research papers on mystery

• Login To RMS System
• About JETIR URP
• About All Approval and Licence
• Conference/Special Issue Proposal
• Book and Dissertation/Thesis Publication
• How start New Journal & Software
• Best Papers Award
• Mission and Vision
• Reviewer Board
• Join JETIR URP
• Call For Paper
• Research Areas
• Publication Guidelines
• Sample Paper Format
• Submit Paper Online
• Processing Charges
• Hard Copy and DOI Charges
• Check Your Paper Status
• Current Issue
• Past Issues
• Special Issues
• Conference Proposal
• Recent Conference
• Published Thesis

Contact Us Click Here

Whatsapp contact click here, published in:.

Volume 10 Issue 8 August-2023 eISSN: 2349-5162

UGC and ISSN approved 7.95 impact factor UGC Approved Journal no 63975

Unique identifier.

Published Paper ID: JETIR2308293

Registration ID: 523232

Page Number

Post-publication.

• Downlaod eCertificate, Confirmation Letter
• editor board member
• JETIR front page
• Journal Back Page
• UGC Approval 14 June W.e.f of CARE List UGC Approved Journal no 63975

Share This Article

Important links:.

• Call for Paper
• Submit Manuscript online

• Dr. Kumar Gaurav

Cite This Article

2349-5162 | Impact Factor 7.95 Calculate by Google Scholar An International Scholarly Open Access Journal, Peer-Reviewed, Refereed Journal Impact Factor 7.95 Calculate by Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar | AI-Powered Research Tool, Multidisciplinary, Monthly, Multilanguage Journal Indexing in All Major Database & Metadata, Citation Generator

Publication Details

Download paper / preview article.

Download Paper

Preview this article, download pdf, print this page.

Impact Factor:

Impact factor calculation click here current call for paper, call for paper cilck here for more info important links:.

• Follow Us on

• Developed by JETIR

Why Mystery Fiction Is So Engaging

Tracking down the killer appeal of the hit show Only Murders in the Building .

In the world of true crime podcasts, it’s practically a given that audiences want narrators to dig deeper into a case, if not solve it. Every little detail could be a clue or a murderer’s tell. So it’s no accident that the protagonists of Hulu’s hit mystery series Only Murders in the Building —Oliver (Martin Short), Charles (Steve Martin), and Mabel (Selena Gomez)—give audiences what they want.

When a murder takes place in their building, they decide to make a podcast to solve it. As one does.

The entertainment value of the show harks back to mystery novels. Trying to explain their appeal, philosopher Alan Harris Goldman writes, “like the detective hero, the reader must pay close attention to even seemingly insignificant details.” Likewise, fans of Only Murders take to Reddit to obsess over each episode, to see if they can reveal who the murder or murderers are.

But long before podcasts and streaming series, other media stoked popular desires to solve mysteries. In the sixteenth century, authors wrote leaflets detailing the latest horrific crime. And for nearly a hundred years now, characters like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys have opened up the joy of solving mysteries to a younger audience. In the backstory of Only Murders in the Building , Mabel and her high school friends—including Tim Kono (Julian Cihi), whose alleged murder inspires the podcast—refer to themselves as the Hardy Boys.

Goldman also observes that in mystery novels, “an apparent early solution to the crime will be false, especially if put forth by the police.” In Only Murders , the police rule Kono’s death a suicide, which our protagonists immediately doubt. Their next step is to figure out who murdered Kono—even accusing Sting (who plays himself) of the crime while interviewing him and occasionally pointing fingers at one another.

Weekly Newsletter

Get your fix of JSTOR Daily’s best stories in your inbox each Thursday.

Privacy Policy   Contact Us You may unsubscribe at any time by clicking on the provided link on any marketing message.

As Oliver, Charles, and Mabel keep investigating their theories, it becomes clear that there is not a clear-cut, comic book–style bad guy. Goldman writes that in good mystery fiction, “multidimensional characters include not only detectives, but culprits or villains as well.” When most real people do questionable things, of course, they’re not automatically evil, and detectives likewise can be far less than saintly. Even after the season finale of Only Murders , on October 19, “some questions may remain in the end in the end about morals and motives,” as Goldman writes.

But that is part of the fun of mystery fiction.

Support JSTOR Daily! Join our new membership program on Patreon today.

JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our articles for free on JSTOR.

Get Our Newsletter

More stories.

• How Pentecostalism Shaped Rock ’n’ Roll

L. M. Montgomery’s Plain Jane

When Aldous Huxley Dropped Acid

Whence Warchitecture

Recent posts.

• Raccoons in the Laboratory
• Genesis of the Modern American Right
• How a Rice Economy Toppled the Shogun
• Richard Gregg: An American Pioneer of Nonviolence Remembered 

Support JSTOR Daily

Sign up for our weekly newsletter.

• Search Menu
• Sign in through your institution
• Advance Articles
• Editors Choice
• Author Guidelines
• Submission Site
• Open Access Options
• Self-Archiving Policy
• Author Resources
• Read & Publish
• Reasons to Publish With Us
• About Postgraduate Medical Journal
• About the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine
• Editorial Board
• Advertising & Corporate Services
• Journals on Oxford Academic
• Books on Oxford Academic

Article Contents

Cocaine, ergot and morphine, john hunter and the body snatchers.

• < Previous

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: a tale of mystery, morality and medicine

• Article contents
• Figures & tables
• Supplementary Data

John Launer, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: a tale of mystery, morality and medicine, Postgraduate Medical Journal , Volume 95, Issue 1121, March 2019, Pages 178–180, https://doi.org/10.1136/postgradmedj-2019-136613

• Permissions Icon Permissions

How many characters can you name from fiction who have become bywords for wickedness? One pair of names will almost certainly come to mind: Dr Jekyll and My Hyde. Even if you have never read the book, or seen one of the many movies based on it, you will immediately recognise what these two names signify: how some people can change in an instant between two apparently quite different personalities – kind and thoughtful at one moment but then suddenly possessed by cold rage or becoming violent. The ‘Strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ by Robert Louis Stevenson tells the tale of a respectable London physician who is mysteriously beholden to a repulsive and ruthless individual living nearby, called Mr Hyde. 1 The doctor has written an extraordinary will in Hyde’s favour, specifying that Hyde should be his heir if he should ever disappear. Jekyll allows Hyde the key to the back door of his premises, and free rein within, to the disgust of his own servants. Jekyll’s lawyer Mr Utterson suspects that Hyde is blackmailing the doctor for some shameful acts in his past. Utterson doggedly tries to piece the mystery together, against Jekyll’s express request not to pry.

The horrific truth only becomes evident after Jekyll’s death. Jekyll has attempted to discover the chemical formula for separating his good nature from his evil impulses, but the experiment has gone horribly wrong. Each time he takes the drug, it turns him into the vicious Mr Hyde, but when he drinks the antidote, he only returns to his mundane self and not the saintly person he had hoped to become. Worse than that, he feels an increasing compulsion to take the potion that divests him of all his virtues, while the antidote lessens in its duration each time, leaving him helplessly trapped in the person of Hyde, and committing escalating acts of depravity and eventually murder. At the climax of the novel, when the supply of the antidote fails altogether, and when Utterson is on the very point of solving the mystery, Jekyll takes his own life.

A mixture of horror story, science fiction, detective novel, psychological thriller and moral fable, ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ is a masterpiece of all these genres, and outclasses most later books written in any of them. Writing in the late nineteenth century, before explicit pornography was legal, Stevenson could do no more than hint at some of the vices that the doctor attempts to suppress, and his evil counterpart enacts, but in some ways the hints are even more suggestive than if everything was spelled out. The book acts as a parable about what it means to be a good doctor, or attempt vainly to become a perfect one, and it presents a deeply critical portrait of medicine, with its power and potential harms.

Stevenson (See figure 1 ) knew from personal experience how drugs could be both life-saving and terrifying as well as habit-forming. He suffered all his life from a respiratory disease that may have been tuberculosis. Around the time when he conceived Jekyll and Hyde, he was taking cocaine and ergot to control pulmonary bleeding, and morphine for pain. He experienced hallucinations, and the story in the novel came to him in an instant during a dream that may well have been fuelled by drugs. 2 Although he was a Scot, Stevenson chose to locate his novel in central London. This allowed him to depict how the wealthy parts of the city, where society physicians like Jekyll practised, lay cheek by jowl with poor districts rife with poverty, alcoholism, prostitution, rent boys and criminality. He could also surround the action of his novel with evocative thick brown fog, to heighten the impression of moral fog, as Dickens had done. However, he almost certainly had a far more specific reason for choosing London: it connects the plot with one of the most famous figures in the history of British medicine.

Robert Louis Stevenson

The novel describes how Jekyll bought his house from ‘the heirs of a celebrated surgeon.’ It fronts a square of ancient and handsome houses. The household quarters lead on to a yard, and then to the deceased surgeon’s dissecting theatre, now converted into Dr Jekyll’s chemical laboratory. A flight of stairs goes up to the doctor’s office, where he swallows his potions. The back of the house is windowless, with a ‘blind forehead of discoloured wall.’ It contains a dilapidated door, opening on to a by-street. It is through this doorway that Mr Hyde leaves and enters. It is only gradually that readers are led to realise that the door leads to Jekyll’s residence, and to understand that the doctor’s grand and welcoming front door connects with a back door resonant with sinister associations. As the novelist Ian Rankin has shown, 3   4 Stevenson was almost certainly describing a real house, not a fictional one. The description fits the house in Leicester Square once occupied by John Hunter, the most celebrated British surgeon and anatomist of all time (see figure 2 ).

Plan of John Hunter’s house in Leicester Square © Wellcome Images

Hunter, another Scot, had been the most successful doctor in London in the eighteenth century, and surgeon to the King. In the days before anaesthetics, when surgery was still a barbaric and agonising procedure, Hunter made the specialty respectable and a subject of research. He created the vast anatomical collections that are now in the Hunterian museums at the Royal College of Surgeons of London, and in Glasgow. He depended for his work on a profuse and continual supply of cadavers, illicitly acquired. Although the front of his house was in a suitably fashionable area, he linked it to another that backed onto the less reputable Castle Street (now Charing Cross Road). Between the two parts of the house he built a private museum for his specimens, and his dissection room. It was at the rear entrance that Hunter would have received the gruesome deliveries of the ‘resurrection men’ also known as ‘body snatchers’ or grave robbers. These deliveries notoriously included the body of the ‘Irish Giant’ Charles Byrne. Hunter had thwarted Byrne’s wishes to be buried at sea in a lead coffin, by bribing the body-snatchers to intercept the corpse and bring it to him. John Hunter’s character, not just his house, had resembled Jekyll and Hyde.

