Tag: Mithras

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve continued to add a few photographs of Mithraic monuments, with their entry in the CIMRM, to the new Mithras site, The Roman cult of Mithras.  It’s become increasingly clear that the approach that I have been following with these is not quite right.  What I have at the moment is one web-page per monument.

You have to attempt some things before you really understand what you’re trying to do.  It’s become clear to me, for instance, that much of what I do when I add a photograph is repetitive, and the process of generating the page for the CIMRM entry is one that could be automated, and therefore should be.  I need to write a wizard to do the uploads, much like that in Wikimedia Commons, but targeted at my special process.  That will help.

But one page per monument doesn’t work.  The value of having this material is the ability to skim over it easily, to get an overview, to understand common features between dozens of images.  With a click per image, and a couple of thousand entries, this isn’t going to work.

Obviously I need some kind of image gallery, like that in Wikimedia Commons, or Google Images.  I was thinking of generating a thumbnail (using ImageMagick) as part of the upload wizard, and then using the wizard, not only to create the web page, but also to add an entry to the gallery.  That still seems like a good idea.

But it occurred to me just now … image gallery scripts must already exist.  Can’t I adapt one somehow?  It’s worth looking into.  A task for tomorrow, perhaps.

The material must be accessible.  We see so many academic sites where it is quite clear that the designer never stopped for a moment, imagined what a user might want to do on the site, and then reflected on how to make that easiest to do.  I don’t want to do this myself.

One other thing that I need to fix on the site.  I’ve got to make it easier to add Greek text!

Share

BBC Radio 4 on Mithras

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A correspondent writes that the BBC Radio 4 has devoted 45 minutes to a discussion of the cult of Mithras.  You can find the programme here.  It was broadcast on Thursday 27 December 2012, as part of the series In our time, presented by Melvyn Bragg.

The Cult of Mithras

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the cult of Mithras, a mystery religion that existed in the Roman Empire from the 1st to the 4th centuries AD. Also known as the Mysteries of Mithras, its origins are uncertain. Academics have suggested a link with the ancient Vedic god Mitra and the Iranian Zoroastrian deity Mithra, but the extent and nature of the connection is a matter of controversy.

Followers of Mithras are thought to have taken part in various rituals, most notably communal meals and a complex seven-stage initiation system. Typical depictions of Mithras show him being born from a rock, enjoying food with the sun god Sol and stabbing a bull. Mithraic places of worship have been found throughout the Roman world, including an impressive example in London. However, Mithraism went into decline in the 4th century AD with the rise of Christianity and eventually completely disappeared. In recent decades, many aspects of the cult have provoked debate, especially as there are no written accounts by its members. As a result, archaeology has been of great importance in the study of Mithraism and has provided new insights into the religion and its adherents.

With:

Greg Woolf, Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews

Almut Hintze, Zartoshty Professor of Zoroastrianism at SOAS, University of London

John North, Acting Director of the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London.

Producer: Victoria Brignell.

FURTHER READING

Jaime Alvar, ‘Romanising Oriental Gods: Myth, Salvation and Ethics in the Cults of Cybele, Isis and Mithras’ (Brill, 2008)

Mary Beard, John North and Simon Price, ‘Religions of Rome’ vol 2 (Cambridge University Press, 1998)

Roger Beck, ‘The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire: Mysteries of the Unconquered Sun’ (Oxford University Press, 2007)

Roger Beck, ‘Beck on Mithraism: Collected Works with New Essays’ (Ashgate, 2004)

M. Boyce and F. Grenet, ‘A History of Zoroastrianism’ vol 3 (Brill, 1991)

Manfred Clauss, ‘The Roman Cult of Mithras: The God and His Mysteries’ (Edinburgh University Press, 2000)

Franz Cumont, ‘The Mysteries of Mithra’ (1st Eng.tr. 1903, Forgotten Books, 2012)

Richard Gordon, ‘Image and Value in the Graeco-Roman World: Studies in Mithraism and Religious Art’ (Variorum, 1996)

John Hinnells, ‘Persian Mythology’ (P. Bedrick Books, 1985)

J. Rupke (ed.), ‘A Companion to Roman Religion’ (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) which includes R. L. Gordon, ‘Institutionalised Religious Options: Mithraism’

Robert Turcan, ‘The Cults of the Roman Empire’ (Wiley-Blackwell, 1997)

I don’t have 45 minutes to spare in order to listen to it, but the reading list suggests that the research has been done properly.

The programme can be downloaded as an MP3, and will be available until next Christmas, apparently.

Share

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

It’s remarkable how much one can achieve in a few dedicated days.  I’ve managed to get my new Mithras site up and functional, although far from complete.  It may be found here.

https://www.roger-pearse.com/mithras

I don’t think that there is very much more to do to the PHP scripts, which is nice.  The content needs to be reviewed, checked, and worked over, but that can happen in slow time.

