Book contents
- Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity
- Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- Part I The Imperial Context
- 2 The Gandharan Problem
- 3 Writing the Art, Archaeology and Religion of the Roman Mediterranean
- 4 Mystery Cult and Material Culture in the Graeco-Roman World
- 5 The Viennese Invention of Late Antiquity: Between Politics and Religion in the Forms of Late Roman Art
- 6 The Rise of Byzantine Art and Archaeology in Late Imperial Russia
- 7 Ferdinand Piper’s Monumentale Theologie (1867) and Schleiermacher’s Legacy: The Attempted Foundation of a Protestant Theology of Art
- Part II After Imperialism: Orientalism and its Resistances
- Part III Post-Colonialist, Old Colonialist and Nationalist Fantasies
- Bibliography
- Index of Names
- Index of Subjects
4 - Mystery Cult and Material Culture in the Graeco-Roman World
from Part I - The Imperial Context
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 February 2020
- Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity
- Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- Part I The Imperial Context
- 2 The Gandharan Problem
- 3 Writing the Art, Archaeology and Religion of the Roman Mediterranean
- 4 Mystery Cult and Material Culture in the Graeco-Roman World
- 5 The Viennese Invention of Late Antiquity: Between Politics and Religion in the Forms of Late Roman Art
- 6 The Rise of Byzantine Art and Archaeology in Late Imperial Russia
- 7 Ferdinand Piper’s Monumentale Theologie (1867) and Schleiermacher’s Legacy: The Attempted Foundation of a Protestant Theology of Art
- Part II After Imperialism: Orientalism and its Resistances
- Part III Post-Colonialist, Old Colonialist and Nationalist Fantasies
- Bibliography
- Index of Names
- Index of Subjects
Summary
If Roman religion has been constructed as something of a void, defined in opposition to the Christianity that succeeded it, and the religions of the Greeks that preceded it, an important part of how it has been shaped is through comparison to forms of religious practice that have been called the ‘mystery’ or ‘Oriental’ cults.1 For some, in harking back to the kinds of ecstatic religious experience of the Greek world framed, for example, by Euripides’ Bacchae, these cults evoke the Dionysian dynamism of a Nietzschean archaic;2 for others, in their creative invention during the imperial period, their momentum owing to adherents rather than the state hierarchy, their possible soteriology and their vibrant material culture, they have seemed the ancestors of Christianity.3 Mystery cults are only a subsection of religion in the Roman period, but they have been seen as forming a distinct and peculiar category of their own.4
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- Empires of Faith in Late AntiquityHistories of Art and Religion from India to Ireland, pp. 81 - 109Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020
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