Roman Mithraism

Overview

Roman Mithraism, called in antiquity the mysteries of Mithras, was a cult that people joined only through initiation. Its members, all men, met in small groups in dim, cave-like rooms to share a sacred meal beneath an image of their god killing a bull. The cult surfaces in the late 1st century CE and spread across the Roman Empire, flourishing above all in Rome, its port of Ostia, and the army bases of the Rhine and Danube. No scripture of theirs survives, so nearly everything we know comes from excavated temples, sculpture and inscriptions, plus scraps from outside writers, many of them hostile Christians. Mithras bore the name of an ancient Iranian god, and how much of the Roman cult really came from Iran has been argued over for more than a century. The cult dwindled during the 4th century and had vanished by the early 5th.^[9–14]

History

An Iranian name Before c. 80 CE

Mitra in India and Mithra in Iran are one ancient god whose name grew out of a word for contract or covenant. In the Avesta's hymn to him, he upholds those who keep faith and punishes those who break it. Rulers on Rome's eastern fringe honoured him too: Antiochus I of Commagene gave a sun-like Mithras a place in his royal cult in the mid-1st century BCE, and the Armenian king Tiridates, crowned by Nero in Rome, hailed the emperor as Mithras. Plutarch says pirates defeated by Pompey in the 60s BCE kept secret rites of Mithras, but whether these fed into the Roman cult is doubtful.^[15–18]

A new cult appears c. 80–150 CE

The Roman cult turns up abruptly. Its earliest datable traces, from the decades around 100 CE, appear almost at once in far-flung places: army bases at Carnuntum on the Danube and Heddernheim near Frankfurt, customs posts, a harbour town in Judaea, and Rome, where a rich slave of the praetorian prefect dedicated a statue of the bull-killing. In the same years the poet Statius already pictures Mithras wrestling a bull by the horns in a Persian cave. Through the 2nd century, shrines and dedications multiply.^[19–21]

Across the empire c. 150–300 CE

By the 3rd century, mithraea stood from Hadrian's Wall to Dura-Europos on the Euphrates, though the cult was far more common in the western, Latin-speaking provinces than in the Greek East. Inscriptions show members drawn largely from soldiers, junior imperial officials, imperial slaves and freedmen, and in towns like Ostia from comfortable craftsmen and traders. Commodus and the Severan emperors seem to have favoured it; the Historia Augusta, a later collection of imperial lives, even claims Commodus defiled its rites with a real killing. In 308 the empire's rulers, meeting at Carnuntum, restored a shrine there to Mithras as patron of their reign.^{[6, 22–24]}

Decline and disappearance c. 312–c. 420 CE

After Constantine turned to Christianity, imperial favour ebbed, and the building and repair of mithraea tailed off through the 4th century. In Rome, pagan senators still made dedications to Mithras in the 370s and 380s, among many other gods. Jerome praises a city prefect, Gracchus, who around 377 smashed a mithraeum and its images before his baptism. Theodosius I banned sacrifice in 391 and all pagan worship in 392. Some mithraea were damaged on purpose, yet others, at Ostia for example, stayed in use into the early 5th century, and the scholar David Walsh argues that the cult mostly withered from within rather than being stamped out.^[25–29]

Rediscovery 16th century–today

Renaissance antiquarians were already identifying bull-slaying reliefs as Mithras, and Franz Cumont's collection of texts and monuments (1896–99) founded modern study of the cult. In 1954, excavations on a bombed site in the City of London uncovered a temple of Mithras, and huge crowds queued to see it. Moved a short distance away in the 1960s, it was reconstructed in 2017 at Roman ground level, near its first site. In Rome, mithraea survive beneath the churches of Santa Prisca and San Clemente.^[30–33]

Beliefs

Deus Sol Invictus Mithras

God, the Unconquered Sun, Mithras

Mithras's cult title made him a god, the Sun and unconquerable at once. Yet the monuments also show him beside the sun god Sol, feasting with him and riding in his chariot, so that he both is and is not the Sun. He was always pictured as a Persian, in trousers and a soft pointed cap, and his followers thought of themselves as Persians in a ritual sense.^[34–35]

Tauroctony

Bull-slaying (a modern term)

The main image, placed at the head of the temple, shows Mithras at a cave mouth pinning a bull and stabbing it. A dog and a snake reach for the blood, a scorpion grips the bull's genitals, a raven perches nearby, and two torchbearers flank the scene while Sun and Moon look on. It seems to show a deed that brought life and cosmic order, but its exact meaning is disputed.^[36–37]

The cave as universe

Members called their temples caves. The 3rd-century philosopher Porphyry says a mithraeum was an image of the cosmos, built so that initiates could be led through the soul's descent into a body and its return. Roger Beck accepts this as real Mithraic teaching; Robert Turcan argued that Platonist philosophers bent the cult to their own ideas.^[38]

The stars

Astronomy and astrology ran through the cult. Each of the seven grades was placed under one of the seven planets, zodiac signs ring many reliefs, and several figures in the bull-slaying match nearby constellations, such as the raven and Corvus. Whether this formed a deep doctrine or was largely decoration is still argued.^[39]

Practice

Initiation

Initiation alone made someone a member, and every member had to be initiated. Paintings at Santa Maria Capua Vetere show small, naked candidates kneeling or blindfolded between two initiators. Tertullian reports that a candidate for the Soldier grade was offered a crown and had to refuse it, saying Mithras alone was his crown.^[40–41]

The seven grades

The grades ran Raven (Corax), Bridegroom (Nymphus), Soldier (Miles), Lion (Leo), Persian (Perses), Sun-runner (Heliodromus) and Father (Pater). The floor of the Felicissimus mithraeum at Ostia shows their emblems in order. Grade titles appear mostly in Rome, Ostia and Dura-Europos, and scholars disagree over whether every member climbed them or the upper grades formed a kind of priesthood; a Father led virtually every group.^[42–44]

