Tag: Mithras

A Mithraic Pope? The “Pater Patrum” or “Father of Fathers”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Among the nonsense that circulates on the web is an interesting claim, which may be found in the old online Catholic Encyclopedia,[1] and spread into atheist literature via the medium of Joseph Wheless’ Forgery in Christianity.[2].  It is perhaps most accessible today by means of the Christ Conspiracy by a certain Acharya S., a poor woman who has seemingly managed to read uncritically incredible amounts of unreliable books, without acquiring any critical sense in the process.[3].  The various corrupt versions of the Catholic Encyclopedia material will doubtless be professionally interesting to the textual critic, who may see therein the process of transmission by careless scribes beautifully exampled.

The CE states:

The fathers conducted the worship. The chief of the fathers, a sort of pope, who always lived at Rome, was called “Pater Patrum” or “Pater Patratus.”

We may reasonably ask what the source for this claim is.  Inevitably we find that it is Franz Cumont’s Textes et Monuments, vol. 1.  On p.317-8 this states:

Finally, at the top of the hierarchy were the Fathers, who appear to have presided over the sacred ceremonies (pater sacrorum). The chief of them bore the title of Pater Patrum [1], sometimes transformed into Pater patratus [2] in order to introduce an official sacerdotal title into a sect which was Roman by naturalisation.  These Grand Masters of the adepts retained until their death the general control of the cult.[3]

1. Pater patrum, cf. t. II, 535, col. 2.  One became pater patrum after being an ordinary pater, cf. inscr. 14, 15 and note, and also 13 and note. — the Marcellinus leo of inscription 45 is perhaps the same person as the Domitius Marcellinus of inscr. 31. — the title of pater nomimus (inscr. 166 and note) seems to be an ordinary Father, as opposed to the Pater Patrum.

2. Pater patratus, inscr. 190; cf. however 514: Pater patratum leonem, which I cannot explain.  Patratus cannot be considered as a collective, despite the expression ob honorem sacri matratus  of inscription 574 b.

3. Inscr. 13 and note, 15 and note.

This material is what lies behind the statements in the C.E., which thus merely serve to popularise.  (The title pater patratus is an ancient one which appears in Livy[4] for a fetial priest with powers to make a religious oath on behalf of the Roman people to conclude treaties, so perhaps might be translated as executive father).[5] 

The material given is unsatisfactory as evidence for the large claims made.  Page 535 is merely the index to all mentions of the term, 14 of them.  Inscription 13 relates to CIL VI 754, set up between 357-362 A.D. by Nonius Victor Olympius, which does not seem to refer to him as a simple pater. Inscr. 14 and 15 are the monuments of Vettius Agorius Praetextatus from 387 A.D.  The latter monuments certainly do not support Cumont’s claim that a Pater Patrum was first a Pater (however probable this would otherwise seem to be).  Neither state, as Cumont does, that the role consisted of a general direction of the cult as a whole.  Inscr. 190 is CIMRM 706, in Milan, where P. Acilius Pisonianus is labelled pater patratus, dedicates a Mithraeum with funds from the municipality of Milan after a fire.  But there is no indication that this title is the same as pater patrum.  Inscr. 514 is a 3rd century inscription in Spain (CIMRM 803), where presidente patrem patratum leonem, is the perfect Father of the Lions presiding.

As so often with Cumont, the evidence simply does not support the claims made in the text.  Wild imagination extrapolates what might be true from the rather less exciting raw data.  None of this material takes us further forward. 

We can speculate ourselves.  The Pater Leonem is, quite possibly, simply a pater with supervisory responsibility for the initiates of the grade of leo or Lion.  By analogy, a Pater Patrum would simply be the senior pater in a Mithraeum.  Given the military links of the cult, that a single individual would lead each grade, and perhaps the Mithraeum as a whole, seems inevitable, just as the centurions were led by a primus pilus in the legion.  This all fits the data admirably, and gives rise to none of the exciting claims of a “Mithraic Pope”.  Do we need to suppose the existence of such a figure?  Even if we refer to a “High Priest of Mithras”, which might have existed … do we need to suppose that there was one?  What evidence requires it?  Or should we, perhaps, see in the pater patrum the equivalent of the Christian bishop, responsible for the temples in a city?  We could; but what evidence requires this?

