This book is eye-opening for those (like the present reviewer) who, out of a combination of naivety and laziness, assume that the history of scholarship on the Greek mysteries begins in the 19th century: specifically, with Christian Lobeck’s Aglaophamus (1825), which refuted Georg Friedrich Creuzer’s Symbolik und Mythologie der Alten Völker, besonders der Griechen (1810-1823). This debate, a precursor of other famous scholarly disputes such as Mommsen vs. Bachofen and Wilamowitz vs. Nietzsche, opposed a positivistic, contextualized study of ancient mystery cults to a romantic and truth-seeking quest for the ancient wells of eternal wisdom. The institutional structures of the Humboldtian university make it easy to trace the routes of philological quarrels between chair-holders and between their respective disciples. When starting the history of research from these 19th-century controversies as if they emerged ex nihilo seems too pitiful even for the lazy and naïve, institutions such as the Academie des Belles-Lettres et des Inscriptions and other royal and clerical establishments provide helpful precedents from previous centuries. This book, however, demonstrates that the grounds on which the ‘Founding Fathers’ of classical philology built our discipline were far deeper and more complex than is generally recognised. Masonic lodges, freelance dilettantes and solitary scientists, clerics in churches and anti-clerical thinkers in salons, conservative and revolutionary clubs: these constituted a most fertile ecosystem in Britain, France, and Germany that produced many different theories about the doctrines of the mysteries and their relation to Christianity and universal religion. While most of these constructions seem now ahistorical and ideologically motivated, we must not forget that the scientific study of ancient religion (as with many other fields) was painstakingly elaborated in dialectic relation to these earlier approaches. Where the Eleusinian mysteries are concerned, these 18th-century authors remain relevant because later scholars reacted to the theories they promoted. They may also have been influential in the subsequent history of Freemasonry and initiatory esotericism, but this does not concern us as classicists.
Most of the characters in this book will be unfamiliar to those of us whose superficial knowledge of the Enlightenment is fully occupied by the grand names of the history of philosophy and political thought. Gibbon, Voltaire, and Rousseau do appear occasionally, but they are not the focus of this research, which explores the work of lesser-known thinkers who, however, engaged more deeply with Eleusis. Only Bishop William Warburton has retained some notoriety to this day, largely due to the derision later scholars express for his interpretation of Aeneid VI as a transcript of the Eleusinian mysteries in his Divine Legation of Moses (1738-1741). Warburton’s book did, however, spark heated responses in Britain and on the continent, fuelling a general debate on the secret Eleusinian doctrines. Characters such as the physiocrat Antoine Court de Gébelin in France and the historian and Freemason Johann August Starck in Prussia, though now unknown to most, were prominent figures in their time, and their responses to Warburton show that academic dialectics within the respublica litterarum were thriving before universities began to monopolise them.
A brief introduction sets the scene: several ancient sources attributed authoritative (but secret) accounts of the origins of civilization to the Eleusinian mysteries. These doctrines supposedly covered agriculture (technical progress), law, and religion, making Eleusis obviously interesting for intellectuals who were prone to think creatively about these three matters. The book is then divided into five chapters, ordered both chronologically and geographically—which also entails a certain ideological evolution from the first to the last. The first three chapters focus on Britain. Chapter one deals with John Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious (1696), which revived the old Protestant contention that the pristine Christian revelation had been corrupted by pagan mysteries at a later stage. These mysteries, of Egyptian origin, were essentially idolatrous superstitions. This (perhaps too long) opening chapter provides a basis for comparison with subsequent authors, who redefined the value of the mysteries and their relationship with Christianity. Of course, this redefinition was applied not only to Toland’s theory, but also to many similar theories about ancient mysteries posited by seventeenth-century authors, from the Cambridge Neoplatonists to Catholic priests such as Daniel Huet and Athanasius Kircher.
