In Our Time - The Cult of Mithras

Episode Date: December 27, 2012

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the cult of Mithras, a mystery religion that existed in the Roman Empire from the 1st to the 4th centuries AD. Also known as the Mysteries of Mithras, its origins are uncertain. Academics have suggested a link with the ancient Vedic god Mitra and the Iranian Zoroastrian deity Mithra, but the extent and nature of the connection is a matter of controversy. Followers of Mithras are thought to have taken part in various rituals, most notably communal meals and a complex seven-stage initiation system. Typical depictions of Mithras show him being born from a rock, enjoying food with the sun god Sol and stabbing a bull. Mithraic places of worship have been found throughout the Roman world, including an impressive example in London. However, Mithraism went into decline in the 4th century AD with the rise of Christianity and eventually completely disappeared. In recent decades, many aspects of the cult have provoked debate, especially as there are no written accounts by its members. As a result, archaeology has been of great importance in the study of Mithraism and has provided new insights into the religion and its adherents. With:Greg Woolf Professor of Ancient History at the University of St AndrewsAlmut Hintze Zartoshty Professor of Zoroastrianism at SOAS, University of LondonJohn North Acting Director of the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London.Producer: Victoria Brignell.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in 1954, construction work was taking place in Walbrook Street in the city of London following the Second World War. One day the builders made a surprising discovery,

the remains of an ancient Roman building. What they had found was a Mithraim, a place of worship for members of the cult of Mithras. Also known as the mysteries of Mithras, this religion emerged in the Roman Empire in the 1st century AD. Its belief have involved a number of obscure practices and rituals, including a sacred communal meal and a complex seven-stage initiation system. The cult existed across the Roman world,

but had almost completely disappeared by the 5th century. Much about Mithraism remains unknown, as there are no written accounts by the cult's followers, and those texts we have are often by the cult's enemies. Most of the evidence we have is archaeological, and it's mainly this that academics have used to build up a picture of Mithraism. With me to discuss the cult of Mithras are

Greg Wolfe, Professor of Ancient History at the University of St. Andrews, Almit Hintzer, Datochty Professor of Zoroastrianism at Saas University of London, and John North, acting director of the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London. Greg Wolf, the cult of Mithras began in the first century AD.

Can you give us some idea of the lands, for religious practices at that time in the Roman Empire? Almost everybody in the Roman Empire believed that there were many deities, and so any city you went into would have temples to lots and lots of gods. You could belong or worship any one of these temples, or many of them if you wanted to. So there wasn't a sort of sense of a defined group of religions. It was a very, very complex world, but more or less what they all did was the same. They had temples, which the gods were believed to live in.

They performed sacrifices, in which gods and humans shared in meals. And when people worshipped, it built community, a family worshipped, a city worshipped, a village worshipped, a group of co-workers worshipped. Was it polytheistic? You could go to the temple you usually went to, but you could go to other temples without anybody saying you'd betraying anything. That's right, yes. Sometimes they use this idea of polytheism to people the heavens with hundreds and hundreds of deities. and sometimes they would just direct their attention towards the god, the divine in general. But yes, it was a world in which the idea that many gods was quite uncontroversial

and in which worshipping one didn't mean you wouldn't worship any of the others. Can you give us some labels for the religions and the cults that were at play in that first century? Well, the gods of the Roman state were Jupiter above all and his queen was Juno. alongside that you'd worship other gods The Capitiline Tried included those two and Minerva. Mars was the god of war But if you went to a Greek city, they'd have Greek names Zeus, Athena, Apollo, and in other parts of the Roman Empire, there'd be local gods.

So there'd be Mercury Dumias in Gaul, or there'd be the African Saturn who stood in for Baal. So there's a huge diversity, and sometimes gods are connected with each other. People would say, well, Baal is Saturn. Why is Christianity in Judaism at this time? If we're thinking about the first century AD, Christianity is almost invisible. If it wasn't, it's hardly noticed by any texts that aren't written by Christians until the second century. Jews are much more noticeable.

