From Genius to Beast: How Men Become Vessels of the Powers

In the early twentieth century, scholars such as Otto Everling and Martin Dibelius helped the world rediscover something that the Apostle Paul saw at the heart of human existence: the reality of principalities and powers; spiritual forces that shape the visible world and often stand in hostility toward God and humanity. For Paul, these were not distant mythological beings but active cosmic powers that influence systems, rulers, and even human hearts. Later theologians like Oscar Cullmann and G. B. Caird showed that Paul viewed Christ’s death and resurrection as a decisive victory over these powers. Through the cross, Christ stripped them of their authority and exposed their rule as false and destructive (Colossians 2:15).

Yet history reveals that these powers still seek vessels. Human beings, desiring to transcend their limits, often open themselves to the very forces Christ overcame. Socrates once spoke of a daimon; a guiding spirit that directed his thoughts. In the ancient world, such possession could be seen as inspiration, even divinity. The Roman emperors adopted a similar pattern: they worshiped the genius, the spiritual essence or guiding power of the ruler. Emperor Augustus, initiated into the secret mysteries, became the model of a man who claimed divine sanction through such spiritual possession. In this, the emperor became both god and idol, the human face of invisible dominion.

The New Testament warns that this same pattern will reach its climax when a final ruler arises; a political figure empowered by Satan himself, allied with a false prophet, who deceives the nations through promises of peace only to plunge them into chaos. This “beast” manifests the ultimate form of human rebellion: the desire to be as gods by yielding to the ancient powers Christ already defeated.

Paul’s letters, written roughly between A.D. 50 and 60, emerged from the heart of the Graeco-Roman world, where Greek culture, Roman power, and pagan religion shaped every aspect of life. Though addressed to both Jews and Gentiles, his audiences shared a common world of thought, fear, and hope; a world that worshiped unseen powers and the divine authority of empire. This period, framed by the battle of Actium in 31 B.C. and the turmoil of the four emperors in A.D. 68, formed the political and spiritual backdrop to Paul’s mission. Actium brought Augustus to power and inaugurated the Pax Romana, a peace built upon the exhaustion and exploitation of the eastern provinces, which had long suffered under Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, and Antony. The supposed stability that followed bound Rome and Asia in mutual dependence, yet it also fostered the imperial cult, where emperors like Augustus were venerated as gods. Even after Nero’s death, the myth of his return haunted the eastern world, while Vespasian’s armies drained its wealth anew. Paul’s ministry unfolded in this charged environment; among the Greek cities of the Aegean looking westward and the Roman colonies of Pisidia settled by veterans loyal to the empire. His message of Christ’s lordship and victory over the “principalities and powers” stood as a direct challenge to this system, proclaiming a divine peace that no emperor could offer and a kingdom that transcended the rule of Caesar.

In the early Roman Empire, Greek and Asian culture increasingly influenced Rome, while Rome itself exerted a powerful and unique impact on Asia. After years of hardship and an earthquake in 12 B.C., Augustus personally paid Asia’s tribute, earning its deep loyalty and sparking a period of prosperity. Romans flocked to “soft Ionia” for leisure, and colonies and trading posts spread Roman presence throughout the region. Though eventually absorbed, these settlements initially embodied an assertive Roman spirit that reshaped local life.

Rome’s influence extended to religion. Augustus revived traditional Roman worship to legitimize his rule and adapted Asian religious customs for imperial purposes. By controlling local cults and redirecting their devotion toward himself, he demonstrated how Rome could reshape indigenous faith. This era was less about new spiritual discovery than about reviving old traditions under Roman direction.

Asia, grateful for stability and prosperity, looked to Rome for guidance, and later emperors; Tiberius, Gaius, and Claudius; continued Augustus’s model of conservative renewal. During Paul’s time, Asia was marked by political loyalty, economic recovery, and religious quietness—a world clinging to its past while unknowingly changing under Roman influence. It was within this calm yet controlled environment that Paul preached, a setting soon to be explored further through its mystery religions, rising interest in astrology, and the witness of Acts.

