ABSTRACT
Braudel’s historiographic models offer intellectual frameworks for investigating a question that lies at the intersection of ritual structures and practical need, and at the heart of one of the ancient Mediterranean’s most eminent mystery cults. The mysteries of the Great Gods of Samothrace promised safety in sea travel as the benefit of initiation. This promise distinguished the rites from other mysteries, which focused more characteristically on a mystical union with the divine, a blessed afterlife, or cosmic visions. It was also well-known far from the island long before the Hellenistic floruit of the cult, and recorded in monumental, literary, and epigraphic form. The promise has been as under-explored in scholarship as it was famous in the ancient world. The lack of attention may reflect either the traditional inattention within Classics to the notion of the efficacy of ritual practice, or the absence of suitable paradigms for its investigation. Braudel’s emphases on geography and geology and the longue durée of social history naturalize the promise. His focus on social institutions directs attention to the island’s epigraphic record of long-distance, long-term structures created and sustained by the rites. These suggest an arresting hypothesis: the rituals worked. Samothracian initiates in fact could travel more safely at sea because of a human social network which ensured cooperation, limited piracy, and improved communication.
