The Ancients - The Mystery of Mithras: A Pagan Christmas?

Episode Date: December 24, 2020

The clichéd Christmas: white snow, hot fires, mulled wine and a feast. This might not be the case were the holiday not to fall on 25 December and, although many things have been missed in 2020, the usual questions of whether this is the right date arrived reliably on time. So, for this episode, Tristan spoke to Professor Matthew McCarty to find out whether Christmas Day was really placed in December to supplant non-Christian worship, in particular that of Mithras. Matthew is Assistant Professor of Roman Archaeology at the University of British Columbia. He has been directing the field excavation of a mithraeum in Apulum (Romania), the first scientifically excavated mithraeum in the province of Dacia. In this festive episode, he shares his insight into the social dynamics of ritual practices in the sanctuary at Apulum and elsewhere.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast, well, first of all, Merry Christmas.

It's Christmas Eve, and I guess we could say that we've got a Christmas-y topic for today's podcast, because we are talking about the worship of Mithras in antiquity because there's been a lot of talk especially around this time of year trying to link the worship of Mithras in antiquity with Christianity. This idea that Christianity supplanted Mithras, the worship of Mithras, as a religion in the ancient world. Well to sort the fact from the fiction I was delighted to get on the show Professor Matthew McCarty from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Matthew is a leading expert on the worship of Mithras in antiquity. He's conducted archaeological excavations in Romania at a site where we have found Mithraeum, one of these eerie cave-like temples to Mithras. So it was great to get him on the show

to sort the fact from the fiction about the worship of Mithras in antiquity. Without further ado, here's Matthew. Matt, it's a pleasure to have you on the show. Thanks so much for having me. Now, not at all, not at all. Mithras, it seems pretty popular this time of year, and an ancient cult shrouded in mystery, in darkness that seized all corners of the Roman Empire. Absolutely. This is a cult that spread probably from Rome all the way to the edges of Britain, to the frontiers of Syria, to the very southern bit of the empire along the Sahara,

and drew in worshippers of almost every social status. It was a big thing if you were living in the Roman Empire in the second century CE and the third century CE. And we're talking just before Christmas. And as mentioned, this time of year, there's a lot of talk about this cult and its relationship with Christianity. Matt, what's the story? What's the truth? What's the myth behind that? set on December 25th in order to rival, replace, challenge pagan worship of Saul in Wictus, the unconquered son, or Mithras. Mithras and Saul in Wictus are closely related in the Roman imagination. And you'll read about this and you'll see that people take it kind of two ways, this interpretation. If you're

reading an evangelical Christian website, it's all about, like, the triumph of Christianity. They do away with this pagan holiday and take it and appropriate it and make it their own. And if you read a secularist or anti-Christian website, it's going to be all about how the Christians take over this holiday, and it's because they can't do anything original on their own. Everything that's Christian is just pagan stuff repackaged. So we see this polemic all around a basic accepted fact that Christianity set the birth of Christ on December 25th in order to challenge pagan religion, and particularly the worship of Mithras. But it's all founded on a myth. This is founded on quicksand. And if we go back

and we look in the 2nd and 3rd century CE, when Christianity is a brand new religion, we have Christians who are setting the birthday of Jesus at all different times a year, right? Some of them have it in the spring, in like April, May. Clement of Alexandria has it in November. There's one whole complex calculation that's done in the third century that basically says God created the world in Genesis at the spring equinox, so March 25th. And then four days later, if you read Genesis, God created the sun, so March 28th. Now because Jesus is like the sun, he must have been born on March 28th. So early Christians don't agree on this at all. And it's really only

much, much later in the middle of the 4th century CE, when Christianity has become dominant, Constantine has moved the capital of the Roman Empire to Constantinople. It's only then that people start to take December 25th, which is the winter solstice, and say, this is the day. And there are a lot of reasons for that, but the big one seems to have nothing to do with paganism at all. It seems to have to do with the fact that there are all of these people who are labeled heretics later on, who want to focus on the fact that Jesus is spirit and downplay the body side of Jesus. And so when you put extra emphasis on the birth, then you do away with those heresies. And so it seems to happen in this inter-Christian conflict that December 25th is set as Jesus' birthday. But it is an arbitrary date, and a number of early Christians acknowledge that. So then where does this idea that it's all

