Gods and Mysteries: The Revival of Paganism and the Remaking of Mythography through the Nineteenth Century

I had often wondered why the Olympians—Apollo, Athena, even Zeus, always vaguely irritated me, and why the mystery gods, their shapes and ritual, Demeter, Dionysus, the cosmic Eros, drew and drew me.

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Jane Ellen Harrison, Alpha and Omega (1915)

From 1800 to the 1920s, the evolution of mythography both informed and was informed by wider cultural developments: the great and difficult project of replacing that Christian mythos that for so long formed the imaginative core of Western culture; the struggle between the drive toward transcendence and a reviving reverence for the material world and its seasonal cycles; the brief but culturally significant dominance of pessimism and, in reaction, the celebration of fertility and the life force. The pressure of these very nineteenth-century concerns redefined the study of ancient Greek religion in this era. Throughout the period, we find a recurrent insistence that the mythology of the ancient Greeks (specifically, that of Homer) is less deeply, less truly religious than the Mystery cults of the chthonian deities Persephone, Dionysos, and Adonis. To trace the variations on this theme through the mythography and literature of the period is to see the era's religious attitudes in the very process of formation.

We shall begin with a specifically Romantic approach to Hellenic religion. The gods of Greek mythology were denigrated as finite in form, limited in sympathy with mortal suffering, and separate from humanity in their inhuman beauty and immortal joy—altogether inadequate, therefore, to a Romantic religious sensibility. By contrast, the Greek Mysteries were assumed to have satisfied the religious sensibility because they connected celebrants with one another, with nature, and with the infinite. This opposition between myth and Mystery (which may not seem characteristic of ancient Greek religion as we now perceive it) grew out of Christian and Romantic concepts of spiritual experience; more importantly, underlying this denigration of myth and elevation of Mystery was a very nineteenth-century agenda. In opposition both to rationalism and to a dogmatic Christianity, a pantheistic religious vision was created and projected on to the Mysteries. Further, against the dominant assumptions of the time, some Romantics suggested that the same religious sensibility informed both ancient Greek and modern Christian religion. This view deeply affected thinking about Greek religion through the high Victorian age. However, in the polarized atmosphere of the late Victorian era, denigrating the Greek gods became a way to attack the Christian cult of transcendence and immortality, the focus on life after death; the exaltation of the Mysteries became a way to celebrate the sacredness of this life, of sexuality, and of the life force. More and more, late Victorians privileged ritual over myth and saw the fertility cult as central to the development of religion, while the myths they still honored were those pertaining to the gods and goddesses of the Mysteries.

These developments, large as they are, are not the whole story. This article focuses on two entwined threads of a complex web (the attack on the Olympian gods and the exaltation of the Mystery cults) and shows how these threads helped to form the larger pattern of Victorian attitudes to ancient Greek myth and religion. The invaluable surveys of Victorian mythography by James Kissane, Janet Burstein, and Frank Turner omit two factors: first, the persistence of a Romantic strain in Victorian mythography and, second, the close relation between mythography and poetry throughout the era. It is an essential part of my argument that British perceptions of myth at this period cannot be understood solely by recourse to British mythography but must be supplemented by recourse both to more sophisticated Continental studies and to British poetry.

British mythographers were hampered even more than their German contemporaries by the need to conciliate a strong evangelical lobby deeply suspicious of paganism in any form. Romantic and Victorian poetry, however, offered a field in which myth could be used, revised, and even explicitly discussed with more freedom than was available to scholars at the time. Poets were not entirely exempt from evangelical pressure, but poetry was to a...