Religions and Cult Worship

The mystery religions are very old and at least in the ancient time, were got from two major sources. The first of it was from the Egyptian mythology on the god of Osiris, his spouse, known as the goddess Isis along with their child called the god Horus. The subsequent sources were from the Greek mythology on the goddesses known as Demeter and Persephone. Both of the traditions concerned a god or goddess who passed away either symbolically or actually, however was resurrected in some way. Both of the religions involved series of birth, death as well as reincarnation in nature especially, the seasons. Although a direct link between them is hard to find, both of the traditions may have reflected on an even ancient tradition of the sacred marriage of the Sumerian gods known as the Inanna and the Dumuzi.

Moreover, these traditions primarily had a pastoral origin and were likely linked to simple fertility customs, which were different by location. This feature of the mysteries is difficult to miss. The emphasis on the secrecy and multi-level initiation procedures is quite evident. This is speculated to be so due to invasions or the migrations; this meant that people of a given area came up with their personal religious customs, however as migrants moved in to their territory, they kept the customs to themselves. The pastoral customs became solid by the beginning of the first millennium. In Egypt, the Osiris or the Isis myth became the foundation of the Pharaonic authority; the Pharaoh was regarded as the Osiris’s agent on earth and came from him through Horus. The resurrected Osiris was the ruler of the netherworld, pharaoh was the ruler of the earth and Horus was the ruler of heaven.

The story of the mystery religions has never died o...

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...ic religion of the polis, however were special subsets of the worship of certain gods.

A number of the cults dealt particularly with the subject of afterlife. The basic Greek ideology of afterlife was not lovely. One existed as a shadow in the underworld. In the odyssey, as Odysseus goes through the underworld and gets together with the ghost of the supreme of fighters, Achilles, Odysseus tells him that he was very supreme in life and his everlasting fame so assured him that he should not consider being dead so rigid. Achilles then says, “Say not a word in death’s favor; I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man’s house and be above ground than king of kings among the dead.” In the olden days, magical spells along with prayers were mostly written on small sheets of paper or a beaten metal, which would eventually be rolled up and worn in an ornament on the neck.