about a conflict with Saul and Wictus and Mithras come from? You read my mind. What is it? You read my mind. What is it? The answer there seems to be really loose. We've got a couple of later Christian sources. One of them talks about the equinoxes and the solstices and says that this is the birthday of the sun. We have a calendar from the year 354 CE that sets December 25th and says, well, there were 30 chariot races given to celebrate the birthday of Invictus, of the unconquered sun, on December 25th. And then much, much later, in the 13th century, we have an Armenian Christian, a Syriac Christian, who writes and says that this is specifically done to rival the feast

day of the sun, the celebration of Christ's birth on December 25th. Now, the problem with all of this is that the feast and the celebration of the sun on December 25th doesn't really have much to do with the god Mithras. It doesn't have much to do with even the personified god Sol. It seems to really be about the winter solstice, right? This is the shortest day of the year, and the next day, all of a sudden, the days start getting longer, the sun comes back, and this seems to be something that's celebrated really across all of the world, or all of the ancient Mediterranean world. And so it really doesn't have anything to do with Sol in Victus or Mithras. The reason that it's treated this way, that people build up in the modern world this myth of rivalry between Christianity and Mithraism,

is really because, well, Christianity needs a rival. It needs someone to push back against. In the narrative of the triumph of Christianity, you can't just have Christianity, you know, kind of mopping up a few pagan cults. You need there to be something that it can triumph over. And so what happens is that in the 19th century, people turn the worship of the sun and the worship of Mithras into a religion. They make it look like Christianity, so that Christianity can have a rival, basically. And in reality, the cult of Mithras, the worship of Mithras in the Roman Empire, is nothing like this. It's very interesting what you're saying there, Matt. It creates Mithraism into a religion in the 19th century. So Matt, how has this creation

distorted our view of Mithraism? Well, let's talk a little bit more about that process. Mithraism is not a term that any ancient worshiper, any person in the Roman Empire ever would have used. The term Mithraism is a term that is popularized at the end of the 19th century, and it's popularized in a specific milieu. It's popularized when people start writing encyclopedias of world religions. And Mithraism is born alongside things like Hinduism, and it gets that ism slapped on the end to make it a kind of coherent thing that people can study and talk about as they're looking at world religions. If you were an ancient, if you were a Greek or a Roman, you would have talked about the mysteries of Mithras, the mysteria. And that's a Greek word

that doesn't quite mean what modern English mystery means. It means something more like the process by which someone's ontological status, their being, is transformed through the other word you might use if you're an ancient, teletai, through initiation rites of Mithras. And that's what you call it if you're working in Greek. If you're working in Latin, you just talk about the sacra of Mithras. You talk about the sacred things, the rites. And so even just looking at how in the ancient world people talk about Mithras, they talk about the worship of Mithras, the act of performing cult to Mithras. And so instead of talking about Mithraism, I think we should take a cue from the people who actually knew in antiquity and talk about the worship of Mithras

or Mithras worship. Well, let's go on to that now. And that's a perfect cue for us to go on to the sources we have from antiquity talking about the worship of Mithras. But Matt, just before we really go on to that, something I really found interesting from what you were saying there was how we have a later Christian writer writer i think you said 13th century armenian who makes this link between christianity and the celebration of mithras on the 25th of december and what really struck me there what really barked out to me was that a few months ago i had a podcast about nero being the antichrist and how this portrayal of nero emerges we think from a christian writer in the fourth century,

like him just going a bit further and linking the two together. And it seems like we've got a similar case here, where one Christian writer's just gone a bit further to link the birth of Christ with the Mithras festival. Absolutely. And actually, it's not even a Mithras festival. It's a festival of Saul, of the sun. And so there's another link that connects Mithras festival. It's a festival of Sol, of the sun. And so there's another link that connects Mithras to the sun. The sun isn't always and everywhere Mithras, even if Mithras

often has a kind of solar element. And when we look at the actual practice, in inscriptions from temples where Mithras was worshipped, sometimes they give us dates of when they do important things. None of these is around the winter solstice. And archaeologically, I'm an archaeologist. I'm interested in the material culture. I'm interested in what people actually do when they worship Mithras. If we look at the actual materials that people use when they worship, sometimes we can date them within the year by season because they'll burn things like fruits and fruits are very seasonal, right? They're ripe at a certain time of year. Or they'll sacrifice and butcher goats or pigs, which also have a kind of seasonality

