The ancient Roman religion known as the Mithraic mysteries has captivated
the imaginations of scholars for generations. There are two reasons for
this fascination. First, like the other ancient "mystery religions,"
such as the Eleusinian mysteries and the mysteries of Isis, the Mithraic
cult maintained strict secrecy about its teachings and practices, revealing
them only to initiates. As a result, reconstructing the beliefs of the Mithraic
devotees has posed an enormously intriguing challenge to scholarly ingenuity.
Second, the Mithraic mysteries arose in the Mediterranean world at exactly
the same time as did Christianity, and thus the study of the cult holds
the promise of shedding vital light on the cultural dynamics that led to
the rise of Christianity.
Owing to the cult's secrecy, we possess almost no literary evidence about
the beliefs of Mithraism. The few texts that do refer to the cult come not
from Mithraic devotees themselves, but rather from outsiders such as early
Church fathers, who mentioned Mithraism in order to attack it, and Platonic
philosophers, who attempted to find support in Mithraic symbolism for their
own philosophical ideas. However, although our literary sources for the
Mithraic mysteries are extremely sparse, an abundance of material evidence
for the cult exists in the many Mithraic temples and artifacts that archaeologists
have found scattered throughout the Roman empire, from England in the north
and west to Palestine in the south and east. The temples, called mithraea
by scholars, were usually built underground in imitation of caves. These
subterranean temples were filled with an extremely elaborate iconography:
carved reliefs, statues, and paintings, depicting a variety of enigmatic
figures and scenes. This iconography is our primary source of knowledge
about Mithraic beliefs, but because we do not have any written accounts
of its meaning the ideas that it expresses have proven extraordinarily difficult
to decipher.
The typical mithraeum was a small rectangular subterranean chamber, on
the order of 75 feet by 30 feet with a vaulted ceiling. An aisle usually
ran lengthwise down the center of the temple, with a stone bench on either
side two or three feet high on which the cult's members would recline during
their meetings. On average a mithraeum could hold perhaps twenty to thirty
people at a time. At the back of the mithraeum at the end of the aisle was
always found a representation-- usually a carved relief but sometimes a
statue or painting-- of the central icon of Mithraism: the so-called tauroctony
or "bull-slaying scene" in which the god of the cult, Mithras,
accompanied by a dog, a snake, a raven, and a scorpion, is shown in the
act of killing a bull. Other parts of the temple were decorated with various
scenes and figures. There were many hundreds-- perhaps thousands-- of Mithraic
temples in the Roman empire. The greatest concentrations have been found
in the city of Rome itself, and in those places in the empire (often in
the most distant frontiers) where Roman soldiers-- who made up a major segment
of the cult's membership-- were stationed.
Our earliest evidence for the Mithraic mysteries places their appearance
in the middle of the first century B.C.: the historian Plutarch says that
in 67 B.C. a large band of pirates based in Cilicia (a province on the southeastern
coast of Asia Minor) were practicing "secret rites" of Mithras.
The earliest physical remains of the cult date from around the end of the
first century A.D., and Mithraism reached its height of popularity in the
third century. In addition to soldiers, the cult's membership included significant
numbers of bureaucrats and merchants. Women were excluded. Mithraism declined
with the rise to power of Christianity, until the beginning of the fifth
century, when Christianity became strong enough to exterminate by force
rival religions such as Mithraism.
For most of the twentieth century it has been assumed that Mithraism was
imported from Iran, and that Mithraic iconography must therefore represent
ideas drawn from ancient Iranian mythology. The reason for this is that
the name of the god worshipped in the cult, Mithras, is a Greek and Latin
form of the name of an ancient Iranian god, Mithra; in addition, Roman authors
themselves expressed a belief that the cult was Iranian in origin. At the
end of the nineteenth century Franz Cumont, the great Belgian historian
of ancient religion, published a magisterial two-volume work on the Mithraic
mysteries based on the assumption of the Iranian origins of the cult. Cumont's
work immediately became accepted as the definitive study of the cult, and
remained virtually unchallenged for over seventy years.
