A nearly life-size fresco just discovered in Pompeii depicts the initiation rituals of the mystery cult of Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstasy. The fresco was over 100 years old when the eruption of ...

The poet Delmore Schwartz once said that time “is the fire in which we burn,” but on the contrary, much of our history has been consumed by water instead of fire. From the sunken city of ...

They were known as 'mystery cults' because their secrets could only be known by people who had been initiated, by way of drug use and communal dancing to pipe music. The cults were often linked ...

“These were mystery cults, so what they did remains a mystery, even in the ancient written sources,” Sophie Hay, an archaeologist at Pompeii, tells the London Times’ Philip Willa ...

And centuries after even the conversion of Constantine, we find endowments to liturgies, to mystery cults, to different Egyptian and Greco-Roman gods. Paganism continues on even after the ...

(In contrast to recognized public religion and worship, in the Greco-Roman world the mystery cults required the worshipper to be initiated.) For more than two decades the house was known as the ...

No longer seen as a joyless fate, the afterlife became more of a personal quest. Mystery cults, shrouded in secrecy, promised guidance for what would come after death. The mystery rites were ...

The second season will delve into the mystery of Wednesday's stalker, possibly involving the cult Morning Song. Bianca Barclay's complex past and potential involvement with the cult suggest a ...

A nearly life-size fresco just discovered in Pompeii depicts the initiation rituals of the mystery cult of Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstasy. The fresco was over 100 years old when the ...