Christianity arose from Palestinian Judaism, as Metzger notes, within a time of intense Jewish nationalism and deep religious conservatism. In such a setting, it is highly unlikely that the first Christians borrowed from pagan mystery religions. Archaeology offers almost no evidence for mystery cults in Palestine, and early Christian writings show neither their language nor their mythological tone. The mysteries’ ideas of divine myths and ritual experiences stood in sharp contrast to Christianity’s historical claims about Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Pagan sacramental rites had little influence on the early Church, and significantly, no mystery religion claimed a resurrection before the late second century.

The mystery cults themselves were weak during Christianity’s rise. Their great center at Eleusis, revived under Augustus after Actium, had become a formal institution of moral and civic renewal rather than a living spiritual force. Augustus and his successors supported these rites as symbols of social order and reverence for the past, not as sources of new faith.

Only later, near the end of the first century, did the mysteries begin to recover, often by linking themselves to the growing imperial cult in cities like Ephesus, Pergamum, and Bithynia. This alliance with emperor worship, supported by local elites, helped restore their prominence in the second and third centuries. But during Paul’s lifetime, mystery religions held little influence; Christianity emerged in a religiously subdued world, distinct in message, rooted in Judaism, and untouched by the waning mystery cults around it.

"With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication,

and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication.”

— Revelation 17:2, KJV

Historically, the genius of Augustus was understood as the divine spirit or life force of the emperor; the spiritual essence that protected, guided, and empowered him. Romans saw every man as having a genius, but in the case of the emperor, it became an object of worship across the empire. This emperor-worship bound political loyalty to religious devotion: to honor the genius Augusti was to honor both Rome and its ruler.

From a theological or Pauline perspective, though, such worship can be seen as the manifestation of a “fallen power”; one of the principalities and powers Paul described as ruling the world in spiritual darkness. The genius of Augustus, presented as a benevolent guardian of peace and prosperity, may in fact have represented a spiritual power opposed to God, deceiving humanity into serving demonic powers instead of the Creator.

Men like Augustus, seeking divine sanction for their rule, were not merely content with political authority; they desired divine status. By accepting worship, Augustus aligned himself not under the one true God but under the influence of these fallen cosmic powers. His cult drew on genuine human longing for stability and salvation but redirected that devotion toward the emperor’s image; a spiritual counterfeit of God’s kingdom.

So while Augustus’ revival of the lares compitales and genius worship looked like a return to traditional piety, it was also a subtle spiritual shift: the elevation of imperial power to divine authority. In Christian terms, this was not the worship of God but of a false spirit, a “power of the air” masquerading as divine order; a power that promised peace yet sought domination, shaping a world in which men served empire rather than the living Christ.

Paul’s two major confrontations with pagan religion in Ephesus, as recorded in Acts 19, and explains what they reveal about the city’s culture and Paul’s message.

The first story involves the sons of Sceva, Jewish exorcists who try to cast out demons “in the name of Jesus whom Paul preaches.” When their attempt fails and they are overpowered, the event terrifies the community, leading many people to burn their books of magic. Luke’s main concern shows the power of Christ’s name over superstition, but his depiction of Ephesus as a center of magic is historically accurate; the city was famous throughout the ancient world for its magical arts, amulets, and spells. The public burning of these books marks a dramatic rejection of occult practices and symbolizes the triumph of the gospel over the “powers” associated with sorcery.

The second event, the riot of the silversmiths, centers on the worship of Artemis (known to the Romans as Diana). Paul’s preaching that “gods made with hands are not gods at all” threatened the trade of local craftsmen who made silver shrines of the goddess. The uproar that follows is more than an economic protest; it reveals how deeply religion, politics, and civic pride were intertwined in Ephesus. The city’s identity and prosperity were tied to the cult of Artemis, whose great temple was one of the wonders of the ancient world.

