La soteriologia dei culti orientali nell’ Impero Romano: Atti del Colloquio Internazionale su la soteriologia dei culti orientali nell’ Impero Romano, Roma 24-28 Settembre 1979

The aim of the Colloquium, in ideal continuity with the Messina Colloquium on the Origins of Gnosticism (1966) and the Rome Seminar on the Religio-historical character of Roman Mithraism (1978) is a religio-historical appreciation of those 'mystic' religions which, originating in the Eastern-Mediterranean and Western Asian territories as local cults, often intended to the promotion of fertility and life, spread widely through the Roman Empire (some of them already through classical Greece and the Hellenistic kingdoms) in the shape of mystery (i.e., initiatory and soteriological) cults, or at least of cults striving for individual salvation in an afterlife.
Thus the Colloquium concentrated on the soteriological conceptions and practices of those cults, in order to identify their typological-historical specificity, as well as the cosmic-mystic, or, alternatively, the gnostic-anticosmic, or else the ambiguously complex ideological implications active in them.
Without excluding contributions on more particular topics, the Colloquium is articulated as follows:
I. General topics, the history of research, Roman topography of the Oriental cults.
II. Literary and epigraphic sources.
III. The cosmopolite, syncretic mystery (or mystery-like) religions in the Roman Empire with their respective, local backgrounds.
IV. Epilegomena and comparative-historical conclusions.