¹ That the Mithraists were in some sense ‘saved’ is agreed by all, the agency of that salvation being, as the dipinto in the Sa. Prisca mithraeum attests, the ‘blood shed’ by Mithras, presumably in the bull-killing (et nos servasti … sanguine fuso: the text quoted here is that deemed secure by Panciera, S. in Bianchi, U. (ed.), Mysteria Mithrae (1979), 103–5Google Scholar). The specifics of that salvation are widely debated, but need not concern us at this point.

² What remains quite unknown is the liturgical year — and indeed whether the Mithraists had one, although it is difficult to imagine a solar cult without. Mithras' birth is generally supposed to have occurred, and been celebrated, on 25 December, but that rests solely on the assumption that it coincided with the Natalis Invicti, the birthday of the official Sun god. The assumption is reasonable but not self-evidently correct. A valiant attempt was made by Tóth, I. (‘Das lokale System der mithraischen Personifikationen im Gebiet von Poetovio,’ Arheološki vestnik 28 (1977), 385–92Google Scholar) to correlate other events in the story of Mithras with the seasonal cycle and hence with a liturgical year, but it was not, in my opinion, persuasive (Beck, R., ‘Mithraism since Franz Cumont’, ANRW II.17.4 (1984), 2002–115, at 2040–1Google Scholar). More cautiously and convincingly, R. Merkelbach (Mithras (1984), 141–5) suggested several dates throughout the solar year as potentially significant, arguing principally from the zodiacs with which Mithraic icons are so liberally endowed. I have argued that the icon of the bull-killing Mithras (the so-called ‘tauroctony’) speaks in a very complex fashion of a particular season, opôra or high summer, but not that the bull-killing is liturgically datable (‘In the place of the Lion: Mithras in the tauroctony’, in Hinnells, J. R. (ed.), Studies in Mithraism (1994), 29–50, at 44–6)Google Scholar. In sum, I do not believe that the Mithraists' ritual year is recoverable — yet at least. Even R. Turcan's tentative summary overstates, although it is surely in principle along the right lines (Mithra et le mithriacisme (2nd edn, 1993), 80–1): ‘Suivant les moments de l'année, on devait mettre l'accent sur tel ou tel épisode de la geste divine: naissance de Mithra pétrogène (peutêtre au solstice d'hiver …); sacrifice du taureau à l'équinoxe de printemps; miracle de l'eau … [final ellipsis marks sic]’. On the possible observance of the summer solstice, see my ‘Qui mortalitatis causa convenerunt: The meeting of the Virunum Mithraists on June 26, A.D. 184’, Phoenix 52 (1998), 335–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ On this there is no disagreement. For treatments of the cult meal and its divine archetype in the more recent general studies of Mithraism: Merkelbach, op. cit. (n. 2), 132n3; M. Clauss, Mithras (1990), 117–22; Turcan. op. cit. (n. 2), 78–80. Of particular studies of the cult meal, the most perceptive, in my view, are Stewardson, J. and Saunders, E., ‘Reflections on the Mithraic liturgy’, in Laeuchli, S. (ed.), Mithraism in Ostia (1967), 67–84Google Scholar, and Kane, J. P., ‘The Mithraic cult meal in its Greek and Roman environment’, in Hinnells, J. R. (ed.), Mithraic Studies (1975), vol. 2, 313–51Google Scholar. Kane concludes, rightly in my opinion, that the giving of bread and a cup of water mentioned by Justin (Apology 66) as a Mithraic ritual is not an element of the cult meal but a rite of initiation (as Justin in fact calls it).

⁴ Konjic = V 1896; recognizable as ministers are the Raven, the Lion, and (?) the Persian. Sa. Prisca = V 483 (best illustration in Bianchi, op. cit. (n. 1), Appx I, Tav. X): the Raven is recognizable; the banquet scene is balanced on the other side of the aisle by a fresco of grade initiates bearing offerings toward a throned Father. A Raven ministrant is also recognizable in V 42.13 (Dura) and 397 (Castra Praetoria, Rome).

⁵ Though, paradoxically, there seems to be an allusion to initiation into Mithras' theft of the bull in the symbolon reported by Maternus, Firmicus, De err. 5.2Google Scholar: mysta boöklopiês, syndexie patros agauou.

⁶ Particularly well represented on the Ladenburg, Rückingen, and Hedernheim (I) reliefs (all illustrated in Clauss, op. cit. (n. 3), 121–2).

⁷ e.g., V 1083 Heddernheim I.

⁸ Turcan, op. cit. (n. 2), 78.

⁹ Vermaseren, M. J., Mithraica I: The Mithraeum at S. Maria Capua Vetere (1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, with excellent colour plates. We shall return to the composition of these initiation scenes below. Until the publication of the cult vessel which will be the principal subject of this article the Capua frescoes were virtually unique as depictions of Mithraic initiation. Descriptions of the lost Velletri reliefs (V 609) are too elusive to furnish helpful parallels (see Vermaseren, Mithriaca I (above), index, s. ‘Velletri’).

¹⁰ Initiation into specific grades are recorded in the fourth-century Roman inscriptions V 400–5, typically in the form NN tradiderunt leontica (persica, patrica, heliaca (for the Heliodromus?), hierocoracica (for the Raven). Ritual is best attested for the Lions: being ‘fiery’ their ablutions are performed with a suitably fiery liquid, honey, not water (Porphyry, De antro nympharum 15); they are the cult's incense offerers (per quos thuradamus, Sa. Prisca dipinto: Vermaseren, M. J. and van Essen, C. C., The Excavations in the Mithraeum of the Church of Santa Prisca in Rome (1965), 224)Google Scholar and in some sense ‘consume’ their fellow initiates (per quos consumimur ipsi, ibid.), presumably something ritually enacted; processions of lions can be seen on both side walls of the Sa. Prisca mithraeum (V 481–2); finally, what may be the text of an initiation ceremony into the grade has recently been published by Brashear, W. M., A Mithraic Catechism from Egypt (P.Berol. 21196) (1992)Google Scholar. For the Mithraic Soldier (Miles), a formal renunciation of a crown, with the formula ‘Mithras is my crown’, is reported by Tertullian (De corona 15). For the Nymphus (the term cannot be translated, for it is a non-word for a non-thing, a ‘male bride’ — see Gordon, op. cit. (below), 48), ritual transvestism was practised, to judge from the frescoes of the Pareti Dipinte mithraeum in Ostia (V 268); they were hailed at some point as the community's ‘new light’ (formula in Maternus, Firmicus, De err. 19.1Google Scholar). On the grades and the extent of our knowledge concerning them, see M. Vermaseren, J., Mithra, cedieu mystérieux (trans. Léman, M. and Gilbert, L., 1960), 115–26Google Scholar; Beck, op. cit. (n. 2, 1984), 2090–3; Merkelbach, op. cit. (n. 2), 77–133 (a very full but somewhat idiosyncratic treatment); Clauss, op. cit. (n. 3), 138–45; Turcan, op. cit. (n. 2), 81–91. By far the best treatment of the ideology of the grades remains, in my view, Gordon, R. L., ‘Reality, evocation and boundary in the Mysteries of Mithras’, JMS 3 (1980), 19–99Google Scholar (reprinted in idem., Image and Value in the Graeco-Roman World (1996), ch. 5). In general, Mithraic ritual seems to be characterized by strangeness, violence, and the extreme. Apart from the ethos of the Capua frescoes, our best evidence is Ambrosiaster (Ps.-Augustine), Quaest. vet. nov. test. 114.11 (CSEL 50, p. 308): ‘Their eyes are blindfolded so they don't recoil from being foully degraded; some flap their wings like birds, imitating the call of the raven; others roar like lions; others again, their hands bound with chicken guts, are propelled over trenches filled with water; then comes someone with a sword and severs the guts — he's called the “liberator”’. Other Christian writers attest the severity of Mithraic rituals of initiation, although in the later sources one must allow for exaggeration based on the increasing remoteness of authentic information; see Clauss, op. cit. (n. 3), III. The emperor Commodus is reported to have actually killed a man during a Mithraic rite in which ‘something is customarily said or counterfeited to elicit a display of fear’ (‘cum illic aliquid ad speciem timoris vel dici vel fingi soleat’, SHA Comm. 9). A possible stage prop for such a ritual has been discovered at the Riegel mithraeum: a blade whose two halves are joined by a hoop which would fit around the body (references, with other interpretations of the object, Beck, op. cit. (n. 2, 1984), 2039); the effect of someone apparently run through by a sword is illustrated, with an appropriately tunicked model, in Schwertheim, E., Mithras: Seine Denkmäler und sein Kult, Antike Welt Sondernummer (1979), 29 Abb. 38Google Scholar. A pit in the Carrawburgh mithraeum has been interpreted as the place for a mimesis of interment or subjection to other ordeals (V 844; Richmond, I. A. and Gillam, J. P., The Temple of Mithras at Carrawburgh (1951), 19)Google Scholar. Finally, we should not overlook the alarming ritual implications of the ‘fiery breath which is an ablution (niptron) for holy magi’ (graffito in the Dura mithraeum, V 68).

