Eleusis and Enlightenment

The Problem of the Mysteries in Eighteenth-Century Thought

Series: 

The age of Enlightenment – the so-called age of reason – was also, paradoxically, the age of the Eleusinian mysteries. By attempting to reveal Demeter's secret cult, British, French, and German thinkers and freemasons of the eighteenth century revealed more than they bargained for: the pagan origins of Christian doctrines such as the Trinity and the afterlife, and through the mythical gift of law and agriculture to Eleusis an alternative narrative of the origins of civilisation to that found in the Bible.
Copyright Year:
2024
E-Book (PDF)
Availability:
Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-69230-5
Publication:
18 Mar 2024
Hardback
Availability:
Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-54754-4
Publication:
28 Mar 2024
Cover Eleusis and Enlightenment

Prices from (excl. shipping):

€118.16€112.00 excl. VAT
Add to Cart
Ferdinand Saumarez Smith, PhD (2022), King's College London, is a historian of ideas and religion. As the director of Factum Foundation for Digital Technology in Preservation in the UK he has also curated exhibitions and organised cultural preservation projects worldwide.
"[This] compels us to reconsider the simplistic notion of the Enlightenment as reflecting an opposition between religion and reason. In fact, it is often through Freemasonry that a renewed interest in the Greek mysteries and their Christianization is cultivated. The conclusion emphasizes the division, established by the Romantic philosophers, between the two Testaments, and the replacement of Israel by Greece in their reflections on the origins of Christianity [...] For a first attempt, it is a masterpiece."

Guy Stroumsa in Kernos : Revue Internationale et pluridisciplinaire de religion grecque antique, volume 38, pp. 335-336
http://journals.openedition.org/kernos/9257 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15yqu)


"This book is eye-opening [...] [it] opens the gates to an extremely interesting field of exploration."

Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, in Bryn Mawr Classical Review (BMCR 2025.11.36)
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Figures

Introduction
 The Age of the Mysteries
 1 Freemasonry and Enlightenment
 2 Summary of Chapters

1 The Word Mystery
 1 Christianity not Mysterious: John Toland
 2 The Trinitarian Controversy
 3 Toland not Deist
 4 ‘Unfolding Nature’s Mysteries, and discoursing on Religion’

2 The Religion of the Patriarchs
 1 William Stukeley: The Antiquarian Freemason
 2 On the Mysterys
 3 The Egyptian Society
 4 True Noachida: James Anderson
 5 Chance Rays of the Hebrews: Andrew Michael Ramsay

3 Law, Agriculture, and the Afterlife
 1 William Warburton and the Ancient Legislators
 2 Agriculture after the Deluge: Noël-Antoine Pluche
 3 The Origin and the End of Society: Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger

4 The Common Temple of the World
 1 The Venemous Cure: Voltaire and Warburton
 2 The Festival of Universal Liberty: Antoine Court de Gébelin
 3 Illuminating the Heathen World: Johann August Starck
 4 The Essence of Religion: Nicolas-Marie Leclerc de Sept-Chênes

5 Christianity Revealed
 1 St John the Egyptian: Christian Ernst Wünsch
 2 The Elysium of Reason: Charles-François Dupuis

Conclusion
 Divided Testaments
Bibliography
 Manuscripts
 Printed Primary Literature
 Secondary Literature
Index
Academic libraries, research institutes, specialists, and graduate and post-graduate students with an interest in the history of ideas and religion, the reception of the classics, freemasonry in the early modern and Enlightenment periods, and the historiography of the Enlightenment. Keywords: Freemasonry, religio duplex, heterodoxy, apologetics, Socinianism, antiquarianism, civilisation, deism, classical reception, historiography of the Enlightenment, typology, biblical criticism, religious Enlightenment, Radical Enlightenment, mythography.
  • Collapse
  • Expand

Manufacturer information:
Koninklijke Brill B.V. 
Plantijnstraat 2
2321 JC
Leiden / The Netherlands
productsafety@degruyterbrill.com