There are Jews in all the major cities of the Roman world and all the major cities of the Persian Empire. And they're spread out already in the first stage of the diaspora that now, of course, is worldwide. So everyone would know who the Jews were. Probably almost nobody would know who Christian. were until the early years of the second century. Where did the cult of Mithras developed? When did it develop, where did it develop first

and how did it develop? It is, like so much, quite mysterious. The first temples of Mithras we know about, the first Mithrae, occur in the suburbs of Frankfurt and on the Danube. All these were apparently founded

by Italians, and most people think the religion must have been invented somewhere in Rome or in Austria, somewhere in the port of Rome, so in Italy, but it seems to spring to life all over at much the same time, and this is in the last decades of the first century AD. And almost immediately we have signs of this cult in Israel, in the Danube provinces, in what's now the Rhineland, and all over Italy. And this country, too?

And this country, yes, it spreads out, as the Roman Empire spreads out, especially in the northern part of the empire, all the way from Hadrian's War to the Black Sea, and then later into the near east. And we find examples of Mithras cult in Africa and a few in Spain. So it isn't evenly spread out, but there's almost no part of the Rome world which didn't have somebody worshipping Mithras.

Greg, what was the cult of Mithras? What was its promise? What was it supposed to deliver? Mithras offered perhaps some kind of sense of salvation, some sense of help, but also something private, unlike these other cults. When you say salvation, do you mean another life? Perhaps. It's difficult to know

because of the basis for our information about Mithras is so obscure and perhaps deliberately obscurantists that we see images, but we don't know quite what they mean. We have text but not text written by people who worship Mithras. So we see it from the outside and have to try and reconstruct it from that sense. Almatinsa, the origins of the god Mithras go back before the Romans and there's dispute about whether it's connected with the god Mithra

in the ancient Vedic religion. Could you take us back as far as the origins of this will allow us to on the with the positive evidence? Yeah, you quite rightly distinguished in your question between Mithras and Mithra. The S at the end of the name is distinctive. When we talk about the Roman god, we refer to him as Mitras.

when we talk about the Indo-Iranian god, we call him Mithra, without an S, at the end. And this god, Mithra, is an ancient Indo-Iranian god, and he is actually one of the earliest attested deities of the Indo-Iranian pantheon, because the earliest attestation

dates back to 1,300 B.C. And it comes, neither from India nor from Iran, but from the ancient Near East. The deity is mentioned in a contract between the king of the Hittites and the Mithani king. And he was obviously invoked as a deity who guarantees the contract by the Mithani people.

And he is mentioned there together with the god Varuna, with Indra and with the Nasatya. So as one of four deities, by whose name the king swears to keep his oath to keep the contract. There's also a gods, I understand it, called Mitra in Zoroastrianism, a religion that has its roots in Iran. Is that the same war? What are we talking about here?

In contrast to the Indian tradition, where Mithra is usually invoked together with Varuna, and where only one single hymn is dedicated to Mithra, in the Vedic tradition. In the Iranian tradition, Mithra is often invoked just by himself as one single god, the god contract.

But also in the Iranian tradition, he is mentioned in combination with another deity in addition to being invoked on his own. And there it is Mithra Ahura, or Ahura Mithra. So he's also joined coupled together with another other deity, but his name the other day.

there is just Ahura. Ahura means Lord. And Lord refers to Ahura Mazda. And in the Iranian tradition, we have got a major hymn dedicated to this god, to Mithra. It is the Mihir Yashd, where Mithra is invoked and praised as the deity. And Mithra claims, and he asks his worshippers to worship him on his own. He wants to be praised and invoked by his name. But also in that same hymn at the beginning, Ahura Mazda legitimizes the worship of Mithra. John North, how likely is it that the Roman cult of Mithras originated in Iran and Zoroastrianism? That was the view that was held sort of in the late 19th century, early 20th century,

and especially in the work of France Cumont, who's a great Belgian scholar, who really started from the thought of Zoroastrianism. And to say that he invented a religion would be a little too far, a little cruel, but he certainly put together these eastern elements of Zoroastrianism with what was known about the Western cult of Mithras and created something which for a time absolutely dominated the field. And then in the 70s, various young scholars started challenging, this, asking what evidence there was of a real connection,