There were, however, a number of serious problems with Cumont's assumption
that the Mithraic mysteries derived from ancient Iranian religion. Most
significant among these is that there is no parallel in ancient Iran to
the iconography which is the primary fact of the Roman Mithraic cult. For
example, as already mentioned, by far the most important icon in the Roman
cult was the tauroctony. This scene shows Mithras in the act of killing
a bull, accompanied by a dog, a snake, a raven, and a scorpion; the scene
is depicted as taking place inside a cave like the mithraeum itself. This
icon was located in the most important place in every mithraeum, and therefore
must have been an expression of the central myth of the Roman cult. Thus,
if the god Mithras of the Roman religion was actually the Iranian god Mithra,
we should expect to find in Iranian mythology a story in which Mithra kills
a bull. However, the fact is that no such Iranian myth exists: in no known
Iranian text does Mithra have anything to do with killing a bull.
Franz Cumont had responded to this problem by focusing on an ancient
Iranian text in which a bull is indeed killed, but in which the bull-slayer
is not Mithra but rather Ahriman, the force of cosmic evil in Iranian religion.
Cumont argued that there must have existed a variant of this myth-- a variant
for which there was, however, no actual evidence-- in which the bull-slayer
had been transformed from Ahriman to Mithra. It was this purely hypothetical
variant on the myth of Ahriman's killing of a bull that according to Cumont
lay behind the tauroctony icon of the Roman cult of Mithras.
In the absence of any convincing alternative, Cumont's explanation satisfied
scholars for more than seventy years. However, in 1971 the First International
Congress of Mithraic Studies was held in Manchester England, and in the
course of this Congress Cumont's theories came under concerted attack. Was
it not possible, scholars at the Congress asked, that the Roman cult of
Mithras was actually a new religion, and had simply borrowed the name of
an Iranian god in order to give itself an exotic oriental flavor? If such
a scenario seemed plausible, these scholars argued, one could no longer
assume without question that the proper way to interpret Mithraism was to
find parallels to its elements in ancient Iranian religion. In particular,
Franz Cumont's interpretation of the tauroctony as representing an Iranian
myth was now no longer unquestionable. Thus from 1971 on, the meaning of
the Mithraic tauroctony suddenly became a mystery: if this bull-slaying
icon did not represent an ancient Iranian myth, what did it represent?
Within a few years after the 1971 Congress, a radically different approach
to explaining the tauroctony began to be pursued by a number of scholars.
It is not an exaggeration to say that this approach has in just the past
few years succeeded in completely revolutionizing the study of the Mithraic
mysteries. According to the proponents of this interpretation, the tauroctony
is not, as Cumont and his followers claimed, a pictorial representation
of an Iranian myth, but is rather something utterly different: namely, an
astronomical star map!
This remarkable explanation of the tauroctony is based on two facts. First,
every figure found in the standard tauroctony has a parallel among a group
of constellations located along a continuous band in the sky: the bull is
paralleled by Taurus, the dog by Canis Minor, the snake by Hydra, the raven
by Corvus, and the scorpion by Scorpio. Second, Mithraic iconography in
general is pervaded by explicit astronomical imagery: the zodiac, planets,
sun, moon, and stars are often portrayed in Mithraic art (note for example
the stars around the head of Mithras in the carving of the tauroctony illustrated
above); in addition, numerous ancient authors speak about astronomical subjects
in connection with Mithraism. In the writings of the Neoplatonic philosopher
Porphyry, for example, we find recorded a tradition that the cave which
is depicted in the tauroctony and which the underground Mithraic temples
were designed to imitate was intended to be "an image of the cosmos."
Given the general presence of astronomical motifs in Mithraic art and ideology,
the parallel noted above between the tauroctony-figures and constellations
is unlikely to be coincidence.
My own research over the past decade has been devoted to discovering why
these particular constellations might have been seen as especially important,
and how an icon representing them could have come to form the core of a
powerful religious movement in the Roman Empire.
In order to answer these questions, we must first have in mind a few facts
about ancient cosmology. Today we know that the earth rotates on its axis
once a day, and revolves around the sun once a year. However, Greco-Roman
astronomy at the time of the Mithraic mysteries was based on a so-called
"geocentric" cosmology, according to which the earth was fixed
and immovable at the center of the universe and everything went around it.
