This section presents answers to some of the most Frequently Asked Questions
about the cult of Mithras.
Mithras
vs Sol Invictus:
1)
Is the
Cult of Sol Invictus equivalent to the Roman cult of Mithras? My understanding
is that it is not. According to the sources I've investigated so far, Mithraists
equated Mithras with the Unconquerable Sun, but also sometimes identified the
deity as an "ally" of Mithras. What is the relationship?
2)
Is there
any evidence that Constantine the Great was a member of the Roman Cult of
Mithras. According to Manfred Clauss, Mithraism was "rejected by the ruling
elite of the Roman Empire". What cults was Constantine a member of prior to
his "conversion" to Xianity?
1) You are correct to say that these two cults are distinct. It is true that
(one of) the cult title(s) of Mithras was, or came to be, Deus Sol Invictus
Mithras (but he could also be called Deus Mithras, Invictus Mithras, Invictus
deus, Deus Invictus Mithras, Deus Invictus Sol Mithras, Sol Invictus Mithras
...). But this title merely reflects a theological claim within the mysteries,
whose full meaning is unclear to us: for there can be absolutely no doubt that
Sol and Mithras appear as separate persons in
the iconography, notably in the 'Feast scene' after the sacrifice of the bull,
or that, in the wall-paintings in the Santa Prisca mithraeum on the Aventine in
Rome, the Father and Heliodromus represent Mithras and Sol respectively.
Dedications to Helios/Sol alone have hardly ever been found in mithraea, though
a cup dedicated in Greek by a man named Theodoros “To the god Helios” has
recently been found in the temple at Martigny, Switzerland (AE 1998: 870).
Helios/Sol seems to have played a role in the narrative, and in ritual, but it
seems not to have been considered appropriate to offer him votives. The
inference must be that none of the numerous inscriptions to him listed in CIMRM
but not found in mithraea are Mithraic. Both at Dura Europos in Syria and at
Poetovio (Ptuj, Slovenia) Helios/Sol is shown beside a removable rayed
head-dress, very similar to the one worn by Heliodromus on the Wetterau-ware
krater found in Mainz and discussed by Roger Beck in Journal
of Roman Studies 90 (2000) 145-80. Mithras of the mystery-cult is very rarely shown with
solar rays, though there certainly are one or two cases. That is, his solar
character is not visually highlighted. In Hellenistic-Roman Anatolia, however,
he seems often to have been identified, or closely associated, with Helios; and
Strabo, 15.3.13 (p.732C), basing his information on a lost work, either by
Posidonius (ca 135-51 BC) or by Apollodorus of Artemita (first decades of 1
cent. BC), states baldly that (the western Parthians)“call the sun Mithra”.
The Roman cult seems to have taken this existing association and developed it in
their own special way. In the cult of Mithras, therefore, it is Mithras, not
Sol, who is
Invictus. At the time when Cumont wrote, a century ago, and
also in the (wretched) "standard work" on Sol Invictus, by a man named
G.H.Halsberghe (The Cult of Sol Invictus,
Leyden 1972), it was taken as axiomatic that this was an 'oriental cult',
specifically a Syrian one (see also his “Le culte de Deus Sol Invictus à Rome
au 3e siècle après J.C.”, Aufstieg und
Niedergang der römischen Welt, eds. H. Temporini and W. Haas, II.17.4
(Berlin 1984) 2181-2201). It certainly is the case that the emperor Elagabalus
(AD 218-22) attempted to establish his ancestral god, from Emesa, in Rome as an
official cult (see e.g. Robert Turcan, Héliogabale
et le sacré du soleil [Paris 1985]). The name of this god is given in
inscriptions as Sol Invictus Elagabal.But at the very time Halsberghe was
writing, the scholar then most familiar with the archaeology of Roman Syria,
Henri Seyrig, argued that Syrian religion was not particularly solar, even if
the Romans may have perceived it to be so (“Le culte du soleil en Syrie à
l’époque romaine” [Antiquités syriennes, 95], Syria
48 (1971) 337-73. And this claim has been recently followed up by an article by
a young Dutchman, S.J. Hijmans, "The sun which did not rise in the East:
the cult of Sol Invictus in the light of non-literary evidence", BABESCH
(Bulletin Antieke Beschaving) 71 81996)115-50.
