Harold R Willoughby: 10 books

Pagan Regeneration A Study of Mystery Initiations in the Graeco-Roman World BY Harold R. Willoughby "According to Harold Willoughby in Pagan Regeneration, the festival of Theoinia was celebrated by those families who were believed to be direct descendents of Dionysos' original followers,...

Of the Oriental mystery religions the first to invade the west was the cult of the Great Mother of the Gods, which came from central Asia Minor. The divine personage in whom this cult centered was the Magna Mater Deum who was conceived as the source of all life as well as the personification of all the...

THERE is a vague but widespread impression that the age that saw the emergence of Christianity was religiously destitute and morally decadent. The general and orthodox conviction of today is that all pagan religions current in the first century A.D. were in a bad state of degeneration. Originally they...

For Mithraism, soldiers were the best kind of missionaries. Mithra himself had been for long centuries the god of battles, and his cult was an exclusively masculine one. Soldiers, on the other hand, were pious to the point of being superstitious. The dangers to which they were constantly exposed caused...

Faced by the problem of the dual constitution of man, his soul Dionysian, divine and immortal, and his body Titanic, evil and mortal, Orphism found the solution of the antimony in two very different directions. On the one hand there was the prospect of a natural process of purification through a series...

"Will it, and it comes to be. Stop the working of your bodily senses, and then will deity be born in you." – HERMES TRISMEGISTUS. On its metaphysical side Hermetic rebirth involved nothing less than deification. "This is the good; this is the consummation for those who have got gnosis--they enter into...

The truth is that sheer physical intoxication from the drinking of wine was the essence of Dionysian religion. In the service of their god the Bacchanals drank wine until they were intoxicated. For the Bacchanals themselves, however, the experience was something more and higher than drunkenness. It was...

Isis was a mother-goddess personifying the power of life in nature and the unquenchable human hope for a final triumph in the conflict of life with death. She also embodied the beneficent influences of culture and religion; for she had taught men the arts and government and the mysteries. She dominated...

The initiates realized a real unio mystica with the divine, in itself a completely transforming process. If the sacred marriage was followed by a holy birth, then the idea of a new life "spiritual, heavenly, and from above," was further accentuated. With the exhibition of sacred relics the initiates...

There is a widespread impression that the age that saw the emergence of Christianity was religiously destitute and morally decadent. The orthodox conviction of today is that all pagan religions in the first century A.D. were in a bad state of degeneration… Completely contradictory to such an estimate...