to them. And if we can tell how many months old a pig or a goat is, we can tell when it was born and what time of year it would have been killed. So if we look at, say, a Mithraeum in Belgium, a new find, relatively recent find at Tienen, people were getting together June, July, roughly. I excavated a Mithraeum in Romania. And similarly, if we look at the material, it looks like they're getting together for their big feast. They're doing something really important in the middle of October. So there is really no evidence that the winter solstice played a role in Mithras worship under the Roman Empire. So let's go on to the sources that talk about Mithras worship in antiquity. And our literary sources, first of all, I'm guessing we have Christian sources that don't give a very positive

portrayal of Mithras worship in antiquity. We do. A lot of Christian authors write about Mithraism in a polemic context, right? They are putting it down. They are trying to separate themselves from it. And it's a little bit kind of what Freud might call the narcissism of petty difference. The Christians look at this and they see something that looks kind of similar to what they're doing. And so they really have to draw a firm line between what those devil-worshipping Mithraeus do and what they themselves as Christians are doing. So we have a handful of contemporary

Christian authors who give us little snippets. And it's usually only one line, two lines, where they say, yeah, they have initiation rites, and they have bread involved, and they eat meals together. Then we have a number of Christian writers who are writing long after the worship of Mithras has disappeared in the Roman Empire. And we don't know what kinds of sources they're using, whether they're just imagining things. But let me give you one example. We have one Christian author, Saint Jerome, who comes in and he says there are seven grades in the cult of Mithras, and worshippers proceed through

these grades, and he names them off. And we have some archaeological evidence that that's true. In Ostia, Rome's port city, there's a Mithraeum where it lays out images, these seven grades. So there we go. We've got confirmation. But then we have another Christian author who comes in and says they have 80 grades and just gives a totally different number. And then if we look at a site on the edge of the Roman Empire, a site like Dura Europas, we've got most of those same grades listed in graffiti that

people have scratched on the wall saying, congratulations to so-and-so making this grade, or hail so-and-so of this grade. But we also have some that don't appear in Jerome, that don't appear anywhere else, that are just weird, and that point to the variety of Mithras worship across the Roman Empire, which is another reason we shouldn't think of this as a coherent Mithraism. Early Christianity, of course, is all kinds of fragmented. But the worship of Mithras is similarly lots of little individual communities who do different things. And before going on to the archaeology really in depth and in detail, do we have any non-Christian sources from antiquity that can give us an insight into Mithras worship? We do. We have one writer, the Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry, who writes

this exegetical work that looks at a couple lines in Homer's Odyssey and tries to explain these as evidence for his whole Neoplatonic cosmology and says even Homer understood this truth about the world. And Porphyry also slips in a few lines about Mithras. And the reason he does that is because he wants to show that the alleged founder of Mithraism, of Mithras worship, Zoroaster, the Persian thinker that we might recognize as the founder of what we call Zoroastrianism, was actually the inventor of Mithraism, but that Zoroaster too recognized these same truths about how the cosmos were set up. Now, I think in many ways, when Porphyry does this, he's just taking something that's kind of a blank

slate for many people in the Roman Empire as a way of confirming the things he's trying to package as truths. And some modern scholars have looked at the passages in Porphyry and even called them the key to understanding Roman Mithraism. This is the thing that unlocks the symbolism of Mithras cult. But again, that sort of comes from the idea that what we want to do is create a religion where the thing that ties it all together is the thought content, the belief system, the dogma, if you will, of a religion. And that's not what Mithras worship is. Mithras worship is about worship. It's about doing. And actions can have any number of meanings woven around them or freighted onto them. You mentioned Zoroaster and you mentioned Persia. So Mithras, this figure,

it emerges into the Roman Empire, but it comes from the east. Sort of. So we have this god Mithras, and we know Mitra is sort of a mid to lower range deity in ancient Persia. He appears in the Avestas. He appears also in India later on. But in the Roman Empire, the worship of Mithras is its own thing. There is no cult of Mithra that looks like the things do in the Roman Empire anywhere outside the borders of the Roman Empire. The worship of Mithra is so closely tied to the Roman Empire and to the social structures and the political structures of empire that it never flourishes. So what seems to happen is that someone, probably in or around the city of Rome itself, takes this minor Persian deity and uses him to create this new form of worship. And in creating it, he comes up with a set of images and ideas that basically invert and turn on their head everything that a Roman might expect about

worshiping gods. So the first thing is he takes a Persian god, Mithra, and dresses him up to look like a Roman version of a Persian. He puts a felt cap on this guy. He puts him in something no self-respecting Greek or Roman would ever wear, trousers, and makes him look so foreign. And then in designing sanctuaries to worship this god, instead of setting them up on a podium the way that you would set most temples in Rome, he sinks it down underground a little bit. So you've got to go down into a cave to subvert those expectations. And at the heart of almost every sanctuary dedicated to Mithras is a central image that shows Mithras stabbing a bull. It's an image that we don't find anywhere, again, outside of the Roman

