Tag: Mithras

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve had an email with some material extracted from Matthieu Cassin’s thesis about Gregory of Nyssa, with the pages discussing the chapter titles in the manuscripts.  I’ve not had a chance to read it yet, but it looks fascinating.  Dr Cassin has done some real work here, and I will discuss it further.

Also I found myself thinking about Mithras today.  Readers will remember that between 2009 and the end of 2010 I revised the Wikipedia Mithras article, to produce something reliable, only to have the work hijacked by a troll.  The troll deleted all references to me — the author of most of it! — and changed it to “prove” that Mithras preceded Jesus, etc; and he has sat on it, dog-in-the-manger, ever since.  But in a way he did me a favour, since I was beginning to contribute far too much time to Wikipedia.

But the reason that I dedicated so much time to looking up and verifying and quoting so much material about Mithras was to dispose of the many myths that circulate online.  That reason is still valid, and it seems to me that it would be sensible to write a few pages about Mithras, using secondary sources of a reliable kind, in order to provide a useful resource to those who need it. 

The obvious thing to do would be to start with the last reliable version — nothing the troll did was of any value –, and remove whichever bits I have not written or validated myself, and then build on that.  

There would be a main page, consisting of short sections, each with a link to a page on that specific subject.  Each sentence in the short sections would be referenced; probably to a reference on the specific page, rather than on the main page.

It would be important to have a professional look to the pages.  I’m not sure how best to achieve that, short of hiring someone (which, of course, is an option).  Some nice graphics would be nice, if I knew a decent graphics designer who could draw…

Ideally the pages would be editable online; but at the moment I couldn’t spare the time for online editing anyway.  I don’t really want to install MediaWiki, so we may have to sacrifice that, and just fall back on some kind of HTML editing.

The object, as always, would be to allow a reader to access the subject, not to push a narrative or my opinions (indeed I have none on Mithras, except that I don’t want to see disinformation circulating).

As part of this, my policy is always to have references that quote the source in extenso, and to link to the online text where possible.  In this way the reader can verify for himself whether or not the reference is fair or accurate.  I did this, after I discovered that most of the references in the Wikipedia Mithras article, before I worked on it, were in fact bogus.  Quote and link makes that problem disappear, and I would continue it.

Naturally I would want to link closely to primary materials.  It would be right to do something about inscriptions and images, if one could.

A page on Mithra, the Persian deity whose name was probably borrowed by the unknown founder of the Mithras cult, would probably be useful.

A guestbook in which comments and feedback could be added would probably be useful also.

Ah, but when will I get the *time*!!!!

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A Mithraeum in Iran? — The “Verjuy Mithra Temple”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A post by a headbanger on a crank site drew my attention to this page on the web:

Verjuy Mithra Temple, the Oldest Surviving Mithraist Temple in Iran

By: Afshin Tavakoli
Iran, Daily Newspaper
No. 2802, May. 16th, 2004, Page 12

Abstract:Maragheh is one of Iran’s most ancient cities having its roots in legends. In the past, its suburbs were used to build temples belonging to the religion of Mithraism. One of the temples is located 4 kilometers south of Maragheh in Verjuy village. There were no signs indicating the location of the temple in the village or even at the entrance of the cemetery. Among other main Mithraism temples in Maragheh, we can refer to hand made caves of the observatory hill.

… Followers of Mithraism built this temple during the Arsacid dynasty (248 BCE-224 CE) …

All around the main hall, there is Quranic inscriptions written in Naskhi script which circles around the walls and entrances like a belt. Parts of the inscription on walls, dating back to the Islamic period when this Mithraism temple was used as a monastery of Sufis or as a mosque, have been destroyed by the course of time.

In the brochure published recently by the Cultural Heritage Organization of Maragheh, the municipality and the governor’s office, these sentences are written about Mehr (Mithra) temple: 

“The historical site of Mehr temple and the shrine of Molla Masoum are located in the south of the historical cemetery of Verjuy village. Before the arrival of Islam, it was a place for worshiping the sun and a place for performing ceremonies by the followers of Mithraism. The building was probably built during the reign of Arsacid or possibly early Sassanid dynasties. After the arrival of Islam, it was used as a mosque and the shrine of Molla Masoum, a well-known intellectual in the 13th century.” 