As Rankin points out, Hunter’s house was ‘purpose-built for a surgeon’s double life.’ It was the kind of double life that Stevenson was fascinated by, and featured in a number of his stories and plays. Two years earlier, for example, he had published a ghost story called ‘The Body Snatcher’, that prefigured ‘Jekyll and Hyde’. 5 It centred around an elegant, charming and wealthy London physician called Wolfe Macfarlane who had managed to conceal his past as a ruthless anatomy demonstrator. In that role, Macfarlane had not only been a body-snatcher himself but, like the notorious Edinburgh murderers Burke and Hare, had on occasion killed for dissection material or to pre-empt blackmail.

It is impossible to draw any single moral from such a multi-layered novel, but there is no doubt that the most important part of the book is Jekyll’s final written confession, read posthumously by his lawyer Mr Utterson. In it, the doctor describes his discovery of “the thorough and primitive duality of man” and his own tragically unsuccessful attempts to separate this duality. In the confession, Jekyll also anticipates the future direction of human understanding. “Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines”, he predicts, and hazards the guess that man will be ultimately known to be a collection of “multifarious, incongruous, and independent” personalities, all residing within a single individual.

It is an extraordinarily prescient idea, which fits with recent advances in our psychological and neurological understanding of human nature. As individuals, we are not divisible into identifiably good and bad parts as Dr Jekyll hoped, let alone capable of distilling ourselves into one or other aspect as he tried to do. Rather, we are each constituted from multiple identities – neither good, bad nor indifferent, but constituted from many conflicting desires, drives, needs and identities. Somehow, we have to find a way of living with all of these and accepting their contradictions, however uncomfortable this may make us. As Stevenson suggested, that goes for us as doctors too.

The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

None declared.

Not required.

Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

Stevenson   RL . Strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and other tales [1886] . Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2006 .

Google Scholar

Google Preview

Harman   C . Robert Louis Stevenson: a biography . New York : Harper Collins , 2005 .

Ian Rankin investigates: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde . Available: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b007qyzv/ian-rankin-investigates-dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde [Accessed February 28 2019].

10 (more) fictional character addresses in London. 8. A square in SoHo . Available: https://exploring-london.com/2017/03/22/10-more-fictional-character-addresses-in-london-8-a-square-in-soho/ [Accessed February 28 2019].

Stevenson   RL . The body snatcher. In: Stevenson   RL , ed. Strange case of Dr Jekyll and MR Hyde, and other tales [1886] . Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2006 : 66 – 84 .

Email alerts

Citing articles via.

• Recommend to Your Librarian
• Advertising and Corporate Services
• Journals Career Network

Affiliations

• Online ISSN 1469-0756
• Print ISSN 0032-5473
• Copyright © 2024 Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine
• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Institutional account management
• Rights and permissions
• Get help with access
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Mystery & Detective Fiction: A Research Guide: Home

• Not at Gumberg?

Mystery & Detective Fiction

literature in which is expressed some sense of the poetry of modern life."

G. K. Chesterton

Sherlock Holmes

Portrait of the detective by Sidney Paget. Public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Library Links

• Ask A Librarian
• Research Databases
• Research Guides
• E-Journals List

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Creator of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.

Photo of the author taken in 1914 by Arthur Genthe. Public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Page created by:

Ted Bergfelt, MLS

Humanities Librarian

Library Liaison to the English Department

412.396.55351

Dorothy L. Sayers, Creator of Lord Peter Wimsey.

Welcome to this research guide designed to point the student researcher to the many resources offered by the Gumberg Library on mystery & detective fiction. It will provide access to:

• Reference works, both print and electronic
• Articles from magazines and journals
• Information on citation in MLA and Chicago styles
• Information of how to get materials not owned by the Gumberg Library

Use the tabs at the top of the screen to go to the different parts of the research guide.

Help is Available!

If at any time in your research you need help, click the "Ask A Librarian " link in "Library Links" box on the left side of the screen. Or you can contact me, Ted Bergfelt , creator of this page. Click to send an email , or you can call me at 412.396.5351.

Reference Works

Online Reference Collections

The Gumberg Library provides access to two suites of electronic reference works geared to literature, including mystery and detective fiction. Using both will provide your with a great amount of introductory information on your chosen literary topic.

Both of these collections of resources can be accessed off-campus, but you will have to enter your Multipass username and password word in order to use them.

Gale Literature Resource Center

This database provides information on thousands of authors and literary works. It includes biographies, reviews and news, literary criticism, and topic and work overviews.

Literature Online (LION)

Along with the full text of of 350,000 English and American works of literature, this database provides articles from 200 full-text literary journals and other key critical and reference resources.

Find Books - Topics

Click a link below to find all books in the catalog on that topic. 

• Detective and mystery stories
• Detective and mystery stories From the Classic Catalog, with subdivisions
• Detective and mystery stories - American - History and criticism
• Detective and mystery stories - English- History and criticism
• Detective and mystery films
• Detective and mystery plays
• Crime in literature
• Criminal investigation in literature
• Detectives in literature
• Espionage in literature
• Holmes, Sherlock
• Murder in literature
• Police in literature
• Private investigators in literature
• Pulp literature
• Spies in literature
• Women detectives in literature

Find Books - Authors

• Chandler, Raymond (Author)
• Chandler, Raymond (Subject)
• Chesterton, G. K. (Author)
• Chesterton, G. K. (Subject)
• Christie, Agatha (Author)
• Christie, Agatha (Subject)
• Collins, Wilkie (Author)
• Collins, Wilkie (Subject)
• Doyle, Arthur Conan (Author)
• Doyle, Arthur Conan (Subject)
• Hammett, Dashiel (Author)
• Hammett, Dashiell (Subject)
• Poe, Edgar Allan (Author)
• Poe, Edgar Allan (Subject)
• Sayers, Dorothy L. (Author)
• Sayers, Dorothy L. (Subject)

Literature Databases

Gumberg Library offers access to many databases providing citations to journal articles, and, in many cases, the full text of articles dealing with authors and their works. Tips on searching these databases. All of these resources can be accessed from off-campus, but you will need to enter your Multipass username and password in order to use them.

• MLA International Bibliography    The premiere database for language, literature and folklore. All serious researchers in those fields will need to use this.
• Literature Resource Center - LRC
• Literature Online (LION)   
• ABELL - Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature

Databases Covering Literature

All of these resources can be accessed from off-campus, but you will need to enter your Multipass username and password in order to use them.

• Academic Search Elite
• Google Scholar   
• Project Muse   
• ProQuest Central
• Next: Videos >>
• Last Updated: Jan 16, 2024 7:52 AM
• URL: https://guides.library.duq.edu/mystery-fiction

Guide for researching conspiracy theories and mystery topics

Example search or keywords, keywords and concepts for this topic:.

(This is not an exhaustive list, but it will help you get started.)

mystery conspiracy misinformation or disinformation conspiracy theor* [ the * tells the database to search different word endings like theory, theories, theorize, etc.] conspiracy theories or beliefs fears trust government conspiracy truth reality alternative reality fake news social media causes or reasons or factors impact or influence or effect perception true crime unsolved crime unsolved

Find articles - for background and framing the issues

• Criminal Justice Database Criminal Justice Database supports research on crime, its causes and impacts, legal and social implications, as well as litigation and crime trends. It includes U.S. and international scholarly journals, and correctional and law enforcement trade publications, dissertations, crime reports, crime blogs and other material relevant for researchers or those preparing for careers in criminal justice, law enforcement and related fields.
• Communication and Mass Media Complete Search for journal articles on topics such as communication, mass media, film, television, marketing, business communication, health communication, and more.
• Academic Search Premier A great place to start your research on any topic, search multidisciplinary, scholarly research articles. This database provides access to scholarly and peer reviewed journals, popular magazines and other resources. View this tutorial to learn how to go from a general idea to a very precise set of results of journal articles and scholarly materials.
• Sociological Abstracts This core database for the field of sociology contains information on sociology and social policy worldwide. Sociological Abstracts includes citations from the 1952-present. It provides abstracting and indexing of articles and book reviews drawn from thousands of journal publications, plus books, book chapters, dissertations, conference papers, and working papers.
• AnthroSource Search or browse major journals from the American Anthropological Association (AAA) including American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, and Medical Anthropology Quarterly.
• Anthropology Plus Anthropology Plus provides extensive worldwide indexing of journal articles, reports, commentaries, edited works, and obituaries in the fields of social, cultural, physical, biological, and linguistic anthropology, ethnology, archaeology, folklore, material culture, and interdisciplinary studies.. Coverage is from the late 19th century to the present.
• APA PsycInfo Find articles in thousands of psychology journals, from 1806 to current. View this tutorial to learn how to go from a general idea to a very precise set of results of journal articles and scholarly materials.

Find articles about an "event"

• U.S. Newsstream This link opens in a new window Search the most recent premium U.S. news content, as well as archives which stretch back into the 1980s featuring newspapers, newswires, blogs, and news sites in active full-text format.
• MasterFile Complete Search magazines, with a small number of journals and newspapers, covering a broad range of disciplines and topics. Includes photos and multimedia.
• America: History and Life America: history and life provides historical coverage of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present with over 2,000 journals including all key English-language historical journals. Limited to 6 simultaneous users.
• Historical Abstracts Find journal articles covering world history from 1450 to the present. Limited to 6 simultaneous users.

Guide for reading magazines, current news, commentary, and opinion

Sample of online books.

• The Stigmatization of Conspiracy Theory since The 1950s by Katharina Thalmann ISBN: 9780429020353 Publication Date: 2019-03-06 Are conspiracy theories everywhere and is everyone a conspiracy theorist? This ground-breaking study challenges some of the widely shared assessments in the scholarship about a perceived mainstreaming of conspiracy theory. It claims that conspiracy theory underwent a significant shift in status in the mid-20th century and has since then become highly visible as an object of concern in public debates. Providing an in-depth analysis of academic and media discourses, Katharina Thalmann is the first scholar to systematically trace the history and process of the delegitimization of conspiracy theory. By reading a wide range of conspiracist accounts about three central events in American history from the 1950s to 1970s - the Great Red Scare, the Kennedy assassination, and the Watergate scandal - Thalmann shows that a veritable conspiracist subculture emerged in the 1970s as conspiracy theories were pushed out of the legitimate marketplace of ideas and conspiracy theory became a commodity not unlike pornography: alluring in its illegitimacy, commonsensical, and highly profitable. This will be of interest to scholars and researchers interested in American history, culture and subcultures, as well, of course, to those fascinated by conspiracies.  