He argues, conclusively in my view, that Sol Invictus was a cult created out of
the traditional Roman cult of the sun (which had always been dismissed by
scholars as unimportant, and indeed given adifferent name, “Sol indiges” to
distinguish it from Sol invictus, even though there is no evidence that this
name was known in antiquity) by the imperial interest in finding a symbol for
beneficent, victorious, sole rule, as represented by the institution of the
Princeps. That is, what the Sun is to the Universe, the emperor is in this
world. The association is generally presented in the form of
‘companionship’: Sol is the comes
of the ‘invincible’ emperor. On occasion the emperor even carries symbols,
such as the radiate crown, which associate him still more closely with the god,
without quite completing an identification. It was the emperor Aurelian in AD
270-75 who pushed this development to its furthest point by elevating Sol
Invictus to the rank of the official head of the pantheon in place of Iuppiter
Optimus Maximus and even creating a parallel set of pontifices. The figure of
Sol with radiate crown appears on coins from Commodus, but is increasingly
common from the mid-third century, just as the empire collapsed into internal
chaos. There is thus a strong element of wishful thinking or whistling in the
dark about this imagery, though Aurelian’s success against the Vandals,
Iuthungi and Sarmati, against Palmyra and the Gallic usurpers, and then that of
the Diocletian and the Tetrarchy made it more meaningful. [There is a special
problem with images on coins of emperors, from Nero, with ‘radiate crowns’;
these images are generally believed to be convetional signs of double
denomination coins, e.g. dupondii, antoniniani.]
2) As for Constantine, we cannot say anything very definite about his religion
prior to his supposed conversion (your expression: “which cults he
worshipped” is odd: generally speaking pagans did not worship 'cults', they
sacrificed to a variety of gods, chosen in relation to the aim of the sacrifice.
The Augustus or Caesar, as it were, had no “private religion”, whatever
their opinions: as pontifex maximus
the emperor (with his co-emperors in the Tetrarchy) was the head of the state
religion, and what he did in that capacity was strictly a matter of custom,
tradition and prescription). This is mainly because of the furious obfuscation
about his early life thrown up by Christian hagiography, esp. the Life by
Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea (ca AD 260-340). Undoubtedly his coins, and the
Arch in Rome, are highly solar: Constantine appears closely associated with Sol
on numerous coin-issues. On
the Arch, he appears as a bust wearing a radiate crown, (probably) with an orb
in his l. hand and his right hand raised in a gesture very similar to that of
Sol nearby. By this time all emperors are “invicti” themselves; the
Tetrarchs made a number of surviving dedications to Sol, notably at Aquileia (ILS
624), and to Sol-Mithras at Carnuntum “fautor imperii sui” (ILS 659).
Constantine’s emphasis on Sol invictus was thus only to be expected at this
date; and, if we can believe Eusebius’ description of what Constantine saw at
the Milvian Bridge, it was closely connected with light, even if he interpreted
it (later?) in specifically Christian terms. There is now yet another
(exhaustive) discussion of Constantine’s vision by Peter Weiss, “The vision
of Constantine,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 16 (2003) 237-59 (a translation of a
paper first presented in German in 1989), arguing that what C. saw was a solar
halo.
Dr. Richard Gordon
Resurrection
of the Dead. Final Judgement:
I finished reading
Cumont's "The Mysteries of Mithra." I enjoyed reading it.
I know authors cannot provide a endnote or footnote of the original
source for everything they say, but I wish Cumont would have
cited more sources. I plan to check out of the library "The Roman
Cult of Mithras" by Manfed Clauss, and hopefully he will mention more of
the ancient remains. As you know Cumont spends some time comparing
Mithraism with Christianity. On page 191 he states both faiths shared some
beliefs. What caught my attention was the belief in immortality of the
soul, the last judgement, in a resurrection of the dead. But he does
not cite any sources for this conclusion. Are you aware of any ancient
literature or archaeological evidences which clearly state Mitharists believed
in resurrection of the dead and a final judgement when Mithras returns to earth
(like Christ)?
