently, the world in which we live in would likely be entirely foreign to us.