Tag: Mithras

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have flu and can’t do anything!  Rats!  But I did manage to add CIMRM 335 to my Mithras pages.  It’s a marble relief of Mithras killing the bull, with some quite clear images of the other figures that hang around while the Persian guy is sticking it to the bull.  So it gets referenced quite a bit.  I noticed David Ulansey referred to it, while discussing the meaning of Cautes and Cautopates.

What’s interesting about this relief is … it’s lost.  Indeed it’s long since been turned into lime and pasted between some renaissance bricks.  Franz Cumont, in his collection of 1894, could do no more than reproduce the  line-drawing given by Montfaucon in the 18th century.  Which is not great, since the original was found and published in 1564.

One of the marvellous things about the web is that you can find original materials.  In the days when we all had to rely on libraries, you’d be very lucky if your research library even had the book.  The chances were that you wouldn’t be allowed to handle a book of that era.  As for getting a copy of a page… oh no!  Ask and the librarian would look down their long nose and make quite clear that you were not likely to be allowed to do that.  Dear me, no!  At the most you might get a very poor quality reproduction.

Today I just typed the stuff into Google, and in seconds came to the University of Chicago site, found the original, downloaded it — thoughtfully they indicated their permissions policy — uploaded it and was all done in less time than it took an old-type clerk to purse his lips and look distasteful.

Magic!

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How we would prefer not to discover antiquity – Durighello and the Sidon Mithraeum

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The Mithraeum at Sidon is lost.  Indeed it was never discovered.  Our knowledge of it rests on two things; a small collection of exquisite statuettes in Parian marble, now in the Louvre; and a letter by their finder, a certain Edmond Durighello.

Durighello’s letter was published in the obscure journal, le Bosphorus egyptien.  A year later, in 1888, it was reprinted by Solomon Reinach in the revue archeologique.  It is here.  My transcription and translation are here.

Let us look at what Durighello says:

The “Egyptian Bosphorus” August 19, 1887, published the following article, which had the honour to be reprinted in the official diary of Madrid news. So beautiful a specimen of fanciful archaeology should not be allowed to fall into oblivion.  Three lines of this article are certainly truthful, although they refer to facts already old; we reproduce the rest without guarantee, in the hope that it may prove to be true.

The cult of Mithras is of Persian origin. Mithras is the god Ormuzd of the Persians.  His cultus, which followed the victorious armies of the Persian kings, was established in the conquered countries and was somewhat transformed there, borrowing from the native cults some of their character. Until now, no temple of Mithras has been found intact, as the rage of Constantine broke like a devastating hurricane over every monument of idolatry. The temple of Sidon alone escaped destruction.

It is several meters underground, completely buried in the rubble. If it was said to someone in passing, while walking on the ground under which the temple lies, that under our feet there are beautiful rooms filled with archaeological treasures, he would be legitimately  astonished, because nothing on the surface reveals the existence of these mysterious vaults. I was able to visit this sanctuary, and here is the description.

It seems that the followers of the cult of Mithras in the city of Sidon, on the publication of the first edict of Constantine, were eager to wall up the door of their secret temple. Perhaps they were victims of the politics which caused Constantine to take action against the idolaters. The fact is that the temple remained hidden and unknown until my subterranean researchs in the rubble in Phoenicia led me to its mysterious entrance. The wooden door was destroyed by moisture; it gave onto a long corridor encumbered by earth which had partly filled it. To the height of a man on both sides of the corridor, in fourteen niches, are placed marble statues of 1m, 10 in size, representing the priests, or rather warriors of all ages, armed at all points with a the military appearance.

