Mystai

Résumé · Peter Mark Adams’ Mystai: Dancing out the Mysteries of Dionysos is the only full length, scholarly study of the ritual process of initiation into the mysteries of Dionysos as depicted in the frescoes of Pompeii’s Villa of the Mysteries. The Dionysian themed frescos of Pompeii’s Villa of the Mysteries constitute the single most important theurgical narrative to have survived in the Western esoteric tradition. No other practitioner account of the ritual process for conducting a mystery rite has survived down to today. The frescoes’ vivid and allusive imagery illuminates both the ritual activity of the participants as well as its esoteric import.