Empire. We never find it in Persia. We never find it in India, where Mithra also appears as a figure getting worship. It only appears in the Roman Empire. And this iconography, which is so distinctive for Roman Mithras worship, is pretty much drawn directly out of a classical repertoire of images. We find it, for example, on friezes showing victories, the goddess Victory sacrificing bulls herself. And the fact that this central image is based on a Roman iconography tells us right away that this is a form of worship that is conceived of and created within the Roman Empire itself. This is all astonishing and bizarre at the same time that the Romans have said they create this worship, this cult, which has all these completely abnormal aspects to it,

this subterranean temple, the iconography. I think bizarre might be the wrong word, but it just feels that, just listening to that now. It does. But you have to remember that the Roman Empire, especially in the period when the worship of Mithras seems to emerge, which is the end of the first century CE, and it spreads really rapidly, this is a time of real religious innovation. Let me give you another example from a generation later that we know about thanks to a text written by the Greek thinker and satirist Lucian. And the text is called Alexander the False Prophet. And it's all about this guy who, in the 150s, 160s, invents an oracle cult that makes him rich. And he does this by basically planting what seems to be an ancient prophecy and then using some special effects to convince people that he has a magic snake that gives real prophecies. And you might think, okay,

this all sounds a little bit ridiculous. This is a cult that is so popular, it attracts some of the most important senators of the Roman Empire. The snake god Glycon gets pictured on coins from the town where this oracle is based. It becomes a big thing across the Roman Empire. And it's in this context of invention and particularly freelance religious experts who use a combination of salesmanship and personal charisma to basically make a living for themselves, draw adherence and build communities. That's also really interesting. So it's not a specific sector of society which seems to enjoy Mithraism more than others, as it were. You can find examples of Mithraic worship, whether

it's in the centre of the empire or on the frontiers. Absolutely. For a long time, it was thought that the worship of Mithras was particularly popular among soldiers. And it's true that in parts of the empire, soldiers do make up a huge number of worshipers. So in Britain, for example, most of our sanctuaries to Mithras are in military zones or outside military camps. But if you start looking at other parts of the empire, so along the Danube, along the Rhine, along those frontiers. They're militarized zones, but the people who are actually worshipping Mithras, for the most part, seem to be civilian administrators, especially early on. Later, it gains more popularity with other groups as it expands,

and as people seem to actively proselytize and bring people into these communities. and bring people into these communities. But it's true. It spreads from soldiers to high-ranking officers to slaves to everyone in between, and eventually some very high-ranking figures. You mentioned earlier the gradings of this cult and the initiations, as it were, and these references we have to it. The archaeology, which must be, as you said, is so crucial to understanding more about the worship of Mithras. Is it telling anything really substantial about these initiations, about the gradings, about what these worshippers would have to do? So again, we have a couple of texts that describe have a couple of texts that describe harrowing initiation rituals. And if you think about initiations, the point is to make someone feel that they've undergone a change. And one of the

ways you do that is through rites of terror that absolutely terrify the person undergoing that change, that sear this act, this moment into their mind, and they come out on the other side feeling changed. This is a life-changing moment. And again, we have some ancient sources who talk about this. We also have a couple of images that come from two places in particular. One is a Mithraeum in Italy at Capua. The other is a Mithraeum in Judea at Caesarea. And they seem to show these kinds of rites of terror. So we have, for example, one image at Capua where there's someone kneeling and he's stripped naked and his hands are bound behind his back. And he's accompanied by someone who stands behind him, who seems to be the guy leading him through these horrifying rites. And in front of him is the

person leading the rites. So we get a sense, right? He's totally stripped naked. He is vulnerable. He is kneeling before these figures in subjection that give us some sense of that. There are a few archaeological traces here and there, too. For example, from a Mithraeum in Germany, we have what looks to be a trick sword. So it's a sword that has a curved section in the middle so that you can stick it so that it looks like it's going through someone when it's not. And this seems to be like a special effect to create the illusion that someone's been stabbed by a sword without actually killing them. And there's even a reference, and again,

