In the middle Ages the world was still centered, as it had been in Antiquity, on Mare Nostrum. The Roman Empire, which Constantine adorned with a new capital, had fallen upon sorry times. The glorious state of the early participate had declined considerably, forces from within and from without had robbed it of much of its power and prosperity, and the reforms of Diocletian had been insufficient to re-establish the former condition of internal strength.
During that era, mystery of religions did much more to modify the traditional religious ideas of the Greeks and Romans than did art, literature, or philosophy. As the intellectuals lost faith in the old gods and as the worship of the ruler seemed but an empty rite, they often turned to philosophy. When this loss of faith affected the masses they usually looked to the religions. Back of these religions was a long evolution about which little is known. The only persons who could have left us information about these cults were the initiates themselves and they were pledged to secrecy.
So historians have had to depend on scattered literary references, on archeological finds, and on the descriptions of the religions in the early Christian writers who regarded these religions with a somewhat jaundiced eye. Each cult seems to have begun as a nature rite connected with the change of the seasons, but, in the course of time, the old myths had been reinterpreted and the rites reorganized to turn on the birth, death, and resurrection of man (C. W. Jones, 1950).
The oldest cults in the Roman world were those in Greece that were connected with the worship of Dionysus, of Orpheus, and of Demeter. With these very interesting cults there were myths that explained that man had a twofold nature; he was part........