¹¹ Most explicit is the Seven Spheres mithraeum at Ostia: Gordon, R. L., ‘The sacred geography of a mithraeum; the example of Sette Sfere’, JMS I (1976), 119–65Google Scholar (reprinted in idem, op. cit. (n. 10, 1996), ch. 6); idem, ‘Authority, salvation and mystery in the Mysteries of Mithras’, in Huskinson, J., Beard, M. and Reynolds, J. (eds), Image and Mystery in the Roman World (1988, repr. in Gordon, op. cit. (n. 10, 1996), ch. 4), 45–80, at 50–60Google Scholar; Beck, R., ‘Cosmic models: some uses of Hellenistic science in Roman religion’, in Barnes, T. D. (ed.), The Sciences in Greco-Roman Society, Apeiron 27.4 (1994), 99–117.Google Scholar

¹² Published by Horn, H. G., ‘Das Mainzer Mithrasgefäß’, Mainzer Archäologische Zeitschrift I (1994), 21–66Google Scholar. The vessel stands some 40 cm high. A dipinto on the rim records the dedication to Mithras (i]nv[icto); for the dedicator's name, Horn (ibid., 30) reads Quintus Cas[sius (though Abb. 13 seems to show no more than Quintus Ca[). The pottery type, Wetterau ware, is of great significance because of its relatively early date; it will be discussed below. The vessel belongs to the class of Schlangengefafäßen, so called from the snakes which are moulded on to them, in this instance a single one with its head resting on the top of one handle and its tail writhing horizontally around a quarter of the cup's body. There are a number of other Mithraic Schlangengefäße, with notable examples from Köln (Schwertheim, E., Die Denkmäler orientalischer Gottheiten im römischen Deutschland (1974), no. 15a) and Friedberg (V 1061)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Swoboda, E., ‘Die Schlange im Mithraskult’, JÖAI 30 (1937), 1–27Google Scholar; Bird, J., ‘Frogs from the Walbrook’, in eadem, Hassall, M., and Sheldon, H. (eds), Interpreting Roman London: Papers in Memory of Hugh Chapman (1996), 119–27, at 119–21Google Scholar (a valuable discussion of the cult contexts and motifs of these vessels: they are associated with other gods besides Mithras). Joanna Bird makes the intriguing suggestion that on the analogy with the Köln vessel cited above, the snake's head on the extant handle may well have been balanced by a lion on the lost handle (personal communication).

The story of the discovery of the vessel and its mithraeum in the context of the commercial redevelopment of the site in Mainz in 1976 makes dismal reading. ‘Leider konnten sie [i.e., the site] von der Archäologischen Denkmalpflege Mainz nicht eingehender untersucht werden. Möglich war lediglich, im Rahmen einer notmaßnahme und mit Hilfe ehrenamtlicher Mitarbeiter die von Baggern zufällig freigelegten Befunde einzumessen und fotografisch mehrschlecht also recht zu dokumentieren sowie vereinzelte Funde zu bergen. Der Grabungsbericht ist demzufolge äußerst lückenhaft’ (Horn, op. cit. (above), 21). Indeed, the mithraeum has to be inferred primarily from the finds; even its precise location and plan are irrecoverable. One can only conclude, with Horn, ‘… daß beim Ausschachten der Baugrube für den Nordstern-Neubau … in Mainz wohl ein komplettes Mithrasheiligtum so gut wie unbeobachtet und undokumentiert zerstört bzw. abgebaggert wurde’ (ibid., 22). Most tragically, to judge from their few remaining fragments, it seems that about eight other vessels similar to ours were smashed during excavation and hauled off with the spoil (ibid., 22, n. 7). If these vessels were anything like as informative as ours, the loss to our knowledge of Mithraism is incalculable. This sorry story is much redeemed by the careful restoration and publication of the surviving vessel, for which we are greatly in the debt of the museum and archaeological services (see next note) and H. G. Horn.

¹³ Photographs: Landesamt für Denkmalpflege Rheinland-Pfalz, Abt. Archäologische Denkmalpflege, Amt Mainz. I am most grateful to this Office for the photographs and permission to reproduce them. To capture the detail, I have used individual photographs of the figures arranged as on the vessel.

¹⁴ op. cit. (n. 12), 28–30.

¹⁵ ‘Das Mainzer Mithrasgefäß’, ZPE 108 (1995), 1–6, at 6Google Scholar.

¹⁶ op. cit. (n. 12), 25–8.

¹⁷ op. cit. (n. 15), 2–5.

¹⁸ Rupp, V., Wetterauer Ware: Eine römische Keramik im Rhein-Main-Gebiet (1987), 54–9.Google Scholar

¹⁹ The view articulated most fully by Merkelbach, op. cit. (n. 2), 75–7 (note the section title: ‘Die Mithrasmystenen — eine neue Religion’); see also my ‘The Mysteries of Mithras: a new account of their genesis’, JRS 88 (1998), 115–28Google Scholar.

²⁰ Swerdlow, X. M., ‘On the cosmical mysteries of Mithras’, CP 86 (1991), 48–63Google Scholar, is the extreme case of this view. There is something of it in R. MacMullen's description of Mithraic cult activities: Paganism in the Roman Empire (1981), 124. Full-scale treatments of Mithraism tend to move away from it because the mass of evidence, principally iconographic, renders it unsustainable: Merkelbach, op. cit. (n. 2); Turcan, op. cit. (n. 2); even Clauss, op. cit. (n. 3), despite his emphasis on cult community over doctrine.

²¹ Thus, e.g., Tiridates of Armenia on his first encounter with Nero at Naples (Dio 63.2.4, tas cheiras epallaxas).

²² Horn (op. cit. (n. 12), 23) suggests a cup. We shall return to the figure's gesture later.

²³ ibid., 25–8.

²⁴ See above, n. 10.

²⁵ Above, n. 23; on the Capua scenes, Vermaseren, op. cit. (n. 9), esp. pls 21–3, 25–8.

²⁶ Vermaseren, ibid., pl. 28.

²⁷ op. cit. (n. 15), 2–5. For the scene's location on various monuments (excluding the Danubian), see Gordon, R. L., ‘Panelled complications’, JMS 3 (1980), 200–27Google Scholar (repr. as ch. 9 in Gordon, op. cit. (n. 10, 1996)); the scene is (letter) ‘O’ in his scheme.

²⁸ There is an example from Mogontiacum, V 1225; similar in composition to the scene on our cup is V 1301 (Besigheim).

²⁹ Above, n. 4.

³⁰ ‘Fons concluse petris, geminos qui aluisti nectare fratres’ (Vermaseren and van Essen, op. cit. (n. 10), 193) is generally thought to refer to the water miracle.

³¹ Cumont, F., Textes et monuments figurés relatifs aux mystères de Mithra, Vol. I (1899), 164–6Google Scholar; Vermaseren, op. cit. (n. 10), 71–4; Merkelbach, op. cit. (n. 2), 112–15; Clauss, op. cit. (n. 3), 80–2. The two subsidiary figures are apparently the same pair as sometimes attend the birth of Mithras from the rock and are probably identifiable with the torchbearers (Cautes and Cautopates) who attend the bull-killing. The rock at which Mithras shoots is also the vault of heaven (Merkelbach, loc. cit.).

³² loc. cit. (n. 31). The parallel with Christian uses of Moses' water miracle at Horeb (Exodus 17:1–7) was already drawn by Cumont, loc. cit. (n. 31).

³³ ibid. Note esp. the fons perennis of V 1533.

³⁴ The Persian cap is the symbol of the Father in the relevant panel of the Felicissimus grade mosaic (V 299). The bow and arrow is, of course, Mithras' weapon.

³⁵ op. cit. (n. 9), 30.

³⁶ V 299. If one were to pursue Horn's identification further, it should be through the associations of raven and cup in the catasterism myth for Corvus, Crater, and Hydra. The story (Apollo instructs the raven to fetch water; the raven dallies in its task, offering the specious excuse that it was prevented by a watersnake; Apollo condemns the raven to thirst over the season of its delay, catasterizing it along with the water-jar and water-snake) has been fully explored by Richard Gordon for its resonances in the ideology of the Mithraic grade system (op. cit. (n. 10), 25–9). Gordon has demonstrated how the story's underlying tension between thirst/drought/aridity and water/fertility/generation is exemplified in the Mithraic grade structure in general and the Raven grade in particular. The same tension, as we have seen, underlies the Mithraic ‘water miracle’, which is the story replicated in the ritual ot our Scene A. If the mitiand is indeed the Raven, as Horn suggests, then perhaps the scene also functions as an esoteric counterpart of the catasterism myth. A different Raven is commissioned by a different Apollo, himself shooting to end drought; in a nice paradox, the cup in which water is to be brought is held (again, if Horn's identification is correct) by a fiery, water-shunning Lion (above, n. 10 — dryness in Mithraism is not a simple negative); and behind ‘Apollo’ writhes a much more formidable manifestation of the raven's feeble excuse, the snake. The vessel itself, on which the scene is depicted, bespeaks, as Merkelbach points out (op. cit. (n. 15), 6), ‘water’. Thus, Horn's identifications may be shown to generate a secondary intent for the scene, but without iconographic warrant it remains inconclusive.

³⁷ op. cit. (n. 15), 2–6.

³⁸ See above, n. 31.