Solving a mystery: a new way to think about writing a research paper

Research papers are a staple of many high school and college history classes, and indeed are miniature versions of the work real historians do. If you’re a history nerd like me, nothing excites quite like historical research.

However, for many students, a research paper is a daunting assignment that can make the study of history seem more much more boring than it really is. So I want to offer a new way of thinking about a research paper that may make the process more engaging and enjoyable.

1. Choose your mystery

The world’s greatest detective has taken on a new case, a mystery complex and fascinating. Though the answer is obscure, he or she begins to gather evidence, compulsively, methodically. That’s how many mystery novels, detective TV shows, and historical research papers begin. You heard me.

The first step in writing a great research paper is to find a “mystery” that suits you. It doesn’t have to be a murder or a conspiracy (though if that’s your thing, history is certainly not short on murders or conspiracies); it can be a life, a relationship, a discovery, a battle, an event. If you’re lost for ideas, look around you; you can explore the historical precedents of the people, places, and activities in your own life. However, it’s crucial to choose a topic that interests you—the sort of thing you’d look up on Wikipedia just because you were curious—because otherwise your entire paper-writing process will be a drag. If the assignment does not allow you a choice of topic, talk to your teacher. Most instructors are happy to make special allowances for enthusiastic students.

2. Gather evidence

Once you’ve picked your “mystery,” dive right into the investigation. Learn as much as you can about the “case” by gathering evidence from all sorts of different sources. An encyclopedia is a good place to start, as is a library. I can’t tell you how many of my own papers have been inspired or aided by simply browsing shelves and pulling off anything that looks relevant. Begin to take notes and make sure to keep things organized. Starting a new page or document for each source and writing the citation info at the top is a good system that has the added benefit of saving you time on your bibliography later.

You’ll quickly find that you can’t take notes on everything, and that’s a good thing. Filtering your note-taking to what you instinctively find important or interesting will naturally narrow your scope and shape the story that you will tell (more on this in Step 3). With an increasingly firm idea of your topic, you can continue to grow your source list with more and specific pieces of evidence. Primary sources, if you can access them, will make your paper much more advanced and professional, and are also fascinating—don’t forget that a letter, diary entry, or firsthand account contains the voice of a real person! How to find appropriate primary sources is a separate topic that’s outside the scope of this blog post, but you can talk to your tutor or contact me through my tutor profile.

3. Solve the mystery

Once you have a well-organized, well-cited wealth of notes, your investigation is finished. The process should have shed light on the “mystery,” and also made you an expert on the topic. So let your expertise show with a confident thesis. 

A thesis is the resolution to the mystery, a sentence or cluster of sentences that clearly express what you’ve discovered. Like an attorney’s closing statement, it must make an argument. A statement of fact is not a thesis. A debatable statement of cause and effect, of relative importance or significance, of what (in your informed opinion) probably happened, is a thesis. Picking an adequate thesis can be tricky, especially if you don’t have existing experience with writing history, so again, if you have trouble, talk to your tutor or contact me.

Typically, theses go at the end of your essay’s first paragraph, which is known as the introduction. I’ve found that it’s helpful to write and polish the entire introduction before moving on to Step 4. This process can help you organize the whole paper in your head and build the lexicon that you’ll use for the rest of the essay.

4. Prove your case

You’ve stated your case—now you have to prove it. Write an outline to order your ideas and reorganize your evidence. This does not have to look pretty, nor do your ideas have to be fully formed or well articulated. What’s most important is tying the ideas to the evidence. If you’re working on a computer, try summarizing your essay in bullet points and then copying selections from your source notes and pasting them under the correct bullets.

Now, you write—but you’re not writing from scratch.

Think of it as imposing order on your outline. Turn your half-baked phrases into real sentences, your jumbled notes into focused quotations, your bullet points into paragraphs. It can be very exciting to see everything come together before your eyes.

When the dust clears, you should have an introductory paragraph culminating in a cogent thesis followed by a series of paragraphs laying out the details of your claim, supported by evidence from your sources. End with a conclusion, a final paragraph in which you tie everything together and perhaps introduce a new thought. There is no formula for the conclusion, but it’s best to wait to write it until everything else is done, giving a conclusion-worthy idea a chance to pop up during the body-writing process.

5. Celebrate

Congratulations, detective. You picked a case, investigated it, resolved it, and backed up your resolution with evidence. Now that you’re a professional mystery-solver, I hope that you will look forward to your next research paper.

Related Content

Nevada Today

Shakespearean mystery: what’s the story of newly discovered manuscript, handwriting similar to the playwright’s distinctive style abounds in previously unknown document.

Eric Rasmussen is reluctant — really, really reluctant — to draw any big conclusions from his newly unearthed manuscript that might have been written in pen and ink by William Shakespeare.

Even so, Rasmussen believes the single handwritten page he purchased at an auction of antiquarian documents not long ago holds promise to help scholars understand some of the mysteries surrounding the life and work of one of the world’s most famous playwrights.

Rasmussen , regents teaching professor and foundation professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, is among the world’s preeminent scholars on early texts of Shakespeare’s work. He’s also a collector of Elizabethan and Jacobean documents from the decades on either side of the year 1600.

So it’s no surprise that he made a $100 bid — the only bid, it turned out — when a small handwritten page from the 16th century came up for sale at an auction house in Social Circle, Ga., that specializes in old manuscripts.

But when Rasmussen received the manuscript and began studying it carefully, he quickly identified a quirk of handwriting that scholars long have associated with Shakespeare, and only with Shakespeare. The playwright wrote with a distinctive, looping hand whenever he encountered words with a combination of the letters h and a — words such as “that,” or “shalt,” or “hang” or “Shakespeare.”

That looping “h-a,” in fact, long has been cited as one of the primary pieces of evidence supporting the belief that Shakespeare was one of several authors of a play known as “Sir Thomas More” written around 1600. Now housed at the British Museum, the manuscript of that play — the only document believed to contain Shakespeare’s handwriting outside of a few signatures on legal documents — includes numerous instances of the distinctive “h-a.” Scholars who studied thousands of manuscripts from Shakespeare’s era haven’t found another single instance of that looping “h-a,” and one leading researcher described the chances of finding one as “astronomical.” Rasmussen beat those odds and has published his discovery in the September issue of the leading scholarly journal, “ The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America .”

Handwritten text covers both sides of the 7-inch by 5-inch manuscript he acquired. The text itself is a portion of a previously unknown English translation of a Catholic theological text written in the 5th century by the French monk Vincent of Lerins.

Importantly, the text includes numerous instances of the distinctive looping “h-a.”

That, Rasmussen said, raises two possibilities:

The first possibility: The newly discovered manuscript is, indeed, in the handwriting of Shakespeare. That would be a spectacular find in a world that knows of only six Shakespearean signatures on legal documents along with the possibility of the three handwritten pages of “Sir Thomas More.”

But that possibility, in turn, raises a host of new questions. Why, for example, was Shakespeare copying a centuries-old text written by a Catholic monk, especially at a time when possession of Catholic texts was largely forbidden in England?

Rasmussen wonders if Shakespeare might have worked as a professional scribe early in his career. Nothing at all is known of the playwright’s life between 1585, when he was 23 years old, and his arrival on the London stage in 1592. The possibility that he was a scribe, even if the only evidence is the single small page owned by Rasmussen, would begin to fill in those blank years.

The second possibility: The manuscript actually isn’t in the handwriting of Shakespeare. The swooping “h-a” isn’t unique to Shakespeare after all.

If that’s the case, Rasmussen said, untold numbers of books, articles and dissertations that attributed parts of the play “Sir Thomas More” to Shakespeare will be undermined. The words of the play, especially its oft-quoted plea for compassion for immigrants, would remain unchanged. But they no longer would necessarily be regarded as Shakespearean.

Many readers would feel the loss.

“The world at large celebrates Shakespeare’s enduring relevance, specially exemplified by his nuanced understanding of issues of immigration and nationalism,” Rasmussen said. “We want Sir Thomas More’s timeless speech — what ‘The International Rescue Committee’ called ‘Shakespeare’s Rallying Cry for Humanity’ – to have been written by, well, Shakespeare.”

So far, other leading Shakespeare scholars around the world have reserved judgment on either of the possibilities, although they’re intrigued by Rasmussen’s findings.

In the meantime, one other big mystery remains: How did a little piece of manuscript possibly containing the handwriting of William Shakespeare end up at an auction house in Social Circle, Ga., a town of 5,000 some 45 miles east of Atlanta?

That, Rasmussen said, probably always will be unknown. He surmises that a Catholic English family seeking to protect themselves from Protestant persecution might have hidden the page and the rest of the document from which it came.

But in the end, he said, no one ever will know the 400-year travels of that little 5-by-7 sheet with its distinctive “h-a.”

Please review the September 2024 issue of “ The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America ” for Rasmussen’s full scholarly article about the Shakespeare manuscript.

Research & Innovation

International collaborations strengthened at Lake Tahoe Summit

USAID group hosted by University of Nevada, Reno attends Lake Tahoe Summit

Humble hemp-seed and its byproducts hold promise to improve digestive health

University of Nevada, Reno researchers find hemp hulls may promote growth, diversity of gut biome

Professor Valerie Fridland receives competitive Fellowship for the second time

The National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship is supporting Fridland in the completion of another book

Researchers use observations to remove bias in climate models in Southern Hemisphere

An unexpected cooling trend, followed by warming, threw models off

Editor's Picks

Sagebrushers season 3 ep. 10: Lilley Museum Director Stephanie Gibson

University of Nevada, Reno hosts their second annual Latinx Parent Welcome ‘Mi Casa es su Casa’

Wolf Pack Map – a new resource is available to help navigate around the University campuses and locations

University of Nevada, Reno signs agreements with two universities in Italy

Summer in South Korea

Engineering student experiences the dalgona challenge, getting lost in Seoul and other adventures on an international exchange

Registering to vote: what University of Nevada, Reno students need to know

The ASUN Center for Student Engagement offers tips, resources

Picture of health: improving Latino representation in health care

From literacy to language barriers, Jose Cucalon Calderon, M.D, aims to bridge gaps in health care access, education and representation for Northern Nevada’s Latino population

Great Basin Mural celebration on Sept. 19 part of the University’s sesquicentennial celebrations

Artist Autumn Harry to discuss how her vision has come to life

New Extension educator to boost farming productivity and sustainability in rural Nevada

Andrew Waaswa will develop targeted training programs to support agricultural producers

University Libraries’ Vault Studio Classroom: A rare gem in academia

Special Collections aspires to be a welcoming, inspiring, and vital primary source laboratory for inquiry and discovery.