The photograph next to these sentences shows a clean temple unlike the reality. Mehr in Avesta and Old-Persian was called Mithra and in Pahlavi language it was called Mithr. In Avesta, Mehr was considered to be one of the creators of Ahura Mazda and was the Yazats (Izad) of contract and promise and hence the god of light and brightness because nothing was kept secret from him. Mithraism reached Babylon and Asia Minor from Iran and it then reached Europe by Roman soldiers. Once in Europe, it was worshiped as a great god. After the appearance of Zoroastrianism, Ahura Mazda became known as the only God and other Aryan gods were considered Yazats or angels which actually resembled characters and the power of God. Mehr was among such Yazats.

All very odd, and none of it seemingly that reliable.  There are almost no references, for instance.  The article is from an Iranian daily newspaper, which uses a municipal leaflet as a source.

The site calls itself CAIS, the “Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies”, and the URL is www.cais-soas.com, as if the School for Oriental and Asiatic Studies were associated with it, although it no longer has any such association.

I thought that I would investigate further.  Nothing about this place looks like a Mithraeum.  No Mithraea are known from Iran.  So … why the Mithras reference?

The monument is described by Dr Arezou Azad.  She is discussing three cave complexes of the region, which seem to be medieval Buddhist.[1]  Here is the start of the description, from p.219:

2. Mihri Temple / Imamzada Ma’sum (Near Maragha)

Previous studies.  The first archaeologist to describe this site was Parviz Varjavand in the early 1970’s.  Warwick Ball provided a more accurate overview by factoring in the inscriptions and decorated stonework in the complex, as well as the adjacent cemetary, and a more detailed floor plan.(37)  …

Observations.  In the outskirts of Maragha lies the site of the Mihri Temple, also known as the Imamzada Ma’sum.  This site is far less known than the last, although it is just as mysterious, and therefore deserves more attention.  The site has three accessible areas: a main space surrounded by four domed chambers (nos. 2, 4, 5, 6, 7); a four-domed hall with a full-size pillar at its centre (no. 3); and a set of three long chambers some 100 metres away.

(37) Parviz Varjavand, ‘The Imamzadeh Ma’sum Varjovi near Maragheh’, East and West 25/3-4 (1975), p.435-8 …; Warwick Ball, ‘The Imamzadeh Ma’sum at Vardjovi. A rock-cut Ilkhanid Complex near Maragheh’, Archaologische Mitteilungen aus Iran 12 (1979), p. 329-40.

And on the article goes, with nothing Mithraic that I could see (although the preview was cut-off  before the end).

A little earlier, on p.217-8, there is discussion of another cave complex in the area, the Rasadkhana caves at Maragha.

Function and dating.   The rectangular stone blocks in chambers a and b were identified as altars, and hence the chambers as sanctuaries.  To Ball they looked like the Buddhist circumambulatory pillar-caves of Afghanistan and Central Asia, and to Bowman and Thompson like the Jacobite style of dual sanctuaries.  I would also note a resemblance to the Sasanian fire altars of Balkh.  Ker Porter wrote: ‘These secluded places [i.e. the caves] we are told, were not merely the habitations of Zoroaster himself and his Magi, but were used as temples.'(27)  In the cave temples of the Mithraists (or Mithraea), altars of such dimensions can also be found.(28)  An ancient Mithraic use is likely  given the similarities with Roman Mithraic temples, but it is the Ilkhanid period that is of greater interest to us.

(27) Porter, Travels in Georgia, Persia, Armenia, vol. 2, p.496.
(28) See Varjavand, Kawish-i Rasadkhana-yi Maragha, p.279-83.  On the history and belief system of Mithraism which developed with the conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great in 331 BCE, see Franz Cumont, Les mysteres de Mithra, Brussels (1913) and Taufiq Wahby, The remnants of Mithraism in Hatra and Iraqi Kurdistan and its traces in Yazidism, London (1962).

The list of diverse possible parallels at the front of the quote makes it abundantly clear that we are in speculation land. 

I have mentioned before how unreliable statements about Mithras can be in academic books, and it seems that we have another example here. 

The 19th century traveller Porter “is told” that Zoroaster himself lived there.  This can only be local folklore.  But aside from that, we then have the repetition (for the author is not a Mithras scholar) of material from Iranian sources of the Royalist period, every one of whom believed in the Cumontian idea  that Persian Mithra was the same as Roman Mithras.  The latter view is contradicted by the archaeology, and can no longer simply be presumed.  And without that identification, what becomes of all this?  It falls to the ground.