At the end of this corridor is a large circular room, whose dome is supported by twenty-four columns forming twelve corners. Each of these corners contains a kind of altar; at the foot of these altars, marble beds of bizarre forms still retain traces of the mysteries that were performed here. On these twelve altars are large marble bas-reliefs on which are carved the signs of the zodiac, and in the free space may be seen, painted on the wall, some extraordinary figures it is impossible to describe here, because of their obscenity; some candelabras or torch-holders, of marble and bronze, true masterpieces of execution, are placed on pedestals of excellent work. This room is paved with mosaics of colored glass inlaid with gold; in the middle is a huge marble bull whose horns are plated with gold; before this bull is a narrow opening leading by a stairway of twelve steps to seven rooms underground, carved into the living rock and giving onto one another by iron gates, all rusty, detached from their hinges, littering the thresholds; the size of these rooms decreases more and more until, with the seventh and last, there is only a space in which twenty people may be  cramped; the walls of these rooms are decorated behind many marble altars, bearing groups of statues arranged into scenes which are remarkable for the varieties of figures as for the whole. On all these altars, the oriental Venus dominates, and the characters that compose the scene wear the heads of different animals. White marble, ivory, bronze, silver, and especially gold, are used in abundance. I have sent from all these treasures only a dozen statues that are now with M. de Clercq in Paris.

When the Turkish government decides to honour its commitments to me, scientists will have the pleasure to study and admire this superb temple.

Edmond Durighello.

In other words, “Give me money and I will show you where it is.  You’ve got no chance of finding it without me.”

It is not difficult to see why Reinach was dubious.  So little of this corresponds to anything found in any Mithraeum.

And yet … there is this:

CIMRM 75 - The Sidon Tauroctony. In the Louvre.

And there is a collection of rather less than a dozen lovely statuettes.

It would be interesting to know whether there really was a Mithraeum at Sidon!

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m still working on the Roman cult of Mithras site.  The what’s new page indicates roughly what I’ve been doing.  The list of artefacts – monuments and inscriptions -(with photographs) is growing ever longer.  The various scripts that I use to manage the site are getting more stable, and adding extra tweaks is getting easier too.

The collection of Mithraic materials by Vermaseren is now more than 50 years old.  That means that there is quite a lot of material that has been uncovered which is not in that collection.  I tend to come across this, when I see some striking image, look for it in the CIMRM, and find … nothing.

So I need some means to handle non-CIMRM artefacts.  At the moment I’ve just got a few at the bottom of the page of all artefacts.  Today I adapted the wizard slightly to give these some kind of structured name.

Really we need to assign numbers to the items; a sort of CIMRM supplement.  To do this, tho, I would need to have a list of items found since 1956.  Doubtless such a list could be compiled from publications … but how?

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The joy of the hunt: some nice Mithraic sculptures and … Sidon?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have just stumbled upon a couple of very nice photographs of some very, very nice sculptures in the Louvre.  Here’s one:

The image is on Picasa, here.  Blessedly the photographer, Julianna Lees, has also photographed the notice boards that went with the images, and written a note:

Louvre, New Galleries, The Roman Empire in the Eastern Mediterranean – sculptures from the Mithraeum at Sidon, Lebanon, marble, 389 AD.  Mithras, sacrificing the bull, is surrounded by the figures of his cult, Cautes and Cautopates with  their torches, the double axe of thunder, etc.  The winged figure with a lion’s  head represents Kronos.  The Mithraeum was discovered in 1887 by Edmond  Durighello, an eccentric antique dealer who did not reveal its exact  whereabouts.

Now that certainly piqued my interest!  Very late but very nice sculptures of items that we normally see only in low-relief, often in grotty photos.  And … “a lost Mithraeum”?

Sidon is in Lebanon, which was part of French Syria during the first half of the 20th century — the happiest days that part of the world knew for 2,000 years, I’m sure — and naturally finds from there ended up in France.

Vermaseren discusses the Sidon Mithraeum in the CIMRM, I see, entries 74 onwards.  And … in his time, these weren’t even in the Louvre:

About the Mithraeum at Sidon (Saida), the article of the journalist Durighello, which has been published again by Reinach, does not give satisfactory explanation. Part of his statements, especially those about the finds, is based on the truth; according to de Ridder, however, one has “demesurement grossi l’importance d’une decouverte reelle”. Beside the statues, niches are mentioned, in which they shall have been placed, and a tesselated floor. According to the seleucid era the Mithraeum must have existed in the second century, assuming, however, the autonomic era of the city itself, the sanctuary existed in the fourth one. The last dating has been proposed by E. Will in Syria XXVII, 1950, 261ff, especially the name of one of the dedicators Fl. Gerontios points into this direction. The collection of sculptures (coll. Peretie) was bought by de Clercq in Paris in 1882 and is now deposited with Comte Louis de Boisgelin, 5 Rue Masseran, Paris (VII), To his kindness we-owe that we have been in the opportunity to study the documents.