it's probably an invented story, that one of the emperors went a little too far in the rites of Mithras and someone got killed during the initiation. So maybe that's a possibility on the table, but it probably doesn't happen because you don't want to kill your client base. If we can expand on that quickly, I mean, so which emperor was this? For the later emperors, was it considered a virtue or a vice if they were in the Mithras worship? This was Commodus. And in this case, it wasn't so much that he was participating, it was that he took it a little too far, even though he is one of the stereotypical bad emperors. Otherwise, we don't really see emperors participating,

except for when we get into the later empire, we have the Tetrarchs who are involved in the rededication of a Mithraeum at a military camp. So it doesn't seem to be either a good thing or a bad thing. Some emperors might for particular reasons, but it's the fact that Commodus just goes a little too far. Okay. And we've been mentioning quite a lot of he's at the moment. And I must ask, do we know anything about women in the cult in antiquity? We know that every dedicant in sanctuaries to Mithras is a man. And there is some evidence that women were totally excluded from the cult. That said, there are different levels of involvement with any one of these new cults that draws members and that focuses on community feast in the middle of summer there.

And it must have involved hundreds of people based on the number of cups and plates and the amount of meat that was butchered and served at this banquet. And it must have drawn people from all over the region to come to this big feast party. And I would be shocked if they could drum up only enough men to do that. So I think there are certainly degrees of involvement. And for the most part, yeah, the cult is reserved for men. Interesting. And let's then go on to these, you mentioned the one in Belgium just there, and you've mentioned quite a few in passing from Britain to Ostia to Capua, as we've been chatting to do at Europos.

So let's chat about a few of these Mithraeum examples that we have surviving from the Roman imperial period. I'd like first to start off with the one that you've been doing a lot of work on in Romania. Yes. So for the past five or six years, I have co-directed excavation of a sanctuary to Mithras at the site of Apulum, modern Alba Iulia, this former capital of Transylvania set in the middle of Romania. because a local developer wanted to build a hotel around 2008. And before you build a hotel close to a historic center, you of course need to get archaeologists in to make sure there's nothing there that's really important. So the archaeologists from the local museum came in, and they dug a test pit just to see what was there, and they found very little. They dug a second test pit at this future hotel site, found nothing, dug a third, found almost nothing. And of course, it's always the last one

in archaeology where you find the exciting stuff. And they came down on the foundations of a building, and these foundations were in stone. And as they started to clear away the dirt around them, a whole series of inscriptions emerged dedicated to Mithras and to his related attendant figures. Well, at this point, you remember 2008, we were in the middle of a financial crisis, and having such an important archaeological site, the developer didn't want to continue on. So the whole thing was reburied. And that's where I came in partnering with a colleague of mine in Romania to re-excavate the site scientifically and to expand the excavations to understand what Mithras worship actually looked like. What did people actually do in this cult? And so for the next few years, we took students, we trained them in archaeological techniques,

and excavated this sanctuary. And like many Mithraea, it's designed in a particular way. There's an entrance, you walk in that entrance, and you're in a kind of antechamber. There's a closet in the antechamber where you might store things you're using for the cult. And then there's a dog-leg turn before you enter into the main room of the sanctuary. And this is important. The worship of Mithras takes place indoors for the most part, and that's something that also distinguishes it from most forms of worship in the Roman Empire, where most of your things happen outside. Sacrificing an animal is messy. You're burning things, which you generally try to avoid doing indoors so you don't start a fire. And these

things happen outside in courtyards in front of temples. But in the worship of Mithras, everything, most things, happen indoors. So as you enter that antechamber, you turn a corner and you're confronted with a room that, again, distinguishes itself from a regular temple in your normal run-of-the-mill religious experience because you go down some steps. And this central room is like a narrow aisle that's flanked by two benches. And these benches are made with their sides constructed out of big, rough rocks to give the whole space the feeling of a cave. And that's one of the ways that ancient authors describe sanctuaries to Mithras, is as caves, giving it that inside, dark feel.