I should add, in fairness to the author of the article, that while I was unable to view p.215, I found there the following snippet:

The Iranian archaeologist Parviz Varjavand described them in the late 1980’s, and emphasized their ancient Mithraic elements, bringing us back to where Porter started in the early nineteenth century: relying on folklore and projecting…

which suggests that the author is in fact well aware of how shaky all this material is.

It would seem, then, that there is, in fact, no evidence associating Mithras (or, I think, even Mithra) with either site.

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  1. [1]Arezou Azad, Three rock-cut cave sites in Iran and their Ilkhanid Buddhist aspects reconsidered, in: Anna Akasoy and others, Islam and Tibet: Interactions Along the Musk Routes, Ashgate, 2001, p.209-230.  There is a Google Books preview here.↩

Getting the CIMRM in digital form – sadly not

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Today I’ve obtained copies of some of the pages from Maarten Vermaseren’s great compilation of Mithraic inscriptions and reliefs, the Corpus Inscriptionum et Monumentorum Religionis Mithriacae or CIMRM. 

This work is frankly very useful indeed.  There are two volumes, and neither is at all easy to access, or available in print.  I do wish that it was possible to get hold of PDF’s of it.

The history of how the CIMRM was created would be useful to know.  For the preface indicates that a third volume was originally projected as well:

The first two parts of this Corpus have laid a basis for the scientific conclusions to be drawn from the material. The texts will be included in the third volume. This will show Mithras and the world that surrounded him during the different periods of his cnlt, in all its abundant varieties. In the accomplishment of that arduous task I hope I may encounter the same spirit of helpful collaboration that I have found everywhere so far.[1]

Vermaseren himself did not write the work in English, but in Dutch.  The translation of the material into English for publication was undertaken by A. M. H. Lemmers, apparently on commission.  Let us hope that the work was done better than the translation (by others) in Mithras: the secret god.

What this means, however, is that a manuscript in Dutch must exist.  And furthermore, that a manuscript of the third volume may also exist.

I wonder where Vermaseren’s papers are?

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  1. [1]Vol.2, p.vi.↩

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Lots of excitement on the Methodius manuscripts this morning — Adrian Tanasescu-Vlas has been through the STSL Ms. 40 and identified the works on Methodius in it.  I’ll do some more on this after lunch.  He confirms that De lepra is in there, which means that it is now possible to get someone who knows the language to translate it into English.

I’ve been thinking more about the Origen book, which hasn’t progressed in 18 months.  This means that, without intervention, it will never be done. Possibly the way to progress this is to bring in a collaborator, charged with finishing it off.

Meanwhile the postman brought me a parcel which proved to contain a paperback of Mithras : de geheimzinnige god, complete with colour cover and a stiff-looking picture of Maarten Vermaseren on the back.  I shall attempt to convert this into a PDF this afternoon, since it will be much more useful that way.  I hope that I don’t destroy it in the process, but I have my doubts.

Maarten Vermaseren, 1959
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David Ulansey to bring out new book on Mithras?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A little while ago I read and reviewed David Ulansey’s well-known  book on the Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries.  The book has remained in print for many years now.

On his website, there is an interesting announcement:

I am also currently finishing a new book for Oxford called The Other Christ: The Mysteries of Mithras and the Origins of Christianity.

I wonder what this is.  I have written to him, anyway, to enquire.

This year, as every year, we get the less pleasant kind of atheist going around the web jeering “Jesus is really Mithras! Har! Har”.  It happens less than it did, since some of us took to combatting it, but, besides being anti-social, it does Mithras studies no good at all.  We are unlikely to establish how it felt to be initiated into the cult, while we have our minds full of anachronism.

UPDATE: 2nd Jan. 2012 — In case anyone asks, I didn’t get a reply; but of course the email address may be out of date, or he may be away.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m still working on Ibn Abi Usaibia.  Yesterday I started going through the .htm files exported from Abbyy Finereader, to rejoin paragraphs and add in page numbers.  I’ve so far found two pages which are out of order in the manuscript — the numerals at the bottom in pencil were clearly added after the pages became disarranged.

I’ve also been experimenting with producing a version of the images of the pages which might be uploadable to Archive.org, by converting them to black and white using ImageMagick as I was doing yesterday.  This sort of works, but requires quite a bit of manual intervention, so I have parked it for now.