Hmm.  How very exciting!

I shall work on all these, and try to add as much as I can to the Mithras site.  There must be other photos of so nice a set of items!

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Surfing the information wave: yeeehaaaa!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I found a picture of Mithras killing the bull online today.  There’s loads of photos on the web, of various monuments, all slightly different.  Identifying them is fun!

Anyway, using the lettering “Alexander”, that I could see on the photo, I did a search in the PDF’s I have of Vermaseren’s CIMRM– collection of all the monuments.  I found it fairly easily.  It’s CIMRM 603.   So I created a page on the new Mithras site for CIMRM 603 and 604.  I included the image.

Anyone searching for CIMRM 603 ought to find it, although, as yet, Google doesn’t seem to pick my site up.  Wonder why.

Vermaseren’s entry, tho, was interesting.  Because he obviously hadn’t seen the monument!  All he had was a literature search.  He reckoned that it was probably the same as an item published in 1746 in Museum Romanum.

Here’s the good bit: I thought it might be fun to find the 1746 publication.  And I did.  It took a bit of faffing around, but then it all just worked.  And I grabbed that engraving, and included that as well.

You know, we are so blessed to live in an age when books are freely available.  Despite the best efforts of German publishers to screw it all up, we can get hold of stuff that previous scholars — like Vermaseren — could only dream of.

The limit is your imagination…

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Mithras in the Apocalypse of Adam

Posted on by Roger Pearse

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.[1]  The work is of uncertain date, although transmitted to us in a coptic codex of the 4th century, and a translation is online.

Unfortunately Yamauchi’s paper is not accessible to me, but the topic is an interesting one, to which the author has returned since.[2]

The text contains a passage which discusses thirteen numbered “kingdoms”, which are all “faulty explanations of the Illuminator”.  An early editor, A. Bohlig, perhaps influenced by Cumontian ideas that Mithras was a Zoroastrian deity, asserted a number of supposed references to Mithras.  Yamauchi ably disposes of these.

Much more interesting is a really possible reference to the birth of Mithras from a rock!  The text runs:

A cloud came upon the earth.  It enveloped a rock.  He originated from it. (80, 21-25).

 The rock-birth of Mithras is one of the distinctive pieces of iconography of the cult.  Yamauchi argues, cogently in my view, that if this is indeed a reference to Mithras, then it must push back the date of the Apocalypse of Adam.  His reasoning seems worth reproducing:

Though Mithra(s) was an ancient Indo-Aryan god, who is attested as early as a treaty between the Hittites and the Hurnans (14th cent. BCE), it was not until the late first century CE that we have evidence of the Roman mystery religion, which we call Mithraism. No mithraea were found, for example, at Pompeii or Herculaneum, which were buried by Mt. Vesuvius in CE 79. There is an allusion to Mithras dragging a bull into a cave in Statius (CE 80). Some Mithraic scholars do not believe that the development of a Roman Mithraism antedates the reign of Hadrian.[57] Though we have numerous examples of Mithraic rock birth motifs attested in Europe, we have none from Egypt. Robert Bull found a mithraeum at Caesarea, which is dated to the fourth cent. CE.” The only Mithraic site in the Near East which attests the rock birth motif is Dura-Europos, where the mithraeum is dated to CE 168.

Reference 57 is to his own paper from Tehran, of which this is, therefore, only a summary.  But I had not seen the statement about the absence of a Mithraeum at Pompeii before, and it is a valid point.

I must admit that I am unconvinced that we should see this passage in the Apocalypse of Adam as referring to Mithras.  It’s not really specific enough.  Anyone might imagine someone or something “born of earth”, or “born of a rock”.  We would need more, to be certain.

