"I have read Mystai with admiration of both your insights and their presentation by the publisher. I have loved all these characters for years. To treat them as mnemonic solves at a stroke the intrusion of mythical beings among contemporary Romans that has stymied other interpreters."
Joscelyn Godwin
“A meticulous study of this book will most likely feel like a daydream transporting the reader to the ancient world of the Mysteries and their gods initiated by Adams’ eloquent writing and personal insights supported by beautiful images of the frescoes of the Villa of the Mysteries and other ancient iconographies and artefacts. The functional combination of text and imagery is what makes Mystai such a potent and inspiring book ... I wholeheartedly recommend that those interested in the Mysteries, both in theory and practice, should indulge in Mystai seeking within every page an epiphany and a celebration of the great god Dionysos immersing oneself into the ritually-centred visuality of the Villa of the Mysteries to generate a beautiful and untamed constellation of theurgic experiences”
Damon Zacharias Lycourinos
“Peter Mark Adams has done it again just like his prior book ‘The Game of Saturn’, Mystai is a feast for the eyes, the mind and the senses. Its a beautifully designed book: the colours, the materials, the printing, the fonts, the imagery and of course the content itself is tremendously enjoyable and extremely enlightening ...
His analysis of the imagery and its meaning, how this would have been utilised in a ritual context, has given us a graduate level course in the ancient Greek mysteries.
Peter Mark Adams has quickly become one of my favourite authors in this genre. His work is extremely unique and insightful he has a way of revealing historical mysteries that no one else has elucidated”
Greg Kaminsky, The Occult of Personality Podcast
“Peter Mark Adams has done it again just like his prior book ‘The Game of Saturn’, Mystai is a feast for the eyes, the mind and the senses. Its a beautifully designed book: the colours, the materials, the printing, the fonts, the imagery and of course the content itself is tremendously enjoyable and extremely enlightening ...
His analysis of the imagery and its meaning, how this would have been utilised in a ritual context, has given us a graduate level course in the ancient Greek mysteries.
Peter Mark Adams has quickly become one of my favourite authors in this genre. His work is extremely unique and insightful he has a way of revealing historical mysteries that no one else has elucidated”
Greg Kaminsky, The Occult of Personality Podcast
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.
The frescoes, created in the most private rooms of the extensive Roman villa, were never meant to be seen by anyone other than the members of the all-female Bakkhic thiasos who conducted their most secret rites within them. Buried and preserved for posterity by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, these stunning proto-Renaissance images guide the viewer through the consecutive stages of a theurgic rite of initiation into the mysteries of Dionysos.
Arising from within the unique interface between Greek and Roman culture in Southern Italy, the frescoes attest to the survival of an unbroken initiatic tradition of Bakkhic mystery rites on the Italian peninsula stretching back to the fifth century BCE.
The recent restoration of the frescoes has provided a fresh opportunity to elucidate the ritual processes hidden in plain sight. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Peter Mark Adams draws on current scholarship on dithyrambic performance; the ritual dress of Greco-Roman priestesses; classical philology and the comparative ethnography of rites of higher initiation. With the same attention to detail which he demonstrated in The Game of Saturn, Adams reveals the stages of initiation encoded and accomplished in dance, gesture, ordeal and sign.
Adams interprets the frescoes through the distinct performative lens of the ritualist, throwing light, for the first time, on the significance of the ritual vocabulary and the phenomenology of ritual participation. We are pulled into the dance ourselves, and emerge transfigured by the experience.
