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Updated: June 8, 2025
Some years ago, when fresh from the study of Sir J. G. Frazer's epoch-making work, The Golden Bough, I was struck by the resemblance existing between certain features of the Grail story, and characteristic details of the Nature Cults described.
In nothing does England's administration of India resemble Rome's government of its provinces in the seven centuries from the reduction of Sicily, 240 B.C., to the fall of the Western Empire, 476 A.D., so much as in the relation of nascent Christianity to the pagan cults which had made society what it was.
If we thus dismiss, as fruitless for our investigation, the most famous representative of the Hellenic Mysteries proper, how does the question stand with regard to those faiths to which Cumont is referring, the hellenized cults of Asia Minor?
If a foreigner, he was nevertheless adopted by the Aztecs and embodied one side of their life, particularly, perhaps, the protests against the human sacrifices, which were so prominent a feature in the cults of the other two deities. There were further a god of rain, a goddess of harvest, and a goddess of sensual pleasure, besides a great number of minor specialized deities.
As was noticed above, the requirement of such withdrawal from all employment that is of human use applies more rigorously to the upper-class women than to any other class, unless the priesthood of certain cults might be cited as an exception, perhaps more apparent than real, to this rule.
+259+. The sacredness of animals, and the fact that they are regarded as embodying the souls of things and human beings, have led to a coalescence of their cults with other religious observances.
He spoke in the name of the future Spain, of a Spain that would have no kings, because it would be governed by itself; that would pay no priests, because, respecting freedom of conscience, it would recognize all cults and give privileges to none.
At first this contrast was scarcely marked, and the very oracles of Apollo which were destined to undermine Juppiter's omnipotence were stored in Juppiter's temple and under his protection. The difference was felt more strongly as the priesthood of the Sibylline books began to grow in influence alongside of the pontiffs, the priests of the Juppiter cults.
The cults impute to their divinity the habits of thought answering to the stage of economic differentiation at which the cults took shape. The anthropomorphic divinity is conceived to be punctilious in all questions of precedence and is prone to an assertion of mastery and an arbitrary exercise of power an habitual resort to force as the final arbiter.
Though individual enterprise was checked by communal regulation, the specialization of local production was encouraged by difference of cults. Family-conservatism or guild-conservatism would tolerate small improvements or modifications suggested by local experience, but would be wary, perhaps superstitious likewise, about accepting the results of strange experience.
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