The paper also contains a salutary warning on the use of Zoroastrian texts, which is relevant to the study of Mithras as well as to gnosticism:

The first editor, A. Bohlig, discerned references to Mithras in the series of kingdoms Bohlig finds such references in kingdoms seven, eight, ten, and eleven.”[44] A scholar who has recendy highlighted the Iranian elements, both from Zoroastrianism and Mithraism, in the tractate is Andrew Welburn.[45] Welburn suggests that the frequent references to the “virgin birth of the Illuminator” (Kingdoms 3, 4, 6, and possibly 1) are best explained as allusions to the stories of the Saoshyants or “redeemers,” who were bom from Zoroaster’s seed, which had been hidden in a lake.[46]

In a more general monograph, which is informed by the ideas of Rudolf Steiner,[47] Welburn also discerns such Iranian influence in the reference to the Magi episode in Matthew.[48] According to Welburn, “At any rate, the eschatological star-child was in some circles also the reappearing Zarathushtra, and in Christian versions he becomes Jesus.”[49]

Welburn prefers to see the incarnations of the thirteen kingdoms in the Apocalypse of Adam as those of the prophet Zarathushtra (Zoroaster) rather than Mithra, by noting the assimilation of Zarathustra to Mithra in Parthian times. He refers to the tradition of “Zaratas, who appeared in Babylonia[50] and was honoured as the founder of the Mithraic cult in its syncretistic form.[51]

But there are many things amiss with Welbum’s use of Iranian traditions to explicate Matthew and the Apocalypse of Adam. First of all, though the word magos was originally an Iranian word, it came to mean “astrologer” and is clearly used in this sense in Matthew[52]. To support his comments on the connection between the magi and Iran, he appeals to the medieval Syrian Chronicle of Zuqnin. The earliest reference to Zoroaster as the source of the prediction about the star and savior is found in Theodore bar Konai (9th cent. CE).[53] The view that Zoroaster was the founder of Mithraism is found in Porphyry (3rd cent. CE).[54] The traditions about Zoroaster’s seed giving rise to the Saoshyants are taken from late Pahlavi works which were not composed until the 9th-10th centuries CE![55] Though there are Greek traditions about Zoroaster, who appeared as Zaratas, there has been no evidence of Zoroastrianism found in Mesopotamia.[56]

44. A. Bohlig, “Die Adamsapokalypse aus Codex V von Nag Hammadi als Zeugnis judisch-iranischer Gnosis,” OrChr 48 (1964) 47-48.
45. A. Welburn. “Iranian Prophetology and the Birth of the Messiah: the Apocalypse of Adam,” ANRW II.25.4 (1988) 4752-94.
46. Ibid.. 4757.
47. A. Welburn, The Beginnings of Christianity: Essene Mystery. Gnostic Revelation and the Christian Vision (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 1991) 26-29.
48. Welburn, 86.; idem, “Iranian Prophetology,” 4785: “On the other hand, a certain stratum of Christian tradition held on to Zoroastrian connections, as is shown by the visit of the Magi in Matthew …”
49. Welburn, “Iranian Prophetology,” 4789.
50. On this Pythagorean tradition, see M. Boyce and F. Grenet, A History of Zoroastrianism, Vol. 3: Zoroastrianism under Macedonian and Roman Rule (Leiden: E. J. Brill. 1991)523-24.
51. Welburn, “Iranian Prophetology,” 4774.
52. See my Persia and the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House. 1990), ch. 13; see also my “The Magi Episode,” Christos, Chronos, and Kairos. ed. J. Vardaman and E. Yamauchi (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1989) 15-39.
53. Boyce and Grenet, A History of Zoroastrianism III, 450.
54. Ibid, 548.
55. On the lateness of many key Zoroastrian documents see E. Yamauchi. “Religions of the Biblical World: Persia,” ISBE, VOL 4, rev. ed, ed. G. W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. 1988) 123-29. idem. Persia and the Bible. ch. 12. On the complete dearth of Persian religious texts from the critical Parthian Era (250 CE – 225 CE) see my review of E. Yarshater, ed.. The Cambridge History of Iran III: The Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian Periods in American Historical Review 89 (1984) 1055-56.

I give all these references because it is really quite difficult for the general reader to get a handle on some of these issues, since few of us are Persianists.  The question of what kind of material was the Greek pseudo-Zoroaster literature, and to what extent it really was Persian in nature, is one that every Mithras enthusiast will find of interest, since it may relate to how Persian Mithras could possibly be.

