Month: December 2011

Ulansey’s “Origins of the Mithraic mysteries” – reviewed

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have now finished my book review of David Ulansey’s much read book.  It is here.

Ulansey’s ideas are interesting, but ultimately quite improbable.  His star-map stuff just does not work.  The tauroctony is a star-map of the sky as it was in 2,000 BC?  I don’t think so, somehow.

I don’t see anything that disproves his theory that Mithras is really a code-name for Perseus.  That bit of the book had some actual evidence for it, which most of his book did not.  The problem is that the actual evidence for this idea is pretty thin; a case-ending in Statius, a scholion on Statius in Lactantius Placidus, plus a lot of speculation.

R. L. Gordon’s dismissal of the book as speculation heaped upon speculation is by and large correct.  Ulansey is making bricks without straw.

Share

Rage and fury

Posted on by Roger Pearse

It’s all very well having the cloud as your editor.  But what happens when it all stops working, bit by bit?

I’ve been writing a review of David Ulansey’s Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries this afternoon.  I’d done two chapters of it.  I’d chosen to use WordPress to edit the article, here in this blog.

I closed up the editor and went off to make a call.  When I came back, I opened it up again to find … most of my work had vanished.  Somehow it hadn’t been saved.  I’d saved it … but the connection had not processed the save.

I am so angry!  I don’t particularly want to dissect Ulansey’s work; but to do it, to do all that work, and all of it in vain … it is utterly infuriating.

I’ve had erratic results from IE for a day or so now.  I’ve just turned off Kaspersky anti-virus, and firewall, and suddenly everything works again.  I wonder if that is the problem?

Why can’t we have reliable technology?

Share

Methodius, De Lepra – opening portion now online in English

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Regular readers will remember that I commissioned an English translation of the German version by Bonwetsch of Methodius’ De Lepra (On leprosy).  I did so, because the work is preserved in an Old Slavonic text, which has never been published, plus Greek fragments.  The GCS series published a German translation by Bonwetsch of the Old Slavonic, interspersed with the surviving Greek remains (for which no translation was provided).

Unfortunately the translator had the greatest difficulty with ecclesiastical language, and I found myself investing more and more time in making what he produced make sense.  This seemed to demoralise him, such that he stopped worrying about whether his output actually made sense in English.  The final straw was when he delivered a long chunk, wherein many of the sentences weren’t even grammatical.  At that point I terminated the contract, foreseeing that I would have to invest just as much time correcting this as I would if I had decided to do the whole thing myself.  I still had to pay rather more than I really felt the work was worth, particularly as he had not troubled to respond to my queries on one set of pages at all.

What was done, to an adequate standard, was the first 6 pages of Bonwetsch, minus a long Greek chunk in the middle of the last two.  This is now online here.  As ever, I make this public domain; do whatever you wish with it, personal, educational or commercial.

Not sure what to do next.  I’d still like this work translated, but I feel a bit bruised at the moment!

Share

Not quite Tennyson

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In the Winter 2011 edition of Evergreen magazine, p.125, there appeared a poem which struck a chord with me.

End of the Day

Is anyone happier because you passed this way?
Does anyone remember that you spoke to them today?
The day is almost over, and its toiling time is through,
Is there anyone to utter now a kindly word to you?

Can you say in parting with the day that slipping fast
That you have helped a single person of the many you have passed?
Is a single heart rejoicing over what you did or said?
Does anyone who hopes were fading, now with courage look ahead?

Did you waste the day or use it?  Was it well or sorely spent?
Did you leave a trail of kindness, or a scar of discontent?
As you close your eyes in slumber, do you think that God would say,
That you have earned “tomorrow” by the way you lived today?

(Sent in by Mrs J. Rawsthorne of Rufford, Lancashire)

It’s unfortunate that the first two verses do not scan, but it’s still worth a read.

UPDATE: After posting this, I did a Google search and found that it is not original, and indeed is slightly corrupt, in that the verse does not scan.  The version I found online is also evidently corrupt, in that it also does not scan, but at different points.  By combining the two versions, I get this.

What did you do today?

Is anybody happier because you passed this way?
Does anyone remember that you spoke to them today?
The day is almost over, and its toiling time is through,
Is there anyone to utter now a kindly word of you?

Can you say tonight in parting with the day that’s slipping fast,
That you helped a single person of the many that you passed?
Is a single heart rejoicing over what you did or said?
Does the one whose hopes were fading now with courage look ahead?