Historians note that this story fits perfectly with the “last age of civic autonomy,” a period beginning under Augustus when cities like Ephesus regained prosperity and local pride after years of instability. The involvement of both religious and civil authorities in the riot shows a society eager to defend its traditional "gods" as symbols of civic loyalty. To reject Artemis was, in their eyes, to reject the city itself.

Thus, the episode captures a clash of kingdoms; Paul’s message of one true God confronting the social, economic, and spiritual powers that sustained the pagan world. As scholar Haenchen put it, this riot reveals “heathen belief in its crassest form,” meaning that the Ephesians’ devotion to Artemis was not just piety but a passionate defense of the old order against the disruptive new faith of Christ.

The fall of the Roman Republic brought turmoil not only to Rome and Italy but also to Asia Minor, which had already been unsettled before the battle of Actium. During the Republic’s collapse, the region’s vast wealth was heavily exploited, leaving it drained by the time the Empire began. Yet this difficult transition also prepared the way for the Golden Age of the Empire in the second and third centuries, when the stability and prosperity promised by Rome’s pax et securitas; peace and security; became a tangible reality. From this stability came both a cultural renewal and a religious revival.

The Greeks Paul encountered lived in a society increasingly shaped by Romanization; not only through new colonies and veterans’ settlements but more deeply through the economic revival and prosperity that followed the establishment of the Empire.

The vision of a new order of the ages—novus ordo seclorum, as it later appears on the Great Seal of the United States and the dollar bill; echoes the same hope first proclaimed by Virgil in his Fourth Eclogue, the birth of a heaven-sent child who would renew the world. In pagan Rome, this prophecy became a political creed: the emperor was hailed as savior, the bringer of divine peace. Yet in the Book of Revelation, such a promise is unmasked as the great counterfeit. John’s vision reveals that the beast, the ultimate political power, receives his throne and authority from the dragon, the adversary himself (Revelation 13:2). What the world celebrates as a golden age of peace is, in truth, the rise of a dominion built on deception.

Throughout history, men who sought to be gods; whether emperors of Rome or initiates of the mysteries; have reached for the same forbidden power. The ancient rites of apotheosis and the modern fascination with secret enlightenment both echo that old temptation: that humanity might achieve divinity apart from the Creator. Revelation warns that this illusion will one day culminate in a ruler who promises peace but brings chaos, a final expression of the empire of the beast.

“And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.”— Revelation 13:15, KJV

“And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast?who is able to make war with him?”— Revelation 13:4, KJV

It is my understanding that the worship of the image of the beast in Revelation mirrors the ancient pattern seen in the pagan world. The Roman emperors claimed divine status through mystical rites and possession by guiding spirits, presenting themselves as living gods. Even philosophers like Socrates spoke of being directed by a daimon, a spiritual presence that shaped their thoughts. In the same way, the figure described in Revelation appears as a man animated by a dark power; one whose authority and influence do not arise from God but from a spirit opposed to Him. Humanity, deceived by this counterfeit divinity, gives its worship to the image of a possessed ruler, repeating the old error of exalting man as god and mistaking spiritual bondage for enlightenment.

The Emperor’s Genius and the Worship of Power

The cult of the emperor’s genius; his divine spirit; was one of the most striking religious developments of the early Empire. What began as the domestic reverence of a man’s guardian spirit soon expanded into a theology of rule. In poets such as Ovid (Fasti III.58–94) and Horace (Odes IV.8, IV.11), the genius natalis, the spirit of one’s birth, was celebrated with cheerful devotion, a symbol of personal fortune and vitality. But under Augustus this private piety became public ideology. As Livy records, vows were made “by the genius of the Roman people,” fusing civic and divine identity. Suetonius tells how Augustus allowed temples to be raised to his genius in the provinces, while Dio Cassius explains that this was not simple vanity but policy: the emperor’s divine spirit embodied the unity and destiny of Rome itself.