and found that the evidence was really very flimsy, and essentially felt that what Kuman had done was to take the sort of ideas and philosophy of Zoroastrianism and marry them to what we knew about Mithraism in the West and create something completely new. And that more or less has dominated the field ever since, that what one should do is not really start with the East and go to the Western evidence,

but start with the Western evidence, see what that tells you, see what sort of cult this was and how it worked, and then see whether it fitted with anything from the East or not. As I understand it, the Western understanding of Zoroastrianism. By the Western, we're talking about first century AD in the Roman Empire. Yes, in Rome and the Roman Empire. That it was dualistic, that it was an opposition between good and evil forces. And that isn't obvious in the evidence from the West,

but Cuman succeeded in finding it, or at least finding black and white powers, powers of light and powers of darkness. The trouble with that is that if you look at the images and the key image is the image of Mithras, dressed in Persian attire, killing a bull, it's not obvious that that's to do with good and evil at all. You might read the bull as evil

and therefore Mithras as good, but that's not obvious. And it isn't obvious that there are black and white powers in the theological ideas of the cult. So the connection is very hard to make out at that level. On the other hand, the listeners out there and listeners such as myself, the connection between the two words seems to be so close as stronger than a coincidence.

Between which two words? Well, Mithra and Mithras. Well, yes, yes. No, it can't be a coincidence. Clearly, the people who invented the cult wherever that was knew something about Mithras, though if they were supposed to see him fundamentally, as a god of contract, that isn't very clear as a connection, because what he's doing in the image, if we understand it at all,

is creating life, possibly creating the cosmos. But just to get back, how do you think that the cult of Mithras came into being then? Do you think that they knew about Zoroastrianism, and they knew about the Vedic presence of Mithras there? They clearly knew something about Eastern religion and about Iranian religion, and they're borrowing things from it. That's, I think, perfectly clear. We don't know where that happened.

There used to be a theory very strongly held that it was actually in Rome, but I think that's not necessary. And because the language of the cult is largely Greek, the likelihood is that it happened somewhere in the Greek world in the East, you know, on the coast of Turkey or somewhere around there, we don't know where. And that that's where the original cult came together. There are one or two clues as a clue,

because, according to Plutarch, after Pompey had destroyed the pirates. Some of them went and worshipped on Mount Olympus, which presumably means Mount Olympus in the northern part of Western Turkey. But that's a rather odd connection because that's on a mountain,

whereas what's characteristic of Mithraism is that it happens in caves and down below. And the cave is said to be the image of the cosmos. Greg, Wolf, do we want to comment on the way that Mithraism was established

or do we leave it confused. I think what John says is it must be right, but it's not the only one that's being created that way, that this is a world of huge cities, people moving backwards and forwards between them. And we can see several cults which are being created in this time, and they take as a sort of mythical point of origin, some existing God, ISIS in Egypt, or the God of the Jews, and then they sort of universalise it and turn to something quite different that can be exported. And so you could see Christianity as a transformation of Judaism and Mithraism as looking to Persian origins,

the worship of ISIS, looking to Egypt. They like the exotic. They like to put something exotic into this big religious mix. But archaeological evidence does kick in quite soon, and it seems to be there are numerous sites, over 400 that I've read, and perhaps more since I read it. Anyway, there are numerous sites and a lot of hard information. Can you tell us something about the people who joined the cult,

the mistress of Mithras? Well, we know quite a lot about them because we have the names of more than a thousand of them, usually on inscriptions that commemorate their dedications to the God, offerings they made or repairs of Mithraea. And most of them seem to

be people who are well integrated into the Roman State. They're soldiers or their tax officials or they're the freedom of the emperor. And the other thing they all have in common is they're all men. This is exceptional. I'm an ancient. cult that is the only worshippers of Mithras are men.

