I’ve just learned from my friend, the respected scholar of ancient religion, Jan Bremmer (University of Groningen), about his recently published book on ancient “mystery cults”: Jan N. Bremmer, Initiation Into the Mysteries of the Ancient World (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014). I immediately read a few chapters, and can already register my praise for the book. It’s a readable, obviously informed study, drawing upon and engaging the whole history of scholarship on these ancient religious developments. Another noteworthy feature is that it is an “open access” publication, the “epub” version available free. The online version is freely available here.
As Bremmer notes, scholarly understanding of these various “mystery cults” has developed (and changed, markedly in some matters) over the last 100+ years. For example, there are now doubts about previous claims of supposedly common “dying/rising gods” (there are gods that die, but hard to find gods that get resurrected). …
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James' Ramblings 
Interesting 🙂
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