When we know nothing, it is really, really important not to speculate.  The data we have indicates very little.

A useful 1982 article by Peter Herz in ZPE [6] lists all the monuments that refer to a Pater Patrum.  There are fifteen of these in all.  Eleven of these are from Rome.  The majority are late Roman noblemen. 

It is, in truth, a thin collection of data.  I hope to review it all at some subsequent point.

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  1. [1]Here.↩
  2. [2]The passage in Wheless may be found here, apparently on p.37, who states that the CE material is on p.403-4.  It reads: “The fathers conducted the worship. The chief of the fathers, a sort of pope,who always lived at Rome, was called ‘Pater Patratus’ … The members below the grade of pater called one another ‘brother,’ and social distinctions were forgotten in Mithraic unity…”↩
  3. [3]Achrya S, The Christ Conspiracy, p.120: ‘Of Mithraism the Catholic Encyclopedia states, as related by Wheless, “The fathers conducted the worship. The chief of the fathers, a sort of pope, who always lived at Rome, was called ‘Pater Patratus.’” The Mithraic pope was also known as Papa and Pontimus Maximus.’↩
  4. [4]Book 1, chapter 24. Here.↩
  5. [5]More details on the ancient “Pater patratus”, a member of the college of priests known as fetiales, may be found in William Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890), online here: “It appears that when an injury had been sustained, four fetiales (Varr. ap. Non.) were deputed to seek redress, who again elected one of their number to act as their representative. This individual was styled the pater patratus populi Romani. (It is an error to suppose that the pater patratus was the permanent head of the college: Mommsen, Staatsr.2 2.670. “↩
  6. [6]Peter Herz, Agrestius v(ir) c(larissimus), Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, Bd. 49 (1982), pp. 221-224. JSTOR.↩

The monument of Vettius Agorius Praetextatus

Posted on by Roger Pearse

CIL VI, 1779 is a statue base.  Blessedly, a photograph is online at BBAW here, which I borrow (right), together with a transcription and a German translation.  I believe the monument may now be in the Capitoline museum in Rome.[1]

The statue which stood atop it has, alas, long since vanished, but on the base is a long inscription set up by the widow of the man in question, one Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, the leader of the “pagan reaction” in the late 4th century, which went down before S. Ambrose and the emperor Theodosius I.  He died in 384 A.D.

The inscription is as follows:

D(is) M(anibus) / Vettius Agorius Praetextatus / augur p[o]ntifex Vestae / pontifex Sol[is] quindecemvir / curialis Herc[u]lis sacratus / Libero et Eleusiniis hierophanta / neocorus tauroboliatus / pater patrum in [r]e publica vero / quaestor candidatus / pr(a)etor urbanus / corrector Tusciae et Umbriae / consularis Lusitaniae / proconsule Achaiae / praefectus urbi / legatus a senatu missus V / praefectus praetorio II Italiae / et Illyrici / consul ordinarius / designatus / et Aconia Fabia Paulina c(larissima) f(emina) / sacrata Cereri et Eleusiniis / sacrata apud (A)eginam Hecatae / tauroboliata hierophantria / hi coniuncti simul vixerunt ann(os) XL // Vettius Agorius Praetextatus / Paulinae coniugi / Paulina veri et castitatis conscia / dicata templis atq(ue) amica numinum / sibi maritum praeferens Romam viro / pudens fidelis pura mente et corpore / benigna cunctis utilis penatibus / cae[le]s[tium iam sede semper mec]u[m e]ri[s // Vettius Agorius Praetextatus / Paulinae coniugi / Paulina nostri pectoris consortio / fomes pudoris castitatis vinculum / amorque purus et fides caelo sata / arcana mentis cui reclusa credidi / munus deorum qui maritalem torum / nectunt amicis et pudicis nexibus / pietate matris coniugali gratia / nexu sororis filiae modestia / et quanta amicis iungimur fiducia / aetatis usu consecrandi foedere / iugi fideli simplici concordia / iuvans maritum diligens ornans / colens // [Sple]ndor parentum nil mihi maius dedit / [quam] quod marito digna iam tum visa sum / [se]d lumen omne vel decus nomen viri / Agori superbo qui creatus germine / patriam senatum coniugemq(ue) inluminas / probitate mentis moribus studiis simul / virtutis apicem quis supremum nanctus es / tu namque quidquid lingua utraq(ue) est proditum / cura soforum porta quis caeli patet / vel quae periti condidere carmina / vel quae solutis vocibus sunt edita / meliora reddis quam legendo sumpseras / sed ista parva tu pius m<y=OVE>stes sacris / teletis reperta mentis arcano premis / divumque numen multiplex doctus colis / sociam benigne coniuge nectens sacris / hominum deumque consciam ac fidam tibi / quid nunc honores aut potestates loquar / hominumque votis adpetita gaudia / quae tu caduca ac parva semper autumans / divum sacerdos infulis celsus clues / tu me marite disciplinarum bono / puram ac pudicam sorte mortis eximens / in templa ducis ac famulam divis dicas / te teste cunctis imbuor mysteriis / tu Dindymenes Atteosqu<e=I> antistitem / teletis honoras taureis consors pius / Hecates ministram trina secreta edoces / Cererisque Graiae tu sacris dignam paras / te propter omnis me beatam me piam / celebrant quod ipse bonam disseminas / totum per orbem ignota noscor omnibus / nam te marito cur placere non queam / exemplum de me Romulae matres petunt / subolemque pulchram si tuae similis putant / optant probantque nunc viri nunc feminae / quae tu magister indidisti insignia / his nunc ademptis maesta coniunx maceror / felix maritum si superstitem mihi / divi dedissent sed tamen felix tua / quia sum fuique postque mortem mox ero

Much of this is an epitaph by the wife, Paulina, and an English translation of it may be found here.  But the list of offices held is also very interesting:

To the shades of Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, augur, priest of Vesta, priest of Sol, member of the Board of Fifteen, initiate of the senate of Hercules, hierophant of Liber and the Elusinian mysteries, neocorus (?), tauroboliate (i.e. had undergone the taurobolium in the cult of Cybele), pater patrum; and in the state: candidate for Quaestor, Urban Praetor, Corrector of Tuscany and Umbria,  a consular of Lusitania, proconsul of Achaia, Urban Prefect, senatorial legate 5 times, Praetorian Prefect of Italy and Illyria twice, consul-ordinary-designate; and Aconia Fabia Paulina, noble woman, initiate of Ceres and the Eleusinian mysteries, initiate of Hecate at Aegina, tauroboliate hierophant …

The mention of “pater patrum” reminds us of the cult of Mithras, where 15 inscriptions attest to a person of high rank, usually in Rome, with that title. 

But when I first read this, I wondered whether it should be connected instead to the list of secular offices.  Unlike any other priesthood, the name of the god is not mentioned.  Could we simply read as “truly the Father of the Fathers in the state”, with the old meaning of patres as the Fathers, the senators, in much the way that Lord Macaulay gives it:

For Romans in Rome’s quarrel spared neither land nor gold,
Nor son nor wife, nor limb nor life, in the brave days of old.
Then none was for a party; then all were for the state;
Then the great man helped the poor, and the poor man loved the great.
Then lands were fairly portioned; then spoils were fairly sold:
The Romans were like brothers in the brave days of old.
Now Roman is to Roman more hateful than a foe,
And the Tribunes beard the high, and the Fathers grind the low.
As we wax hot in faction, in battle we wax cold:
Wherefore men fight not as they fought in the brave days of old.

But it seems to be generally read as a reference to the Mithraic office.

Praetextatus was a great man in his day, a Roman aristocrat at the end of the 4th century, watching the world change in unthinkable ways and trying, in his own way, to resist.  Within a handful of years of his death, the barbarians would ride in triumph through Rome itself.  How curious that his monument should survive, 16 centuries later, as a window into a Rome that was vanishing as it was carved.