Why do you think it is then? It's difficult to know. You could say, I suppose, that each one of these new invented religions has to have some kind of unique selling point and maybe the one that works from Mithras is that it's all about masculinity, it's all about achievement within these graded hierarchies

of the Roman Empire where you're used to being promoted through a bureaucracy or promoted through the army. And this is a world that is a world of men because women didn't get these jobs. They didn't serve in the army. They didn't serve in the Imperial Administration. But it's more than chance that we know so many of them that there's no real possibility that this is actually.

Middle-ranking soldiers, middle-ranking civil servants. There's something that escapes me. Freed slaves seem to figure there as well. That's the members of it. These freed slaves are those freed slaves who work for the emperor. The emperor uses freed slaves in the administration. There are some high-ranking people, not so many, but there aren't so many high-ranking people in the Roman Empire generally.

and very few distinguish commanders of military units, eventually in the fourth century senators. And of course it may be that there are lower ranking people who can afford the inscriptions. So there is a problem with the evidence here that we see that of all the people in the Roman Empire we see through these media. It's the middle people we see most clearly. Al Matinsa, the culture of Mithras was called now a mystery religion. What does that mean? And were there other mystery religions at the time? Mystery religion, the word mystery, of course, it comes from Greek, or to be silent

or with your lips not to speak openly about what's happening. And this is a very good way of describing these religions. The ideas which underpinned the religious practices of different cults were usually not promulgated publicly. And this is certainly the case for the mislemen. Israelism, and that is one of our major problems in interpreting the archaeological evidence and the images which are there. But at the time, there were a number of other cults, and it has already been mentioned, that there were the Egyptian cults. But ISIS and Osiris, yes, and they had this Egyptian garb, a cult which involved these Egyptian gods and a myth, again, a story of a descent and an Assyr.

and then there are other cults like such as Demeter and Persephone, a cult of very local origin from Elyos. But again, it has his component of the descent and the ascent. Demeter is the goddess of agriculture and of corn, loses her daughter, her daughter, Persephone, who is abducted by Hades and taken back into the netherworld. And Demeter who goes and searches for her and finds her eventually and then brings her up again on earth and to Elyoses.

And this is then the origin of this cult and the Athenians. They make processions at the time of harvest to Elyos. And they have nocturnal assemblies of large numbers of people. And there then in these assemblies the ideas are explained, well then they are expressed verbally. But we don't know exactly what they are. really believed. John North don't know

seems to be a little running theme as a little varnerian teeth going on here. We have no literary sources written by followers of the cult, do we? No, no, we don't. So do any literary sources

worth a fig anyway? We have references. The Christian ones people are suspicious of and I suspect rightly though there are some Christian texts which seem to give you hard information. Suspicious because Christians are...

Because Christians are hostile and the Christians, both about the cults that Almond was talking about and also these, Mithraism, the Christians tend to say and believe that these are inventions of the devil, that the devil invented them, put them on the planet before Jesus came, so that they would pollute the story of Jesus, people would say, well, they're just imitating these cults. Because a lot of them, not Mithras, but a lot of them are gods,

who you might describe as dying, rising. They die and they come. back just as Jesus does. Now Mithras doesn't do that. He's a god who is the centre of this cult and his key act as far as we can see from the imagery is the killing of the bull. So that does differentiate him though the mystery part of it presumably is the progressive revelation as you go through the seven

grades. In the initiation ceremonies yes. Yes exactly each initiation presumably tells you a bit more about the story. You start as a raven and end up as the father. You start as a raven and you work your way through seven grades, you end up as a father. And we know a little bit about the actual ceremonies because there are depictions of them.

And what we have, one particular depiction suggests that they are very brutal, that they're very cruel, that the initiate is humiliated, blindfolded, threatened, and very generally maltreated. So they are ordeals in a way. And presumably

connected with the ordeals is learning but quite how, I don't think we know, but another don't know, but presumably there is a progressive revelation. And one thing which is quite clear which we haven't talked about yet is that there is a strong connection with astrology, which also, of course, comes from the East.