By the time of Pliny’s Panegyric to Trajan, the veneration of the emperor’s numen; his divine presence; had become a normal part of public life. To swear by the emperor’s genius was to affirm loyalty to the state; to refuse was to risk death. This was the spiritual atmosphere in which the early Christians found themselves. The Martyrdom of Polycarp preserves a moving example: when ordered to “swear by the genius of Caesar,” the aged bishop refused, declaring that his worship belonged to Christ alone. Tertullian later argued that Christians prayed for the emperor but never to him, distinguishing prayer from sacrifice. For Lactantius, the genius was no guardian at all but a demon, a false spirit masquerading as divine.

Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) In his sermon “On the Consecration of the Roman Pontiff,” Innocent III declared:

“The pope holds the place of the true God on earth.”— Sermo 2: In Consecratione Pontificis Romani

Augustine, in the City of God, developed this line further, contrasting the pagan daemones with the true angels who serve God, and Ambrose later clarified that Christian honor toward saints was not idolatry but love transfigured by faith.

Modern scholars such as Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price have shown how deeply this emperor-cult penetrated the civic religion of Rome. Robert Turcan and Duncan Fishwick trace its spread through the provinces, where local traditions of divine kingship blended easily with Roman propaganda. In many cities, the emperor’s image stood beside that of the local gods, a visible sign of the unity of heaven and earth. Yet as historians like Peter Brown and Ramsay MacMullen have shown, the eventual rise of Christian saint veneration did not erase this structure; it transformed it. The saints became, in a sense, the new intercessors of the Christian polis, their relics replacing the old civic altars. The continuity is unmistakable: where the genius Augusti once guarded the empire, the "saints" now guarded the Church.

Theologically, the cult of the genius reveals the same ancient longing that Revelation exposes: humanity’s temptation to worship its own reflection, to find divinity in power and order rather than in the living God. The Roman emperors were hailed as gods not only by decree but because people desired a visible savior, a guarantor of peace—pax et securitas. The Church’s earliest martyrs stood precisely against that illusion. They refused to bow to the spirit of empire, even when it spoke in the language of religion.

Thus, the story of the emperor’s genius is more than a chapter of Roman history; it is a mirror of the enduring struggle between divine truth and human self-deification through possession.

“And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying,

Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen,

and is become the habitation of devils,

and the hold of every foul spirit,

and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.”

— Revelation 18:2 (KJV)

The Legacy of Dionysius and the Light of Empire

Yesterday we learned how the Byzantine imperial church, claiming to guard orthodoxy, expelled the Eastern churches and branded them heretics. Yet within that same imperial world we also meet the figure of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, whose writings quietly shaped the spirituality, theology, and even the architecture of Byzantium. The paradox is striking: while purging others in the name of purity, the imperial church embraced a mysticism deeply marked by Neoplatonic philosophy; a legacy that reached back to the mystery religions of Greece and Egypt.

The author we call Pseudo-Dionysius, writing in the late fifth or early sixth century, built a Christian system out of the thought of Proclus and other pagan philosophers. His vision of divine hierarchy, heavenly light, and ascent toward the ineffable One became a cornerstone of medieval theology, inspiring the design of churches whose domes and mosaics mirrored the order of heaven. Yet the very name Dionysius evokes the old god of ecstasy and dissolution; known to the Egyptians as Osiris; whose cult celebrated the death and rebirth of divine power within nature. The continuity of symbol is difficult to ignore: the same empire that condemned Eastern Christians for heresy drew its spiritual imagination from a world steeped in pagan mysticism.

The ancient emblem of Osiris, the stone pillar or obelisk, once a sign of solar power and resurrection, now stands in the piazza before "St. Peter’s" in Rome. What began as a monument to Egypt’s sacred kings became a trophy of empire and, later, a symbol of the Church’s alleged triumph over paganism.