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  1. [1]See the website here.  This gives an inventory no, inv. MC0208, and tells us the item is 125 cm high.↩

The Dieburg Mithraeum – some reflections on the 1928 publication

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Great news – Behn’s Das Mithrasheiligtum zu Dieberg, De Gruyter (1928) has arrived.  Here’s an image of the title page as proof!

The discovery of the Mithraeum at Dieberg was something of a watershed.  I don’t know if there were monographs dedicated to individual Mithraea before then, but it set a pattern for such monographs in future.  Most notably these included the publications of Vermaseren of the splendid Mithraea of Marino and Barberini, with the amazing colour frescos.

Behn’s book was doubtless cutting-edge in its time.  But what struck me, as I looked through it, was how poor the quality of the photographs was.  They are small, grainy, and I don’t know how useful they are to the scholar.  Yet, most likely, these are the only available images of the lesser finds.

The Mithraeum in Germany tends to contain very elaborate tauroctonies, with side panels depicting what must be elements of the mythology of the mysteries of Mithras.  Unfortunately we can only guess from these what the story being told was.

So the German tauroctonies are important for the study of Mithras.  The Dieburg Mithraeum is one of these.

The volume itself is A4, and less than 50 pages, so I have made a copy of it for my own use.  I wish that I could share it; but the fact is that it will probably be in copyright when I am in my grave.  I doubt that more than a handful of people ever consult Behn’s tome; and, so long as we have oppressive copyright laws, that is the way that it will stay.

So why scan it?  Well, because I want to read it.  And I don’t read German very well.  Once the OCR has completed, I can copy and paste portions of the German text into Google Translate.  And that will give me a very fair idea of what most of the book — much of it probably waffle – says.

It has been long since I sat at my scanner on a Friday evening, and it has been a pleasant reminder of how I used to spend my weekends.  The time at my disposal grows less every year, or so it seems.  The night comes, when none of us can work.  But “ah, not yet, not yet”.[1]

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  1. [1]Matthew Arnold, On the Rhine. From Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems, 1855.  Online here.↩

Finding the limits of the internet

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve just added a page to my new Mithras site for CIMRM 1083.  This monument is perhaps the most complicated and well-preserved example of a carving of Mithras killing the bull.  It shows all sorts of events from his (unknown) mythology in side panels.  In other words, it’s a gem.  Vermaseren states that just about every book that ever mentions Mithras includes a photograph of it.  It’s famous.  It’s the classic representation.  It comes from the Nida-Heddernheim Mithraeum no 1, and apparently it’s in a museum in Wiesbaden.

Yet … I have been quite unable to find any photographs of it on the web!  Yes, the internet doesn’t have the classic relief of Mithras doing his Mithras-act.

It is worth reminding ourselves that what is online may be very skewed.  We tend to judge by availability.  Yet here we have an example where the internet is distorting the message, by omitting something really, really important.  It leads to the general question: how is the internet misleading us?

Here’s Vermaseren’s image of it, for your reference:

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve continued to work on the new site about the Roman cult of Mithras.  I’ve added some more monuments to the page of selected monuments.

Butr today I went through the section on the main page about initiation into the mysteries, and looked up all the material and checked it.  The results were not that encouraging.  It wasn’t wildly wrong… but it wasn’t that good.  The new version is quite a bit different from the version that was there yesterday, particularly when it comes to footnotes.

This material was based on the last reliable version of the Wikipedia Mithras article, which I contributed to very largely before it was hijacked and poisoned by a troll with the support of a couple of corrupt administrators.  So I thought it was reasonably reliable.  It didn’t feel grossly wrong, even to me.  But of course there was stuff that I had never checked, even in the days when I worked on Wikipedia.

My eye fell particularly on the table of grades of initiation, supposed symbols, and the god / planet for each.  It took very little reading in the literature to realise that the data was from two different sources, and that this fact was not made clear.  The “symbols” were often not really right.  When they were right, the author had not realised that two of the three symbols related to the god, not to the grade of initiation.

