Month: October 2026

Hermes Trismegistus had two careers in the history of ideas. The first was in late antique Egypt, where Greek-speaking authors wrote dialogues of revelation in his name. The second was in the Renaissance, which took him for a sage older…

The Roman Empire had no creed, but it did have a cult that every subject could be asked to perform. Between Augustus and Constantine the worship of the emperor, his Genius and his deified predecessors became the common language of…

Philosophy, as Chapter 42 showed, remained the creed of an educated few. Samuel Dill argues that the masses of the Roman Empire found their “Divine light” elsewhere: “the voice came to them at last from the regions of the East.…

After Alexander, the free city-state lost its central place in Greek life. Rome then built a world empire, and the philosophical schools came to offer educated Greeks and Romans what the civic cults no longer could: a rule of life,…

Between the sixth and the fourth centuries BCE the Greek world produced a new kind of religious thinking. It did not replace the civic cults or the mysteries. It recast their promises (purification, the survival of the soul, a better…

Eleusis offered a better lot after death through a single, publicly administered rite. A second current of Greek religion offered something more radical. Through Dionysus it offered ecstatic union with a god of wine, madness and rebirth. Through the literature…

The civic gods of the previous chapter guarded the city but promised the individual little beyond the grave. The Mysteries of Demeter and her daughter Persephone (Kore) at Eleusis, west of Athens, filled that gap for close to two thousand…

Part 5 moves from the Iranian and Near Eastern worlds to the Greek city-state, where religion took a form very different from the scripture-based and priest-led systems treated earlier in this study. Greek cult ran through the institutions of the…

Part 4 closes with a question the Second Temple period did not settle and modern history made political: who, by descent, belief or law, counts as a Jew? The question matters for the study of religion because modern answers to…

Between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries, rabbinic Judaism, the Talmudic order described in the previous chapter, broke into the forms it has today. Kabbalah, a mystical system, produced a messianic explosion in 1666 that ended in apostasy. Out of…