Did you waste the day or use it? Was it well or sorely spent?
Did you leave a trail of kindness, or a scar of discontent?
As you close you eyes in slumber, do you think that you can say:
That you have earned “tomorrow” by the way you lived today?

It’s a small bit of textual criticism, perhaps; to use the metre to correct the versions.  It is my guess that the real title is “what did you do today”?

So… I wonder if we can locate the real original of these?  Clearly the original author was a poet, and belonged to a period when poetry was read.

Share

Mithras in the papyri

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Few people can be aware that the papyrus discoveries of the last century have included references to Mithras.  I do not refer here to the use of the name of Mithras in the Greek Magical Papyri, in PGM IV,[1] where one of the incantations was even given the name of the Mithras Liturgy by its unfortunate early editor, Dieterich.[2]  The luckless Dieterich dedicated the book to the great Franz Cumont, but Cumont declined to agree with Dieterich that the text was Mithraic.

Rather I refer to two papyri, which seem unavoidably connected with the initiation rituals of the cult.  Rather amazingly, I find transcriptions and even translations of both online here.

The first of the papyri is P. Berol. 21196, a scrap of papyrus probably found at Ashmounein in Egypt in 1906, and the property of the Aegyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung of the Berlin State Museum.  It dates from the 4th century AD, and consists of fragments of a single papyrus sheet from a codex.  It was published in 1992 by the late William Brashear.[3]

The document seems to involve questions and answers, and is perhaps a preparatory catechism for an initiation.  There is mention of a pater — the 7th grade of initiation in the mysteries; of night as the time for some ceremony, putting on a girdle or belt with 4 tassels, wearing linen, dealing with something sharp, and something hot or cold, and the mention of a meal.  Line 9 of the second side refers to “becoming a lion” (ἐγένου λέων).  The grade of Leo is found only in the cult of Mithras, and this ties the papyrus squarely to that cult.[4]

The second papyrus belongs to the 3rd century AD.  I know no more about this than I can find in the webpage mentioned earlier: that it was published by Vittorio Bartoletti in two sections.[5].  There is reference to ἀστέρων, indicating astral or astrological elements — rather relevant this, considering that I’ve been looking at David Ulansey’s book — and there is also the word καυτοπαυ (= Καυτοπάτου?)  or Cautopates, the name of the ancillary deity in the temples of Mithras.  There is also a reference to Serapis, interestingly.  The suggestion is that this is an oath.

This all left me wondering whether there were any Mithraea in Egypt, and if so, where.

Share
  1. [1]Paris Bibliothèque Nationale Suppl. gr. 574.↩
  2. [2]Albrecht Dieterich, Eine Mithrasliturgie, Leipzig: Teubner, 2nd enlarged edn. 1910↩
  3. [3]William M. Brashear, A Mithraic Catechism from Egypt. <P. Berol. 21196> (Tyche Supplementband, I.) Pp. 70; 2 plates. Vienna: Holzhausen, 1992.  There is a review of the publication by J. Gwyn Griffiths, in The Classical Review, N.S. 44.1 (1994), p.181-2. http://www.jstor.org/stable/712295 ↩
  4. [4]Griffiths adds, p.182: “It is true that Plutarch in Ch. 38 of his De Iside et Osiride says that the Egyptians honoured the constellation of the Lion and adorned the doors of temples with lions’ jaws — an allusion perhaps to the lion-shaped bolts found in late temples. While this might relate to the term λεοντίον in the papyrus, it does not suit the idea of becoming a Lion.”↩
  5. [5]V. Bartoletti, Papiri, Greci e Latini (= PSI) vol. X, no. 1162; and V. Bartoletti, “Frammenti di un rituale d’iniziazione ai misteri” in Annali della R. Scuoli Normale Superiore de Pisa (Pisa: 1937) 143-152.↩

Eusebius book update

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The sales figures for last month through Amazon for Eusebius of Caesarea, Gospel Problems and Solutions, have just arrived.  Sales continue fairly level, with no evident sign of diminishing, which is good news.

The total sold through Amazon so far, since June, is 55 copies.  That includes both hard back and paper back copies, but not the ones sold directly by myself.  I’m also getting orders through the book trade, mostly from European dealers.

We’re not at breakeven point yet by any means, but the fact is that the book is selling far better than I had any reason to expect.