Another crass error was a reference to “colitores”.  But the term (a version of cultores) only appears in inscriptions to Jupiter Dolichenus.  The author of the material had simply lost control of his syntax, thereby confusing the reader.

It may seem like small stuff but, as ever, I came away discouraged as to the likely reliability of any Wikipedia article.  How many people can afford to spend several hours verifying a relatively short paragraph of text?

Worrying.  Still, the version on my new site is pretty solid.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Back at work after two weeks illness, and I find myself suffering from the tiredness that goes with being less than fully fit after illness.  But I’m still busy with this and that.

I’ve been reading a little red hardback Loeb edition of Horace, and enjoying it more than I thought that I might.  I’ve read it through before, of course, but it wasn’t very interesting to me then.  This time it has been very good to read.  The editor refers to the scholiasts on Horace; Porphyrio and the like.  Their explanatory passages tell us who were some of the now-mysterious personages referred to in the text.  Isn’t it funny that we don’t have translations of these?  I know that the old scholia on Juvenal are really quite short; and I wish these existed in English.  Perhaps I should seek out the scholia on Horace also.

The Horace has been on my shelves for ages.  It wasn’t new when I bought it for five pounds at some unremembered second-hand shop.  It was reprinted in 1961, and so I must infer was the property of another.  His heirs disposed of his books for a song, no doubt, and so it comes to me.  There is no book-plate – do men use book-plates any more? – nor note of name.  One day it will pass on from me also.  I hope the next owner enjoys it too.

Work on the Mithras site continues, and consists at the moment of adding entries from Vermaseren’s Corpus Inscriptionum et Monumentum Religionis Mithriacae to the site.  I try to find a photograph in every case, although clearly more work will be needed.  Gratifyingly, it is attracting some traffic.  I haven’t really worked on the text pages on the site much.  Once I have identified all the inscriptions and monuments that reference “Arimanius”, then I shall rework that page.  That would seem to be a good way forward.  In the mean time, I can do best by adding data.

Most recently I’ve been looking at some of the entries in the CIMRM for the Carrawburgh Mithraeum.  These mainly consist of quotations from the Illustrated London News, as the temple had only just been discovered in the 50’s.  Irritatingly the ILN is not online.  There is a gushy story in the Guardian about it “going online”, but in reality all that has happened is that a commercial company has digitised it and made access available for money to well-heeled institutions.  I shall need to consult it, and that means a 40 mile journey.  I could wish that our government put a stop to this kind of extortion racket, which, after all, is funded by taxpayers money.

But this has led me to draw up a list of things to do, places to go, and photos to take.  I have also started to look around to find out how I can discover what monuments, items, inscriptions about Mithras have been published in the last 50 years.  At some point I shall have to start searching these, draw up a table of monuments and add them to the site.  It will be rather fun to do some field trips!  But … I shall probably have to seek the cooperation of the curators.  And petty bureaucrats can be a pain.  Likewise I need to get good photographs, yet I am a rotten photographer.  So a little planning and thought seems called for.

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Mithras and Ormazd in Britain

Posted on by Roger Pearse

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 827.  It’s a silver denarius, found at St. Albans in Hertfordshire in the UK, the site of Verulamium.  But it’s been tampered with.  It was found in a layer of debris from 150-200 AD.

Originally it showed Tarpeia on one side.  This is the Roman woman who betrayed Rome to the Gauls in return for money.  The contemptuous Gauls then killed her by throwing their heavy shields onto her in a pile.  Here’s an example:

But now it looks like this:

Or better this:

(Isn’t it curious how Vermaseren’s photograph, the first one, doesn’t look right?)

The inscription has been removed from the reverse, leaving just a picture of someone buried under shields.  This looks very like Mithras rock-born.

But the obverse has been smoothed down, and an inscription added: MITHRAS OROMASDES, in a circle.  In the centre is the word PHREN.