One of the drivers for the new site was that I want to make use of all the photographs of statues of Mithras (etc) that are online.  The printed literature tends to have few photographs, and all of those black and white.  But there are very many colour images of statues, inscriptions, frescos, and so on, online.  These convey information … if, if, we know what we are looking at, and can get an overview of more than one of them.

The first thing that might be done is to link as many as possible to their entry in Vermaseren’s Corpus Inscriptionum et Monumentum Religionis Mithriacae.  These descriptions are very useful, in that they explain much of what we are looking at.  Without this information, the images by themselves are little more than decoration.

I’ve created a few pages in the new site for individual images, but I’m not happy with how that is going.  I’m looking at the moment at how Wikimedia Commons handles images, and galleries of images.  This will require some thought, some design and some special scripting.  Since I don’t quite know what I am trying to achieve, I will put that to one side this evening.

Instead I shall review translations of Ephraim the Syrian’s Hymns against Heresies, nos. 23 and 24.  Adam McCollum has sent these in, and I need to read over them for glitches of any sort.  Once I am sure that they are complete, I will post them online and announce them.

Share

Mithras the free-mason?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Yesterday I showed the new Mithras pages to a correspondent.  He commented that a great deal of what we know about Mithras corresponds to what we know about Free-masonry.  An all-male group that got together in a closed room for secret rituals, had grades of initiation and titles, with a special handshake … well, the parallels have not escaped the lunatic fringe, as an article from 1923 shows.[1]

We hear a great deal online from the ignorant about supposed parallels with Christianity.  Yet the parallels, if such they are, with Masonic practises seem much closer.  Yet there is no actual link.

I suppose that it shows the weakness of any “parallels” argument, that it tends to give false positives.  Human beings tend to carry out the same kinds of activities in many lands, ages and cultures.  That a group of men have a strange handshake, as a mark of membership, is not enough to indicate connection, or derivation; neither it nor a great many trivial links of the same kind.

Share
  1. [1]http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/mysteries.html↩

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have spent the day with the new Mithras site, to its great profit.  It is by no means complete, nor is it intended to be.  It is merely a starting point, based on the more reliable elements of the old Wikipedia site.  Much in it needs to be reverified.  Much will be worked on, ad hoc, as time and energy permit.

The most enjoyable part of the process was working with the pictures.  These days we have all sorts of photographs of Mithraic monuments and inscriptions online.  But these images are useless, because they are not tied to Vermaseren’s Corpus Inscriptionum et Monumentum Religionis Mithriacae, which assigns a number to each monument and describes it.  What I did, for several of the pictures from Wikimedia Commons, was track down the CIMRM number, and the entry, and write a page containing image and data.

Much of the imagery is inscrutable on first glance.  If I do very much of this, it will get much less inscrutable.  And I did rather enjoy doing it.  Adding data to the web (rather than opinion) is what I do, and what I want to do.

I’ve emailed someone online, and asked them to take a look.  I can see various problems with the site; but a fresh pair of eyes would be invaluable.

Share

‘Twas Christmas Eve in the workhouse…

Posted on by Roger Pearse

It is now Christmas Eve.  A minority of people will be sat at home, in a traditional Dickensian family circle, waiting for Christmas.  In rather more households there will be excited children rushing around, and all blessing to them and their harried parents.

But for a great many people, including most people who spend their lives online, this evening will be spent on their own, as will tomorrow and many more days.  We need not be surprised.  In our age this is normal.  Let us never regret that we do not enjoy the kind of Christmas that the TV advertisers tell us that we all should.  The reality of this world in these days is that a great number of people will be on their own.

It is traditional for bloggers to wish their readers a happy Christmas, and I shall not omit this courtesy.  I wish everyone reading these words a merry Christmas, and every blessing.

I include in these words those who I count as my friends, and those who have worked with me during the year.

I include in these words those who have written to me, those who have encouraged me, those who have shared in this work of education and learning.

I include everyone who intends to do good to his fellow man; and I include those who are simply trying to get by.

I include those who disagree with me.  I hope that disagreement may be generous, at least on our own side.

I also include, this Christmas time, one poor unhappy soul far away.  I don’t know his name, for he has taken pains to be anonymous.  I include him because I believe that this poor soul has little to enjoy at Christmas, and is an unhappy man.  I infer this because last year he had nothing better to do on Christmas day, the best of days, than to go online and attempt to cause me an injury.  Pathetically, he failed, in that I did not even learn of his deed until months later, and didn’t care even then.  I suspect that he reads this blog occasionally.  If so, I wish him a happy Christmas, and a prosperous New Year.

This Christmas I will be blogging away, and will try to provide something for people to read.  I’m still busy with the Mithras pages, which are beginning to assume a form which is not altogether horrible.  I hope to have a couple of Hymns by St. Ephraim the Syrian, newly translated into English, for you tomorrow.

Merry Christmas to you all!

