One fact becomes immediately clear from an examination of those documents. The old national religion of Rome was dead.[10] The great dignitaries still adorned themselves with the titles of augur and quindecimvir, or of consul and tribune, but those { 205} archaic prelacies were as devoid of all real influence upon religion as the republican magistracies were powerless in the state. Their fall had been made complete on the day when Aurelian established the pontiffs of the Invincible Sun, the protector of his empire, beside and above the ancient high priests. The only cults still alive were those of the Orient, and against them were directed the efforts of the Christian polemics, who grew more and more bitter in speaking of them. The barbarian gods had taken the place of the defunct immortals in the devotion of the pagans. They alone still had empire over the soul.
With all the other "profane religions," Firmicus Maternus fought those of the four Oriental nations. He connected them with the four elements. The Egyptians were the worshipers of water--the water of the Nile fertilizing their country; the Phrygians of the earth, which was to them the Great Mother of everything; the Syrians and Carthaginians of the air, which they adored under the name of celestial Juno;[11] the Persians of fire, to which they attributed preeminence over the other three principles. This system certainly was borrowed from the pagan theologians. In the common peril threatening them, those cults, formerly rivals, had become reconciled and regarded themselves as divisions and, so to speak, congregations, of the same church. Each one of them was especially consecrated to one of the elements which in combination form the universe. Their union constituted the pantheistic religion of the deified world.
All the Oriental religions assumed the form of mysteries.[12] Their dignitaries were at the same time pontiffs of the Invincible Sun, fathers of Mithra, { 206} celebrants of the taurobolium of the Great Mother, prophets of Isis; in short, they had all titles imaginable. In their initiation they received the revelation of an esoteric doctrine strengthened by their fervor.[13] What was the theology they learned? Here also a certain dogmatic homogeneity has established itself.