Through its influence, both the Byzantine and later Latin worlds came to understand sacred space as a reflection of the cosmos; filled with divine light, yet still bearing the shadow of the old gods, the very fallen powers of which the apostles once warned.

The Legacy of Dionysius and the Light of Empire

Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (so-called because he wrote under the name of St. Paul’s Athenian convert Dionysius) was a mysterious theologian of the late 5th or early 6th century. Far from being a simple Bible exegete, he was in fact a Christian Neoplatonist who “transposed... the whole of Pagan Neoplatonism” into a Christian key plato.stanford.edu. Modern scholars have shown that his writings exhibit a “thoroughgoing dependence” on the Greek philosopher Proclus. Indeed, Pseudo-Dionysius likely studied under Proclus or his school – absorbing the teachings of Platonic theurgy, hierarchical cosmos, and the ineffable One. Writing as “Dionysios,” he built a Christian theological system with strikingly Neoplatonic structure, blending biblical terminology with concepts drawn from pagan philosophy. It is now accepted that he lived after Proclus (who died 485) and before about 528, since his work is first cited around then. Tellingly, the first to quote Dionysius was Severus of Antioch, a leader of the very Miaphysite (Monophysite) church that Chalcedonian Byzantium branded heretical. His mystical treatises soon intrigued the imperial (Chalcedonian) theologians as well. By the 6th century, orthodox commentators like John of Scythopolis and Maximus the Confessor labored to integrate and “interpret” Dionysius in line with orthodox doctrine. Thus the imperial church appropriated this once-suspect mystical corpus for itself. The paradox is evident: an officially Christian empire adopted the insights of a “crypto-pagan” mystic, albeit after scrubbing them of overt heterodoxy. Pseudo-Dionysius’ very pen name hints at a layered identity – Dionysius was also the Greek god Dionysos, and the author’s theology indeed carries echoes of the mystery cults of ecstasy and "divine union".

Angelic and Ecclesiastical Hierarchies: Angels, Saints, and Divine Order

One of Pseudo-Dionysius’ most influential contributions is his vision of the hierarchical cosmos, especially the ranks of angels. In his work The Celestial Hierarchy, he describes “nine choirs of angels” arrayed in triads – Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones; Dominions, Virtues, Powers; Principalities, Archangels, Angels. These angelic orders, he taught, participate in divine light and mediate that light down the chain of being, “lifting us up to God”. Each higher rank illuminates the rank below it in a cascading revelation from God to creation. In The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, Dionysius (aka Osiris-whose phallus sits outside the Vatican) mirrored this structure in the Church itself, organizing bishops, priests, deacons, monks, laity, catechumens, penitents, and even the “demon-possessed” into a spiritual hierarchy. The bishop (hierarch), at the summit of the earthly church, reflects the order of the highest angels and conveys divine grace to the lower orders. Through sacramental rites (which Dionysius daringly calls “theurgic” acts), the Church on earth becomes a microcosm of the heavenly hierarchy. This bold fusion of Christian liturgy with Neoplatonic order deeply influenced medieval theology, especially angelology in both East and West. The Roman Catholic tradition of enumerating nine choirs of angels and depicting them in art and devotion owes much to Pseudo-Dionysius. Scholars note that Thomas Aquinas – the 13th-century Catholic theologian – cites Dionysius over 1,700 times, often regarding the nature of angels and the celestial order. Catholic teaching on angels and saints absorbed the Dionysian view (not Christian view) that all creation is a vast hierarchy ascending to God. Saints in heaven, like the angels, are bathed in God’s light and become part of the celestial court. Medieval art expressed this by surrounding saints with halos of light and arranging figures in ordered ranks in church frescoes and mosaics – visually echoing Dionysius’ celestial hierarchy. Even the great reformer Martin Luther, while critical of what he called Dionysius’ “fabrications about the angels”, acknowledged the influence of this hierarchy on Christian thought. Thus, through Dionysius, angelology and the veneration of the saints in the Catholic Church took on a decidedly Neoplatonic flavor: a vision of all spiritual beings, angelic or human, organized in a grand chain of light leading to the One God.