At the very rear was a raised podium. And on that podium was probably where the image of Mithras stabbing the poet doesn't survive from our Mithraeum, but these images are everywhere. That's where that stood. And so worshippers would come in, they would recline on these benches to drink and to dine and to chat with each other, probably to sing hymns, to say prayers, and to look at that image of Mithras. Initially, from what you're saying, the image that you get, it feels quite eerie at first, but then you say you have all these reclining places where people would sit and talk in it, and it feels more comfortable. Yeah. So there's a mix of the eeriness and the strangeness

that certainly marks this off as something that's not run-of-the-mill and not the sort of thing you do every day. It is a special experience going into one of these spaces. But at the same time, there are creature comforts, right? As you recline and you dine on a special meal. And in a number of sanctuaries to Mithras, we find chicken bones. meal. And in a number of sanctuaries to Mithras, we find chicken bones. And nowadays, right, we're used to like these big Purdue chickens with their oversized breasts and lots of meat. Chickens in the ancient world are small birds. They're bony birds, but they're still tasty and they're a special meal. You eat them really on ritual occasions. Chicken meat is an expensive meat.

So you're eating something that is delicious and special and different and that transports you to a very different kind of world. And at our Mithraeum too, for example, we have some evidence for a bear paw, which suggests that people probably were lying on blankets made of bear skins or otherwise had these displayed there, maybe using them as blankets to keep warm in the colder months. But it is a strange space, but a comfortable space because you're there to eat and drink and feast. Absolutely. And just so crystal clear, this Mithraeum at Apulum in the Roman times,

was this a military settlement? Mithraeum at Apulum, in the Roman times, this was, was this a military settlement? So the site of Apulum itself housed the main legionary base that was there for the pacification of the new province of Dacia. So it was very much a military site. Now, our Mithraeum isn't in the camp. It sits outside the camp and military camps develop suburbs in the Roman Empire, places where people live, where people work, that people settle in to provide services to the camp, to piggyback on the economy of the camp, things like that. And in our case, we have evidence that the person who paid for our Mithraeum,

because he's the one who dedicates all of these inscriptions, was a slave, Vitalis, who was involved in the imperial custom system. So he's not a military person. And again, this is further evidence that even when we have sanctuaries to Mithras close to military forts the people who use them aren't always directly involved in the military they're not always soldiers and well that goes into the next question and if we go to another frontier hadrian's wall and we look at mithras worship there do you think mithras worship was popular among soldiers predominantly or do you think we could also see people coming from nearby

civilian settlements that we know were near the forts on Hadrian's Wall? So one of the things that seems to happen with most communities of Mithras worshippers is that they're built up of pre-existing social groups. This is how they spread, right? You bring your buddy and he becomes a participant in this worship. So when we have, as we do on Hadrian's Wall, military communities, chances are that they stay military. So to give you an example, if we go to Karabroth, we have multiple commanders of a unit dedicating altars in the same Mithra sanctuary. And the people who are worshiping there are probably members of a unit dedicating altars in the same Mithras Sanctuary, and the people who are

worshipping there are probably members of his unit. Likewise, if you go to other Mithras sanctuaries, we have a whole list of members from the site of Verunum. It seems like some of them are family members, some of them are freedmen who work in the same industry. They're all of these pre-existing groups whose borders stay within those groups. And what about if we then go a bit further south? Sorry, my geography is going from one place to another pretty quickly, but another key place in Roman Britain, not in the military zone, but at the heart of the province in London. Absolutely. And the London Mithraeum, which has been wonderfully re-displayed now with new

excavations in the area around it, it's worth going to visit if it's open for visitors with the current COVID situation. That seems to probably be a much more civilian group. The other thing to bear in mind, especially in Britain, is that our evidence for Mithras worship in Britain in most provinces comes from inscribed or figured stone monuments. And the demographics in Britain of the people who are paying for and carving stone monuments are especially the military and people in very urban, rich places like London. There's not a lot of in-between groups. Most civilian settlements and small towns in Britain don't have a lot of stonework. And so one of the wonderful things

about the Tienen Mithraeum in Belgium is that they were able to identify it without any of those stone monuments. I think that as new excavations happen and people pay very close attention to small finds and to faunal remains, to animal bones, we might very well start to identify more Mithraea in non-military contexts in Britain. That's very interesting. So is that why it was perhaps initially thought that Mithras worship was more popular among the soldiers than, say, like the everyday citizens, because they had more archaeology surviving from these inscriptions written from the militarized zone? But actually, the evidence from other communities is there, but it just doesn't survive as well. I think that's definitely a big part of it, especially in provincial milieu,