Study projects Humboldt lithium project will generate over $1 billion per year in investment and sales for Nevada

University quantifies estimated economic and fiscal impacts of the mine on Humboldt County and Nevada

Sanford Center for Aging receives $783,000 in grant funding

Funding will support programs for older adults in fiscal year 2025

• Bibliography
• More Referencing guides Blog Automated transliteration Relevant bibliographies by topics
• Automated transliteration
• Relevant bibliographies by topics
• Referencing guides

Murder mystery

• Most Cited Papers
• Most Downloaded Papers
• Newest Papers

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• Academia.edu Journals
•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

"The Influence of the Mystery Religions on Christianity"

Author:  King, Martin Luther, Jr. (Crozer Theological Seminary)

Date:  November 29, 1949 to February 15, 1950 ?

Location: Chester, Pa. ?

Genre:  Essay

Topic:  Martin Luther King, Jr. - Education

King wrote this paper for the course Development of Christian Ideas, taught by Davis. The essay examines how Christianity developed as a distinct religion with a set of central tenets and how it was influenced by those pagan religions it assimilated. King repeats material from an earlier paper, “A Study of Mithraism,” but he extends the discussion here to the influence of other mystery religions. 1  Davis gave the essay an A, stating: “This is very good and I am glad to have your conclusion. It is not so much that Christianity was influenced by the Mystery Cults, or borrowed from them, but that in the long process of history this religion developed. It, Christianity, is the expression of the longing of people for light, truth, salvation, security.

“That is, with this study you have made, we see the philosophy both of Religion and History. Underneath all expression, whether words, creeds, cults, ceremonies is the spiritual order—the ever living search of men for higher life—a fuller life, more abundant, satisfying life.

“That is essential. Never stop with the external, which may seem like borrowing, but recognize there is the perennial struggle for truth, fuller life itself. So through experience, knowledge, as through other forms, the outer manifestations of religion change. The inner spiritual, continues ever.”

The Greco-Roman world in which the early church developed was one of diverse religions. The conditions of that era made it possible for these religions to sweep like a tidal wave over the ancient world. The people of that age were eager and zealous in their search for religious experience. The existence of this atmosphere was vitally important in the development and eventual triumph of Christianity.

These many religions, known as Mystery-Religions, were not alike in every respect: to draw this conclusion would lead to a gratuitous and erroneous supposition. They covered an enormous range, and manifested a great diversity in character and outlook, “from Orphism to Gnosticism, from the orgies of the Cabira to the fervours of the Hermetic contemplative.”\[Footnote:] Angus, The Mystery Religions and Christianity, p. vii.\ 2  However it is to be noticed that these Mysteries possessed many fundamental likenesses; (1) All held that the initiate shared in symbolic (sacramental) fashion the experiences of the god. (2) All had secret rites for the initiated. (3) All offered mystical cleansing from sin. (4) All promised a happy future life for the faithful.\[Footnote:] Enslin, Christian Beginnings, pp. 187, 188.\

It is not at all surprising in view of the wide and growing influence of these religions that when the disciples in Antioch and elsewhere preached a crucified and risen Jesus they should be regarded as the heralds of another mystery religion, and that Jesus himself should be taken for the divine Lord of the cult through whose death and resurrection salvation was to be had. 3  That there were striking similarities between the developing church and these religions cannot be denied. Even Christian apologist had to admit that fact.

Christianity triumphed over these mystery religions after long conflict. This triumph may be attributed in part to the fact that Christianity took from its opponents their own weapons, and used them: the better elements of the mystery religions were transferred to the new religion. “As the religious history of the empire is studied more closely,” writes Cumont, “the triumph of the church will, in our opinion, appear more and more as the culmination of a long evolution of beliefs. We can understand the Christianity of the fifth century with its greatness and weakness, its spiritual exaltation and its puerile superstitions, if we know the moral antecedents of the world in which it developed.”\[Footnote:] Cumont, Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism, p. xxiv.\ 4  The victory of Christianity in the Roman empire is another example of that universal historical law, viz., that that culture which conquers is in turn conquered. This universal law is expecially true of religion. It is inevitable when a new religion comes to exist side by side with a group of religions, from which it is continually detaching members, introducing them into its own midst with the practices of their original religions impressed upon their minds, that this new religion should tend to assimilate with the assimilation of their members, some of the elements of these existing religions. “The more crusading a religion is, the more it absorbs.” Certainly Christianity has been a crusading religion from the beginning. It is because of this crusading spirit and its superb power of adaptability that Christianity  ahs  {has} been able to survive.

It is at this point that we are able to see why knowledge of the Mystery religions is important for any serious study of the history of Christianity. It is well-nigh impossible to grasp Christianity through and through without knowledge of these cults. 5  It must be remembered, as implied above, that Christianity was not a sudden and miraculous transformation, springing, forth full grown as Athene sprang from the head of Zeus, but it is a composite of slow and laborious growth. Therefore it is necessary to study the historical and social factors that contributed to the growth of Christianity. In speaking of the indispensability of knowledge of these cults as requisite for any serious study of Christianity, Dr. Angus says: “As an important background to early Christianity and as the chief medium of sacramentarianism to the West they cannot be neglected; for to fail to recognize the moral and spiritual values of Hellenistic-Oriental paganism is to misunderstand the early Christian centuries and to do injustice to the victory of Christianity. Moreover, much from the Mysteries has persisted in various modern phases of thought and practice.”\[Footnote:] Angus, The Mystery Religions and Christianity, p. viii.\

This is not to say that the early Christians sat down and copied these views verbatim. But after being in contact with these surrounding religions and hearing certain doctrines expressed, it was only natural for some of these views to become a part of their subconscious minds. When they sat down to write they were expressing consciously that which had dwelled in their subconscious minds. It is also significant to know that Roman tolerance had favoured this great syncretism of religious ideas. Borrowing was not only natural but inevitable. 6

The present study represents an attempt to provide a survey of the influence of the mystery religions on Christianity. In order to give a comprehensive picture of this subject, I will discuss  Four  {Five} of the most popular of these religions separately, rather than to view them en masse as a single great religious system. The latter method is apt to neglect the distinctive contribution of each cult to the religious life of the age and, at the same time, to attribute to a given cult phases of some other system. However, in the conclusion I will attempt to give those fundamental aspects, characteristic of all the cults, that greatly influenced Christianity.

The Influence Of The Cult Of Cybele and Attis

The first Oriental religion to invade the west was the cult of the Great Mother of the Gods. 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 powers of nature.\[Footnote:] Willoughby, Pagan Regeneration, p. 114.\ 7  She was the “Great Mother” not only “of all the gods,” but of all men” as well. 8  “The winds, the sea, the earth, and the snowy seat of Olympus are hers, and when from her mountains she ascends into the great heavens, the son of Cronus himself gives way before her, and in like manner do also the other immortal blest honor the dread goddess.”\[Footnote:] Quoted in Willoughby’s, Pagan Regeneration, p. 115. 9 \

At an early date there was associated with Cybele, the Great Mother, a hero-divinity called Attic who personified the life of the vegetable world particularly. Around these two divinities there grew up a “confused tangle of myths” in explanation of their cult rites. Various writers gave different Versions of the Cybele-Attis myth. However these specific differences need not concern us, for the most significant aspects are common in all the various versions. 10  We are concerned at this point with showing how this religion influenced the thought of early Christians.

Attis was the Good Shepard, the son of Cybele, the Great Mother, who gave birth to him without union with mortal man, as in the story of the virgin Mary. 11  According to the myth, Attis died, either slain by another or by his own hand. At the death of Attis, Cybele mourned vehemently until he arose to life again in the springtime. The central theme of the myth was the triumph of Attis over death, and the participant in the rites of the cult undoubtedly believed that his attachment to the victorious deity would insure a similar triumph in his life.

It is evident that in Rome there was a festival celebrating the death and resurrection of Attis. This celebration was held annually from March 22nd to 25th.\[Footnote:] Frazer, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, p. 166.\ The influence of this religion on Christianity is shown by the fact that in Phrygia, Gaul, Italy, and other countries where Attis-worship was powerful, the Christians adapted the actual date, March 25th, as the anniversary of our Lord’s passion.\[Footnote:] Ibid, p. 199\ 12

Again we may notice that at this same Attis festival on March 22nd, an effigy of the god was fastened to the trunk of a pine tree, Attis thus being “slain and hanged on a tree.” This effigy was later buried in a tomb. On March 24th, known as the Day of Blood, the High Priest, impersonating Attic, drew blood from him arm and offered it up in place of the blood of a human sacrifice, thus, as it were, sacrificing himself. It is this fact that immediately brings to mind the words in the Epistle to the Hebrews: “But Christ being come an High Priest … neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood … obtained eternal redemption for us.”\[Footnote:] Heb. 9:11, 12.\ Now to get back to the festival. That night the priests went back to the tomb and found it empty, the god having risen on the third day from the dead; and on the 25th the resurrection was celebrated with great rejoicing. During this great celebration a sacramental meal of some kind was taken, and initiates were baptised with blood, whereby their sins were washed away and they were said to be “born again.”\[Footnote:] Weigall, The Paganism In Our Christianity, pp. 116, 117.\ 13

There can hardly be any doubt of the fact that these ceremonies and beliefs strongly coloured the interpretation placed by the first Christians upon the life and death of the historic Jesus. 14  Moreover, “the merging of the worship of Attis into that of Jesus was effected without interruption, for these pagan ceremonies were enacted in a sanctuary on the Vatican Hill, which was afterwards taken over by the Christians, and the mother church of St. Peter now stands upon the very spot.”\[Footnote:] Ibid, p. 117.\

The Influence of Adonis

Another popular religion which influenced the thought of early Christians was the worship of Adonis. As is commonly known Antioch was one of the earliest seats of Christianity. It was in this city that there was celebrated each year the death and resurrection of the god Adonis. This faith had always exerted its influence on Jewish thought, so much so that the prophet Ezekiel\[Footnote:] Ezekiel 8:14.\ found it necessary to scold the women of Jerusalem for weeping for the dead Tammuz (Adonis) at the very gate of the temple. When we come to Christian thought the influence seems even greater, for even the place at Bethleham selected by the early Christians as the scene of the birth of Jesus was none other than an early shrine of this pagan god—a fact that led many to confuse Adonis with Jesus Christ.\[Footnote:] Weigall, op. cit., p. 110\ 15

It was believed that this god suffered a cruel death, after which he descended into hell, rose again, and then ascended into Heaven. Each following {year} there was a great festival in commemoration of his resurrection, and the very words, “The Lord is risen,” were probable used. The festival ended with the celebration of his ascention in the sight of his worshippers. 16  Needless to say that this story of the death and resurrection of Adonis is quite similar to the Christian story of the death and resurrection of Christ. This coincidence had led many critics to suppose that the story of the burial and resurrection of Jesus is simply a myth borrowed from this pagan religion. 17  Whether these critics are right in their interpretation or not still remains a moot question.