Oromazdes is, of course, the Greek form of Ormazd, Ahura Mazda, the chief deity of Zoroastrianism, who appears under that name at the peculiar hierotheseon at Nemrud Dag, built by Antiochus I of Commagene to honour both Greek and Persian gods (and himself).  “Phren” is apparently a solar name from Graeco-Roman magic – Phre, equivalent to Re, the Egyptian term for the sun[1].  So this item — an amulet, a pass to the Mithraic meeting, whatever it may have been — ties together some very interesting ideas.  I don’t know of another genuine Mithraic item that mentions Ormazd.  And the link to magical material may be relevant to the appearance of Mithras in the Greek Magical Papyri.

So … not an afternoon wasted, in any sense.

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  1. [1]H. D. Betz, The Greek magical papyri in translation, vol. 1., p.338: “Phre: See Ra.” “Ra (Re, Phrē): The Egyptian god of the sun (P)rē, without the definite article. Re means simply ‘sun’, while Prē, the form of the god’s name from the New Kingdom onward, means ‘the sun’. See Bonnet, RARG 626-30, s.v. ‘Re’.”↩

Wiki-nonsense – material about Mithras of very dubious standing

Posted on by Roger Pearse

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 been looking at some of the material, and getting ever more suspicious.

Elsewhere, as at Dura Europos, Mithraic graffiti survive giving membership lists, in which initiates of a Mithraeum are named with their Mithraic grades. At Virunum, the membership list or album sacratorum was maintained as an inscribed plaque, updated year by year as new members were initiated.  By cross-referencing these lists it is sometimes possible to track initiates from one Mithraeum to another; and also speculatively to identify Mithraic initiates with persons on other contemporary lists – such as military service rolls, of lists of devotees of non-Mithraic religious sanctuaries.

These are authoritative-sounding claims.  But … there isn’t a single reference for any of them.  Continuing…

Names of initiates are also found in the dedication inscriptions of altars and other cult objects.  Clauss noted in 1990 that overall, only about 14% of Mithriac names inscribed before 250 identify the initiates’ grade – and hence questioned that the traditional view that all initiates belonged to one of the seven grades. [=Manfred Clauss, “Die sieben Grade des Mithras-Kultes”, ZPE 82, 1990, p.183-194]

That’s the only reference.  The paragraph continues:

Clauss argues that the grades represented a distinct class of priests, sacerdotes.  Gordon maintains the former theory of Merkelbach and others, especially noting such examples as Dura where all names are associated with a Mithraic grade.  Some scholars maintain that practice may have differed over time, or from one Mithraea to another.

And there it ends, again without a reference.

Now doesn’t that all sound authoritative?  It does, even to someone like myself who has read a lot of Mithras material.  But … I have been looking at this stuff, and getting less and less happy.

Firstly, Clauss’ article from the ZPE is actually accessible online here, although the Wikipedia article quietly fails to link to it.   Now German is not one of my better languages, but even I can find the numeral “14 %” in a PDF file.  And it occurs, not as above, but in this context:

Umgekehrt stammen aus den Provinzen, die 66% des Gesamtmaterials der Namen beisteuern, lediglich 29% der Inhaber von Graden. Besonders kraß ist das Mißverhältnis in den Donauprovinzen, aus denen über 43% aller Kult-Anhänger bekannt sind, aber nicht einmal 14% der in die Grade Eingeweihten.

Conversely from the provinces, which account for 66% of the total material with names, come only 29% of the holders of grades of initiation.  The disproportion is particularly glaring in the Danube provinces, from which around 43% of all cult followers are known, but less than 14% of the known initiates.

That’s not what Wikipedia says.  In fact a few pages further on I find this summary of the epigraphic evidence:

Damit ergibt die Auswertung des epigraphischen Materials folgendes Bild: Innerhalb der Anhängerschaft des Mithras-Kultes gab es zwei Gruppierungen. Die überwiegende Mehrzahl der Mitglieder begnügte sich mit einer Einweihung in den Kult, engagierte sich darüber hinaus finanziell an dem Bau der Heiligtümer wie an ihrer Ausgestaltung durch Altäre, Reliefs und Statuen. Wie bei vielen uns unbekannten Kult-Anhängern werden sie sich auch an der Beschaffung der Verbrauchsmaterialien wie Kerzen, Weihrauch, Pinienzapfen und vor allem an den Lebensmitteln für die Kultmahle beteiligt haben.

