I just found a very good article about mystery religions. The point of the article is to show how Satanism qualifies as a mystery religion, and he makes that point fairly well. The thing that he focuses on is what is called the inner vs. the outer mysteries.

Basically, what that means is that most religions consist of a couple different layers of stories and knowledge. The outer mysteries are what people see who are new to the religion or who have only a surface acquaintance of it. The inner mysteries consist of more complex or obtuse symbolism which exists within these same stories. A nice example of this might be created with mainstream Christianity vs. what is taught in various Gnostic Christian sects. Basically, the idea is that the outer mysteries draw in people who are of the proper mindset to be initiated into the inner mysteries, and filter out those who are not.

Actually, on that note, he has a good quote from what looks to be an interesting book called The Jesus Mysteries: Was the “Original Jesus” a Pagan God? - (and here’s an online summary of that book):

“Each Mystery tradition had exoteric Outer Mysteries, consisting of myths which were common knowledge and rituals which were open to anyone who wanted to participate. There were also esoteric Inner Mysteries, which were a sacred secret known only to those who had undergone a powerful process of initiation. Initiates of the Inner Mysteries had the mystical meaning of the rituals and myths of the Outer Mysteries revealed to them, a process which brought about personal transformation and spiritual enlightenment.”

He also talks a lot about “keys” which are given to neophytes in a religion to help them translate and decode the inner mysteries of their religion. One of the characteristics, he says, of mystery religions is that they keep the keys to their inner mysteries private, or they attempt to restrict access to them to people who have undergone their initiation.

This idea of public & private keys reminds me instantly of encryption technology. I’m also interested in how this relates to another technological analogy, in terms of getting the proper codecs to play a media file. (I mentioned codecs in a post yesterday also.)