And the probability is that they're learning the star law as they go up. Though how important that is very controversial amongst those who work on these things. Before we turn to archaeology, Gregor, do you want to rummage around any other evidence, any literary

evidence or written evidence at all? John's talked about the Christian texts. The other group of texts we have are written by philosophers. The big one, the most important one, is by Porphyry, who's writing a book about the cave of the nymphs, in which he's trying to explore the way in which the image of a cave has been an allegory, used by lots of philosophers. And just in passing, he mentions Zoroaster, and he mentions Mithras,

and talks about this idea that the cave, the Mithraim is an artificial cavern, and that this is a model of the cosmos and all the things in it represent things that are in the cosmos in the world that Mithras created. So we get some sort of little glimpse here. Now perhaps, for he's a Platonist, perhaps this is influenced a little bit by his own interest in Plato's use of the cave,

but as an allegory. But perhaps it's a tiny glimpse of a Mithraic understanding of the world. Almond Hinter, archaeology now, that's been very important indeed for the study of Mithrasm. Can you give us some idea of the range of it and what you find, what the archaeological evidence delivers?

Perhaps one of the most important bits of evidence for the Mithraic cult are the places where the Mithraeus would meet. And these are places which are described as caves, either natural caves or they are rooms which are styled as caves. Usually a few steps down, it's accessed. And these places are referred to as Mithraeer, or Mithraic temples.

And they are relatively small. And the community, we can gather from the size of these meeting places, how large was the size of the communities. Probably they didn't comprise between 20 to 40 members, men. Greg? I mean, that seems very strikingly different from all the other stuff that's going on. around, isn't it? The temples that people would be familiar with were in the open air

and the idea of performing cults in the dark was regarded as very dubious and sinister. And so having a temple that is often invisible from the outside because it's buried in the bottom of a villa or a bathhouse or something and everything takes place in the dark and people don't know what goes on there. That's

it's a sort of offence against the norms of classical religion and that sort of offence, that challenge must have been part of the attraction. There's two things here John Northmore. One is a comparatively few people. I presume that when they got to be too many for the building, they went and built another place

down near Barlow. That might well explain why there's a sort of explosion of building these things in quite a short period. There are 16 in Austria, which is quite a small town. It makes it be a sort of a club isn't it, as people travel around the Empire. They can always go to

Mithrae in time. Especially soldiers. A lot of the Mithrae are concentrated on the frontier zones, not by any means all, And those, presumably, if you move from one frontier to another, you know, there's one that we have on the very eastern frontier and one right up in Hadrian's wall, and soldiers moved around,

and they would find a cult that they're familiar with and a situation they're familiar with. I don't quite, we haven't quite nailed for the listener, what's in this mythraim, what sort of inscriptions, what sort of relief, what sort of evidence? The dominant element in it, the structure of the mythraim, the organisation of the mythraim, is very important, you're quite right.

The image, which I've been talking about, is the sort of central feature which is, I think, always there, or virtually always there. Or at least we assume it's always there. The Mithraeim itself has two benches along the side. So it looks like a dining room. And the assumption is that they met there and had a sacred meal. And on the back of the big Mithras altar, you sometimes get a depiction of a banquet,

which may be, as it were, the sort of sacred... forbear for the meal. And that is a banquet between Sol and, who is the sun, and Mithras, who also ought to be the sun, dining on a table which is covered with the skin, apparently, the hide of the bull. And that sacred meal in some way sets up the Mithraim, sets up the world probably, sets up the way the world works,

possibly sets up the whole cosmos, and then that's echoed in the banquet of the worshippers. That's what we assume to be the case. Greg, one has a... As has been mentioned, one of the features of the Mithraic mysteries is the seven grades of initiation and their connection with seven planets. Can you tell us more about that? Yes, there are seven grades which, as you said, each Mithraim is run by the fathers, the Pater.