In this cosmology the universe itself was imagined as being bounded by a
great sphere to which the stars, arranged in the various constellations,
were attached. So, while we today understand that the earth rotates on its
axis once every day, in antiquity it was believed instead that once a day
the great sphere of the stars rotated around the earth, spinning on an axis
that ran from the sphere's north pole to its south pole. As it spun, the
cosmic sphere was believed to carry the sun along with it, resulting in
the apparent movment of the sun around the earth once a day.
In addition to this daily rotation of the cosmic sphere carrying the
sun along with it, the ancients also attributed a second, slower motion
to the sun. While today we know that the earth revolves around the sun once
a year, in antiquity it was believed instead that once a year the sun--
which was understood as being closer to the earth than the sphere of the
stars-- traveled around the earth, tracing a great circle in the sky against
the background of the constellations. This circle traced by the sun during
the course of the year was known as the "zodiac"-- a word meaning
"living figures," which was a reference to the fact that as the
sun moved along the circle of the zodiac it passed in front of twelve different
constellations which were represented as having various animal and human
forms.
Because the ancients believed in the real existence of the great sphere
of the stars, its various parts-- such as its axis and poles-- played a
central role in the cosmology of the time. In particular, one important
attribute of the sphere of the stars was much better known in antiquity
than it is today: namely, its equator, known as the "celestial equator."
Just as the earth's equator is defined as a circle around the earth equidistant
from the north and south poles, so the celestial equator was understood
as a circle around the sphere of the stars equidistant from the sphere's
poles. The circle of the celestial equator was seen as having a particularly
special importance because of the two points where it crosses the circle
of the zodiac: for these two points are the equinoxes, that is, the places
where the sun, in its movement along the zodiac, appears to be on the first
day of spring and the first day of autumn. Thus the celestial equator was
responsible for defining the seasons, and hence had a very concrete significance
in addition to its abstract astronomical meaning.
As a result, the celestial equator was often described in ancient popular
literature about the stars. Plato, for example, in his dialogue Timaeus
said that when the creator of the universe first formed the cosmos, he shaped
its substance in the form of the letter X, representing the intersection
of the two celestial circles of the zodiac and the celestial equator. This
cross-shaped symbol was often depicted in ancient art to indicate the cosmic
sphere. In fact, one of the most famous examples of this motif is a Mithraic
stone carving showing the so-called "lion-headed god," whose image
is often found in Mithraic temples, standing on a globe that is marked with
the cross representing the two circles of the zodiac and the celestial equator.
One final fact about the celestial equator is crucial: namely, that it
does not remain fixed, but rather possesses a slow movement known as the
"precession of the equinoxes." This movement, we know today, is
caused by a wobble in the earth's rotation on its axis. As a result of this
wobble, the celestial equator appears to change its position over the course
of thousands of years. This movement is known as the precession of the equinoxes
because its most easily observable effect is a change in the positions of
the equinoxes, the places where the celestial equator crosses the zodiac.
In particular, the precession results in the equinoxes moving slowly backward
along the zodiac, passing through one zodiacal constellation every 2,160
years and through the entire zodiac every 25,920 years. Thus, for example,
today the spring equinox is in the constellation of Pisces, but in a few
hundred years it will be moving into Aquarius (the so-called "dawning
of the Age of Aquarius"). More to our point here, in Greco-Roman times
the spring equinox was in the constellation Aries, which it had entered
around 2,000 B.C.
It is this phenomenon of the precession of the equinoxes that provides the
key to unlocking the secret of the astronomical symbolism of the Mithraic
tauroctony. For the constellations pictured in the standard tauroctony have
one thing in common: namely, they all lay on the celestial equator as it
was positioned during the epoch immediately preceeding the Greco-Roman "Age
of Aries." During that earlier age, which we may call the "Age
of Taurus," lasting from around 4,000 to 2,000 B.C., the celestial
equator passed through Taurus the Bull (the spring equinox of that epoch),
Canis Minor the Dog, Hydra the Snake, Corvus the Raven, and Scorpio the
Scorpion (the autumn equinox): that is, precisely the constellations represented
in the Mithraic tauroctony.