This morning I went to the library and obtained a copy of Maarten Vermaseren’s Mithras: De geheimzinnige God, the original version of Mithras: the secret God, which has caused so much misinformation to circulate.  It’s physically a tiny book — indeed the title page calls it an “Elsevier pocket book”, evidently one of a series — printed on very cheap paper which has yellowed and perished, and bound so tightly that the pages are almost impossible to open, and the printed text is so close to the binding that making a photocopy is almost impossible.  The perished paper tends to tear if you simply open the book!  I suspect that if I want an electronic copy of this, I shall have to buy a copy and destroy it, by cutting the spine off, in order to scan it.  Most vexing.

But the important bit so far is that this isn’t a scholarly work at all!  It’s just a bit of popularisation, probably undertaken at the behest of a publisher, who decided the format etc.

Meanwhile the postman brought me the 2010 translation of Origen’s Homilies on Ezekiel by Thomas Scheck.  Regular readers will remember that I commissioned a translation of this work — then untranslated — back in 2009, and that it was projected as volume 2 of Ancient Texts in Translation.  Nothing much has happened on this for over a year now, as it has been awaiting some revision work.  I think I shall have to draw up a plan whereby I can get it out of the door, and so I have purchased a copy of Scheck with this in mind.  I’ll work on this in January, perhaps.

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Ulansey’s “Origins of the Mithraic mysteries” – reviewed

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have now finished my book review of David Ulansey’s much read book.  It is here.

Ulansey’s ideas are interesting, but ultimately quite improbable.  His star-map stuff just does not work.  The tauroctony is a star-map of the sky as it was in 2,000 BC?  I don’t think so, somehow.

I don’t see anything that disproves his theory that Mithras is really a code-name for Perseus.  That bit of the book had some actual evidence for it, which most of his book did not.  The problem is that the actual evidence for this idea is pretty thin; a case-ending in Statius, a scholion on Statius in Lactantius Placidus, plus a lot of speculation.

R. L. Gordon’s dismissal of the book as speculation heaped upon speculation is by and large correct.  Ulansey is making bricks without straw.

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Mithras in the papyri

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Few people can be aware that the papyrus discoveries of the last century have included references to Mithras.  I do not refer here to the use of the name of Mithras in the Greek Magical Papyri, in PGM IV,[1] where one of the incantations was even given the name of the Mithras Liturgy by its unfortunate early editor, Dieterich.[2]  The luckless Dieterich dedicated the book to the great Franz Cumont, but Cumont declined to agree with Dieterich that the text was Mithraic.

Rather I refer to two papyri, which seem unavoidably connected with the initiation rituals of the cult.  Rather amazingly, I find transcriptions and even translations of both online here.

The first of the papyri is P. Berol. 21196, a scrap of papyrus probably found at Ashmounein in Egypt in 1906, and the property of the Aegyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung of the Berlin State Museum.  It dates from the 4th century AD, and consists of fragments of a single papyrus sheet from a codex.  It was published in 1992 by the late William Brashear.[3]

The document seems to involve questions and answers, and is perhaps a preparatory catechism for an initiation.  There is mention of a pater — the 7th grade of initiation in the mysteries; of night as the time for some ceremony, putting on a girdle or belt with 4 tassels, wearing linen, dealing with something sharp, and something hot or cold, and the mention of a meal.  Line 9 of the second side refers to “becoming a lion” (ἐγένου λέων).  The grade of Leo is found only in the cult of Mithras, and this ties the papyrus squarely to that cult.[4]

The second papyrus belongs to the 3rd century AD.  I know no more about this than I can find in the webpage mentioned earlier: that it was published by Vittorio Bartoletti in two sections.[5].  There is reference to ἀστέρων, indicating astral or astrological elements — rather relevant this, considering that I’ve been looking at David Ulansey’s book — and there is also the word καυτοπαυ (= Καυτοπάτου?)  or Cautopates, the name of the ancillary deity in the temples of Mithras.  There is also a reference to Serapis, interestingly.  The suggestion is that this is an oath.

This all left me wondering whether there were any Mithraea in Egypt, and if so, where.