However when we come to the idea of Jesus’ decent into hell it seems that we have a direct borrow from the Adonis religion, and in fact from other religions also. Both the Apostles Creed and the Athanasian {Creed} say that between the Friday night and Sunday morning Jesus was in Hades. Now this idea has no scriptural foundation except in those difficult passages in the First Epistle of Peter\[Footnote:] I Peter 3:19–4:6.\ which many scholars have designated as the most ambiguous passages of the New Testament. In fact the idea did not appear in the church as a tenet of Christianity until late in the Fourth Century.\[Footnote:] Weigall, op. cit., p. 113.\ 18  Such facts led almost inevitably to the view that this idea had a pagan origin, since it appears not only in the legend of Adonis, but also in those of Herakles, Dionyses, Orpheus, Osiris, Hermes, Balder, and other deities.\[Footnote:] Ibid, p. 114.\

The Influence of Osiris and Isis

The Egyptian mysteries of Isis and Osiris exerted considerable influence upon early Christianity. These two great Egyptian deities, whose worship passed into Europe, were revered not only in Rome but in many other centers where Christian communities were growing up. Osiris and Isis, so the legend runs, were at one and the same time, brother and sister, husband and wife; but Osiris was murdered, his coffined body being thrown into the Nile, and shortly afterwards the widowed and exiled Isis gave birth to a son, Horus. Meanwhile the coffin was washed up on the Syrian coast, and became miraculously lodged in the trunk of a tree. This tree afterwards chanced to be cut down and made into a pillar in the palace at Byblos, and there Isis at length found it. After recovering Osiris’ dismembered body, Isis restored him to life and installed him as King in the nether world; meanwhile Horus, having grown to manhood, reigned on earth, later becoming the third person of this great Egyptian trinity.\[Footnote:] Weigall, op. cit., p. 119.\ 19

In the records of both Herodotus and Plutarch we find that there was a festival held each year in Egypt celebrating the resurrection of Osiris. While Herodotus fails to give a date for this festival, Plutarch says that it lasted four days, giving the date as the seventeenth day of the Egyptian month Hathor, which, according to the Alexandrian claendar used by him, corresponded to November 13th.\[Footnote:] Frazer, op. cit., p. 257.\ Other Egyptian records speak of another feast in honour of all the dead, when such lamps were lit, which was held about November 8th.\[Footnote:] Ibid, p. 258.\ 20

It is interesting to note that the Christian feast of all Souls, in honor of the dead, likewise falls at the beginning of November; and in many countries lamps and candles are burned all night on that occassion. There seems little doubt that this custom was identical with the Egyptian festival. The festival of all Saints, which is held one day before that of all Souls is also probably identical with it in origin.\[Footnote:] Weigall, op. cit., p. 121.\ This still stands as a festival in the Christian calendar; and thus Christians unconsciously perpetuate the worship of Osiris in modern times. 21

However this is not the only point at which the Religion of Osiris and Isis exerted influence on Christianity. There can hardly be any doubt that the myths of Isis had a direct bearing on the elevation of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, to the lofty position that she holds in Roman Catholic theology. As is commonly known Isis had two capacities which her worshippers warmly commended her for. Firstly, she was pictured as the lady of sorrows, weeping for the dead Osiris, and secondly she was commended as the divine mother, nursing her infant son, Horus. In the former capacity she was identified with the great mother-goddess, Demeter, whose mourning for Persephone was the main feature in the Eleusinian mysteries. In the latter capacity Isis was represented in tens of thousands of statuettes and paintings, holding the divine child in her arms. Now when Christianity triumphed we find that these same paintings and figures became those of the Madonna and child with little or no difference.\[Footnote:] Ibid, p. 123\ In fact archaeologists are often left in confusion in attempting to distinguish the one from the other. 22

It is also interesting to note that in the second century a story began to spread stating that Mary had been miraculously carried to Heaven by Jesus and His angels.\[Footnote:] The spreading of this story has been attributed to Melito, Bishop of Sardis.\ In the sixth century a festival came to be celebrated around this event known as the festival of Assumption, and it is now one of the greatest feasts of Roman Catholicism. It is celebrated annually on August 13th. But it was this very date that the festival of Dianna or Artemis was celebrated, with whom Isis was identified. Here we see how Mary gradually came to take the place of the goddess.\[Footnote:] Weigall, op. cit., p. 125.\ 23

The Influence Of The Greater Mysteries At Eleusis

In the first century of the Christian era the Eleusinian mystery cult was more favorable known than any of the cults of Greece. 24  Its fame and popularity was largely due to the connexion of Eleusis with Athens. The origin of this cult is obscure and uncertain. Some writers traced its origin to Egypt while others upheld Eleusis in Greece as the place of its birth.

In order to understand the type of religious experience represented by this important cult, we must turn to the myth of the rape of Demeter’s daughter by Pluto. It is stated with sufficient elaboration in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. In this myth, Persephone is depicted playing in the meadows of Mysia in Asia with the daughters of Oceanus and Tithys. While playing she was stolen by Pluto and carried off to the underworld to be his bride. The mother, frenzied with grief, rushed about the earth for nine days in search for her lost daughter, 25  As a result of her wandering, she came to Eleusis where she was seen, although not recognized, by the four daughters of Kekeas sitting near a public well called the Fountain of Maidenhood. After telling a fictitious tale of her escape from pirates, she won the sympathy of the girls who took her home and at her own request was given a job to nurse their infant brother, Demophon. After making herself known, she commanded the people of Eleusis to build her a temple. In connection with the temple, she established certain ceremonies and rites for her worship.

During her short stay at the temple of Eleusis, the whole earth grew barren. Men began to die for the lack of food while the sacrifices to the gods decreased in number because the animals were dying out. The other gods pleaded with her to relent but she refused to do so until Persephone was restored to her. Pluto, (also called Hades) therefore, at the request of Zeus released her but not before he had caused her to eat a pomegranate seed which magically required her return after a period of time. Demeter, in her joy at the restoration of her lost daughter, allowed the crops to grow once more and institute in honor of the event the Eleusinian mysteries which gave to mortals the assurance of a happy future life. 26

The significance of this story is immediately clear. It was a nature myth portraying a vivid and realistic picture of the action of life in the vegetable world in regards to the changing seasons. Every year nature passes through a cycle of apparent death and resurrection. In winter, all plants die, this represents the period of Demeter’s grief over her daughter. Spring, the time when all plants come back to life, indicates the return of plenty when the goddess maintains all life until autumn when her daughter returns to Hades and the earth becomes once more desolated.\[Footnote:] Willoughby, op. cit., p. 42.\ 27

The myth is also an example of poignant human experience, reflecting the joys, sorrows, and hopes of mankind in the face of death. The mysteries of human life and death are vividly enacted by Demeter, Persephone, and Hades. Hades, the god of death, stole the beloved daughter, Persephone, from Demeter, the life giver, who refused to admit defeat until she secured her daughter’s resurrection. In this legend, human beings, who are always loved and lost, are depicted as never or seldom loosing hope for reunion with their God. These fundamental human experiences and the life of nature are the main substances of the Eleusinian Mysteries. 28  To the searchers of salvation, the Eleusinian cult offered not only the promise of a happy future, but also a definite assurance of it.\[Footnote:] Nilsson, Greek Popular Religion, p. 54.\

Now when we observe the modern Greek Easter festival it seems certain that it preserves the spirit if not the form of the old Eleusinian worship. In the spring, those who had shared Demeter’s grief for the loss of her daugher welcomed the return of Persephone with all the joy that the returning life of vegetation might kindle. And today similar experiences are represented by Greek Christians. After mourning over the dead Christ, represented most conspicuously by a wax image carried through the streets, there comes an announcement by the priest, on the midnight before Easter Sunday, that Christ is risen. At this moment the light from the candle of the priest is passed on to light the candles of his companions; guns and firecrackers are discharged as they prepare to break the Lenten fast.\[Footnote:] Fairbanks, Greek Religion, p. 288.\ 29  As in the Eleusinian mysteries the modern Greek Christian finds this a moment of supreme joy. So we might say that Eleusinianism was not blotted out by Christianity. On the contrary many of its forms and some of its old content has been perpetuated in Christianity. 30

The Influence of Mithraism

Mithraism is perhaps the greatest example of paganism’s last effort to reconcile itself to the great spiritual movement which was gaining such sturdy influence with its purer conception of God.\[Footnote:] Dill, Roman Society From Nero to Marcus Aurelius, p. 585.\ Ernest Renan, the French philosopher and Orientalist, expressed the opinion that Mithraism would have been the religion of the modern world if anything had occured to halt or destroy the growth of Christianity in the early centuries of its existence. All this goes to show how important Mithraism was in ancient times. It was suppressed by the Christians sometime in the latter part of the fourth century a.d.; but its collapse seems to have been due to the fact that by that time many of its doctrines and practices had been adopted by the church, so that it was practically absorbed by its rival. 31

Originally Mithra was one of the lesser gods of the ancient Persian pantheon, but at the time of Christ he had come to be co-equal with Ahura Mazda, the Supreme Being. 32  He possessed many attributes, the most important being his office of defender of truth and all good things. In the Avesta,\[Footnote:] This is the sacred book of the religion of Iran.\ Mithra is represented as the genius of celestial light. He emerges from the rocky summits of eastern mountains at dawn, and goes through heaven with a team of four white horses; when the night falls he still illumines the surface of the earth, “ever walking, ever watchful.” He is not sun or moon or any star, but a spirit of light, ever wakeful, watching with a hundred eyes. He hears all and sees all: none can deceive him.\[Footnote:] Cumont, Mysteries of Mithra, pp. 2, 3.\ 33  Tarsus, the home of Saint Paul, was one of the great centres of his worship; and there is a decided tinge of Mithraism in the Epistles and Gospels. Such designations of our Lord as the Dayspring from on High, The Light, the Sun of Righteousness, and similar expressions seem to come directly from Mithraic influence.\[Footnote:] Weigall, op. cit., p. 129.\ 34

