North, 'Studies in Mithraism: Papers associated with the Mithraic Panel organized on the occasion of the XVlth Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9508
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9508-north-studies
@@@@95.9.10, Hinnells, ed., Studies in Mithraism
John R. Hinnells (ed.), Studies in Mithraism: Papers
associated with the Mithraic Panel organized on the occasion of
the XVlth Congress of the International Association for the
History of Religions. Rome: L'Erma di Bretschneider, 1994.
Pp. 299. ISBN 88-7062-834-5.
Reviewed by Helen F. North -- Swarthmore, Pennsylvania
In Mithras' house there are many mansions, whose diversity is
evident in this collection of papers from the fourth
international Mithraic congress held in Rome in 1990 (earlier
meetings were held in Manchester, 1971, Tehran, 1975, and Rome,
1978). Twenty papers in four languages (English 15, French 3,
Italian and German 1 each) range in length from 4 to 34 pages and
in subject from archaeological descriptions of sites (Imperial
Rome, Bulgaria, Thessalonica) through epigraphical evidence (for
Dacia), iconography (the tauroctony, the lion-headed deity, the
rock-birth, Aion with zodiacal hoop), and exegesis of familiar
texts (Tertullian, Celsus, Porphyry), to discussions of such
time-worn, still unsettled issues as the travels of Mithras from
Iran through Syria and Anatolia to Rome, speculations about cult
practices, and the source and meaning of his innumerable
astrological connections.
The Foreword by Ugo Bianchi offers a brief statement about the
principal concerns dealt with at the conference: the place of
Mithraism in the context of ancient mystery cults and the impact
of astrological speculations. The Introduction by John R.
Hinnells, who organized the conference and edited the
Proceedings, sketches in greater detail major trends, popular and
unpopular topics, and changing fashions in the interpretation of
archaeological and literary sources. He also calls attention to
topics needing further investigation, perhaps at a Toronto
conference in 1996, which would mark the centenary of Cumont's
ground-breaking Textes et Monuments.
This review will confine itself for the most part to a
selection of papers that offer the most substantive (if sometimes
controversial) contributions to the understanding of current
Mithraic scholarship, and will keep in mind particularly what
they have to offer to the non-specialist, since interest in
Mithras is widespread among classicists in general.
A reader seeking one paper that would provide a sober
assessment of what can be known about "our Mithraism"--Roman
Mithraism--and what can reasonably be inferred from the known
facts would make no mistake in turning first to "The expansion of
Mithraism among the religious cults of the second century" by
Wolf Liebeschuetz (195-216), which takes up point by point the
major issues: the scarcity of Mithraic sites in the East and in
Greece, the possibility of a single founder in the West, the
existence of four scattered areas in which sites are
concentrated, with Ostia/Rome as probably the earliest, the role
of the legions and the customs service in spreading the cult (and
the non-role of merchants and traders), possible reasons for the
absence of persecution (high regard for fides on the part
of Mithraists and Roman society in general?), the importance of
households and guilds in establishing Mithraea, regional
variations in technical vocabulary, the sporadic evidence for all
seven grades of initiation, and the irrelevance for this cult of
the survival of the soul after death. "The conclusion is
unavoidable: the benefits of Mithraic initiation were expected in
this life" (214). The reader will turn from this paper to the
others with a firm basis on which to judge the degree of
probability of various hypotheses.
Several writers represented here were deeply impressed by the
1989 monograph by David Ulansey, The Origins of the Mithraic
Mysteries: Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World, and
accept, though not without qualifications, his theory that
Mithras personified the force responsible for the precession of
the equinoxes (discovered by Hipparchus in the second century
B.C.). None had as yet had an opportunity to consider the review
of Ulansey's book by N.M. Swerdlow in Classical Philology
86 (1991) 48-63, which is likely to engender second thoughts,
especially about the identification of the torchbearers in the
tauroctony with the equinoxes. (This alone requires the
precession to be invoked, in order to place the equinoxes in
Taurus and Scorpio, as was the case c. 4,000-2,000 B.C., and
justify the identification of Mithras with the constellation
Perseus, located just above Taurus in the sky.) Criticism of
Ulansey's principal thesis is expressed at some length in this
collection, by Beck (29-50) and Waldman (265-77).