This is down to everyone who contributed; Nick who did the cover design and Bob who did all the typesetting and made sure it was all professional; David who translated so much of it and went through bits that I had missed and corrected them; Adam who translated all the stuff that I couldn’t get done, and transcribed the text; and Carol and her friends at UCL who did such interesting things with the Coptic.  And it is of course to all the other people that I have not mentioned, but whose role was critical.  The list of credits is a very long one!

The links to the Amazon pages are:

UK Hardback (50GBP)

UK Paperback (30 GBP)

US Hardback ($80)

US Paperback ($45)

I can’t quite imagine this book as a Christmas present, but if you can, please oblige!

Copies can also be bought direct from me through this site.

Share

Google or Bing? A surprising answer

Posted on by Roger Pearse

From time to time I do the unthinkable.  Yes, I go into Google and search for “roger pearse”.

I’ve done this perhaps once or twice a year for many years, and I did it this evening.  I must say that I was rather surprised by what I found.

Because the content in Google was rubbish.  Yes, it brought back a handful of  things that I have done.  But it only gave 20 pages of hits — from someone who has put something online every day for the last 14 years — and most of these were of a very poor quality.  There was garbage from identity-fishing sites (which are useful as a guide to stuff we need to hide, but not otherwise), and stuff like that.  But there was very little that gave any idea of who am I or what I do.

Now of course I could just say, and truthfully, “Well, I’m not that important”.  But because I have done this before, I know that my unimportance isn’t the issue here.  The Google search results simply aren’t as good as they used to be.

As an experiment, I tried the same search on Bing.  And … instantly I got better results.  Of course many were occasional comments that I had added to blogs here or there, but in general the quality was far better.  And it remained better all the way to page 21 of results, at which point I stopped.

I’ve commented before on the poor quality of Google Books search.  It’s actually impossible to find volume N of the Journal of XYZ in there, even if it is in there.  But this evening’s experience suggests that Google’s main search engine itself is no longer much good.

In which case, isn’t it time we all moved over to Bing?

Share

Reading Ulansey’s “Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I got David Ulansey’s book on the Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries from the library this morning, and I’m reading through it.  I’ll probably do a review once I’ve read the whole thing, but here’s some thoughts so far.   This is the first time that I have really sat down with it and tried to read it cover to cover, but I dipped into it before.

Firstly it’s a better piece of work than I recalled. The opening chapters are well done, and well referenced, and very clearly written.  The suggestion that the god in the secret cult of “Mithras” turns out to be Perseus is by no means impossible.  I was quite struck by his exegesis of the passage in Statius, the earliest literary reference to the cult:

717 ……  seu te roseum Titana vocari
Gentis Achaemeniae ritu, seu praestat Osirim
Frugiferum, seu Persei sub rupibus antri
Indignata sequi torquentem cornua Mithram.

Whether it please thee to bear the name of ruddy Titan
after the manner of the Achaemenian race, or Osiris
lord of the crops, or Mithra as beneath the rocks of the Persian cave
he presses back the horns that resist his control.

This latter passage is given by Manfred Clauss as:

Mithras ‘twists the unruly horns beneath the rocks of a Persian cave’.

Ulansey points out correctly that Persei is not the correct form of “Persian” but rather means “Persean” or “Of Perseus”; and “antri persei” could be “the cave of Perseus”.

Likewise pointing out that the 5th grade of initiation is “Perses”, which is not merely “Persian”, but also the name of the son of Perseus, and that this idea — meaning “son” — would give point to the 7th grade, “Pater”, i.e. “Father”, meaning Mithras / Perseus himself.

The “Persian” bit, then, was eyewash for outsiders; the real truth was that the cult was “Persean”.  Mithras was the “Persean god”.  I can quite imagine that this sort of pun would appeal.  The members could talk about the cult, safe in the knowledge that they were telling the truth, and that they would be totally misunderstood, and laugh about it among themselves.  The real teachings of the cult would then be based on astrology.

It’s all possible, although a certain degree of scepticism seems appropriate.  We don’t know any of this for sure, after all.  It’s just a theory to explain some of the data.

But when I got to chapter 6, I was starting to lose confidence.  It all got a bit von Daniken for me.

The Swiss maestro and former hotel-keeper used to write his books about Chariots of the Gods according to a set pattern.  He would think up his theory, and then hunt around for bits of data that could decorate them.  He would propose his theory, as a theory; and then he would introduce some bit of information; and then another, and then he would exclaim at the coincidence as proving he was right.  The fact that he had selected this material precisely because it fit the theory — there was no coincidence — was quietly ignored.