³⁹ That there is an extensive correlation between the grades and the figures in the various scenes of the Mithraic myth cycle was central to Merkelbach's interpretation of the latter in his monograph on the cult: op. cit. (n. 2), 86–133; see also his Weihegrade und Seelenlehre der Mithrasmysterien, Rheinisch-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vorträge G 257 (1982)Google Scholar. The goal of relating cult life to myth and doctrine is wholly admirable, but Merkelbach's correlations, at least as an extended system, have not proved credible; see my review article of his Mithras'. ‘Merkelbach's Mithras’, Phoenix 41 (1987), 296–316, at 306–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁰ There are no precise parallels in the section of Quintillian's Institutio oratorio (11.3.92–104) which discusses hand gestures.

⁴¹ Studies on the Iconography of Kingship in the Ancient World (1953), 171–97Google Scholar. His examples are drawn from sarcophagus reliefs, diptychs, coins, catacomb frescos, mosaics, etc. Admittedly, much of the material comes from early Christian art and is thus quite late relative to the Mainz vessel. Particularly germane, however, are (i) the illustrations of ancient comic actors, especially the Prologus, in the Terence Codex Vaticanus, and (ii) the Sabazius hands. On the latter, the gesture is interpreted as giving voice to the symbols with which the hands are embellished; they become ‘speaking hands’. The gesture eventually becomes one of blessing (the so-called benedictio latino), but L'Orange argues, convincingly in my view, that that was not its original intent. While such a construction could be placed on the Sabazius hands, it could scarcely be so in the Apuleius passage below, or in the Terence miniatures (cf. the scene of the council of the gods at the start of Aeneid 10 from the Codex Romanus (vat. lat. 3867, fol. 234V): that Venus is about to speak is to be inferred from the gesture in question which she alone makes; also ibid., fol. ir, Meliboeus makes the same gesture as he leads off the amoebaean song of the Eclogues).

⁴² One might add as a particularly vivid example the scene of the traditio legis on a silver casket from Thessalonica (illustrated in Mathews, T. F., The Clash of Gods: a Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art (1993), 80, fig. 57)Google Scholar: Christ makes the speaker's gesture with his right hand as he hands the scroll to Peter on his left (viewer's right), while Paul on his right answers with the identical gesture in imitation. The composition is an elegant statement of the authority of the Word, spoken and written. In gesture and uplifted gaze, both Christ and Paul are strongly reminiscent of our Mainz mystagogue.

⁴³ Apuleius, , Met. 2.21Google Scholar (ed. Hanson).

⁴⁴ I echo the word of another talking artifact, the scroll which carries the ‘author's’ address to the reader in the introduction of the Golden Ass (1.1).

⁴⁵ L'Orange contrasts the ‘gesture of thought’ with the ‘gesture of power’. In the latter (op. cit. (n. 41), 139–70), the right hand is extended but the palm is open (outwards) and the fingers all extended. In the archery scene on the Mainz cup the mystagogue's gesture of speech is balanced by a different ‘gesture of power’: the Father's hands draw the bow and hold it in tension with arrow poised. This is the essence of the drômenon. In contrast to the hands of the two active figures, the hands of the initiand between express passivity and subordination (above, n. 21).

⁴⁶ The symbol is found in the Sun-Runner's panel in the mosaic of the Felicissimus mithraeum (V 299).

⁴⁷ Nama Heliodromis tutela Solis (V 480.2; Vermaseren and van Essen, op. cit. (n. 10), 156).

⁴⁸ Horn, op. cit. (n. 12), 24, 29; Merkelbach, op. cit. (n. 15), 6. This symbol, complete with ribbons to tie the bonnet beneath the chin, is found, together with the symbol of the whip, in the Sun-Runner's panel in the Felicissimus mosaics (V 299).

⁴⁹ See, once again, the relevant panels of the Felicissimus mosaics (V 299).

⁵⁰ op. cit. (n. 12), 24, 29. On the Nymphus, the only grade name which I have left untranslated, see above, n. 10.

⁵¹ op. cit. (n. 15), 6.

⁵² op. cit. (n. 2), 91.

⁵³ See above, n. 10; see also n. 12 — Joanna Bird's suggestion that the vessel may have carried a lion on the top of the missing handle to balance the snake's head on the extant handle.

⁵⁴ On the iconography of the torchbearers (with frequencies and geographic distribution), see Hinnells, J. R., ‘The iconography of Cautes and Cautopates, I: the data’, JMS I (1976), 36–67Google Scholar; on their astronomical significance, Beck, R., ‘Cautes and Cautopates: some astronomical considerations’, JMS 2 (1977), 1–17Google Scholar; on their opposition (and the rare exceptions to it), idem, ‘The Mithraic torchbearers and “absence of opposition”’, Classical Views 26, N.S. I (1982), 126–40; most recently, R. Hannah, ‘The image of Cautes and Cautopates in the Mithraic tauroctony’, in M. Dillon (ed.), Religion in the Ancient World (1996), 177–92.

⁵⁵ V 2268/9.

⁵⁶ Astronomically, dromos means the distance (in longitude) covered by a celestial body in a given period of time. A particularly relevant example, in view of what follows, is Geminus 1.34–5: as a result of the eccentricity of its orbit, ‘the sun's [sc. annual] dromos is divided into four unequal sectors’; hence the inequality of the seasons. The Mithraists' verbal coinage is thus precisely and literally appropriate. On analogous -dromos coinages see R. L. Gordon, ‘Mystery, metaphor and doctrine in the Mysteries of Mithras’, in Hinnells, op. cit. (n. 2), 103–24, at 110–13.

⁵⁷ Raised and lowered objects, whether they be torches as normally or rods as here, are appropriate signifiers for the solstices and equinoxes as contrasted pairs. At the spring equinox the Sun is ascending in daily altitude as it crosses into the northern half of the ecliptic; at the autumn equinox it is declining in daily altitude as it crosses back into the southern half. The solstices are more ambiguous: at the summer solstice the Sun reaches its zenith at the ecliptic's northern extreme, but at the selfsame moment it starts its descent southward; conversely, at the winter solstice the Sun reaches its nadir but at the same time starts its climb back northward and upward — the paradox of midwinter renewal.

⁵⁸ De antro 24: ‘To Mithras as his proper seat, they assigned the equinoxes … As creator and master of genesis, Mithras is set at the equator with the northern signs to his right and the southern signs to his left. They set Cautes to the south because of its heat and Cautopates to the north because of the coldness of its wind’. From context it is clear that the northern and southern tropics, i.e., the summer and winter solstices, are intended. Cautes and Cautopates were restored to the text by the brilliant — and universally accepted — emendation of the Arethusa edition (1969). On the passage, see Beck, R., ‘The seat of Mithras at the equinoxes: Porphyry, De antro nympharum 24’, JMS I (1976), 95–8Google Scholar; idem, op. cit. (n. 11, 1994), 106–7, 114–15.

⁵⁹ Schwertheim, op. cit. (n. 12), no. 15a; good colour illustration in idem, op. cit. (n. 10), Abb. 42 (see also Abb. 83, 86).

⁶⁰ Sol between Cautes and Cautopates is apparently the subject of one of the fresco panels in the mithraeum in the Tribune's house at Aquincum: Madarassy, O., ‘Die bemalte Kultwand im Mithräum des Legionslagers von Aquincum’, Kölner Jahrbuch für Vor- und Frühgeschichte 24 (1991), 207–11Google Scholar, at 209–10; the scene is numbered 11 in the sequence. It is badly damaged and difficult to decipher, but whatever its interpretation, this is a new side-scene in the cycle, in the sense that it has not been encountered before. Sol is kneeling, and Madarassy reads it as an initiation scene: ‘Vermutlich handelt es sich um eine mit dem Kult zusammenhängende Einweihungszeremonie, um die darstellung einer Wiedergeburt’. There are similarities, noted by Madarassy, with the Dura-Europus scene of Cautes and Cautopates bearing between them the carcase of the slain bull (V 42.12).

⁶¹ The Mithraic core of the cosmology of De antro 24 is not really in doubt, but the point is worth making explicitly because certain of its important features, to be introduced below, are dismissed as spurious (i.e., non-Mithraic) in Turcan's, R. influential Mithras Platonicus: Recherches sur l'hellénisation philosophique de Mithra (1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Turcan, as we shall see, tends to construe such things as philosophers' constructs calqued on the Mysteries by outsiders. The issue of genuineness needs to be addressed definitively. Since the issues are technical and complicated, I shall deal with them for the most part in the Appendix. For a brief critique of Turcan's overall approach, see my ‘Mithraism since Franz Cumont’ (above, n. 2), 2055–6. It is encouraging that the compilers of the most recent sourcebook on Roman religion include, as a probable Mithraic source and with a serviceable commentary from that perspective, generous excerpts from the De antro: BNP Sourcebook, 90–1 extract 4.6a, 313–16 extract 12.5g. In BNP History (277–8) the authors discuss this question of the reliability of Porphyry's Mithraic data, but conclude that ‘this is only a pressing problem if you imagine that there was a single “real” Mithraic message which could, in principle and if you had enough evidence, be disentangled’. I return to this answer in my Conclusion. Since I maintain that Mithraism did indeed have doctrinal norms (as I would prefer to call them) and that the Mainz vessel affords us significant new access to them, the problem, in my view, is indeed ‘pressing’ and its solution achievable.