The sacred meal

The chief rite was a shared meal. Members reclined on the raised benches along both walls, facing each other, to eat and drink as Mithras and Sol had feasted on the hide of the slain bull. Some large reliefs could be turned on a pivot to show the bull-slaying on one face and this banquet on the other.^[45]

Vows and gifts

Worshippers thanked Mithras by fulfilling vows with altars and sculptures. At Carrawburgh three commanders of the fort each gave an altar, and in London a veteran of the Second Augustan Legion, Ulpius Silvanus, recorded on a marble relief that he had been initiated at Orange in Gaul.^[46–47]

People

Scripture

Santa Prisca wall inscriptions

c. 210–230 CE

Painted and scratched lines on the walls of the mithraeum beneath Santa Prisca in Rome, among the very few words to survive from Mithraists themselves. They include verses on the god bearing the gods' commands and saving his followers, and greetings to the grades used in the London reconstruction's soundscape.^[51]

On the Cave of the Nymphs

3rd century CE

An essay by the Neoplatonist Porphyry, citing an earlier writer, Euboulus. It says Zoroaster dedicated the first cave to Mithras as creator and father of all, and explains the mithraeum as a model of the universe. How faithfully it reports real Mithraic belief is debated.^[52]

Places

Mithraeum of Santa Prisca, Rome

ITA · UNESCO World Heritage, 1980

A mithraeum under the church of Santa Prisca on the Aventine, within the Historic Centre of Rome World Heritage property. Two layers of wall paintings show initiates in procession. It was filled with rubble around 400 CE, after which a church was built above it.^[53]

Mithraeum of San Clemente, Rome

ITA · UNESCO World Heritage, 1980

Three levels deep, within the Historic Centre of Rome: a 12th-century basilica stands on an older church, and below that lies a mithraeum with an altar carved with the bull-slaying. The lower church dates from the late 4th or early 5th century; when the mithraeum was abandoned is unknown.^[54]

Mithraeum of Felicissimus, Ostia

ITA

One of many mithraea in Rome's port city, dating from around the middle of the 3rd century. Its black-and-white floor mosaic shows, in sequence along the aisle, the emblems of the seven grades and of the planetary gods linked with them.^[55]

Temple of Mithras, Carrawburgh

GBR

A small temple of about 200 CE outside the Hadrian's Wall fort of Brocolitia, where replicas of three altars given by the fort's commanders stand in place. It was rebuilt or refurbished four times and had fallen out of use by about 350, after some deliberate damage.^[56]

London Mithraeum, Walbrook

GBR

Built around 240 to 250 CE on the bank of the Walbrook stream and used as a mithraeum into the 4th century. Found in 1954, it is now shown seven metres below the modern street, at the Roman ground level.^[57]

Where it spread

Art & objects

Public-domain objects from museum collections. Select one to see it at the museum.

Bronze plaque of Mithras slaying the bullRoman, Mid-Imperial, Antonine or Severan, mid-2nd–early 3rd century CEStatue of Mithras, from "Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae"1564Relief with Mithras kneeling upon a bull and driving a sword into its shoulder, at left two smaller standing figures, one holding a sheathed sword and one holding a sword, a frieze with chariots and serpents coiled around figures above1564

How we know

Stones, not scriptures

No Mithraic scripture, creed or service book survives, and members themselves are almost silent. The evidence is overwhelmingly archaeological: temples, reliefs, altars, small finds and inscriptions, catalogued by Cumont and later by Maarten Vermaseren. Outsiders add a little, but much comes from Christian writers such as Justin Martyr, Tertullian and Jerome, who wrote to attack the cult; Justin called its bread-and-water rite a demonic copy of the Eucharist. Many scholars therefore treat Christian claims with caution.^[58–59]

Iran or Rome?

Cumont argued that the cult was Iranian religion, Romanised on its way west. Since the 1970s that picture has been dismantled: no Iranian text has Mithra killing a bull, and plainly Iranian elements shrink to the god's name, a few words such as nama, and a figure called Areimanius. Merkelbach and Clauss see a new creation of the Roman world, Clauss placing it in Rome; Beck traces its founders to the court of Commagene; Gordon derives it from the remnants of older Iranian cult in Anatolia. There is no consensus, but opinion has moved towards reinvention.^[60–63]

A map of the sky?

Because the bull-slaying's animals line up with constellations, some scholars read it as a star map. David Ulansey argued that it encoded the precession of the equinoxes; critics, Gordon among them, find that thesis strongly contested and built on misreadings of Hipparchus. Beck holds that the monuments speak an astronomical language without concealing a single secret doctrine.^[64]

Common misconceptions

Glossary

Mithraeum

Modern name for a Mithraic temple: a small, often partly sunken room built to recall a cave, with a central aisle between raised benches and the bull-slaying image at the far end.^[68]

Mysteries · mystēria

Cults entered by initiation; the Greek word means rites into which one is initiated, not anything mystical. Mithraism went by the name mysteries of Mithras, or of the Persians.^[69]

Pater

Father, the highest grade and the leader of a Mithraic group.^[70]

Sol Invictus

The Unconquered Sun: part of Mithras's cult title, but also the name of a Roman sun god honoured by emperors, which has caused confusion between the two.^[71]

Nama

A Persian word meaning hail, one of the few genuinely Iranian words used in the cult.^[72]

Phrygian cap

The soft cap worn by Mithras in Roman art, part of the eastern, Persian costume that marked him as a foreign god.^[73]