NB: Dionysus is NOT Christ, and the aforementioned is NOT Christianity.

Pagan Echoes and the Paradox of Empire

For all its lofty theology, the Dionysian legacy carried unmistakable echoes of pagan mysticism. The very name Dionysius calls to mind Dionysus (Bacchus), the ancient Greek god of ecstasy, whose cult promised union with the divine through ritually induced trance. In the Hellenistic era, Greeks identified Dionysus with Osiris, the Egyptian god of life, death and rebirth. This is more than a curious coincidence. The symbolism that Pseudo-Dionysius wove into Christian thought – death and rebirth, divine light, mystical union – had long been central to the mystery religions of the Mediterranean. The Neoplatonic philosophers who so influenced Dionysius (Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus) were themselves inheritors of those mystery traditions, practicing theurgy (sacred rituals to unite with the "gods") and teaching about the ascent of the soul. Pseudo-Dionysius, in Christianizing these ideas, gave the imperial church a mysticism that was in some respects a baptized version of pagan spirituality. The continuity of symbols is difficult to ignore. For instance, Dionysius describes the soul’s ascent to "God" in language resembling the upward initiation of a myste in Eleusis or the Isis cult – albeit now the soul ascends to the Trinity rather than to Zeus or Osiris. He speaks of divine darkness and unknowing as the final stage of union, concepts that parallel the ecstatic loss of self in Dionysian rites. Little wonder that later critics, such as the Renaissance humanist Lorenzo Valla—famous for exposing the Donation of Constantine as a forgery that had underpinned papal claims to temporal power—came to suspect that “Dionysius the Areopagite” was likewise a pious fraud, a writer deeply steeped in Platonic philosophy rather than apostolic tradition.. Even so, the Church embraced his works as orthodox, illustrating how thoroughly the old wisdom was absorbed into Christian thought.

Other vestiges of the “old gods” persisted in Christian imperial culture, thinly veiled. Consider the obelisk – an ancient Egyptian symbol of the sun’s ray and a monument to pharaonic divinity. 

When Pope Sixtus V raised this obelisk in the piazza of St. Peter’s, he performed a solemn exorcism on it and crowned it with a relic of the True Cross. An inscription at the base boasts that the obelisk, “dedicated in impious reverence to the [pagan] gods of the Gentiles,” was now “expiated of superstition and consecrated to the Cross”. The Church explicitly cast the obelisk’s new role as a trophy (how humble!) – a once-pagan pillar now “captured” for Christ, signifying the defeat of the old religion. Yet in doing so, the Church also literally preserved and enshrined a piece of pagan sacred architecture at the heart of its own sacred space. The obelisk in St. Peter’s Square is a granite metaphor for the dynamic at play with Dionysius: that which was pagan is not destroyed but repurposed and spiritually reinterpreted. The “fallen powers” of old – the gods and idols the apostles had denounced as demonic (St. Paul wrote that “what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons, not God”) – were ostensibly vanquished by the Cross. But their cultural forms (philosophies, artistic motifs, even monuments) lived on, now carrying Christian meanings. To zealous eyes, this was a victorious co-opting; to critical eyes, it was a sign that the shadows of the old gods still flickered beneath the surface of Christendom.

See....

If God had ever desired a pagan trophy to display His majesty, He would have had no need to borrow the idols of Egypt or the pillars of Rome. He could have raised His own monument from dust — for as Christ said, “If these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out” (Luke 19:40). The Lord who thundered against graven images does not decorate His house with the relics of rebellion. His temple is not carved from the spoils of empire, but from “living stones” ; the faithful themselves; “built up a spiritual house” (1 Peter 2:5), while the monuments of men crumble beneath their own pride.

…but it seems the Lord of heaven and His self-appointed vicar on earth were not, after all, looking in the same direction.