Again tradition has it that Mithra was born from a rock, “the god out of the rock.” It must also be noticed that his worship was always conducted in a cave. Now it seems that the general belief of the early church that Jesus was born in a cave grows directly out of Mithraic ideas. The words of St. Paul, “They drank of that spiritual rock … and that rock was Christ” also seem to be {a} direct borrow from the Mithraic scriptures. 35

The Hebrew Sabbath having been abolished by Christians, the Church made a sacred day of Sunday, partly because it was the day of resurrection. But when we observe a little further we find that as a solar festival, Sunday was the sacred day of Mithra; it is also interesting to notice that since Mithra was addressed as Lord, Sunday must have been “the Lord’s Day” long before Christian use.\[Footnote:] Ibid., p. 137.\ It is also to be noticed that our Christmas, December 25th, was the birthday of Mithra, and was only taken over in the Fourth Century as the date, actually unknown, of the birth of Jesus. 36

To make the picture a little more clear, we may list a few of the similarities between these two religions: (1) Both regard Sunday as a holy day. (2) December 25 came to be considered as the anniversary of the birth of Mithra and Christ also. (3) Baptism and a communion meal were important parts of the ritual of both groups. (4) The rebirth of converts was a fundamental idea in the two cults. (5) The struggle with evil and the eventual triumph of good were essential ideas in both religions. 37  (6) In summary we may say that the belief in immortality, a mediator between god and man, the observance of certain sacramental rites, the rebirth of converts, and (in most cases) the support of high ethical ideas were common to Mithraism as well as Christianity. In fact, the comparison became so evident that many believed the Christian movement itself became a mystery cult. “Jesus was the divine Lord. He too had found the road to heaven by his suffering and resurrection. He too had God for his father. He had left behind the secret whereby men could achieve the goal with him.”\[Footnote:] Enslin, op. cit., p. 190.\

Although the above paragraph makes it obvious that there are many similarities between these two religions, we must guard against the fallacy of seeing all similarity as direct borrowing. For an instance, the sacraments of baptism and the eucharist have been mentioned as rites, which were  preactice  {practiced} by both Christians and pagans. It is improbable, however, that either of these were introduced into Christian practices by association with the mystery cults. The baptismal ceremony in both cases (Christian and Pagan) was supposed to have the effect of identifying the initiate with his savior. But although baptism did not originate with the Christians, still it was not copied from the pagans. It seems instead to have been carried over from Jewish background and modified by the new ideas and beliefs of the Christians. The eucharist, likewise through similar in some respects to the communion meal of Mithraism, was not a rite borrowed from it. There are several explanations regarding the beginning of the observance of the Lord’s Supper. Some held that the sacrament was instituted by Jesus himself. Others saw it as an out-growth from Jewish precedents. Still others felt that, after the death of Jesus, the disciples saw in their common meal an opportunity to hold a kind of memorial service for him.

On the whole, early Christians were not greatly concerned about the likenesses between the Mithraic cult and their own. They felt at first that these competitors were not worthy of consideration, and few references to them are found in Christian literature. When Mithraism became widespread and powerful, it attracted so much attention that certain Christian apologists felt the need to present an explanation for the similarities in their respective characteristics. The only one they could offer was quite naive, but it was in keeping with the trends of thought in that age. They maintained that it was the work of the devil who helped to confuse men by creating a pagan imitation of the true religion. 38

There can hardly be any gainsaying of the fact that Christianity was greatly influenced by the Mystery religions, both from a ritual and a doctrinal angle. This does not mean that there was a deliberate copying on the part of Christianity. On the contrary it was generally a natural and unconscious process rather than a deliberate plan of action. Christianity was subject to the same influences from the environment as were the other cults, and it sometimes produced the same reaction. The people were conditioned by the contact with the older religions and the background and general trend of the time. 39  Dr. Shirley Jackson Case has written some words that are quite apt at this point. He says: “Following the lead of the apostle Paul, the Christian missionaries on gentile soil finally made of Christianity a more appealing religion than any of the other mystery cults. This was accomplished, not by any slavish process of imitation, but by {a} serious attempt to meet better the specific religious needs that the mysteries had awakened and nourished, and by phrasing religious assurances more convincingly in similar terminology.”\[Footnote:] Case, “The Mystery Religions,” The Encyclopedia of Religion, Edited by Vergilius Ferm, pp. 511–513\

The greatest influence of the mystery religions on Christianity lies in a different direction from that of doctrine and ritual. It lies in the fact that the mystery religions paved the way for the presentation of Christianity to the world of that time. They prepared the people mentally and emotionally to understand the type of religion which Christianity represented. They were themselves, in verying degrees, imperfect examples of the Galilean cult which was to replace them. They encouraged the movement away from the state religions and the philosophical systems and toward the desire for personal salvation and promise of immortality. Christianity was truly indebted to the mystery religions for this contribution, for they had done this part of the groundwork and thus opened the way for Christian missionary work. Many views, while passing out of paganism into Christianity were given a more profound and spiritual meaning by Christians, yet we must be indebted to the source. To discuss Christianity without mentioning other religions would be like discussing the greatness of the Atlantic Ocean without the slightest mention of the many tributaries that keep it flowing. 40

Christianity, however, [ strikeout illegible ] survived because it appeared to be the result of a trend in the social order or in the historical cycle of the human race. Forces have been known to delay trends but very few have stopped them. The staggering question that now arises is, what will be the next stage of man’s religious progress? Is Christianity the crowning achievement in the development of religious thought or will there be another religion more advanced?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Angus, S., The Mystery Religions and Christianity, (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York: 1925),
• Cumont, Franz, The Mysteries of Mithra, (The Open Court Publishing Co., Chicago: 1910).
• Cumont, Franz, The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism, (The Open House Publishing Co., Chicago: 1911).
• Dill, Samuel, Roman Society From Nero To Marcus Aurelius, (Macmillan and Co., New York: 1905), pp. 585–626.
• Enslin Morton S., Christian Beginnings, (Harper and Brothers Publishers, New York: 1938), pp. 186–200.
• Frazer, J. E., Adonis, Attis, Osiris, (London, 1922), Vol. I.
• Fairbanks, Arthur, Greek Religion, (American Book Co, New York: 1910).
• Halliday, W. R., The Pagan Background of Early Christianity, (The University Press of Liverpool, London: N.D.), pp. 281–311.
• Hyde, Walter, W, Paganism To Christianity in the Roman Empire, (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia: 1946).
• Moore, George F., History of Religions, (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York: 1913), Vol. I, pp. 375–405.
• Nilsson, Martin P., Greek Popular Religion, (Columbia University Press, New York: 1940), pp. 42–64.
• Weigall Arthur, The Paganism in Our Christianity, (Hutchinson and Co. London: N.D.).
• Willoughby, Harold R., Pagan Regeneration, (University of Chicago Press, Chicago: 1929).

1.  See “A Study of Mithraism,” 13 September–23 November 1949, pp. 211–225 in this volume.

2.  S. Angus,  The Mystery-Religions and Christianity  (London: John Murray, 1925), p. vii: “These Mysteries covered an enormous range, and manifested a great diversity in character and outlook, from Orphism to Gnosticism, from the orgies of the Cabiri to the fervours of the Hermetic contemplative.”

3.  The preceding three paragraphs are similar to a passage in King’s earlier paper, “A Study of Mithraism,” p. 211 in this volume.

4.  Grant Showerman, introduction to Franz Cumont,  Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism  (Chicago: Open House Publishing Company, 1911), pp. xi–xii: “Christianity triumphed after long conflict … It took from its opponents their own weapons, and used them; the better elements of paganism were transferred to the new religion. ‘As the religious history of the empire is studied more closely,’ writes M. Cumont, ‘the triumph of the church will, in our opinion, appear more and more as the culmination of a long evolution of beliefs. We can understand the Christianity of the fifth century with its greatness and weaknesses, its spiritual exaltation and its puerile superstitions, if we know the moral antecedents of the world in which it developed.’”

5.  The preceding two sentences are similar to a passage in “A Study of Mithraism,” p. 211 in this volume.

6.  The preceding paragraph is similar to passages in two of King’s earlier papers: “Light on the Old Testament from the Ancient Near East,” 14 September–24 November 1948, p. 163 in this volume; “A Study of Mithraism,” p. 212 in this volume.

7.  Harold R. Willoughby,  Pagan Regeneration  (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), p. 114: “Of these Oriental mystery religions the first to invade the west was the cult of the Great Mother of the Gods,… 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 powers of nature.”

8.  Willoughby,  Pagan Regeneration , p. 114: “She was the ‘Great Mother’ not only ‘of all the gods,’ but ‘of all men’ as well.”

9.  Willoughby quoted from Apollonius  Argonautica  1.1098 ff. ( Pagan Regeneration , p. 115).

10.  Willoughby,  Pagan Regeneration , pp. 116–117: “With [the Great Mother] was associated a hero-divinity called Attis who personified the life of the vegetable world particularly.… Around these two divinities, the Great Mother and the god of vegetation, there grew up a confused tangle of myths in explanation of their cult rites. Various writers, pagan and Christian, gave different versions of the Cybele-Attis myth.… The specific variations in all these diverse statements do not concern us, for certain significant elements were common to all the various versions.”

11.  Arthur E. Weigall,  Paganism in Our Christianity  (n.p.: Putnam, 1928), p. 121: “Attis was the Good Shepherd, the son of Cybele, the Great Mother, or, alternatively, of the Virgin Nana, who conceived him without union with mortal man, as in the story of the Virgin Mary.”

12.  Weigall,  Paganism in Our Christianity , pp. 121–122: “In Rome the festival of his death and resurrection was annually held from March 22nd to 25th; and the connection of this religion with Christianity is shown by the fact that in Phrygia, Gaul, Italy, and other countries where Attis-worship was powerful, the Christians adopted the actual date, March 25th, as the anniversary of our Lord’s passion.”

13.  Weigall,  Paganism in Our Christianity , pp. 122–123: “At this Attis festival a pine-tree was felled on March 22nd, and to its trunk an effigy of the god was fastened, Attis thus being ‘slain and hanged on a tree,’ in the Biblical phrase. This effigy was later buried in a tomb. March 24th was the Day of Blood, whereon the High Priest, who himself impersonated Attis, drew blood from his arm and offered it up in place of the blood of a human sacrifice, thus, as it were, sacrificing himself, a fact which recalls to mind the words in the Epistle to the Hebrews: ‘Christ being come an High Priest … neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood … obtained eternal redemption for us.’ That night the priests went to the tomb and found it illuminated from within, and it was then discovered to be empty, the god having risen on the third day from the dead; and on the 25th the resurrection was celebrated with great rejoicings, a sacramental meal of some kind being taken, and initiates being baptised with blood, whereby their sins were washed away and they were said to be ‘born again.’”