The English translation of Cumont by McCormick is
simply a translation of a tiny fraction of Cumont's
great work Textes et
monuments
relatifs aux Mystères de Mithra (1896-1899), in fact of the final section, which he called
"Conclusions". That is one reason why he doesn't support what he says with footnotes: there
are thousands in the main sections of the book (which you could only find in a
good research library, and you would need to know French).Cumont's
book is thus more than a century old. In the meantime, there have been many very important
archaeological finds, some of which you will perhaps have learned about from
Vermaseren's book of 1960. It would be a good idea to look at Manfred Clauss'
book, which is well-illustrated and provides a much more up-to-date idea of
modern work. But even from reading Cumont, it must be clear to you that the main
problem with the cult of Mithras is that we know hardly anything about it. There
are virtually no ancient sources to tell us what the archaeology - of which
there is almost too much, scattered about over the entire Roman world -- might
mean. As for Cumont, the difficulty is twofold: not merely did he write his
“Conclusions” before 70% of the now known archaeology was discovered, but
his solution to the problem posed by the lack of written evidence. Just before
Cumont began to work on Mithras, James Darmesteter translated the whole of the
Zoroastrian sacred books, the Zend Avesta, into French. For the first time, it
was possible for a European who did not know Avestan and Pahlavi to read these
Zoroastrian texts. Reading them through, Cumont, concluded that the cult of
Mithras must have been Iranian - indeed Zoroastrian - in a strong sense, that is, that
the figuresin the Roman iconography were in reality Zoroastrian divinities in
disguise. Both
the final judgement and the resurrection of the dead are tenets of Zoroastrianism - it is perfectly possible that they
derive from Judaism, but no one knows for sure: it is usually considered that
the Jews got these ideas from the Iranians after the captivity in Babylonia. At
any rate, sine he believed the entire cult to be a thinly-disguised from of
Zorastrianism, Cumont thought they must also have been present in the Roman
cult. Since the
1970s, Cumont’s entire construction has come under heavy fire. One can say
that there is no one now working on Mithraism who believes in it. This change of
heart was largely due to articles published in the proceedings of the first
Mithraic conference in Manchester in 1971: Mithraic Studies, ed. J.R. Hinnells (Manchester, 1975). Cumont
himself was aware that the Roman Mithraic evidence for the resurrection of the
body and the judgement at the end of the world was very thin, so he was
delighted when the excavation of the mithraeum at Dieburg in 1926 produced a
very unusual Mithraic relief (CIMRM 1247) with a scene of Phaethon receiving his
father's Sun-chariot. In view of the well-known result of this voyage, Cumont
argued in an article published in 1931 that the scene was intended as an
illustration of the Frasegird, the final conflagration of the world in
Zoroastrianism. But the story of Phaethon was understood in many less
adventurous ways in the Roman period, which he did not attempt to explore. The
only other evidence for the idea of resurrection occurs in a sentence of the
Church Father Tertullian, De
praescriptione haereticorum 40 (written AD 203), where he says '(Diabolus)
celebrat et panis oblationem et imaginem resurrectionis inducit et sub gladio
redimit coronam': (The Devil) celebrates the ritual offering of bread, performs
a semblance of resurrection, redeems a crown under threat of death. Although the
last phrase may indeed relate to the cult of Mithras, there is no reason to
think the others do: the passage as a whole simply
lists a variety of ways in which Tertullian seeks (absurdly) to explain the
numerous similarities between pagan and Christian rituals by saying the Devil
has deliberately imitated Christian rituals. At any rate,this passage is the
SOLE evidence Cumont could find for Mithraic belief in resurrection - why of the
body, is anyone's guess. We can see clearly that he needed to reinforce his
belief that Roman Mithraism was really a form of Zoroastrianism, and thus ended
up by arguing in a complete circle. We
may say that at the most scholars now believe that the cult of Mithras was Iranian only in a weak sense; indeed,
many people think it wasn't Iranian at all, but simply pseudo-Iranian, and that
the cult was created in Italy. I think that goes too far; but, thanks primarily
to the work of Shaul Shaked, Dualism in
Transformation: Varieties of Religion in Sasanian Iran (London, 1994), we do
now know that there was no such thing as Zoroastrianism in a sense reasonably
familiar to us until the Sasanid reforms
of the religion in the third century AD; and even for the Sasanid form of the
religion it is difficult to find reliable evidence, because of the extent of the
censorship and pruning imposed by the priests who created the Pahlavi sacred
books of Zoaroastriansim in the ninth century AD after the Muslim conquest of
Iran. But I do think there are some feature sof the Roman cult of Mithras: his
association with light, might and fertility, for example, and the moral
stringency, which have old-Iranian origins- at any rate, they are all found in
the Avestan Hymn to Mithra, composed in the second half of the fifth century BC.