In fact, we may even go one step further. For during the Age of Taurus,
when the equinoxes were in Taurus and Scorpio, the two solstices-- which
are also shifted by the precession-- were in Leo the Lion and Aquarius the
Waterbearer. (In the above diagram of the "Age of Taurus," Leo
and Aquarius are the northernmost and southernmost constellations of the
zodiacal circle respectively-- these were the positions of the summer
and winter solstices in that age.) It is thus of great interest to
note that in certain regions of the Roman empire a pair of symbols was sometimes
added to the tauroctony: namely, a lion and a cup. These symbols must represent
the constellations Leo and Aquarius, the locations of the solstices during
the Age of Taurus. Thus all of the figures found in the tauroctony represent
constellations that had a special position in the sky during the Age of
Taurus.
The Mithraic tauroctony, then, was apparently designed as a symbolic representation
of the astronomical situation that obtained during the Age of Taurus. But
what religious significance could this have had, so that the tauroctony
could have come to form the central icon of a powerful cult? The answer
to this question lies in the fact that the phenomenon of the precession
of the equinoxes was unknown throughout most of antiquity: it was discovered
for the first time around 128 B.C. by the great Greek astronomer Hipparchus.
Today we know that the precession is caused by a wobble in the earth's rotation
on its axis. However, for Hipparchus-- because he held to the ancient geocentric
cosmology in which the earth was believed to be immovable-- what we today
know to be a movement of the earth could only be understood as a movement
of the entire cosmic sphere. In other words, Hipparchus's discovery amounted
to the discovery that the entire universe was moving in a way that no one
had ever been aware of before!
At the time Hipparchus made his discovery, Mediterranean intellectual and
religious life was pervaded by astrological beliefs. It was widely believed
that the stars and planets were living gods, and that their movements controlled
all aspects of human existence. In addition, at this time most people believed
in what scholars call "astral immortality": that is, the idea
that after death the human soul ascends up through the heavenly spheres
to an afterlife in the pure and eternal world of the stars. In time, the
celestial ascent of the soul came to be seen as a difficult voyage, requiring
secret passwords to be recited at each level of the journey. In such circumstances,
Hipparchus's discovery would have had profound religious implications. A
new force had been detected capable of shifting the cosmic sphere: was it
not likely that this new force was a sign of the activity of a new god,
a god so powerful that he was capable of moving the entire universe?
Hipparchus's discovery of the precession made it clear that before the Greco-Roman
period, in which the spring equinox was in the constellation of Aries the
Ram, the spring equinox had last been in Taurus the Bull. Thus, an obvious
symbol for the phenomenon of the precession would have been the death of
a bull, symbolizing the end of the "Age of Taurus" brought about
by the precession. And if the precession was believed to be caused by a
new god, then that god would naturally become the agent of the death of
the bull: hence, the "bull-slayer."
This, I propose, is the origin and nature of Mithras the cosmic bull-slayer.
His killing of the bull symbolizes his supreme power: namely, the power
to move the entire universe, which he had demonstrated by shifting the cosmic
sphere in such a way that the spring equinox had moved out of Taurus the
Bull.
Given the pervasive influence in the Greco-Roman period of astrology and
"astral immortality," a god possessing such a literally world-shaking
power would clearly have been eminently worthy of worship: since he had
control over the cosmos, he would automatically have power over the astrological
forces determining life on earth, and would also possess the ability to
guarantee the soul a safe journey through the celestial spheres after death.
That Mithras was believed to possess precisely such a cosmic power is in
fact proven by a number of Mithraic artworks depicting Mithras in various
ways as having control over the universe. For example, one scene shows a
youthful Mithras holding the cosmic sphere in one hand while with his other
hand he rotates the circle of the zodiac.
Another image shows Mithras in the role of the god Atlas, supporting
on his shoulder the great sphere of the universe, as Atlas traditionally
does.
A further example is provided by a number of tauroctonies that symbolize
Mithras's cosmic power by showing him with the starry sky contained beneath
his flying cape (see illustration at beginning of article).
If Mithras was in fact believed to be capable of moving the entire universe,
then he must have been understood as in some sense residing outside of the
cosmos. This idea may help us to understand another very common Mithraic
iconographical motif: namely, the so-called "rock-birth" of Mithras.
This scene shows Mithras emerging from the top of a roughly spherical or
egg-shaped rock, which is usually depicted with a snake entwined around
it.