14.  Weigall,  Paganism in Our Christianity , p. 123: “There can be no doubt that these ceremonies and beliefs deeply coloured the interpretation placed by the first Christians upon the historic facts of the Crucifixion, burial, and coming again to life of Jesus.”

15.  Weigall,  Paganism in Our Christianity , pp. 115–116: “Now one of the earliest seats of Christianity was Antioch; but in that city there was celebrated each year the death and resurrection of the god Tammuz or Adonis,… This faith had always exerted its influence on Jewish thought, and, indeed, the prophet Ezekiel had found it necessary to scold the women of Jerusalem for weeping for the dead Tammuz at the very gate of the Temple; while, in the end, the place at Bethlehem selected by the early Christians as the scene of the birth of Jesus (for want to [ sic ] any knowledge as to where the event had really occurred) was none other than an early shrine of this pagan god, as St. Jerome was horrified to discover—a fact which shows that Tammuz or Adonis ultimately became confused in men’s minds with Jesus Christ.”

16.  Weigall,  Paganism in Our Christianity , p. 116: “This god was believed to have suffered a cruel death, to have descended into Hell or Hades, to have risen again, and to have ascended into Heaven; and at his festival, as held in various lands, his death was bewailed, an effigy of his dead body was prepared for burial by being washed with water and anointed, and, on the next day, his resurrection was commemorated with great rejoicing, the very words ‘The Lord is risen’ probably being used. The celebration of his ascension in the sight of his worshippers was the final act of the festival.”

17.  Weigall,  Paganism in Our Christianity , p. 117: “This coincidence has, of course, led many critics to suppose that the story of the burial and resurrection of Jesus is simply a myth borrowed from this pagan religion.”

18.  Weigall,  Paganism in Our Christianity , pp. 118–119: “But there is one feature of the Gospel story which seems really to have been borrowed from the Adonis religion, and, in fact, from other pagan religions also, namely, the descent into Hell. The Apostles Creed and Athanasian Creed say that between the Friday night and the Sunday morning Jesus was in Hell or Hades;… It has no scriptural foundation except in the ambiguous words of the First Epistle of Peter; it did not appear in the Church as a tenet of Christianity until late in the Fourth Century.”

19.  Weigall,  Paganism in Our Christianity , pp. 124–125: “The popular and widespread religion of Osiris and Isis exercised considerable influence upon early Christianity, for these two great Egyptian deities, whose worship had passed into Europe, were revered in Rome and in several other centres where Christian communities were growing up. Osiris and Isis, so runs the legend, were brother and sister and also husband and wife; but Osiris was murdered, his coffined body being thrown into the Nile, and shortly afterwards the widowed and exiled Isis gave birth to a son, Horus. The coffin, meanwhile, was washed up on the Syrian coast, and became miraculously lodged in the trunk of a tree,… This tree afterwards chanced to be cut down and made into a pillar in the palace at Byblos, and there Isis at length found it.… Afterwards, however, he returned to the other world to reign for ever as King of the Dead; and meanwhile Horus, having grown to manhood, reigned on Earth, later becoming the third person of this great Egyptian trinity.”

20.  Weigall,  Paganism in Our Christianity , pp. 125–126: “Herodotus states that the festival of the death and resurrection of Osiris was held in Egypt each year, though he does not give the date;… Plutarch also records the annual Osirian festival, and says that it lasted four days, giving the date as the seventeenth day of the Egyptian month Hathor, which, according to the Alexandrian calendar used by him, corresponded to November 13th. Now we know from old Egyptian records that a feast in honour of all the dead, when such lamps were lit, was held … about November 8th.”

21.  Weigall,  Paganism in Our Christianity , pp. 126–127: “But the Christian feast of All Souls, in honour of the dead, likewise falls at the beginning of November; and in many countries lamps and candles are burnt all night on that occasion.… there seems little doubt that this custom was identical with the Egyptian festival.… the festival of All Saints, which is held one day before that of All Souls and which was first recognised by the Church in a.d. 835, is undoubtedly identical with it in origin. This still stands as a festival in the ecclesiastical calendar; and thus Christians unconsciously perpetuate the worship of Osiris and the commemoration of all his subjects in the Kingdom of the Dead.”

22.  Weigall,  Paganism in Our Christianity , pp. 129–130: “There were two aspects of Isis which commended themselves particularly to her worshippers: firstly, that of the lady of sorrows, weeping for the dead Osiris, and, secondly, that of the divine mother, nursing her infant son, Horus. In the former capacity she was identified with the great mother-goddess, Demeter, whose mourning for Persephone was the main feature in the Eleusinian mysteries;… In her aspect as the mother of Horus, Isis was represented in tens of thousands of statuettes and paintings, holding the divine child in her arms; and when Christianity triumphed these paintings and figures became those of the Madonna and Child without any break in continuity: no archaeologist, in fact, can now tell whether some of these objects represent the one or the other.”

23.  Weigall,  Paganism in Our Christianity , pp. 131–132: “At about this time a story, attributed to Melito, Bishop of Sardis in the Second Century, but probably of much later origin, began to spread that Mary had been miraculously carried to Heaven by Jesus and His angels; and in the Sixth Century the festival of the Assumption, which celebrates this event, was acknowledged by the Church, and is now one of the great feasts of Roman Catholicism,… It is celebrated on August 13th; but that was the date of the great festival of Diana or Artemis, with whom Isis was identified, and one can see, thus, how Mary had gradually taken the place of the goddess.”

24.  Willoughby,  Pagan Regeneration , p. 36: “Among the cults of Greece none was more favorably known in the first century of the Christian era than the Eleusinian mysteries.”

25.  Willoughby,  Pagan Regeneration , p. 41: “In order to understand the type of religious experience represented by this important cult, it is necessary clearly to keep in mind the main points of the Eleusinian myth which was developed to explain and justify the cult rites. These are stated with sufficient elaboration in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter,… According to the story, Persephone,… was stolen by Pluto and carried off to the underworld to be his bride.… The mother, frenzied with grief, rushed about the earth for nine days.”

26.  Willoughby,  Pagan Regeneration , p. 42: “Demeter, in her joy at the restoration of her lost daughter, allowed the crops to grow once more and instituted in honor of the event the Eleusinian mysteries which gave to mortals the assurance of a happy future life.”

27.  Willoughby,  Pagan Regeneration , p. 42: “The experiential basis for this story is quite clear. It was a nature myth, a vivid depiction of the action of life in the vegetable world with the changing of the seasons. Each year nature passed through the cycle of apparent death and resurrection. In winter vegetable life was dead while Demeter, the giver of life, grieved for the loss of her daughter. But with the coming of spring the life of nature revived again, for the sorrowing mother had received her daughter back with rejoicing. Through the summer the mother abundantly maintained the life of nature until autumn, when again her daughter returned to the underworld and earth became desolate once more.”

28.  Willoughby,  Pagan Regeneration , pp. 42–43: “It was also a reflection of poignant human experiences, mirroring the joys, sorrows, and hopes of mankind in face of inevitable death. The three actors of the Eleusinian tragedy,… enacted the mystery of human life and death. The god of death himself stole the beloved daughter away from the life-giver; but the divine mother would not give up her loved one, and in the end she accomplished her daughter’s resurrection. Here was human experience made heroic and divine; for man has ever loved and lost, but rarely has he ceased to hope for reunion with the loved one. The Eleusinian myth told of these fundamental human experiences as well as of the life of nature.”

29.  Arthur Fairbanks,  A Handbook of Greek Religion  (New York: American Book Company, 1910), p. 288: “Certainly the Greek Easter festival seems to preserve the spirit if not the forms of the old Eleusinian worship. In the spring, those who had shared Demeter’s grief for the loss of her daughter welcomed the return of Persephone with all the joy that the returning life of vegetation might kindle. And today the Greeks mourn over the dead Christ, represented most realistically by a wax image borne through the streets on a bier; then at midnight before Easter Sunday the Metropolitan at Athens, the priest in smaller towns, comes out of the church announcing that Christ is risen; the light from his candle is passed to the candles of his companions and on to candles throughout the crowd, guns and firecrackers are discharged, and as they prepare to break their Lenten fast the multitude drop all restraint in the expression of wild joy.”

30.  Fairbanks,  Greek Religion , p. 293: “This religion was not blotted out by Christianity. On the contrary, whatever real life it had was perpetuated in Christianity, since the conquering religion had adopted many of its forms and some of the old content in these forms.”

31.  Weigall,  Paganism in Our Christianity , p. 135: “It was suppressed by the Christians in a.d. 376 and 377; but its collapse seems to have been due rather to the fact that by that time many of its doctrines and ceremonies had been adopted by the Church, so that it was practically absorbed by its rival.”

32.  Weigall,  Paganism in Our Christianity , pp. 135–136: “Originally Mithra was one of the lesser gods of the ancient Persian pantheon, but … already in the time of Christ he had risen to be co-equal with, though created by, Ormuzd (Ahura-Mazda), the Supreme Being.”

33.  The previous five sentences are similar to a passage in King’s earlier paper, “A Study of Mithraism,” pp. 213–214 in this volume. Franz Cumont,  The Mysteries of Mithra  (Chicago: Open Court, 1910), pp. 2–3: “In the Avesta, Mithra is the genius of the celestial light. He appears before sunrise on the rocky summits of the mountains; during the day he traverses the wide firmament in his chariot drawn by four white horses, and when night falls he still illumines with flickering glow the surface of the earth, ‘ever waking, ever watchful.’ He is neither sun, nor moon, nor stars, but with ‘his hundred ears and his hundred eyes’ watches constantly the world. Mithra hears all, sees all, knows all: none can deceive him.”

34.  Weigall,  Paganism in Our Christianity , pp. 136–137: “Tarsus, the home of St. Paul, was one of the great centres of his worship, being the chief city of the Cilicians; and, as will presently appear, there is a decided tinge of Mithraism in the Epistles and Gospels. Thus the designations of our Lord as the Dayspring from on High, the Light, the Sun of Righteousness, and similar expressions, are borrowed from or related to Mithraic phraseology.”

35.  Weigall,  Paganism in Our Christianity , p. 137: “Mithra was born from a rock, as shown in Mithraic sculptures, being sometimes termed ‘the god out of the rock,’ and his worship was always conducted in a cave; and the general belief in the early Church that Jesus was born in a cave is a direct instance of the taking over of Mithraic ideas. The words of St. Paul, ‘They drank of that spiritual rock … and that rock was Christ’ are borrowed from the Mithraic scriptures.”