Share

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have continued to work on the new Mithras pages.  Today I have found myself mostly working on PHP scripts.  Naturally I want to see if there are any hits on the pages, so I have written a simple statistics script.  I will beef it up once it goes live and I have more interest in seeing who (other than myself) is looking at the site.

I’m still getting useful snippets out of Macrobius.  Here is a bit of book 2, chapter 6:

[1] Let me turn back now from stories of women to stories of men and from risque jests to seemly humor.

The lawyer Cascellius had a reputation for a remarkably outspoken wit, and here is one of his best known quips. Vatinius had been stoned by the populace at a gladiatorial show which he was giving, and so he prevailed on the aediles to make a proclamation forbidding the throwing of anything but fruit into the arena.

Now it so happened that Cascellius at that time was asked by a client to advise whether a fir-cone was a fruit or not, and his reply was: “If you propose to throw one at Vatinius, it is.”

Share

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Yesterday I returned to working on my site about the Roman deity Mithras.  To my surprise and delight, I found that the code was stable enough to allow me to enter content, and I started doing so, using as a baseline the last reliable version of the Wikipedia Mithras article.

I’ve been looking today at the material which supposedly shows a link between Mithras and the Orphic deity Phanes.  This consists of a couple of literary testimonies, which are fair enough, and also some relief sculptures.  I thought that I would look at this critically, and try to find images of the reliefs.

The more that I burrow into this, the less convinced I am.  It all seemed so simple, when I wrote a couple of paragraphs on it for Wikipedia, based on some perfectly reliable modern sources.  And yet … trying to verify the facts, by looking at the inscriptional evidence, I find myself very much less than convinced. 

Still it was lots of fun, tracking down images of the relevant reliefs online (and they all were online!), and reworking the text as I gradually came to grips with the issues.  I actually enjoyed working away on this, and I will do more.  I need to understand just why Phanes is invoked at all.  I did some more work on the site this evening.

While entering the data, it was interesting, amusing or mildly depressing to see that the footnote data that I had added to the Wikipedia article had become partially scrambled, even before the troll attack that wrecked the whole thing.  For I have been looking at each footnote as I enter it, and I check whether it looks OK or not.  Evidently I am pretty much the only person who ever does look.  For I found obvious typos, even missing words.  Worse I found that references had been changed to fit some standard format, by someone who didn’t know what the reference was and so corrupted it.  In one case the fool had presumed that “IX.6” was a page number, rather than a book and chapter reference, although why is hard to imagine.  The damage wasn’t bad; but it was all unnecessary.

I am deeply grateful that I didn’t spend any more time adding stuff to Wikipedia.  It was an exercise in futility.

Share

Mithras and the Portable Antiquities Scheme database

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Another day another database, or so it sometimes seems.  But this is not a complaint!  On the contrary, it makes accessible material that no-one could ever see.

Today I learn via Cultural Property Observer of the PAS database.

The information provided by members of the public over the last 15 years is available for all to see on the PAS database. This now contains around 810,000 items and spans objects dating from the Stone Age to Anglo-Saxon, Roman, medieval, and post-medieval times. Every entry includes archaeological information on the object in question, details of where it was discovered and often incorporates notes of scholarly interest. The database provides a historical snapshot of human settlement in England and Wales and is an awesome example of what can be achieved by harnessing the power of the public.

Now that sounded interesting, so I headed over there and typed Mithras into the search box.  Three results came up, one of them interesting:

A Roman copper-alloy figurine depicting Cautopates, Mithras’ attendant who symbolises darkness. He is shown holding a torch pointing downwards in his right hand and his left hand is placed on his waist. Cautopates stands facing forwards with his head turned slightly to the right, his legs crossed at the calves and with his left hand placed on the left hip. He wears a Phrygian cap, trousers, a short-sleeved tunic, a cloak and has mid-length tousled hair. The cloak is ornamented with V-shaped motifs and grooved, curved lines on the trousers and tunic represent the folds of the cloth. The figurine is 81.5mm long, 33.9mm wide and 11.2mm thick. It is not free-standing and despite the lack of evidence for an attachment it must have been fixed to a base.

The article continues, full of useful data.  It’s undateable, of course, and comes from Yorkshire.  Usefully there are a couple of excellent photographs.  And these are downloadable!

Nice.

 

Share

Mithraeum in Rome under Baths of Caracala reopens

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Mike Aquilina of Way of the Fathers draws my attention to this piece:

Few people have ever visited the long network of underground tunnels under the public baths of Caracalla, which date back to the third century AD and are considered by many archaeologists to be the grandest public baths in Rome. This underground network, which is due to be reopened in December, is also home to a separate structure, the largest Mithraeum in the Roman Empire, according to its director Marina Piranomonte.

The Mithraeum was discovered a century ago and was almost entirely devoid of decoration. Only a small and poorly conserved fresco of Mithra remained, …

Ignore the statement about a “fossa sanguinus”, tho.

I’d love to see it.  I must go to Rome again.

Share