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  1. [1]Paris Bibliothèque Nationale Suppl. gr. 574.↩
  2. [2]Albrecht Dieterich, Eine Mithrasliturgie, Leipzig: Teubner, 2nd enlarged edn. 1910↩
  3. [3]William M. Brashear, A Mithraic Catechism from Egypt. <P. Berol. 21196> (Tyche Supplementband, I.) Pp. 70; 2 plates. Vienna: Holzhausen, 1992.  There is a review of the publication by J. Gwyn Griffiths, in The Classical Review, N.S. 44.1 (1994), p.181-2. http://www.jstor.org/stable/712295 ↩
  4. [4]Griffiths adds, p.182: “It is true that Plutarch in Ch. 38 of his De Iside et Osiride says that the Egyptians honoured the constellation of the Lion and adorned the doors of temples with lions’ jaws — an allusion perhaps to the lion-shaped bolts found in late temples. While this might relate to the term λεοντίον in the papyrus, it does not suit the idea of becoming a Lion.”↩
  5. [5]V. Bartoletti, Papiri, Greci e Latini (= PSI) vol. X, no. 1162; and V. Bartoletti, “Frammenti di un rituale d’iniziazione ai misteri” in Annali della R. Scuoli Normale Superiore de Pisa (Pisa: 1937) 143-152.↩

Reading Ulansey’s “Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I got David Ulansey’s book on the Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries from the library this morning, and I’m reading through it.  I’ll probably do a review once I’ve read the whole thing, but here’s some thoughts so far.   This is the first time that I have really sat down with it and tried to read it cover to cover, but I dipped into it before.

Firstly it’s a better piece of work than I recalled. The opening chapters are well done, and well referenced, and very clearly written.  The suggestion that the god in the secret cult of “Mithras” turns out to be Perseus is by no means impossible.  I was quite struck by his exegesis of the passage in Statius, the earliest literary reference to the cult:

717 ……  seu te roseum Titana vocari
Gentis Achaemeniae ritu, seu praestat Osirim
Frugiferum, seu Persei sub rupibus antri
Indignata sequi torquentem cornua Mithram.

Whether it please thee to bear the name of ruddy Titan
after the manner of the Achaemenian race, or Osiris
lord of the crops, or Mithra as beneath the rocks of the Persian cave
he presses back the horns that resist his control.

This latter passage is given by Manfred Clauss as:

Mithras ‘twists the unruly horns beneath the rocks of a Persian cave’.

Ulansey points out correctly that Persei is not the correct form of “Persian” but rather means “Persean” or “Of Perseus”; and “antri persei” could be “the cave of Perseus”.

Likewise pointing out that the 5th grade of initiation is “Perses”, which is not merely “Persian”, but also the name of the son of Perseus, and that this idea — meaning “son” — would give point to the 7th grade, “Pater”, i.e. “Father”, meaning Mithras / Perseus himself.

The “Persian” bit, then, was eyewash for outsiders; the real truth was that the cult was “Persean”.  Mithras was the “Persean god”.  I can quite imagine that this sort of pun would appeal.  The members could talk about the cult, safe in the knowledge that they were telling the truth, and that they would be totally misunderstood, and laugh about it among themselves.  The real teachings of the cult would then be based on astrology.

It’s all possible, although a certain degree of scepticism seems appropriate.  We don’t know any of this for sure, after all.  It’s just a theory to explain some of the data.

But when I got to chapter 6, I was starting to lose confidence.  It all got a bit von Daniken for me.

The Swiss maestro and former hotel-keeper used to write his books about Chariots of the Gods according to a set pattern.  He would think up his theory, and then hunt around for bits of data that could decorate them.  He would propose his theory, as a theory; and then he would introduce some bit of information; and then another, and then he would exclaim at the coincidence as proving he was right.  The fact that he had selected this material precisely because it fit the theory — there was no coincidence — was quietly ignored.

Throughout chapters 5 and 6 this old trick appeared again and again, and indeed I have just lost patience and stomped off to have a bath.  I’ll return to the book later.  It’s just speculation, not interpretation.  Not that I accuse Ulansey of deception; it’s quite likely to be self-deception.

But the problem is simply that the contortions that he gets into, to try to fit the stars in the sky into his theory, get worse and worse and worse.  You can feel the man straining.  There is not the slightest chance, in my humble opinion, that anyone devising a cult ca. 50 AD decided to represent in stone the configuration of the constellations in 2000 BC.  The fact that the precession of the equinoxes had been discovered is irrelevant; you just wouldn’t do that.  You’d make your cult myth fit what people could see up in the sky.

But it’s better than I had thought.

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