But the very late date of much Zoroastrian material is really critically important to remember.  The majority of Avestan material, dating from the Sassanid period when it was first written down (and perhaps modified in the process? as a conscious act of rivalry to the activity of Constantine in support of Christianity in the same period?) was largely destroyed by the Moslems.  This includes the Great Avesta, found in every fire temple after the 4th century A.D.

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  1. [1]E. Yamauchi, ‘The Apocalypse of Adam, Mithraism and Pre-Christian Gnosticism’, J. Duchesne-Guillemin (ed.), Études Mithraiques, (Acta Iranica IV; Leiden/Teheran/Liège, 1978), pp. 537-63.↩
  2. [2]Yamauchi, The issue of pre-Christian gnosticism reviewed in the light of the Nag Hammadi texts, in: John D. Turner, The Nag Hammadi Library After Fifty Years: Proceedings of the 1995 Society of Biblical Literature Commemoration, Brill, 1997, p.72 f. The discussion is on p.81.↩

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Just busy working on the Roman cult of Mithras pages.  Adding comments using Discus is easy.  Adding “like” buttons for Facebook or Google+, etc, is much harder than you might think!

I spent a little time today on Picasa, the online photo sharing site.  I searched for “Mithras” and added a comment with the CIMRM number to a few of the photos.  That way they will come up if people start using the CIMRM.

I realise that I need to learn more about how scholars interact with monuments.  What is the “bull. ep.”?  What is AE, where a monument gets an AE number.  So much to do.

And on Monday I have to go back to work, and will be, once again, reduced to doing dribs and drabs of useful work online in spare moments in the evenings.  It is remarkable how much more progress I have made with the Mithras site in a week, than in nearly a year before that.

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Accessing images of monuments and inscriptions of Mithras

Posted on by Roger Pearse

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 on what you’re looking at.

I’ve started to address this on my new Mithras site.  I’ve created a gallery of selected monuments, and an upload wizard that allows me to create new entries fairly easily.  Each monument has a page with an image or two, the CIMRM text, and whatever else is to hand.

The idea, simply, is that if you find a reference in the scholarly literature to “CIMRM 593”, you don’t just sigh and rub your eyes.  Instead you can go to the gallery, find out what it looks like, find links to a couple of images, and then, if need me, hunt down some more photos yourself.

CIMRM 593 is a good example.  That’s it, on the right.  It’s an item which must be photographed dozens of times every day, because it lives in the British Museum in London, on public display.

What makes it important is that it seems to be one of the very earliest tauroctonies – monuments of Mithras killing the bull.  The two chaps at the back are Cautes and Cautopates, the torch bears, in an unusual position.  Unfortunately the statue was restored at some remote date.  Various bits are not original: the head should be facing towards us, and there are other bits that are not right.  But now … you can get details of what is not authentic from my page above.

And suddenly, you don’t have to be a specialist in order to know anything about the monument.  We can all look, even if we don’t have the training of a professional, once we know what those images on Google Images are.  We can all see what the argument is about, at least.

Which is what I want to make possible.

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Ezquerra, Romanising Oriental Gods – freely accessible online!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Just discovered that Jaime Alvar Ezquerra and his publisher Brill have done something marvellous with Richard Gordon’s translation of his book Romanising oriental gods: Myth, Salvation and Ethics in the Cults of Cybele, Isis and Mithras (2008).  I needed to consult it, and Google books gave me so very little with which to do so.

They put the thing online.  In PDF form.  Here:

http://archive.org/details/RomanisingOrientalGods

I could have wept!  How amazing!  How useful!

Thank you, gentlemen.

UPDATE: Oh rats! They omitted the plates!

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve spent some time working on the security of the Mithras site.  This now seems to be working, but we will see.  On Saturday I logged out and made sure that every page had some kind of security check.  No vandalism occurred yesterday, therefore.  Today I added a login page and password.

The vandal made two more attempts to edit today, one from an IP address supposedly in Sweden, the other using an IP address supposedly in Germany.  Clearly the IP addresses have been spoofed, and tell us nothing, therefore.

I’ve now started to think once more about how best to display the CIMRM data for monuments, inscriptions, etc.  Probably the thing to do is to experiment with one or two downloadable solutions, and see if these can be adapted.  I have a dreadful cold, however, so I may just go back to bed!

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