⁶² De antro 21–9. In chs 21 and 22 Porphyry acknowledges the second-century Neopythagorean Numenius of Apamea ‘and his associate Cronius’ as his immediate sources for these solstitial soul gates. Later in the passage, as we have seen, Porphyry explicitly cites the doctrines of the Mithraic mysteries. Whether Mithraic doctrine was mediated through Numenius (and/or Cronius), or whether through another source (Porphyry elsewhere cites Pallas and Eubulus, on whom see Turcan, op. cit. (n. 61), 23–43, as sources on Mithraism), or whether Porphyry here drew directly on the Mithraists, it is difficult to tell. As is apparent from the parallel account in Proclus, the Numenian material will have been drawn from that author's commentary on the ‘Myth of Er’ with which Plato concludes his Republic (Numenius fr. 35 Des Places = Proclus, , In Rempubl. 2, p. 128Google Scholar Kroll). Although his is the earliest attested account of it, there is no reason to suppose that the theory of solstitial gates is original to Xumenius. The Mithraists could well have had priority; indeed, it appears likely from the Mainz vessel that they did. Below and in the Appendix, I address Turcan's contention that the Mithraists cannot have held a theory of solstitial gates because it is incompatible with other elements of their doctrine. A third literary version of the theory, which is also thought to derive ultimately from Numenius, is found in Macrobius, , In Somn. 1.12.1–4Google Scholar. See Lamberton, R., Homer the Theologian (1986), 66–75, 120–33, 318–24Google Scholar; de Ley, H., Macrobius and Numenius (1972)Google Scholar. L. Simonini gives a full commentary on this section in her edition of the De antro (1986). Although she furnishes much detailed and germane background information, she does not succeed, in my opinion, in disentangling the literary and Mithraic sources or in displaying their relationship; the architecture of the section remains opaque. Modern scholarship on the larger topic of the soul's celestial journey is considerable. I cite the major treatments in my Planetary Gods and Planetary Orders in the Mysteries of Mithras (1988), nn. 12, 180Google Scholar (add Segal, A. F., ‘Heavenly ascent in Hellenistic Judaism, early Christianity and their environment’, ANRW II.23.2, 1333–94Google Scholar). Planetary Gods is itself largely concerned with manifestations of the theory of the soul's celestial journey in the literary testimonia and on the monuments of Mithraism (esp. 41–2, 73–85, 92–100).

⁶³ De antro 6, quoted above in my Introduction.

⁶⁴ op. cit. (n. 62), 92–100; op. cit. (n. 11), 106–9, 112–14; see also the studies by R. L. Gordon cited above, n. 11.

⁶⁵ (1) Celebration of the solstices as feasts of mortality and immortality is suggested by a formula in the recently discovered Virunum album: see my ‘Qui mortalitatis causa convenerunt: the meeting of the Virunum Mithraists on June 26, A.D. 184’, Phoenix 52 (1998), 335–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Piccottini, G., Mithrastempel in Virunum (1994), 24Google Scholar. (2) In the papyrus ‘Mithraic catechism’ (Brashear, W., A Mithraic Catechism from Egypt (1992), 23, on line 5 recto)Google Scholar, the supplement ‘tropic’ is proposed by Merkelbach and Burkert (no mean authorities!) to the initiand's response, ‘through the summer …’

⁶⁶ op. cit. (n. 61), 88–9.

⁶⁷ For fuller descriptions of the mithraeum's design, see the works cited above, n. 11. For simplicity's sake I have included only what is relevant to our present concerns.

⁶⁸ Aries, the spring equinox, is intimated by the knife which Mithras wields, Libra, the autumn equinox, by the fact that he straddles the bull. The logic is tortuous and can only be recovered by emendation of the De antro's text (Beck, op. cit. (n. 58)): the knife belongs to Mars, and Mars has Aries as his astrological ‘house’; the bull, qua Taurus, belongs to Venus, again as her astrological house, and Venus has Libra as her other house.

⁶⁹ At the Dura mithraeum one of the columns along the front of the ‘north’ (geographic south) bench is obligingly labelled ‘eisodos / exodos’ (V 66, graffito ‘in minute letters’; for location see V 34). One would be ill-advised to attempt literal entry or egress since there is no physical doorway there — and never was. Clearly this is a soul gate, and its function is ritual or psychagogic. On the wall on the same side in the Capua mithraeum there is a graffito INYODUM, which it is tempting to construe as ‘a barbarous Latin-Greek contamination for eisodos’ (Vermaseren, op. cit. (n. 9), 23–4, though he concludes that this ‘involves too liberal an interpretation of the laws of epigraphy’). The Capua mithraeum also contains conspicuous mid-bench niches with a transverse line in the form of a narrow stone slab across the aisle between — not to mention the relief of Cupid and Psyche in the central panel of the wall on the same side as the graffito, approximately above the mid-bench niche representing the gate of entry of souls. The appropriate conclusions were drawn by Gordon, op. cit. (n. 11,), 57–8.

⁷⁰ Actual mithraea are aligned in many different directions: see Beck, op. cit. (n. 11), 112 n. 24.

⁷¹ A mistake made by Gordon, op. cit. (n. 11, 1976), 127 fig. 2, 133–4, and Turcan, op. cit. (n. 61), 84. Unfortunately, BNP Sourcebook (315) compounds the error by introducing it into the text of De antro 24 as an explanatory gloss: ‘Mithras is placed … on the line of the equinoxes < facing west >, with the north on his right and the south on his left’.

⁷² The planets, though not the sun and moon, can also move westward in so-called ‘retrograde motion’.

⁷³ It is important to note here a major limitation in the mithraeum's design. Moving ‘westward’ up or down the aisle would indeed intimate universal daily motion. However, in the actual universe that motion does not take place against a fixed background, as does eastward (or westward) planetary motion. The entire background, including the signs and the four tropics, revolve together with the sun, moon, and planets in the course of twenty-four hours. Clearly this motion cannot be imparted to the model, though it can be imagined.

⁷⁴ In the imagination of antiquity these are frequented routes. In the great myth of the Phaedrus gods and human souls travel them (although the description is imprecise: Dicks, D. R., Early Greek Astronomy to Aristotle (1970), 114–15)Google Scholar. It is the ultimate périphérique (in Plato's account, at 248B, quite as crowded and risky as its latter-day urban exemplars), and the Mithraists are doing nothing unusual, conceptually, in joining the traffic. It is their mode of joining that is truly original.

⁷⁵ If a mind experiment would help, imagine a fly walking around the edge of a transparent disk which is viewed side-on. The fly is proceeding in the same direction, but for the viewer it appears to be going to and fro along a single linear path. Now imagine a second disk concentric with the first, but somewhat oblique to it, with the intersecting diameters at right angles to the viewer's line of sight. The circumambulating fly still appears to be going to and fro, but its path deviates from one side to the other in a shallow ellipse. In the mithraeum (and in my floor-plan of its design), the paradox of motion in the same direction appearing as motion in opposite directions is the inevitable consequence of trying to express in two dimensions a three-dimensional reality. There is a certain appropriateness here. As everyone in antiquity knew, the cosmic original is spherical and endowed with a circular motion which is divine; but the mortal denizens of the physical mithraeum, constructed to a rectangular plan in the sublunary world, must intimate that celestial motion by the rectilinear motion proper to the elements of mutability. Such are the constraints of one half of our human nature.

⁷⁶ On the explicit privileging of the spring equinox at the Sette Sfere mithraeum, see R. Beck, ‘Sette Sfere, Sette Porte, and the spring equinoxes of A.D. 172 and 173’, in Bianchi, op. cit. (n. 1), 519–29. If we wish to go further and specify sunrise as the time of day — though nothing in the mithraeum's design or the De antro data necessitates it — then Mithras as the rising Sun would indeed, terrestrially speaking, be in the east. Only so can the mithraeum's cult-niche be equated with an ‘east’ and its entrance with a ‘west’.

⁷⁷ There is an interesting analogy in the vestments of the Jewish high priest. Like the tabernacle and its furnishings, they too were interpreted by contemporaries as an image of the universe (Josephus, , AJ 3.180, 184–7Google Scholar), although that is not their meaning in the charter text (Exodus 28, 39). They were worn, i.e., the image was activated, each year only on the three most solemn festivals and the one fast (AJ 18.94). Their custody at other times was a contentious issue, being held at various times not only by the Temple establishment but also by client kings and Roman prefects.

⁷⁸ De antro 24.

⁷⁹ Rufinus, , HE 11.23Google Scholar.

⁸⁰ Rufinus, ibid.; Quodvultdeus, , Liber promissionum et praedictorum dei 3.42Google Scholar; formula in Rufinus. On both events, see R. Merkelbach, Isis regina — Zeus Sarapis (1995), 149–50.

⁸¹ Apuleius, , Met. 11.24Google Scholar: ‘After I had thus been decorated in the likeness of the Sun (ad instar Solis) and set up in the guise of a statue, the curtains were suddenly opened and the people wandered round to view me' (trans. Hanson). Specifically, the solar accoutrements are (1) the twelve stoles, (2) the lighted torch, (3) the ‘crown made of leaves of shining palm, jutting out like rays of light’. The last is, of course, virtually the same as the headgear of the Sun-Runner. A celebration follows to mark Lucius' ‘birth into the mysteries’ (natalem sacrorum): ‘a delicious banquet and a cheerful party’. Solar pageantry and good cheer: is it surprising that Apuleius chose to call Lucius' mystagogue — Mithras?