And people start as a Khorax as a raven, they work their way through it, presumably through these kind of horrendous rituals that John describes. And occasionally a Mithraim has got some evidence that. this. There's one in Austria, the Mithraim of Fenne of Fennecissimus, and there's a mosaic floor which is organised with a set of seven pictures, and each picture is related to one of these grades. So you start at the bottom and you go through climbing up, well, one source is going up a ladder. And each of these seven corresponds to a planet. The seven planets of antiquity are the ones that we still use for the days of the week. They're the sun and the

moon. And then the five planets that you can see in the sky without a telescope, so Mars, Mercury, Venus, Saturn and Jupiter. And the Pateirs are under the protection of Saturn. So in the Mithraim underneath Santa Prisca, in Rome, you have labels on the walls say, hail to the Paters from East and West, under the protection of Saturn, and then you get all the other ones,

all the other grades with their own deities. And this astrological set of seven, with those things, goes back to Babylonian, astronomy, astrology, and it's in lots of other cults around the same time. Lots of other religious movements use it. The Magi and a travelling star in Christianity, aren't they? But in Mithras, it does seem to be something that is quite important.

And occasionally some of these great... John described these long cavernous temples you go into with the low roofs and vaults over them. And at the far end, the great big scene of a god sitting astride, the bull, pulling the bull's head back, pressing the dagger down, and then surround about other pictures. And around these other pictures, around the central... act of bull killing. Often there are astrological signs and stars.

I'm going to come to the bull in a minute, but just to continue this notion of the initiation, which you've said, John North, it was quite severe, as far as we know, and I suppose physically severe. People were, whatever it was, tested physically. And association with the seven panaceous, as Greg has outlined,

can we just dig into that a bit more? What do you think was going on? What were they doing when they were doing that? The initiation itself was a voluntary act and these misriq associations, they were like clubs. And there were voluntary associations and people were members of a misriq community in addition to being members of the public religion.

So it was something which went on on top. The initiation itself, what they did, we don't really know. We don't have descriptions. We don't have any verbal discursive. a description of what exactly they did. We have pictures. We don't know if everybody went all through all the seven stages.

Perhaps only a few made it to the top. Maybe you paid a bit more as you got different grades. Could everybody hope to be a patria if they hung about long enough? It seems a bit unlikely. There's subtexts which rather imply that Leo, which is the middle grade of the whole set, that that is a kind of normative grade that everybody can aspire to get to.

They talk about Leo as if it's the typical grade, whereas the higher ones then would be special, and really in the army, presumably, for officers. What we would like to know is whether the officers got fast-tracked into the top grades. You can't imagine them going through all the stages to get there, but perhaps they did. I mean, it does look like this hierarchical structure mirrors the hierarchy of the world around them. This isn't a place you go to achieve if you're not achieving elsewhere.

This is a way in which you echo your progress. through these masculine hierarchies. Alman. It also seems that each myth realm, each myth-rite society, was presided by one father. So there was only one leader of one group.

Let's come to this iconic, strange iconic image. Starting with you, John, can you describe in more detail this great central image, which is so important? Yes. You'll tell us why it's so important. First of all, you've got the bull.

You've got the bull. you've got the bull rearing up and Mithras holding it very often by its nose. He has one leg on its back and one leg holding a foot down and he's stabbing it with a very visible knife in the area of the shoulder. So it's not a typical sacrifice scene. The first place, the person doing the sacrificing is a god, not a person. And secondly, there's the enormous emphasis on the knife and the blood and the blood and the position of the various participants and then round it are a set of creatures.

The raven, the scorpion, the dog and the serpent are lapping the blood. You can see the blood spurt out and they're lapping it up. So it's interpreted as a scene of creation. The creation of life. What's a scorpion doing? The scorpion is in one way or another

attacking the scrotum of the bull. Why? The raven is sitting... What's the symbolism of that? That I can't answer. Are these, Almond, are these, is this image everywhere? It is, yeah, in the, each temple, each myth realm has this cult image. It is the focus of it all. Where do you think it comes from?