Throughout chapters 5 and 6 this old trick appeared again and again, and indeed I have just lost patience and stomped off to have a bath.  I’ll return to the book later.  It’s just speculation, not interpretation.  Not that I accuse Ulansey of deception; it’s quite likely to be self-deception.

But the problem is simply that the contortions that he gets into, to try to fit the stars in the sky into his theory, get worse and worse and worse.  You can feel the man straining.  There is not the slightest chance, in my humble opinion, that anyone devising a cult ca. 50 AD decided to represent in stone the configuration of the constellations in 2000 BC.  The fact that the precession of the equinoxes had been discovered is irrelevant; you just wouldn’t do that.  You’d make your cult myth fit what people could see up in the sky.

But it’s better than I had thought.

Share

Images of Perseus with a phrygian hat

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Reading David Ulansey’s Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries, I was struck by the following statement on p.26:

However, in two of the earliest surviving pictures of the constellation Perseus — the Salzburg Plaque and Codex Vossianus Leidensis 79 — Perseus is shown wearing a Phrygian cap, demonstrating that this was a frequent attribute of Perseus the constellation as well as of Perseus the hero.[2]

On p.129 is the note:

2. For the Salzburg plaque, see A. Rehm and E. Weiss, “Zur Salzburger Bronzescheibe mit Sternbildern,” Jahreshefte des Österreichischen Archäologischen Instituts 6 (1903), 39; for Codex Vossianus Leidensis 79, see Georg Thiele, Antike Himmelsbilder (Berlin: Weidmann, 1898), p. 111.

I’m not sure that two examples, one of them a medieval ms., is evidence that this is a “frequent” way to depict Perseus.*  But I am always curious to check such references.

The first volume appears here:

http://wel.archive.org/details/jahresheftedes06oste

(Isn’t it remarkable how badly Google Books handles series?)  The “Scheibe” is a disc, or platter, rather than a plaque, which leads one to wonder whether Ulansey verified his reference.  Anyway on p.39 there is this a diagram, of a zodiac.  It looks as if we have just a portion of the disc.

It’s not a particularly satisfactory image, I think.  I presume the bottom bit is the reverse of the top.  The article says that the item is of unknown provenance, and came into the Salzburg museum from two unidentified worker.  It probably came from some Roman tombs in the Salzburg area.  The item was published in the same journal, plate 5, in volume 5 (1902), apparently.  This may be found here:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=WQ5aAAAAYAAJ

The image is on p.416 of the PDF, although for some reason I cannot export it.  So here are two screen grabs of the top and bottom of the page:

The actual publication is E. Maass, Salzburger Bronzetafel mit Sternbildung, p. 196-7 + Tafel V.  This tells us that the piece came to light in Salzburg, with a thick crust on it, and was sent to the museum in Vienna for cleaning by the conservation staff.  It is the fragment of a large circle, with the edges punched.  The find site was searched for further pieces but without result.

Antike Himmelsbilder can be found here:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=59wsAAAAYAAJ

It’s an interesting work, which really should have had colour images.  On p.111 we get this image:

Certainly this is an image of Perseus — the Gorgon’s head makes that clear.  The manuscript seems to contain the text of Aratus, and this is accompanied by a series of images of the constellations.  The original is in colour, of course.  The ms. is 9th century, copied from a 5th century exemplar, and various copies of it exist.

 So far, then, so good; we have depictions of Perseus without his winged hat.  I must admit, however, that Ulansey’s interpretation of this — he’s trying to show that Mithras is really Perseus — seems a little thin.

* UPDATE 29/5/15: This is a misunderstanding on my part – see the comment kindly added by David Ulansey to this post, clarifying the context – thank you.

Share

The translation of Methodius crashes and burns

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Sometimes it just doesn’t work.  This morning I started looking through the translation of the German version of Methodius, De lepra, as given by Bonwetsch from the Old Slavonic.  The translation into English — for which I am paying commercially — just didn’t work.  The translator did not have the feel for ecclesiastical works, and so the result was unreadable.  Worse, it was ungrammatical English at points.  It made my head hurt, just looking at it and trying to work out what, if anything, it meant.

I’ve accepted the inevitable and messaged the translator to cancel the project.  I shall have to pay him for what he has done, useless tho it is.  It’s money down the drain, essentially.

Oh well.  I tried.

The first few pages were not too bad, after I commented and suggested etc.  I’ll post these here when I have handed over the money.

Share