36.  Weigall,  Paganism in Our Christianity , p. 145: “The Hebrew Sabbath having been abolished by Christians, the Church made a sacred day of Sunday, partly because it was the day of the resurrection, but largely because it was the weekly festival of the sun; for it was a definite Christian policy to take over the pagan festivals endeared to the people by tradition, and to give them a Christian significance. But, as a solar festival, Sunday was the sacred day of Mithra; and it is interesting to notice that since Mithra was addressed as  Dominus , ‘Lord,’ Sunday must have been ‘the Lord’s Day’ long before Christian times.… December 25th was the birthday of the sun-god, and particularly of Mithra, and was only taken over in the Fourth Century as the date, actually unknown, of the birth of Jesus.”

37.  The preceding five sentences are similar to a passage in “A Study of Mithraism,” pp. 222–223 in this volume.

38.  The preceding two paragraphs are similar to a passage in “A Study of Mithraism,” pp. 223–224 in this volume.

39.  The preceding four sentences are similar to a passage in “A Study of Mithraism,” p. 224 in this volume.

40.  The preceding two sentences are similar to a passage in “A Study of Mithraism,” p. 224 in this volume.

Source:  MLKP-MBU, Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers, 1954-1968, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University, Boston, Mass.

©  Copyright Information

Essay Service Examples Life

Mystery essays

9 samples in this category

Suspense, Characterisation And Resolution As The Attributes Of Mystery Story In The Book And Then There Were None

Life-changing family reunion: narrative essay, the rabies theory of edgar allan poe's mysterious death: critical essay.

800+ verified writers can handle your paper.

Critical Essay on the Mysteries Surrounding King Tut

Christie’s and then there were none: chapters one and two analysis, the theme of culpability in the novel and then there were none.

And Then There Were None: The Choice Between Right And Wrong

The topics of past and justice in the novels and then there were none and murder on the orient express, who was the murderer in "and then there were none".

Top similar topics

Join our 150k of happy users

• Get original paper written according to your instructions
• Save time for what matters most

Fair Use Policy

EduBirdie considers academic integrity to be the essential part of the learning process and does not support any violation of the academic standards. Should you have any questions regarding our Fair Use Policy or become aware of any violations, please do not hesitate to contact us via [email protected].

• History Classics
• Your Profile
• Find History on Facebook (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Twitter (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on YouTube (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Instagram (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on TikTok (Opens in a new window)
• This Day In History
• History Podcasts
• History Vault

The Mystery of Nikola Tesla’s Missing Files

By: Sarah Pruitt

Updated: June 1, 2023 | Original: May 3, 2018

After Nikola Tesla was found dead in January 1943 in his hotel room in New York City, representatives of the U.S. government’s Office of Alien Property seized many documents relating to the brilliant and prolific 86-year-old inventor’s work.

It was the height of World War II, and Tesla had claimed to have invented a powerful particle-beam weapon, known as the “Death Ray,” that could have proved invaluable in the ongoing conflict. So rather than risk Tesla’s technology falling into the hands of America’s enemies, the government swooped in and took possession of all the property and documents from his room at the New Yorker Hotel.

What happened to Tesla’s files from there, as well as what exactly was in those files, remains shrouded in mystery—and ripe for conspiracy theories. After years of fielding questions about possible cover-ups, the FBI finally declassified  some 250 pages of Tesla-related documents under the Freedom of Information Act in 2016. The bureau followed up with two additional releases, the latest in March 2018. But even with the publication of these documents, many questions still remain unanswered—and some of Tesla’s files are still missing.

Three weeks after the Serbian-American inventor’s death, an electrical engineer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was tasked with evaluating his papers to determine whether they contained “any ideas of significant value.” According to the declassified files, Dr. John G. Trump reported that his analysis showed Tesla’s efforts to be “primarily of a speculative, philosophical and promotional character” and said the papers did “not include new sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.”

The scientist’s name undoubtedly rings a bell, as John G. Trump was the uncle of the 45th U.S. president, Donald J. Trump. The younger brother of Trump’s father, Fred, he helped design X-ray machines that greatly helped cancer patients and worked on radar research for the Allies during World War II. Donald Trump himself cited his uncle’s credentials often during his presidential campaign. “My uncle used to tell me about nuclear before nuclear was nuclear,” he once told  an interviewer.

At the time, the FBI pointed to Dr. Trump’s report as evidence that Tesla’s vaunted “Death Ray” particle beam weapon didn’t exist, outside of rumors and speculation. But in fact, the U.S. government itself was split in its response to Tesla’s technology. Marc Seifer, author of the biography Wizard: The Life & Times of Nikola Tesla , says a group of military personnel at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, including Brigadier General L.C. Craigee, had a very different opinion of Tesla’s ideas.

“Craigee was the first person to ever fly a jet plane for the military, so he was like the John Glenn of the day,” Seifer says. “He said, ‘there’s something to this—the particle beam weapon is real.’ So you have two different groups, one group dismissing Tesla’s invention, and another group saying there’s really something to it.”  

Then there’s the nagging question of the missing files. When Tesla died, his estate was to go to his nephew, Sava Kosanovic, who at the time was the Yugoslav ambassador to the U.S. (thanks to his familial connection with Serbia’s most celebrated inventor). According to the recently declassified documents, some in the FBI feared Kosanovic was trying to wrest control of Tesla’s technology in order to “make such information available to the enemy,” and even considered arresting him to prevent this.

In 1952, after a U.S. court declared Kosanovic the rightful heir to his uncle’s estate, Tesla’s files and other materials were sent to Belgrade, Serbia, where they now reside in the Nikola Tesla Museum there. But while the FBI originally recorded some 80 trunks among Tesla’s effects, only 60 arrived in Belgrade, Seifer says. “Maybe they packed the 80 into 60, but there is the possibility that…the government did keep the missing trunks.”  

For the five-part HISTORY series The Tesla Files , Seifer joined forces with Dr. Travis Taylor, an astrophysicist, and Jason Stapleton, an investigative reporter, to search for these missing files and seek out the truth of the government’s views on the “Death Ray” particle-beam weapon and Tesla’s other ideas.

Despite John G. Trump’s dismissive assessment of Tesla’s ideas immediately after his death, the military did try and incorporate particle-beam weaponry in the decades following World War II, Seifer says. Notably, the inspiration of the “Death Ray” fueled Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars” program, in the 1980s. If the government is still using Tesla’s ideas to power its technology, Seifer explains, that could explain why some files related to the inventor still remain classified.

There is evidence that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president, Henry Wallace, discussed “the effects of TESLA, particularly those dealing with the wireless transmission of electrical energy and the ‘death ray’” with his advisors, according to FBI documents released in 2016. Along the same lines, Seifer and his colleagues in  The Tesla Files  uncovered the role played by Vannevar Bush, whom FDR appointed as head of the  Manhattan Project , in the evaluation of Tesla’s papers. They also looked at the possibility that FDR himself may have sought a meeting with the inventor just before he died.

By visiting some of the key places in Tesla’s life—from his laboratory in Colorado Springs to his last living quarters at the Hotel New Yorker to the mysterious wireless tower he built at Wardenclyffe, Long Island—Seifer, Taylor and Stapleton sought to unravel some of the mysteries surrounding the celebrated, enigmatic inventor. They also traveled to California, where some of Tesla’s other groundbreaking ideas —many of which were seen as unrealistic or even crackpot during his own lifetime—now fuel some of the most dominant industries in Silicon Valley.

Although some of his more sensitive innovations may still be hidden, Tesla’s legacy is alive and well, both in the devices we use every day, and the technologies that will undoubtedly play a role in our future. “Tesla is the inventor of wireless technology. He’s the inventor of the ability to create an unlimited number of wireless channels,” Seifer says of the inventor’s lasting impact. “So radio guidance systems, encryption, remote control robots—it’s all based on Tesla’s technology.”

Sign up for Inside History

Get HISTORY’s most fascinating stories delivered to your inbox three times a week.

By submitting your information, you agree to receive emails from HISTORY and A+E Networks. You can opt out at any time. You must be 16 years or older and a resident of the United States.

More details : Privacy Notice | Terms of Use | Contact Us

• Free Samples >
• Type of Paper >
• Research Paper

Mystery Research Papers Samples That Help You Write Better, Faster & with Gusto

When you require a little push to craft an excellent Mystery Research Paper, nothing does the job more efficiently than a top-notch example you can use for inspiration or as a template to follow. And hardly can you find a finer place with so many top-notch Research Paper samples than WePapers.com open-access repository of Mystery papers. Each Mystery Research Papers example you spot here can do one or several of these things for you: give you a hint about a noteworthy topic; motivate you to come up with an original outlook on a well-explored matter; showcase the best writing approaches you can utilize; and/or present you with accurate structure patterns. Apply this valuable knowledge to compose an impressive paper of your own or use our skillful authors' help to get an original Mystery Research Paper sample sent right to your email inbox.

We use cookies to improve your experience with our site. Please accept before continuing or read our cookie policy here .

Wait, have you seen our prices?

Climate Capitalists

Firms' perceived cost of green capital has decreased since the rise of sustainable investing. Green and brown firms perceived their cost of capital to be the same before 2016, but after the post-2016 surge in sustainable investing, green firms perceived their cost of capital to be on average 1 percentage point lower. This difference has widened as sustainable investing has intensified. Within some of the largest energy and utility firms, managers have started applying a lower cost of capital to greener divisions. The changes in the perceived cost of green capital incentivize cross-firm and within-firm reallocation of capital toward greener investments.

We are grateful to Marcin Kacperczyk, Lasse Pedersen, Monika Piazessi, and Martin Schneider for helpful comments. This research was supported by the Asness Junior Faculty Fellowship, the Becker Friedman Institute, the Fishman Faculty Research Fund, the Fama-Miller Center, the Lamfalussy Research Fellowship, and the William S. Fishman Fund. Gormsen has been a paid consultant to the World Bank in connection with projects on the cost of capital and firm investment in developing nations. We thank Rahul Chauhan, Jason Jia, Sonali Mishra, Esfandiar Rouhani, Felix Trikos, and Raymon Yue for outstanding research assistance. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

MARC RIS BibTeΧ

Download Citation Data

• project website

Working Groups

More from nber.

In addition to working papers , the NBER disseminates affiliates’ latest findings through a range of free periodicals — the NBER Reporter , the NBER Digest , the Bulletin on Retirement and Disability , the Bulletin on Health , and the Bulletin on Entrepreneurship  — as well as online conference reports , video lectures , and interviews .