⁸² Bull, R. J., ‘The mithraeum at Caesarea Maritima’, in Duchesne-Guillemin, J. (ed.), Études Mithriaques (1978), 75–89, at 79.Google Scholar

⁸³ Beck, op. cit. (n. 2, 1984), 2034.

⁸⁴ On ancient sundials see Gibbs, S. L., Greek and Roman Sundials (1976).Google Scholar

⁸⁵ Buchner, E., Die Sonnenuhr des Augustus (1982)Google Scholar; see also Beck, op. cit. (n. 11, 1994), 100, 102, 104–5.

⁸⁶ For other examples of this form of dial, see Gibbs, op. cit. (n. 84), nos 4001–15; note esp. no. 4007 with lettering for the signs of the zodiac and for the equinoctial and two solstitial lines.

⁸⁷ To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (1987)Google Scholar.

⁸⁸ The phrases in quotation marks are of course the familiar ones from De antro 24. They steer one clear of the inappropriate question ‘which equinox?’ Just as the microcosm of a planar horizontal sundial has separate solstitial lines but only a single equinoctial line (see above, n. 86), and the analogous microcosm of the mithraeum has separate ‘northern’ and ‘southern benches’ but only a single ‘east–west’ aisle), so the performance of this drama of the tropics requires separate actors for the solstices and their deities but only one for the equinoxes and the god Sol Mithras located there.

⁸⁹ Even at the physical level the symbolism is appropriate, for from the summer solstice the sun starts to descend and from the winter solstice it starts to rise again. Porphyry's De antro (21–5) preserves a different logic, which is probably the Mithraists' own since it is used to locate their torchbearing deities. The solstices are first identified as ‘northern’ and ‘southern’ (indeed, the terms ‘summer’ and ‘winter’ are never used of the solstices in this section); the northern (i.e., summer) solstice is assigned to Cautopates and descent into genesis because the north wind is bracing and vivifying, the southern (i.e., winter) solstice to Cautes and ascent into apogenesis because the south wind is warm and relaxing and so dissolves mortality back into immortality. That said, however, it would be unwise to exclude altogether the obvious exoteric connotations of the raised and lowered sticks with summer (high sun) and winter (low sun) respectively. By conflating the terrestrial with the celestial, the paradox can be made to seem implicit in nature: (terrestrial) north is cold, but the (celestial) northern tropic is the site of the summer sun; (terrestrial) south is warm, but the (celestial) southern tropic is the site of the winter sun. The Mithraists probably appreciated the ambiguity. I would not altogether exclude the possibility, adumbrated there, that the rodbearers also intimate the equinoxes where Sol-Mithras has his ‘proper seat’, the raised stick the waxing sun at the spring equinox, the lowered stick the waning sun at the autumn equinox. See above, n. 57.

⁹⁰ Crawford, M., Roman Republican Coinage (1974), no. 433/1.Google Scholar

⁹¹ V 481. Rightly, in my view, Merkelbach (op. cit. (n. 2), 180–2) maintains that what is represented is an actual, not an ideal, procession (the participants being named individual Mithraic Lions). If so, it could only take place outside, there being insufficient space to parade an ox through a mithraeum. Following Vermaseren (op. cit. (n. 10), 43 f.; cf. Vermaseren and Van Essen, op. cit. (n. 10), 160–4), Merkelbach decribes the procession as the preliminary to the suovetaurilia (the sacrifice of a pig, a sheep, and a bull, customary on certain great public occasions). Turcan denies this, on the grounds that the cock, which is also carried by one of the Mithraists, is not one of the prescribed animals (op. cit. (n. 2), 79). This is too simple: we might rather say that the Mithraists' procession alludes to the suovetaurilia, and hence signals the importance of their ritual, but deprecates identification precisely by the inclusion of an improper victim. The cock is the ‘Persian bird’ (Persikos ornis); no prize, then, for guessing whose ritual this quasi-suovetaurilia has become. In the same way, our procession of the Sun-Runner deprecates identification with the magistrate's procession by inverting one of the quasi-fasces. On processions in pagan, imperial, and Christian art see, Mathews, op. cit. (n. 42), 150£71.

⁹² ‘The Mysteries of Mithras: a new account of their genesis’, JRS 88 (1998), 115–28Google Scholar.

⁹³ Tacitus, , Ann. 15.44.6–7Google Scholar.

⁹⁴ Dio 63.6.2 (Loeb translation). The same conceit underlies Lucan, , Phars. I. 48–50Google Scholar: ‘seu te flammigeros Phoebi conscendere currus / telluremque nihil mutato sole timentem / igne vago lustrare iuvet …’

⁹⁵ Nor do I mean to imply that Nero systematically used solar imagery to promote a certain form of divine monarchy. Thus, the strictures of (e.g.) M. T. Griffin (Nero: the End of a Dynasty (1984), 215–20) against such interpretations do not apply. We have to do not with propaganda in the service of calculated policy, but with exuberant and opportunistic fictions shaped as much by audience response as by artistic initiative. I have deliberately left out of account here the colossal statue of Nero in his own Domus Aurea (Suet., Nero 31), since it is a moot point whether or not it incorporated solar iconography. Also, I have avoided making much of Tiridates prostrating himself before Nero ‘as Mithras’ (Dio 63.5.2). No doubt, Tiridates' words (supposing them correctly reported) carried a wealth of meaning for both parties, but I follow Boyce, and Grenet, (History of Zoroastrianism, Vol. 3 (1991), 39Google Scholar) in hearing Iranian royal ritual as their primary referent: ‘… to prostrate myself before you as I do before Mithras too’ (hôs kai ton Mithran). If this episode and Tiridates' initiation of Nero into ‘Magian/magic feasts’ (‘magicis etiam cenis initiaverat’, Pliny, , NH 30.6Google Scholar) have anything to do with Roman Mithraism, it is only as an incident that brought the Persian god to Rome's attention prior to the founding of the Mysteries. We need to get the cart back behind the horse: Nero and Tiridates were in no sense playing to a local audience of Mithraists, because Mithraism as we know it did not then exist. It is one of the merits of a late foundation scenario that we do not have to postulate Roman Mithraic input into some hybrid ‘Zoroastrian-Mithraic’ (Griffin's term, ibid., 216) investiture or, worse, into the monarchs' ‘Magian feasts’. (Although this is not the place to do so, Cumont's reconstruction (‘L'iniziazione di Nerone da parte di Tindate d'Armenia’, Rivista di Filologia N.S. II (1933), 145–54Google Scholar) can be vindicated by explaining the Mithraic investiture scene and the banquet scene in terms of outcome rather than input: Mithraic myth and ritual, together with their artistic representations, developed as they did in imaginative response to the flamboyant actions of the rulers of the two world powers, Rome and Parthia/Armenia; they were not, as Cumont imagined, pre-existent forms brought to Rome by Tiridates' magi and played out there in a context that already knew them in the Roman mysteries. This path merits further exploration — eventually. One wonders, for example, about the role of the following fantasies in Mithraism's genesis: (1) a world said to be ruled, in its master's absence, by a freedman called ‘Sun’ (Dio 63.12.2); (2) an exceptionally Romanophile Parthian prince and the exchange of high courtesies with great pageantry of arms in the East (Tac, ., Ann. 15.28–30Google Scholar); (3) the same prince, Tiridates of Armenia, transfixing a pair of bulls with a single arrow fired from his seat in games given in Puteoli by another of Nero's freedmen, Patrobius (Dio 63.3.1–2) — all grist, I suspect, to that mill of the imagination, which on rare occasions and at certain cultural junctures grinds out a new religion.)

⁹⁶ One last Neronian fantasy is worth citing here: the rotating dining-room in the Domus Aurea. Whatever its ideological intent, it not only ‘could have represented the heavens’ (Griffin, op. cit. (n. 95), 138; cf. L'Orange, H.-P., ‘Domus Aurea — der Sonnenpalast,’ Symbolae Osloenses Suppl. II (1942), 68–100Google Scholar, at 72) — it did represent them, or at least was thought to do so and was so described by Suetonius, whose text (31.2) is unambiguous: ‘praecipua cenationumrotunda, quae perpetuo diebus ac noctibus vice mundi circumageretur’. It is difficult to imagine what this rotunda could be other than a dome representing at least the northern celestial hemisphere (with the pole at the zenith) revolving, with or without the chamber below, every twenty-four hours so as to bring the stars and constellation figures on to the actual meridian at the correct time. In any event, it was interpreted by contemporaries as a cosmic model which replicated the universe by daily revolution. With fewer resources but more imagination, the Mithraists too managed to hold their meals in cosmic models. Was it the palace that here furnished a precedent for lesser folk to achieve the heavens?

