Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
The Hungarian scholar Istvan Toth died this year. I learn this from his page at Academia.edu, where may be found all his papers and books in electronic form. This is no small thing, for many are quite inaccessible in the west, even in major research libraries. Well done, Dr Toth, for making all this mass […]
The Mithraeum of Santa Prisca in Rome is of great importance to Mithraic studies because it contains striking wall paintings, with text against the images. The scenes depict a procession of the seven grades of initiate, and other interesting items. Among the verses is a statement that “you have saved us after the shedding of […]
There are endless crank books about Mithras, usually with an anti-Christian twist. They go unnoticed by scholars, as a rule. A correspondent drew my attention to some remarks made by Maarten Vermaseren on one of them. The title is Mithras: the fellow in the cap, by a certain Mrs Wynne-Tyson, back in 1958 (but reprinted […]
I’m extremely busy at the moment adding material to the Mithras site. At the moment this is driven by a list of Mithraeums discovered since 1960. I am attempting to research each of these online, grab some text, some images, and create a page for it. This is, inevitably, a very time-consuming business. Several things […]
I’ve been back working on the Mithras site in the evenings, and in particular looking at Mithraea found in recent years. I’ve created a page for these, and I’m going through them. Last night I was searching for material about the Hawarte Mithraeum in Syria. The site was a 5th century church, excavated in the […]
When I wrote the PHP scripts that support my Roman cult of Mithras site, I incorporated some code to tell me if anyone was looking at the pages. Specifically it tells me which pages are popular; information that is useful to me when deciding what to work on. Each page is accessed using an address like this: […]
I have continued to add material to the new Mithras pages. In particular I am trying to track down photographs, drawings, anything on the monuments. I’m having quite a bit of luck in doing so, although I can see that I might have to do some photography trips. One item today caught my eye. It’s CIMRM […]
I have been looking at a section of the article at the new Mithras pages on the initiation process into the cult. This section is copied from the Wikipedia Mithras article as it was at the start of 2011, before the article was deliberately poisoned. But that doesn’t mean, necessarily, that it is sound. I’ve […]
At the 2nd Internation Congress for Mithraic Studies, held in Tehran in 1975, Edwin Yamauchi, a scholar specialising in the field of pre-Christian gnosticism, delivered a paper on the Nag Hammadi Gnostic text, the Apocalypse of Adam. The work is of uncertain date, although transmitted to us in a coptic codex of the 4th century, […]
Anyone who searches for “Mithras” in Google images is confronted with a mass of photographs by all sorts of people from all sorts of sites across the web. There’s a lot of good images there, clear and useful … but the site owners rarely give the CIMRM reference number, and usually have no real information […]