Chapter two focuses on three figures of the next generation. First and foremost, we meet the English antiquarian Revd. William Stukeley, whose mostly unpublished work on the mysteries is discussed here at length for the first time. Stukeley was a collega minor and friend/rival of Warburton who postulated that Eleusis, like the Celtic remains in England that he also investigated, preserved echoes of an Adamic revelation that was later renewed in Christianity. Stukeley’s main source was the Bembine Table in Turin, whose hieroglyphics are now considered meaningless decorations from the 1st century CE, but which were widely regarded at the time as the key to the Egyptian Isis mysteries, from which the Eleusinian ones derived. Two other prominent Scottish Freemasons, James Anderson and Andrew Ramsay, also framed Masonic initiation on the model of the Eleusinian rites, which they believed preserved a primordial revelation to Noah. Chapter three first addresses Warburton’s theory that, while Christianity was anchored in Mosaic revelation, the lesser mysteries in Eleusis taught the people doctrines about the afterlife (as reflected in Vergil’s poetry); these doctrines are found in all religions except Israel’s, where God’s direct sovereignty made them unnecessary for maintaining law and order. Instead, the greater mysteries taught a select minority of initiates the true nature of pagan religion, adopting the Euhemeristic view that it celebrates mankind’s progress by divinizing benefactors. The second part of the chapter discusses Warburton’s critical reception in France by the Jansenist Noël-Antoine Pluche and the philosopher Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger, for whom Eleusis rather taught initiates that the expansion of agriculture was the civilising force for mankind.
All the different theories examined in chapters two and three reconcile the attachment to Biblical revelation with the legitimacy of the worldly structures, from the Church to Freemasonry, which transmit that revelation in alliance with the Eleusinian mysteries, since all such institutions ultimately collaborate for the benefit of mankind’s progress. In contrast, the next two chapters examine several other French and German authors who depict Christianity as a newcomer in contrast to an enlightened natural religion preserved in ancient mysteries. Chapter four looks at some writers who openly reject Warburton’s thesis, arguing that Eleusis represents human progress and natural deism (whose flame is kept alive in Masonic rites), while Christianity arrived later and is hence derivative—representing at worst the degeneration and at best the evolution of these primordial truths. Such is the view of the panoply of theories held by Voltaire, Court de Gébelin, Starck, and Louis XVI’s secretary of cabinet Nicolas-Marie Leclerc de Sept-Chênes. Chapter five introduces two further authors whose work makes an explicit attack on Christianity in comparison to Eleusis, offering a perspective directly opposed to that of Toland just a century earlier: Christian Ernst Wünsch, who opposes in his anonymous Horus (1783) an astronomical Greek Eleusis to an astrological Eastern Christianity, and Charles François Dupuis (Origine de tous les cultes, ou religion universelle, 1795), for whom Christ’s solar myth is derived from the corruption of the true doctrine of a natural deity initially celebrated at Eleusis. A brief conclusion provides some echoes of these ideas in Hegel and Schelling, as a sort of envoi for future research.
All in all, this book is well written and documented, though it is occasionally repetitious. Saumarez Smith offers a vivid and sufficiently contextualized portrait of the intellectual world of the 18th century through the lens of the Eleusinian mysteries, onto which these thinkers projected their own worries and obsessions about religion and human society—incited by the ritual secrecy of Eleusis and a firm belief in a revealed doctrine. Historians of the 18th century and of the origins of modern esotericism will naturally benefit from these materials, which show the ideological diversity and variety of approaches to religion within the sphere of Masonry, contrary to the usual unified portrayals of intellectual radicalism. Classicist readers will see their curiosity stimulated by the possibilities of expanding this research into fields more directly appealing to scholars of ancient religion. They might, for instance, undertake a systematic pursuit of the cultural reception of some specific texts on Eleusinian matters, like Diodorus’ or Clement’s, throughout the works of Enlightenment thinkers; or they might establish the degree of influence that these discussions had on later figures such as Creuzer or Max Müller. But these are other books that can now be wished for only because Saumarez Smith has written this one, which opens the gates to an extremely interesting field of exploration.