As I mentioned previously, the tauroctony depicts the bull-slaying as
taking place inside a cave, and the Mithraic temples were built in imitation
of caves. But caves are precisely hollows within the rocky earth, which
suggests that the rock from which Mithras is born is meant to represent
the Mithraic cave as seen from the outside. Now as we saw earlier, the ancient
author Porphyry records the tradition that the Mithraic cave was intended
to be "an image of the cosmos." Of course, the hollow cave would
have to be an image of the cosmos as seen from the inside, looking out at
the enclosing, cave-like sphere of the stars. But if the cave symbolizes
the cosmos as seen from the inside, it follows that the rock out of which
Mithras is born must ultimately be a symbol for the cosmos as seen from
the outside. This idea is not as abstract as might first appear, for artistic
representations of the cosmos as seen from the outside were in fact very
common in antiquity. A famous example is the "Atlas Farnese" statue,
showing Atlas bearing on his shoulder the cosmic globe, on which are depicted
the constellations as they would appear from an imaginary vantage point
outside of the universe.
That the rock from which Mithras is born does indeed represent the cosmos
is proven by the snake that entwines it: for this image evokes unmistakeably
the famous Orphic myth of the snake-entwined "cosmic egg" out
of which the universe was formed when the creator-god Phanes emerged from
it at the beginning of time. Indeed, the Mithraists themselves explicitly
identified Mithras with Phanes, as we know from an inscription found in
Rome and from the iconography of a Mithraic monument located in England.
The birth of Mithras from the rock, therefore, would appear to represent
the idea that he is in some sense greater than the cosmos. Capable of moving
the entire universe, he cannot be contained within the cosmic sphere, and
is therefore depicted in the rock-birth as bursting out of the enclosing
cave of the universe, and establishing his presence in the transcendent
space beyond the cosmos.
This imaginary "place beyond the universe" had been described
vividly by Plato several centuries before the origins of Mithraism. In his
dialogue Phaedrus (247B-C) Plato envisions a journey by a soul to the outermost
boundary of the cosmos, and then gives us a glimpse of what the soul would
see if for a brief moment it were able to "look upon the regions without."
"Of that place beyond the heavens," says Plato,
none of our earthly poets has yet sung, and none shall sing worthily. But this is the manner of it, for assuredly we must be bold to speak what is true, above all when our discourse is upon truth. It is there that true being dwells, without colour or shape, that cannot be touched; reason alone, the soul's pilot, can behold it, and all true knowledge is knowledge thereof.I would suggest that the awe-inspiring quality of Plato's vision of what is beyond the outermost boundary of the cosmos also lies behind the appeal of Mithras as a divine being whose proper domain is outside of the universe. As the text from Plato shows, the establishment by ancient astronomers of the sphere of the stars as the absolute boundary of the cosmos only encouraged the human imagination to project itself beyond that boundary in an exhilarating leap into an infinite mystery. There beyond the cosmos dwelled the ultimate divine forces, and Mithras's ability to move the entire universe made him one with those forces.
Beyond the heavens
"Fascinating."
--Scientific American, vol. 265, #3 (September, 1991) pp. 188-90.
"Thrilling.... Bravo for Ulansey."
--Religious Studies Review, vol. 17, #1 (January, 1991) p. 66.
"Brilliant and fascinating... entirely convincing....The reviewer
had trouble in putting it down."
--The Ancient World, vol. 23, #1 (1992) pp. 112-13.
"Ulansey has produced an astounding book."
--Critical Review of Books in Religion, vol. 4 (1991) pp. 277-79.
"Erudite, well-written, and fascinating to read.... Extremely successful."
--Bulletin of the Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions,
vol. 16, #2 (1989-90) pp. 90-92.
"Remarkable.... In comprehensiveness [Ulansey's] theory appears
to have no rival."
--Ancient Philosophy, vol. 12 (1992) p. 242-44.
"Brilliant and fascinating."
--Latomus, vol. 55, #2 (April-June 1996) pp. 496-98.
"Convincing.... All fits together beautifully."
--Journal of Religion, vol. 72, #2 (April, 1992) pp. 301-302.
"Brilliant.... an absolutely spell-binding detective story of antique
lore."
--Gnosis, #20 (Summer, 1991) p. 76.
