Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
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 […]
Into town bright and early, in the hope of avoiding the crowds of shoppers, and to the library to pick up David Ulansey’s Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries (1989). Slightly nervous in case there is a later edition. The library charged me 5.40 GBP (about $8) for the use of it for 3 weeks. I’ve […]
A reader kindly purchased a CD of my collection of the Fathers in English (available here). Since this collections is something that I work on continuously, I don’t keep a stock. So the order meant that I had to produce one. I spent most of the morning trying to do so, and having baffling difficulties. This was […]
A dull Saturday morning, and I went into town and visited the local library, in search of my book order from Tuesday. On entering my ears were assailed with music, from some device stationed on the enquiries desk, and there were stalls filling the main library area. Apparently the library had been turned into a tatty-looking craft […]
Into town this morning, and into Suffolk Central Library in Ipswich. My purpose? To enquire as to the whereabouts of the copy of Vermaseren’s Mithras: the secret god. A copy lives 40 miles away in the county reserve in Lowestoft, and I ordered it online on Tuesday. Yet here we are on Thursday, and it has […]
I’m still proofing the OCR of the English translation of Ibn Abi Usaibia, and reached p.639 last night. The translation of Methodius De lepra is creeping forward. I prompted the translator last night, and another couple of (short) pages arrived this morning, and I have just annotated them and sent them back. These pages from […]
I’ve been looking at another story about Mithras originating with Franz Cumont. In the process, I find that the PDF’s I have of his master-work, Textes et monuments figurés relatifs aux mystères de Mithra, 2 vols, 1899- are not that good where the pictures are concerned. A Google Books search reveals nothing. But I suspect this is […]
You can learn quite a lot from looking at non-English versions of Wikipedia. For instance the German Mithras article is quite a bit superior to the English one in several respects, handling the Mithra-Mithras dichotomy well. It lacks the heavy referencing that I added to the English one; but since all that work did not save the article from […]
A truly interesting article at Past Horizons: Temple of Mithras to be restored to its original location. Plans to dismantle and move the reconstructed Roman Temple of Mithras to temporary storage, ahead of a more faithful reconstruction, will begin on the 21 November 2011 by Museum of London Archaeology. The temple, which is located at […]