Narrating the Past and the Future: The Position of the religions orientales and the mystères païens in the Evolutionary Histories of Religion of Franz Cumont and Alfred Loisy

International audienceIn their grand narratives on the ancient history of religions, the Belgian historian of religions, Franz Cumont (1868-1947) and his French colleague and correspondent , Alfred Loisy (1857-1940) both assigned a prominent place to the so-called pagan mystery religions. This paper seeks to identify the specific theories of religion and the deeper motivations underpinning Cumont's and Loisy's historiographical construction of the mystery cults as a distinct type of religion within their evolutionary accounts of the history of religions. Through a comparative analysis of their rich correspondence (1908-1940) and a selection of their publications, we demonstrate how their historical studies of the religious transformations in the Roman Empire, their in-depth dialogues in the troubled times in which they lived, and their philosophical views on the overall history and future of religion, were in fact mutually constitutive