⁹⁷ The hierarchy of ‘worlds’ and the routes through them are offered as heuristic and hermeneutic devices for comprehending the complex of realities — myth, ritual, initiates, and initiation, ‘place’ in the Smithian sense (above, n. 87), art and artifacts, theology, cosmology and soteriology — which made up the Mysteries of Mithras. No precedence is intended in the hierarchy, except of course that the art and artifacts (first level) are generally posterior, temporally and conceptually, to the rituals, myths, and ideas (second through fourth levels) to which they give visual expression. Even that is an overstatement: fewwould deny, for example, that much Mithraic myth and theology was defined, not prior to, but in the creation of the icon of the bull-killing. In particular, I do not intend to imply priority in creation or formulation, or a hierarchy of religious or metaphysical value, or even a highly conscious differentiation, as between the worlds of ritual performance (second level), myth and cosmology (third level), and abstract ideology (fourth). Especially, I would wish to avoid anyimpression that Mithraic myth (or cosmology), because it ‘authorizes’ ritual as its ‘imitation’, therefore generates ritual, in the sense that the Mithraists deliberately designed ritual to express existing myth (or cosmology). The ‘invention’ of Mithraic myth and ritual, which I regard as essentially equipollent realities, is a topic to which we shall return.

⁹⁸ See, most obviously. Lloyd, G. E. R., Polarity and Analogy. Two Types of Argumentation in Early Greek Thought (1966), 15–171Google Scholar. In cosmology, the best example, because it is also fundamental to that aspect of Mithraism, is the opposition of the two celestial motions, the motion of the universe (westward) and the motion of the planets (eastward), which exemplified for Plato in the Timaeus (36) the even more fundamental polarity of Same and Different.

⁹⁹ See the works cited in n. 54, above.

¹⁰⁰ Fr. 51 DK.

¹⁰¹ Trans. Arethusa ed. (1969), modified to restore ‘mortal or immortal road’ to their correct order.

¹⁰² Some other considerations leading to that conclusion: (1) The ‘cardinal points’ are not our familiar points of the compass, but the astrological kentra, repectively the ‘midheaven’, the ‘lower midheaven’, the ‘ascendant’, and the ‘descendant’. The use of technical astrological concepts is typical of Mithraism as presented to us both in the De antro and on the monuments. (2) A fairly recent discovery in a mithraeum in Mundelsheim probably exemplifies another of these polarities, ‘left and right’: the left half of an ox skull sunk into the bench on the left (as one enters) and the right half of the same or another ox skull in the opposite bench (Planck, D., ‘Ein römisches Mithräum bei Mundelsheim’, Archäologische Ausgrabungen in Baden-Württemberg (1989), 184–90)Google Scholar. More than the tautology ‘this is on your left/right’ is surely intended! Interestingly, ‘right’ and ‘left’ are here relative to the mortal entering the mithraeum rather than the god in the cult-niche (see diagram, Fig. 2).

¹⁰³ op. cit. (n. 56), 84–5.

¹⁰⁴ This would explain a puzzling feature of Porphyry's language: it is ‘harmony’ itself that ‘shoots’. We may suppose two stages in the transmission of the Herachtan saying, which originally took the form of a baldly stated simile appended to a vivid metaphor: palintonos harmoniê hokôsper toxou kai lyrês (‘there is a back-stretched connection, as of a bow and of a lyre’, trans. Barnes). First, the Mithraists split the saying, converting part of the bland simile into a dramatic statement about their god's bowmanship. Since action accompanied words, there was no need to specify the subject. Secondly, Porphyry (or his philosophical predecessor) reintegrated the saying. Robbed of its performance context, the second element, somewhat awkwardly, acquired ‘harmony’ as its grammatical subject.

¹⁰⁵ Contra Celsum 6.22. Plato uses diexodos as one of his terms for the celestial paths of gods and souls in the Phaedrus (247 A, there are ‘many’ such diexodoi).

¹⁰⁶ Beck, op. cit. (n. 62), 73–85. Turcan (op. cit. (n. 61), 44–61), following Cumont (‘La fin du monde selon les mages occidentaux’, RHR 103 (1931), 29–96Google Scholar), argued that the symbol signified something altogether different, a sequence of world ages. There is nothing in the evidence to compel such a reading; equally, no reason why Celsus' testimony cannot be read literally and at face value.

¹⁰⁷ See above, n. 98.

¹⁰⁸ It is worth noting that the prime example of the ladder symbol in Mithraic art is found on another German snake-vessel, V 1061: see Ogawa, H., ‘Mithraic ladder symbols and the Friedberg crater’, in de Boer, M. B. and Edridge, T. A. (eds), Hommages à Maarten J. Vermaseren (1978), 854–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁰⁹ A further important element in the account was the involvement of the Sun and Moon in these journeyings — hardly a surprise in Mithraism: in De antro 29, following the list of opposites, we learn that the Moon was a gate of descent and the Sun a gate of ascent (Beck, op cit. (n. 2, 1994), 48). We should appreciate that all this ‘soul travel’ was not necessarily, or even primarily, viewed as posthumous (Beck, op. cit. (n. 62), 77–8). In ritual, in imagination, and in progress through the grades and their tutelary planets, the journeys were undertaken in the here and now; they were not mere planning for the disembodied future — or recollections of a pre-embodied past.

¹¹⁰ My study of the bull-killing relief (op. cit. (n. 2, 1994)) was largely an exploration of how the cult icon functions, inter alia, as a sort of map and calendar for soul travel in the sphere of the fixed stars. My Planetary Gods (above, n. 62) was more, though not exclusively, concerned with the Mithraists' journeys in the spheres of the planets.

¹¹¹ Horn, H. G., ‘Eine Mithras-Weihung vom Niederrhein’, Ausgrabungen im Rheinland 1983/84, Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn: Kunst und Altertum am Rhein 122 (1985), 151–5Google Scholar. In his subsequent publication of the Mainz vessel (idem, op. cit. (n. 12)) Horn of course makes appropriate reference to the Burginatium altar.

¹¹² ‘Viewing Mithraic art: the altar from Burginatium (Kalkar), Germania Inferior’, ARYS I (1998), 227–58Google Scholar. Among monuments which ‘list’ in this way by the mere juxtaposing of symbols, the closest analogies are V 1496 (Poetovio) and V 1706 (Carnuntum). The donor of the altar describes himself as p(ater) s(acrorum) (following Horn, Gordon, and Clauss (Cultores Mithrae (1992), 98) for the expansion, rather than p(ecunia) s(ua)) he had, presumably, the expertise to marshal his symbols in a meaningful way.

¹¹³ Gordon (ibid., 248–58) links the other symbol on the same face of the altar, the crater with snake, to the ‘water miracle’; hence to the bow, to Mithras as archer, and to rituals of initiation — i.e., to everything that we find in Scene A of the Mainz vessel. Note that the Mainz vessel is what the Burginatium altar depicts, a ‘snake-vessel’. On the former, the seated Father/Mithras is privileged by location with respect to the snake: writhing beneath him and up the handle it defines his place of enthronement.

¹¹⁴ The Sun-Runner's other symbol may also be present: Gordon (ibid., 232) describes the staff on the same side as having ‘a slightly thickened top perhaps suggesting a whip’. The lamp would refer to the light of the Sun: the cult's solar (and lunar) altars are sometimes illuminated by lamplight shining through apertures (e.g., V 847, where the apertures are the solar rays). That the lamp also indicates the grade of Nymphus, whose proper symbol it is, should be considered too (Gordon, ibid., 243–4; Horn, op. cit. (n. 12), 30, n. 52).

¹¹⁵ Horn, op. cit. (n. 12), 30.

¹¹⁶ See Beck, op. cit. (n. 92), 118–19.

¹¹⁷ BNP History, 249; cf. 278, where the postulate of ‘a single “real” Mithraic message’ is questioned (see above, n. 61), and 302–6 where the authors pose the problem of the ‘homogeneity’ of the cults, allowing that it is only ‘because there is a degree of uniformity in their material remains’ (302, emphasis sic) that we can plot their distribution across the Empire. For Mithraism, they rightly see that homogeneity (or otherwise) is largely a question of the centripetal in iconography versus the centrifugal (302 with n. 174, 303–4 with n. 177).

¹¹⁸ There is room for disagreement here. Clauss, (‘Die sieben Grade des Mithras-Kultes’, ZPE 82 (1990), 183–94Google Scholar) argues that the grade hierarchy was an optional priesthood entered by some 15 per cent of cult members, i.e, the proportion for whom grade status is recorded. Most scholars, however, continue to believe otherwise: that the attested grade membership is the tip of an iceberg, albeit one of indeterminable size, and that silence about grades in a particular mithraeum does not imply absence. Again, it is a matter of what the Mithraists chose to be talkative about, and of what it was considered appropriate to say in what medium. Gordon, (‘Who worshipped Mithras?’ JRA 7 (1994), 459–74, at 465–7Google Scholar) rightly points to the extensive grade information conveyed at Dura in the fragile medium of scratched and painted texts; the same is of course true of the Sa. Prisca mithraeum. The Mainz vessel is itself an important vehicle of new information about the grades (especially the seldom attested Sun-Runner) and their early appearance in the cult's history, although, as I have argued, its seven figures do not ipso facto confirm the sevenfold hierarchy.

¹¹⁹ These range from truly idiosyncratic exemplars of the tauroctony (e.g., V 334, 1275) to such obviously localized ideological initiatives as the personification of mythic events at Poetovio (Tóth, op. cit. (n. 2)). There are also broad regional variations in the composition of the side scenes relative to the main bull-killing in complex reliefs and frescos, a perennial topic in Mithraic scholarship: see Beck, op. cit. (n. 2, 1984), 2074–8.