But this is not the same as saying that the Roman
cult of Mithras was Iranian in a strong sense, let alone that it contained
numerous Zoroastrian features. And unless one starts from that hypothesis, there
is no good reason to suppose that the Roman cult believed either in the
resurrection of the dead, or in a final judgement at the end of the world.
Dr. Richard
Gordon
Branding in the cult of Mithras:
I am studying Mithras
and specifically a passage by Tertullian in which he mentions
"soldiers" of Mithras had a sign placed on their foreheads.
Franz Cumont states that this sign may have been burned on the forehead with a
hot iron. Some Internet web sites and books claim to know what this sign
looked like. Some state it was an X, while others state it was a T (tau).
But none of them provides any ancient proof of what the forehead sign of Mithras
looked like. Is there any ancient evidence from Roman times, either texts
or architectural, that shows what the Mithras' forehead sign was? Or are
these people claiming as true nothing more than speculation?
Any information you provide would be greatly appreciated.
Branding in the cult of Mithras is an old chestnut.
There is no evidence for it apart from what Tertullian says, still less can
anyone credibly claim to know what it looked like. As so often (e.g. Plutarch,
Vita Pompeii 24), a literary text is granted credence whatever the
archaeological/iconographic evidence. The fullest discussion is by Per Beskow,
"Branding in the Mysteries of Mithras?", in Mysteria
Mithrae, ed. Ugo Bianchi (Leyden 1979), 487-501, who shows that the
entire idea is a "scholarly myth". The same conclusion is to
be drawn from the careful and learned article by Christopher Jones,
"Stigma: Tatooing and branding in Graeco-Roman antiquity", Journal of Roman Studies 77 (1987) 139-55, which showed that human
beings were virtually never branded, and that stigma means 'tatoo'. When, on p.
152, he discusses religious branding, he does not even mention Mithras, any more
than he does on p.144f., where he discusses religious tatooing. There
are two aspects to the matter. Tertullian in De
praescriptione haereticorum 40.1 says only "et (Diabolus) signat illic in
frontibus milites suos", The Devil gives his soldiers a sign there (illic),
on their foreheads, where "illic" refers to the name/cult of Mithras,
inserted into the deprecating parenthesis "si adhuc memini Mithrae",
if I recall (what I know about the cult of) Mithras aright. He makes no mention
of a brand or permanent mark: that is an unwarranted interpretation by Cumont et
al. The idea that the mark was an X was invented by the German archaeologist
Hilga von Heintze in an article in MDAI (Römische Abtailung) 64 (1959) 69-91,
where she identified the X on the forehead of Hostilius (the younger son of
Traianus Decius) on the famous Ludovisi Schlachtsarkophage as 'the' Mithraic
sign. The most
important negative evidence is that there is no image of a Mithraic initiate with such a mark. Since
Tertullian speaks expressly of 'milites suos' we might expect that the pictures
of a Miles in the lower and upper
layers of paintings in the mithraeum beneath the Church of Santa Prisca in Rome
(ca. AD 210, 220/30) would carry such a mark: but they
do not. Nor do the paintings of initiation on the pdoium-facades in the
mithraeum of S. Maria Capua Vetere show such marks (ca. 260); nor, to cite a
more recent find, does the image of a Miles on the Mainz krater (which you will
know from Roger Beck's article in Journal
of Roman Studies 90 (2000)). Moreover
the very idea of a brand on one grade is stupid, since if a permanent mark were
made on the forehead of everyone who got to the low grade of Miles, virtually
all Mithraists would have had one (on the usual
understanding that people passed through seven grades, which may not be
accurate), because they couldn't have washed it off with soap and water. But NO
known images of Mithraists have such a mark.In
general, in studying Mithras, and the other Greco-oriental mystery cults, it is good practice to steer clear of
all information provided by Christian writers: they are not
"sources", they are violent apologists, and one does best not to
believe a word they say, however tempting it is to supplement our ignorance with
such stuff. Further, very little of what you read in web-sites and books about
the cult of Mithras is 'true' in the sense of being securely based on
archaeological evidence. The trouble is that such evidence is simply not
transparent, it has to be interpreted, and there is practically no limit to the
fantasies of scholars. David Ulansey is a case in point: a fantastic tower of
nonsense, speculation piled on speculation, unremittingly promulgated on the
inter-net and sold as ‘the truth about the cult of Mithras’.You would do
well to take everything you read with a large pinch of salt.
Dr. Richard Gordon