An entirely different approach to the dadaphoroi, and much
else, is taken by Howard M. Jackson, who traces them to such
torchbearing erotes as flank Dido in the Dido mosaic from Low Ham
(Plate XVIII) and finds a precedent for the zodiacal hoop
familiar in the Modena Pantheus (Plate I) and the Housesteads
Rock-Birth (Plate II) in the hoops bowled by Greek youths, such
as Ganymede or Eros himself on red-figured vases of the fifth
century B.C. (Plates XIX-XXI). Whether or not these novel
theories find general acceptance, most readers will be grateful
for the accumulation of bibliographical notices and the generous
illustrations that help track, not only the zodiacal hoop, but
the cosmic, demiurgic god Aion through an intricate genealogy
beginning with the shield of Achilles and including the column
base of Antoninus Pius (Plate III), numerous mosaics of imperial
Roman date, and an aureus of Hadrian (Plate XIc), which initiates
the allegory of the hoop-rolling Aion so popular in imperial
iconography. This paper, "Love makes the world go round: the
Classical Greek ancestry of the youth with the zodiacal circle in
Late Roman Art," (131-64) is the only one not actually delivered
at the conference in Rome.
Two papers offer helpful discussions of problems related to
language and terminology. Per Beskow, "Tertullian on Mithras"
(51-60), studies the four brief passages by Tertullian referring
to Mithraic rites and urges that key terms be interpreted in the
context of Tertullian's own Christian usage. Richard L. Gordon,
"Mystery metaphor and doctrines in the Mysteries of Mithras"
(103-24), contributes a fascinating analysis of Mithraic use of
language, including the development of linguistic codes and of a
jargon (differing in various places) to be mastered as the
initiate advances in the cult. Included also is a discussion of
the arcane significance of labelling cult-furniture.
Two papers, "Mithra and Ahreman in Iranian Cosmogonies," by
Philip G. Kreyenbroek (173-82), and "On the Armeno-Iranian roots
of Mithraism," by J.R. Russell (183-93), attempt to redress the
recent tendency to understand Mithraism primarily as a Roman
phenomenon. Noting that in the closest Zoroastrian counterpart to
the Mithraic tauroctony the killing of the bull is attributed to
Ahreman, the evil spirit, Kreyenbroek proposes the derivation of
certain important features of Mithraism from a pre-Zoroastrian
Indo-Iranian myth of the cosmogony, which survived among the
Western Iranian Magi and credited Mithra, rather than Ahreman
with the primordial sacrifice that brought warmth and energy to
the world. Russell calls attention to Armenian associations for
important Mithraic myths, especially the petrogeny, and suggests
hidden allusions to Mithraic lore in the poetry of the Armenian
St. Nerses as late as the 12th century. Helmut Waldman, "Mithras
tauroctonous" (265-76), also considers the eastern origins of
Mithraism and discusses critically views of some of the other
contributors.
Astrological speculations dominate several papers. "In the
place of the Lion: Mithras in the tauroctony," by Roger Beck
(29-50), in addition to taking issue with Ulansey's 1989
publication, identifies Mithras as the Sun in Leo. The late Ioan
P. Couliano, in "The Mithraic ladder revisited" (75-91),
discusses the effect of Gnostic doctrine on late antique
mysteries in which the ascent of the soul to heaven was
widespread, concluding that the doctrine of the planetary journey
(reported by Celsus as Mithraic) was especially popular among
Platonists. Plato also looms large in Ulansey's contribution,
"Mithras and the hypercosmic sun" (257-64), which attempts to
account for the distinction between Helios and Mithras by tracing
a theory of the hypercosmic sun (= Mithras) to passages in the
Republic and Phaedrus, as interpreted by
Platonizing Mithraists, who were influenced by such intervening
sources as Philo and the Chaldean Oracles.
The hazards of Mithraic scholarship are illustrated by several
papers in which "one may wonder whether," "it is possible to
see," "it is easy to suppose" and similar phrases introduce a
host of speculations unsupported by solid evidence. A. David
Bivar ("Towards an integrated picture of ancient Mithraism,"
60-73) provides a useful summary of current views of Mithraism,
from the Vedic Mitra to Roman times, with emphasis on the astral
significance of the tauroctony and a strong defence of the
deep-rooted eastern origins of Roman Mithraism (68). The paper
concludes with wide-ranging speculation about possible Mithraic
connections on the part of Plato, Alexander the Great, the god
Sarapis, and later Sasanian rulers. The evidence for Plato as
here presented depends on two items: the lionheaded being in
Republic IX ("it is hard to believe that so characteristic
a simile could be wholly independent") and the fact that coins of
his namesake, Plato King of Bactria, displayed as reverse types
solar deities identifiable with Mithra (65).
Studies in Mithraism contains an indispensable Thematic
Index, as well as separate indices of Ancient Authors, Ancient
Texts, Sites, Modern Authors, and an Index to citations from the
Corpus Inscriptionum et Monumentorum Religionis
Mithriacae. The editor is to be congratulated on the small
number of misprints, relative to the length and complexity of the
material and the variety of languages involved. (The misspelling
of "millennia", however, is unlikely to be a misprint.)