¹²⁰ Sect. II, ad fin.

¹²¹ Similarly, the ‘mithraeum’ described in Sect. IV is not a single Ostian example, Sette Sfere, but a composite of Porphyry's data and of actual features, some of which are exemplified in all mithraea, others in many mithraea, but none contradicted by contrary features elsewhere. Sette Sfere is simply the most ‘garrulous’ case (see next note).

¹²² On ‘garrulity’ see Gordon, R. L., ‘A new Mithraic relief from Rome’, JMS I (1976), 166–86Google Scholar (reprinted in op. cit. (n. 10), ch. 8), at 175–7.

¹²³ The really interesting question is how those norms in Mithraism were developed and maintained. Obviously, it was not as in Christianity where orthodoxy was progressively defined by appeal to scripture backed by the authority of the episcopacy, especially the apostolic tradition of the greater sees. Just as obviously, the transmission of doctrinal norms in Mithraism was dependent on the transmission of iconographic norms (see above, nn. 117, 119), an irrelevance to Christianity. The contrast is implicit in the treatment of ‘homogeneity’ in BNP History, 302–6.

¹²⁴ In terms of group identity, what links, for example, the Bacchic manifestations of the 186 B.C. scandal, the Villa of the Mysteries, and Agrippinilla's thiasos (BNP History, 91–6, 161–4, 271, respectively)? Yet all three arguably exemplify mysteries of Dionysus. The absence of these mysteries from the discussion of ‘homogeneity’ in BNP (see preceding note) in effect makes the case for the zero grade: there could be mysteries of the same god with no common group identity at all.

¹²⁵ Note the plurality of the title and the fact that nevertheless the ‘religions’ are not presented in self-contained sections.

¹²⁶ Most would agree that the explosive growth of Mithraism began towards the end of the first century A.D. Some hold (on the testimony of Plutarch, Pomp. 24) that the cult came to Rome much earlier; but if so, it remained latent for more than a century, and we have no idea of its early form, for it has left no trace in literature or archaeology. The very substantial monumental and epigraphic record, which defines for us the Mysteries of Mithras as one of the religions of the Roman Empire, begins at the very end of the first century A.D. One need suppose an incubation period of no more than a generation or so before the commencement of that record. For a scenario of Mithraism's genesis, see Beck, op. cit. (n. 92) (survey of scholarly opinion, 115–16; on Plut., Pomp. 24, 121 n. 38). Cf. Franz Cumont, Les religions orientates dans le paganisme romain (1929), 130: ‘Car, si une communauté de leurs adeptes [i.e., Mithraists] paraît avoir existé à Rome dès le temps de Pompée …, leur diffusion réelle ne commença qu'à partir des Flaviens vers la fin du I^er siècle de notre ère’.

¹²⁷ On the Mithraic cult meal, see above, Section I, esp. n. 3. For the acceptance of such analogies, see the extended quotation from Clauss concerning the ‘water miracle’, above (Sect. III). That the Christian eucharist (whatever one chooses to call it) was validated by a charter myth, at least for Paul of Tarsus and his Corinthian correspondents, is readily apparent in I Cor 11:23–5 (cf. Mk 14:22–5, Mt 26:26–9, Lk 22:17–19).

¹²⁸ For the story (admittedly, not presented explicitly as a charter for cult practice), see Mk 1:4–11, Mt 3, Lk 2:1–22. A further comparison may be drawn between the Mithraic and the Christian rites of initiation: archery of Father : archery of Mithras = water miracle:: rite of baptism: baptisms by John. What gives the analogy particular interest is the appearance of water on both sides of the comparison. From there one might pursue (though not here) baptisms, on both sides, in another element — fire (on the Mithraic side, see above, n. 10, on the initiation of Lions and ‘the fiery breath which is an ablution for holy magi’; on the Christian, the ‘baptism with the holy spirit and with fire’ (Lk 3:16, Mt 3:11, cf. Mk 1:8), in opposition to the baptism of water). I emphasize, however, that we are here concerned more with the comparison of relationships (a: b::x:y) than with the comparison of things (ritual a with ritual x, myth b with myth y).

¹²⁹ Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (1990)Google Scholar.

¹³⁰ On the distinction, Smith, ibid., 47–51.

¹³¹ In characterizing both religions as ‘sacramental’, I intend first what I here argue: that Mithraism and Christianity alike developed rituals related to events in their myths (or to some other esoteric ‘fact’); and secondly that the development of the ritual-myth relationships in each system was a conscious and pervasive process.

¹³² To an earlier generation of scholars (e.g., Angus, S., The Mystery-Religions (2nd edn, 1928; repr. 1975)Google Scholar) the sort of analogies I have set out and the conclusions I have drawn from the Mainz vessel would have seemed methodologically unproblematic, though possibly quite disturbing in their implications for the stature of Mithraism relative to early Christianity.

¹³³ Undoubtedly, this started as a healthy reaction against an excessive and faulty emphasis on theology and soteriology. Walter Burkert's Ancient Mystery Cults (1987), it seems to me, admirably set the limits of what we can legitimately say about these aspects of the mystery cults. For Mithraism specifically, Clauss's study (op. cit. (n. 3)) was an equally salutary corrective.

¹³⁴ op. cit. (n. 129), 121–43.

¹³⁵ ibid., 99–114, 120–43. For his characterization of early Christianities, Smith builds on (1) the manifestly locative symbolism of their artistic remains convincingly set out in Snyder, G. F., Ante Pacem: Archaeological Evidence of Church Life Before Constantine (1985)Google Scholar, and (2) certain ‘movements in Palestine and southern Syria that cultivated the memory of Jesus as a founder-teacher’, as reconstructed, with equal persuasiveness, in Mack, B., A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins (1988, from which the quotation is taken (Mack II, Smith 135))Google Scholar. It is important to note that even locative Christianities observed the practices of baptism and cult meal which I have listed as Christian rites in the comparison above. Indeed, Smith (ibid., 129–30) describes Mack's set of Christianities in just such terms: ‘a heterogeneous collection of relatively small groups, marked off from their neighbours by a rite of initiation (chiefly, adult baptism), with their most conspicuous cultic act a common meal …’ For the Attis cult, Smith relies on its characterization in Gasparro, G. Sfameni, Soteriology and Mystic Aspects in the Cult of Attis and Cybele (1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, a characterization with which I am entirely in agreement. My quarrel, it should be clear, is not with Smith's new comparison between locative Christianities and locative mysteries, which I find extraordinarily fruitful, still less with the interpretations on which Smith relies, which I accept as valid and thus leading to a valid comparison. What disturbs me, rather, is the privileging of the Attis cult and its demonstrable lack of a robust soteriology as a template for the mysteries as a whole. That the mystery cults might furnish other soteriologies, other ‘utopian’ systems differing toto caelo from the type sought but not discovered in the Attis cult, seems for some reason to be inconceivable. We shall return to this problem later.

¹³⁶ op. cit. (n. 129), passim. This is a vast and complicated story, told with immense learning; I have alluded here only to the most obvious strand scrutinized by Smith, the polemics of ‘pagano-papism’ (ibid., 120–5).

¹³⁷ ibid., 89–111; see also above, n. 135.

¹³⁸ Mithras can be brought on to this comparative grid only by redefining it in terms of ‘struggle’ rather than death. Hence Ugo Bianchi's Mithras as a god of ‘vicissitude’ (‘dio in vicenda’), to which human vicissitude can be related: ‘The religio-historical question of the mysteries of Mithra’, in idem, op. cit. (n. 1), 3–60, esp. 10–16 (see also Smith, op. cit. (n. 129), 107–8 nn. 40–1).

¹³⁹ On the approximate date of Mithraism's emergence in the Roman Empire, see above, n. 126.

¹⁴⁰ This is all to the good, since claims of ‘uniqueness’, as Smith vehemently argues (op. cit. (n. 129), 37–46), ruin the comparative enterprise: that which is truly unique (sui generis) is, strictly speaking, incomparable. Yet Christianity to mystery comparisons were regularly made for that very reason: to advance the former's uniqueness.

¹⁴¹ For a sensible, brief but nuanced statement on the inter-relation of myth and ritual, see (e.g.) Burkert, W., Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual (1979), 56–8Google Scholar; for the problems of even a revised myth-and-ritual theory, Graf, F., Greek Mythology: An Introduction (trans. Marier, T., 1993), 50–3Google Scholar. The Mekone story: Hesiod, , Theog. 535–61.Google Scholar

¹⁴² By ‘invention’ I do not mean fabrication de novo (i.e., altogether without precedent or antecedents). I mean rather, in the present context, the ‘discovery’ and consecration of a set of stories as especially relevant to the inventing group and the organization of an apparatus of ritual, initiation, place, art, and structured cult life in order to harness that relevance on the group's behalf. Place and art were particularly important for the Mithraists; for the Christians one would probably substitute ‘text’. In this sense of the word, I have attempted to recapture the ‘invention’ of the Mithraic mysteries and the inventing group in art. cit. (n. 92). In my scenario, the cult's initial explosive growth follows quickly on — to some extent, perhaps, is concurrent with — its invention (see above, n. 126).

¹⁴³ See above, n. 135.