It's just very striking. Yeah, it is obviously something syncretistic. It has certain elements which faintly remind of Zoroastrian features, which is one is the dress of Mithras, which is a Persian dress, the trouser suit and a cloak. Then there is the dog and the serpent. Now, these two animals, they are very symbolic in the Zoroastrian tradition. The serpent represents evil,

and the dog is the most revered animal for the Zoroastrians. It's a friend of the human being. And it is an enormous offence to do. do harm to a dog for Zoroastrian. But here they are in the presence of a rather violent killing. The killing itself has, from a Zoroastrian point of view, very un-Iranian features, very un-Zorustrian features, which is the violence. And indeed the Zoroastrian tradition, much of it is actually about reducing violence in

the world, especially violence inflicted on the animal, represented by the bull. and the Zoroastrians do sacrifice animals during their rituals, but not explicitly not by violence. Greg, you want to come in and then you, John. Yes, I wanted to say this as well of these great, big, huge reliefs in the caves. They make miniatures of this. So there are tiny little clay tablets with the image, and you get the image on coin occasion,

particularly on amulets, so people wear images of this scene around their necks, presumably it's some kind of protection the way they were anti-evil eye amyos. John? I was just going to add that we know from the little side scenes that Greg was talking about beside these altars sometimes

that there's a whole story, a whole narrative about the catching of this bull. There's a hunt. There is sometimes you see Mithras dragging the bull to the cave. So you've got a whole story that was told before you get there. And that's presumably

part of a sacred narrative, though the funny thing about these scenes is they're not in any special order. So they vary the order, and if it were a proper sacred narrative, you'd expect to get the same order every time. That's what you would think a sacred narrative was. So that's a bit of a puzzle, but there's a story to how the bull gets there, and the cave is where it's killed, and the killing in the cave is what the sources say is the image of the cosmos. But is it true to say the killings in the cave is not only just the image of the cosmos, it's the start, the beginning of the world. Yes. So it seems, yes.

So how does the ball figure in the beginning of, what's it doing to be the beginning of the world? There are other mythological traditions, some from the Near East, in which a killing starts everything, in which destroying an animal, destroying a god, is the starting moment of violence

at which everything springs. But beyond that... Also, an element of the Zoroastrian creation myth has been adduced in this context. In the Zoroastrian tradition, we have the killing of the animal at the beginning of time. That is when evil in the form of the destructive force of Ariman rushes into the creation and he attacks the animal, the uniquely created animal, which is represented by the bovine and kills the bovine. So we have there an initial killing.

However, it is a product of evil. It is how death came into the world. Can we turn to the communal meal now, John, North again, which is a product of evil. is a big, a major aspect. You said, I think it was you who said at the beginning, when you walk into this temple, you have benches on the other side, as it were, people, for people to sit down and have a meal. Why was that so important? Well, an meal often is important in these cults and indeed in life in the Roman Empire generally, we know lots about societies of all kinds, some of which are called religious, some of which are not. They

all have a religious aspect and they all dine together. It's a very, very common thing to do. But what we assume from the decoration of the and character of the cave is that this is a special recollection of a sacred moment, which is why it's often compared to the sacred meal of the Christians and why they no doubt think this is a take-off of what they do. So it clearly has a sacred character. It's not just a dining together, but it consolidates the group,

and it emphasises those who enter the cave and participants in the mitral. And then presumably the initiations are somehow connected with it. though we don't know how. What John says, what John North says, Almond, takes us to the discussion about the similarities between Mithraism and Christianity. Do you see strong similarities? Yeah, amongst the similarities, John has already mentioned one of them,

the communal meal. Another parallel which has been introduced is the date of the 25th of December as the date of Christmas for the Christians in the Western, the Western Christians, not in the East. In the East, it has always remained the 6th of January the date to celebrate the birth of Christ. As far as the Christian tradition is concerned,

the earliest evidence for this is in the calendar of Philoccalus, which mentions that the year, this calendar dates from the year 354 of the Christian era. And there, it is stated that on the 25th of December

is the day when Christ was born in Bethlehem, in Judea. This is the earliest evidence we have for that the Western Christian celebrated Christmas on the 25th of December. Now, the question is, when did the Mithraists

celebrate the birth of Mithras or the birth of soul? Now, in the same calendar, from 354 of the Christian era, there is also an entry that of deus natalis of the foundation of a sanctuary of the cult of soul.