Von dieser großen Gruppe läßt sich eine Minderheit abheben. Sie brachte das Engagement auf, sich der sicherlich langwierigen Prozedur der stufenweisen Initiation in die sieben Grade zu unterziehen, um dann die Opfer, den Kultvollzug und die Deutung der Kultlegende durchführen zu können. Dieses Engagement war vor allem dort vorhanden, wo der Mithras-Kult länger verankert war, also in Rom und Italien.

Thus the evaluation of the epigraphic material gives us the following picture: Within the followers of Mithras cult, there were two groups. The vast majority of the members were content with an initiation into the cult, were involved also in funding the construction of sanctuaries and their design, with altars, statues and reliefs. Like many cult followers unknown to us, they were also involved in the procurement of supplies such as candles, incense, pine cones and especially the food for the cult feast.

Out of this large group a minority sought elevation. They had the commitment to undergo the certainly lengthy procedure of the gradual initiation into seven grades, in order to perform the sacrifice, the cult implementation and interpretation of the cult legend. This commitment mainly existed where the Mithras cult was longer established, so in Rome and Italy.

There’s nothing in there about cult members who were not initiates.  Am I blind?  Or is this material really complete rubbish?

Secondly, what’s this about an album sacratorum at Virunum?  I’ve looked at the Virunum entries in the CIMRM.  There’s no such item there.  The only use of the term, indeed, is CIMRM 325, a marble tablet from Portus in Italy, reprinted from the CIL and obviously long lost.  This does indeed give a list of names, and mentions a “pater” and a “leo” (and that’s all).

What about Dura Europos?  I find a graffito in CIMRM 54, which gives names.  But the CIMRM entry doesn’t describe it in these terms.  It reads: “On behalf of the victory of our Imperial Lord, NAMA THEO MITHRAI, NAMA to the fathers Libeianos and Theodorus, NAMA also to Marinus the PETITOR, NAMA to all the SYNDEXIOI in the presence of the god.”[1]  Is that what most of us would understand from the Wikipedia article?

I don’t know who wrote this stuff, why, or when.  Yet, if it fails these simple tests of verification, this very authoritative-looking stuff has to be considered as rubbish.  All that stuff about cross-referencing lists of members … erm, how?  What lists?

Wikipedia has no mechanism to detect rubbish of this sort.  Nor can such a mechanism be devised.  It is only possible to fix this, through sheer human effort.  It is likely, therefore, that much of the material in the site is similarly dubious, and impossible to detect.  I certainly never was moved to check any of this, in the two years that I worked on that article.  The troll who currently owns it wouldn’t dream of doing such a task as verifying anything unless he disagreed with it.  So … whoever could do so?

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  1. [1]Leroy A. Campbell, Mithraic iconography and ideology, Brill, 1969.  He adds, “Here Mithras is still Theos Mithras, as on the Zenobios relief of A. D. 170/171 (40*), and not Helios Mithras.”↩

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve spent some time this morning on CIMRM 829.  This is the supposed Mithraeum in Colchester, not from from the temple of Claudius.  It’s not actually that far away from me, so I had thoughts of going to see it when I was better.  On a raw, frosty morning like today, of course, such a trip is not to be thought of!

There doesn’t seem to be any actual hard evidence associating it with Mithras at all.  The association seems to be the product of one man’s imagination.

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A lovely view of the hierostheon at Nemrud Dag

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Antiochus of Commagene built a strange, syncretistic temple on the hill at Nemrud Dag, in which he depicted various Greek and Persian gods as identical.  Since one of the latter was Mithra, the monument appears in Vermaseren’s corpus of Mithraic monuments, under the impression that Persian Mithra is the same as Roman Mithras (which it isn’t).

Including this data in my new site is not a high priority, but I have just added an entry for CIMRM 28, the first entry for Nemrud Dag.  Why?  Because of this gorgeous image of the site, which I found on Flickr here.

I only wish there was a larger photo available!

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