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Though the basic meaning of spiritual salvation in Christianity is the saving of the soul from damnation, the term has broader resonance. For many Christians, salvation has been not just a heavenly expectation, but an earthly experience: a dramatic sense of release. What the release is “from” may vary—maybe just from fear of damnation upon physical death, but maybe from something else; maybe from some enslaving influence, such as alcohol, maybe from free-floating anxiety or guilt. And the release can be dramatic. Many evangelical Christians are firmly affixed to faith at the moment they feel “born again,” perhaps while walking to the front of a congregation to accept Christ as their savior or during the subsequent ritual of baptism. It’s probably no coincidence that religions with which Christianity competed during its formative years also featured moments of transformative release. In the second century CE the Greek writer Lucius Apuleius described an initiation ritual in the Isis cult as a “voluntary death and a salvation obtained through prayer,” a way of being “reborn to a course of new salvation.” Apuleius’s account, though fictional, seems to draw on his own experience as a devotee of both Isis and Osiris, and it provides plenty of detail about the born-again experience. Here the initiate recounts his attempt to utter a prayer after a multiday ritual designed to culminate in a sense of contact with Isis: I began so greatly to weep and sigh that my words were interrupted, and as devouring my prayer, I began to say in this sort: O holy and blessed dame, the perpetual comfort of humankind, who by thy bounty and grace nourishest all the world, and bearest a great affection to the adversities of the miserable, as a loving mother thou takest no rest.… Thou art she that puttest away all storms and dangers from man’s life by thy right hand, whereby likewise thou restrainest the fatal dispositions, appeasest the great tempests of fortune and keepest back the course of the stars … thou givest light to the Sunne, thou governest the world, thou treadest down the power of hell. Note how many things the Isis initiate is being released from: the threat of hell, all kinds of “storms and dangers” of life, and, indeed, the very root of misfortune; back then astrology was for some a grim determinism, and a religion could prosper by promising to liberate people from the fate that their stars foretold. Hence the initiate’s gratitude to Isis who “keepest back the course of the stars.” There has probably never been a religion that was saving people from only one thing. And certainly in the ancient world most religions, like the Isis cult, addressed various threats to physical and mental well-being.
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