And this has been interpreted as being the date when Saul Invictus was born, the god who is associated with Mithras. However, such interpretation has been challenged and it has been suggested, no, this just refers to the date when this cult was established of soul invictus. and as to the rest there is no evidence

that the 25th of December had any significance for the birth of Mithras. Can we talk about this connection with, if there was one, what was it, with Christianity? I think the real connection is tangential that this is an age in which many new kind of religious forms are being created and monotheous Christianity is one, Mithrasm's another.

In some ways they're not very alike, because Mithraism never could have been a religion for an entire society. It's only men, it's only a fraction of men within that. It's just these particular sections are attracted. I'm an idea of the size of it compared with Christianity in the third or fourth century.

It's difficult to calculate. It can't have been that, because John says there are lots of Mithrae, but they're all very small. So even 16 Mithrae in Oster or 6 in Aquincum wouldn't necessarily accommodate more than a couple of hundred people in the quink and maybe a few more in Austria. John, we could just bring in one thing at that point,

which is a newly acquired information from a place called Tienan in Belgium, where they've discovered beside a Mithraeum the remnants of a quite large feast of perhaps 300 people. Now, okay, this is only this particular Mithraim, so you can't generalise from it, but it does suggest that the whole community around is somehow participating. We've talked about it being secret,

but it isn't really secret. These places are not invisible. Quite often they're in blocks, particularly in Rome. And sometimes you get a block which has a Mithraeum and a Christian prayer room both in the same block.

And they must have known about one another. There can't be any secrecy about it. So it's possible there are larger communities which know about and support this, that there are specialists who go in the cave and that there's a wider support group. Is it a fact that when Mithraea is a steep decline

in the late 4th and 5th centuries, that was because the strengthening of Christianity and the Christian bishops attacked this cult. Most of what we know about mythrism comes from the second and early third centuries. That's partly because we know it so much through material remains and that's a great era for building temples and putting up things. And for whatever reasons, inscriptions and images are made less in the later third century. Mythrism certainly carries on after the conversion of Constantine

in the early 4th century for about. a hundred years or more. Around the end of the 4th century, you do see some withro that do seem to be torn to pieces, and the only people are likely to have done that are Christians. Sarabork in Belgium, you have one which has been smashed and the sacred offerings dispersed. But I think that probably it was going to...

Why were Christians so against it? Christians did this to all pagan temples. It took... For about 100 years, the Empress held them off, even when the emperors were Christians. But eventually the power of the bishops was too strong, and gangs of monks would turn up and tear a temple physically to pieces while their worshippers looked on.

And the authorities, who were authorised within a Christian empire, did nothing to stop them. The pagans carried on to the 6th century, but increasingly sort of hidden in the background. And certainly there's no Mithraic activity known in the 5th century. John John. In many ways, there's more similarity between the figure of Jesus Christ and other figures, not Mithras, who seems to be completely different, actually, but Attis and Osiris, who are also gods, who are men as well, or perhaps men who become gods, but they're ambivalent anyway between manhood and deity,

and they also have lives and suffer and suffer a cruel death, and then in some sense come back. Though neither of them, neither Osiris nor Atis does it as successfully as Jesus does. Almond, so finally are getting there. Can you still see Persian culture, manifest in Mithraism in those first four centuries, Hedy? I recognise some features of Persian culture in the iconography, in the garments which Mithras wears.

Finally, Greg. I think in the end, Mithraism died out because it really was a religion of the Roman establishment that fitted so well with the Roman hierarchy that when the Roman hierarchy did something else, which is start worshipping Christ, Mithras' greatest supporters dropped him like a hoppetreys. Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Alan Matinsa, Greg Wolf and John North. There's no in our time next week, but I'll be back on Monday for a week of programs looking at the idea of culture and its development from the writing of Matthew Arnold in 1869 and E.B. Tyler in 1871 to the present day. So as I say, join me every weekday morning at 9 o'clock and again in the evening at 9.34, the value of culture. And thanks for listening.

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