Mithraism

Every mithraeum had the same image at its focal end. Mithras, a young man in a Phrygian cap and streaming cloak, kneels on a bull and drives a dagger into its shoulder while turning his face away. A dog and a snake go for the wound, a scorpion attacks the bull's genitals, a raven perches nearby, and ears of grain sometimes grow from the bull's tail or from the blood. Two torchbearers flank the scene, Cautes with his torch raised and Cautopates with his lowered. Sol and Luna occupy the upper corners. This is the tauroctony, and it is reproduced with only small variation from Britain to Syria.

Many reliefs are carved on both faces or set to pivot, and the reverse shows Mithras and Sol at a banquet on the bull's hide. Congregations ate together on benches running down the long sides of the room, which suggests the banquet, and not only the killing, was what members re-enacted.

Initiation ran through seven grades. They are listed by the Christian writer Jerome and laid out in a mosaic floor at the Mithraeum of Felicissimus at Ostia: Corax the raven, Nymphus the bridegroom, Miles the soldier, Leo the lion, Perses the Persian, Heliodromus the sun-runner, and Pater the father. Each carries a planetary association. What a grade actually required is known only from fragmentary paintings, scratched graffiti and a hostile Christian description of ordeals.

Astronomical symbolism is unmistakable. Zodiacs frame many reliefs, and every figure in the tauroctony matches a constellation lying along a continuous band of sky. What that symbolism meant to an initiate is a separate question, and a harder one.

Mithraism produced no surviving scripture, no theological treatise and no account of itself. This is not a gap further excavation is likely to close, because there is little sign such texts ever existed. What we have is images, floor plans, dedications naming individuals and grades, some graffiti, and the remarks of Christian opponents describing a rival.

The consequence is that the central question, what initiates believed the bull-killing accomplished, has no agreed answer. Salvation, cosmic renewal, the release of life, the commemoration of an astronomical event, and a rite of loyalty and cohesion among men who served together have all been proposed and none has been established.

The old framework came from Franz Cumont, who from the 1890s treated the Roman cult as Iranian Mazdaism transplanted westward and read its images through Zoroastrian texts. At the First International Congress of Mithraic Studies at Manchester in 1971 this was rejected outright, with John Hinnells and Richard Gordon arguing that Cumont had imposed Iranian content on Roman evidence and that the field had to begin again. Later work by Roger Beck allows a more limited eastern contribution, since the cult plainly took its god's name and much of its visual dress from Persia, but not the wholesale derivation Cumont proposed.

David Ulansey argued in 1989 that the tauroctony encodes the precession of the equinoxes out of Taurus, making Mithras a god capable of moving the cosmos itself. The astronomical reading is widely taken seriously; Ulansey's particular version of it is not the consensus.

Women appear to have been excluded, on the evidence of the inscriptions, though a small number of disputed cases keep even that question open.

Because mithraea were small, sunk below ground and often built inside other structures, an unusual number survive well enough to walk into.

Rome has several, including the mithraeum beneath the basilica of San Clemente, reached through two earlier levels of building, and the painted mithraeum under Santa Prisca on the Aventine, whose walls carry processions of the grades and lines of verse scratched into the plaster. Ostia, Rome's port, has produced around eighteen, among them the Mithraeum of Felicissimus with its mosaic of the seven grades.

Dura-Europos in Syria, a garrison town abandoned in the 250s, preserved a mithraeum with painted walls and dated dedications by Palmyrene archers. Its paintings were removed to Yale in the 1930s, which is why they still exist at all.

In Britain, the mithraeum at Carrawburgh on Hadrian's Wall survives as low walls with replica altars standing in place. The London Mithraeum, found in 1954 during postwar rebuilding and reassembled badly nearby, was in 2017 reinstalled close to its original position and depth beneath an office building, where it can be visited free of charge.

The rooms themselves tell you something the texts cannot. They are small, most holding between twenty and forty people, with benches along both sides facing inward across a narrow aisle. Worship meant reclining close together in near darkness, eating and drinking, in a space deliberately built to feel like a cave. Whatever the doctrine was, the setting was intimate and the congregation was tiny.