¹⁴⁴ That Mithraism had a Utopian soteriology which cannot be accommodated to the pattern postulated (rightly or wrongly) for the other cults and that this soteriology had to do with the cosmic soul journey were conclusions reached in the ‘final statement’ of the International Seminar on the ‘Religio-Historical Character of Roman Mithraism’ (Rome, 1978: Bianchi, op. cit. (n. 1), xiv–xviii). To appreciate this conclusion one has to read behind the convoluted language needed to secure consensus in the drafting committee, so I shall not quote the statement here. Wisely, the statement also warns against another comparative pitfall: assimilating Mithraic doctrines of genesis and apogenesis unthinkingly to an antimaterial Gnostic or dualistic pattern.

¹⁴⁵ op. cit. (n. 129), 107, cf. 120–1.

¹⁴⁶ I have attempted to trace Mithraism's continuities as well as its ‘inventions’ (see above, n. 142) in my recent study of the cult's origins (op. cit. (n. 126), esp. 123–5). The continuities are significant, but they are not definitive. They do not even include, for example, Mithras as bull-killer. The failure of more than a century of scholarship to find the Iranian original of this central cult ‘fact’ suggests strongly that it too was an ‘invention’ antedating by little, if at all, its iconographic expression. The new in Mithraism was not a ‘rectification’ (to draw on another of Smith's illuminating concepts: Imagining Religion (1982), 66–101)Google Scholar, in which new myth or ritual is generated within a religion to accommodate an external cultural shock. The fact is that Mithra-worship itself migrated across a huge cultural divide. Although one can identify bits of the linguistic, conceptual, and mythic baggage carried across, they were reconstituted in what is more usefully characterized as a ‘new religion’ (Merkelbach, op. cit. (n. 2), 75–7) than as Romanized Mazdaism, as Cumont persisted in describing it. On post-Cumontian scholarship which saw Mithraism essentially as a continuation or collateral branch of Iranian religion, see my survey in op. cit. (n. 2, 1984), 2063–71, in particular on Campbell, L. A., Mithraic Iconography and Ideology (1968)Google Scholar, the most thoroughgoing attempt to trace a systematic pattern of Iranian religious thought, much of it highly abstract, in the Roman cult. A. D. H. Bivar's quest for an ‘esoteric Mithraism’ pervasive throughout the ancient world from Rome to India has recently culminated in his The Personalities ofMithra in A rchaeology and Literature (1999).

¹⁴⁷ (1994).

¹⁴⁸ ibid., 99–119, quotation at 119.

¹⁴⁹ ibid., 125–38: Tatius, Achilles, Leucippe and Cleitophon 2.2Google Scholar; Petronius, , Satyrica 141.2–11Google Scholar. In the latter, Bowersock argues that the word play testamentum/diathêkê is an intentional part of the parody.

¹⁵⁰ On Mithraism as a conformist's religion: Gordon, R. L., ‘Mithraism and Roman society’, Religion 2 (1972), 92–121CrossRefGoogle Scholar (reprinted in Gordon, op. cit. (n. 11, 1996)); W. Liebeschuetz, ‘The expansion of Mithraism among the religious cults of the second century’, in Hinnells, op. cit. (n. 2), 195–216.

¹⁵¹ The ritual depicted in Scene B of the Mainz vessel is both locative and Utopian: locative in that it affirms the actual physical order of the heavens as the science of the times describes it, Utopian in that it admits the individual human initiate into a soul journey within that vast spatio-temporal order. In a recent article (see above, n. 65) I have argued that it was to celebrate this soul journey as well as to commemorate their deceased colleagues (a locative response) that the Mithraists of Virunum met, as their album records, mortalitatis causa on 26 June 184. I also remark there on some striking modern comparisons: the terrible consequences, in the cults of the Solar Temple and Heaven's Gate, of propelling oneself or others physically rather than symbolically on a celestial journey analogous to the Mithraists'.

¹⁵² BNP History, X.

¹⁵³ ibid.

¹⁵⁴ ibid.

¹⁵⁵ For a forceful restatement, within the Christian theological tradition, of the primacy of ritual, see Pickstock, Catherine, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (1998)Google Scholar.

¹⁵⁶ op. cit. (n. 20), 62. Swerdlow is reacting, with reason, to excesses in the astronomical/astrological interpretation of Mithraism.

¹⁵⁷ Though the current trend is rather to elevate the Christians up the social scale: e.g., R. Stark, The Rise of Christianity (1996), 29–47, following esp. W. A. Meeks, The First Urban Christians (1983). Contra, Hopkins, Keith, Journal of Early Christian Studies 6 (1998), 185–226, at 207–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hopkins's tripartite stratification (élite, sub-élite, masses) is here more useful than the bipartite (élite versus the rest). He construes early Christianity as a movement led by thoroughly literate members of the sub-élite recruiting from that class and the masses.

¹⁵⁸ I exclude epigraphic chatter, which in Mithraism, as in other cults, emanates from anyone who could afford a dedication with an inscription. Typically, though, such communication is confined to the titles of the god and the career of the dedicator. It says next to nothing about cult or individual ideology.

¹⁵⁹ Cultural ‘trickle down’ is conceivable, seepage upwards not. Hence, finally, that reluctance, noted in Section IV, to allow testimonies about Mithraic doctrine to mean what they say. True originality is drained out of Mithraism by interpreting its doctrines as the construction of philosophers. That the philosophers might actually have learnt from the Mithraists about solstitial soul gates and other such things seems not to be an option. One should not, of course, go to the other extreme of romanticizing Mithraism as a people's religion, exclusively the product of proletarian thought. Learned input, especially astrological, played a part, and I have suggested a conduit, exempli gratia, in the person of Ti. Claudius Balbillus (Beck, op. cit. (n. 92), 126–7).

¹⁶⁰ The bad press that an all-male cult can now expect may be illustrated from an important work by a leading literary scholar. In The True Story of the Novel (1996), 68, Margaret Ann Doody casually condemns Mithraism for expropriating the taurobolium from the female devotees of the Great Goddess and then excluding them. The inadvertent insertion of ‘Mithraic’ into S. Angus' sentence ‘The most impressive sacrament of the Mysteries was the taurobolium’ (Doody, 494, n. 7; Angus, op. cit. (n. 132), 94) is revealing — as is the pseudo-history so generated.

¹⁶¹ See above, n. 150. Again, Hopkins's tripartite stratification is useful (above, n. 157). We should think of Mithraism as a religion of the sub-élite (including freedmen and even slaves, where they wielded a measure of actual power and enjoyed a measure of material resources) — and of those striving to get a foot on the lowest rung of the sub-élite ladder. Is it perhaps just intellectual snobbery that makes it hard to envisage such folk embarked autonomously on a high cognitive enterprise?

¹⁶² op. cit. (n. 61), 88–9.

¹⁶³ Firmicus, , Mathesis 3.1Google Scholar; Macrobius, , In Somnium 1.21.23–7Google Scholar. For a description of the thema mundi and further references, see A. Bouché-Leclercq, L'Astrologie grecque (1899), 185–7. The earliest mention of the thema, though without specifics, is by the first-century A.D. astrologer Thrasyllus, (CCAG 8.3.100.27–30Google Scholar).

¹⁶⁴ Thus, Moon in Cancer, Sun in Leo, Mercury in Virgo, Venus in Libra, Mars in Scorpius, Jupiter in Sagittarius, Saturn in Capricorn. For the planets proper, these are their ‘diurnal’, as opposed to ‘nocturnal’, houses. See Bouché-Leclercq, op. cit. (n. 163), 182–92.

¹⁶⁵ Cumont, F., Recherches sur le symbolisme funéraire des Romains (1942), 38–41.Google Scholar

¹⁶⁶ Firmicus, , Math. 3.1.18Google Scholar; Macrobius, , In Somn. 1.21.23Google Scholar.

¹⁶⁷ op. cit. (n. 62), 20.

¹⁶⁸ One may well ask why Porphyry (or his sources) introduced and described the system of houses (ch. 22), which at first sight has no obvious connection with the solstitial soul gates. The answer is twofold. (1) It provides the reason why the Saturnalia, a festival of liberation and hence a prototype for the exit of souls from mortality, is celebrated at the winter solstice when the sun enters Capricorn (23): Capricorn is the house of Saturn. (2) It underpins the highly complicated and compacted (and textually corrupt) argument linking the symbols of the tauroctonous Mithras to the equinoxes which are his ‘proper seat’ (24): see above, n. 68. Since the Mithraists used the astrological houses in their cosmology, it is possible, indeed probable, that they are Porphyry's ultimate source for the system in the present context.

¹⁶⁹ De Ley's error is perpetuated in Simomni's commentary (op. cit. (n. 62), 191): ‘Porfirio introduce il thema mundi …’ Simomni cites J. Flamant, Macrobe et le néo-platonisme latin (1977), 452 (n. 253), but Flamant says only that Porphyry ‘donne cette domiciliation … et fait allusion à la “géniture” du monde selon les Egyptiens, mais il ne lie pas les deux choses’. Even this is mistaken, for what Porphyry alludes to is ‘genesis into (eis) the cosmos’ not the genesis of the cosmos. Scholarship has rendered the De antro, never an easy text, virtually unnavigable in places.

¹⁷⁰ See above, n. 68.

¹⁷¹ op. cit. (n. 62), 54–6.

¹⁷² ibid., 89.