the biggest consumers of stone. And the people who have stone carvers on hand and who are able to support industries of stone carvers are military communities and then the civilian towns that kind of build up around them. So I think that has led to an over-representation of military things, or at least Mithraea close to military settlements that are big users of stone. Well, from one edge of the Roman Empire to another, because there's one other real frontier site that I'd love to talk about, the Syrian Pompeii, Dura Europos. This site, I'm guessing also, and I think you mentioned it earlier as well, we do have evidence for worship of Mithras. Absolutely. So Dura Europos is this amazing small town on the edge of the Euphrates River in the middle of Syria. It's briefly taken over from the Parthian Empire, the Arsac Lucius Verus, in his campaigns in the East, brings Dura into the Roman Empire for about 100 years. And Dura is not only wonderful because it's a well-preserved

site that was excavated, especially in the 20s and 30s to what was at the time a high standard. But it preserves one of the most complete sanctuaries to Mithras in the Roman Empire. It preserves the earliest Christian building and baptistry, which also has surviving decoration. And it has the best preserved synagogue in the empire. And it just is this wonderful microcosm of life and religious life in the wider Roman Empire. I mean, does it emphasize the fact that there's a Christian center of worship and there's this worship of Mithras and the synagogue as well? Does it really emphasize how Christianity and Mithras worship was for quite a significant amount of time living side by side, shall we say.

Absolutely. And I think probably, although our early Christian authors are all about polemic, there's probably a great deal of cross-pollination that goes on there. And Dura's one example of this. Granted, the Christian community seems to establish itself much later than the Mithras community. Our evidence for the Christian building is really from probably about the 240s CE, whereas our Sanctuary at Mithras was built by 169 CE, so almost immediately after the site became a small Roman garrison. And from all these sites we mentioned on the frontiers at the moment, we'll go into one in the centre of the empire in a second, but can we see some clear similarities in the architecture, let's say, of the design and perhaps in the iconography, as you've mentioned, but also some

clear differences in how Mithras was worshipped in each part of this empire? It's not even each part of the empire, because it's not geographically bounded. We see differences based on the kinds of backgrounds people bring. So for example, at Dura Europas, we have the early sanctuary set up there by a group of Palmyrene archers who are based there. And these archers probably trained in the Danube. And the image of Mithras that the first one to make an image of Mithras dedicates looks very much like scenes from the Danube, because that's where he was exposed. So it's not geographic so much as it is he probably learned the cult serving in the Danube region or alongside soldiers from that region. Likewise, at Caesarea in Judea, the Mithraeum, one of the images of Mithra stabbing a bull, is carved on a little white marble plaque that's like hand size and portable, and it's carved in a style and a

material used in the Danubian region. So rather than thinking in terms of there's a Syrian form of Mithras worship, or a Spanish form of Mithras worship, or an Italian, it's better to think about this sort of group of people who learn how to worship Mithras in a particular milieu, and when they move, they bring with them and maybe recombine with other people who have learned to worship Mithras in a slightly different way and create these wonderful rich hybrids that start to look different from one another. Wow, that's really interesting that worshipping Mithras in their unique ways, as it were. And do we have a good example of this also in the heart of the empire at Ostia?

So Ostia is a special case. Ostia was excavated in clearance style under Mussolini. So we have one to two thirdsthirds of the city that's well known and excavated, and our picture of Ostia is changing every day thanks to new work that's being done there. In Ostia, we have a whole slew of Mithras sanctuaries, and this seems to be the case in many medium to large towns in the empire. So at Poetovio, for example, as we move back to the Danubian region, there are also a whole series of four or five sanctuaries to Mithras. At Apulam, there are probably at least four or five sanctuaries to Mithras. And Ostia, we just happen to have more of them excavated. And to a certain extent, there's a distinctly Ostian strain of Mithras worship, because these communities do seem to interact with one another to an extent.

And at Ostia, we have a lot more astrological symbolism than we do at other sites. And this interest in astrology at Ostia isn't totally shared by other sites, and yet the Ostian version has become paradigmatic. It's the thing that everyone looks to when they want to reconstruct what was Mithraism. Well, they look at these excavated Ostian examples and say, this is the standard, when in fact Ostia does its own thing. And in fact, again, one of the Mithraea that's been taken as exemplary and the key and used to make the model Mithraeum that all of them reflect or depart from a little bit or maybe misunderstand comes from a private house in Ostia that may even have belonged to a Neoplatonic philosopher who was really interested in astrology and cosmic things. So it's not exemplary at all. It is the product of an

individual spinning significances around these core shared elements in a unique way. Matthew, all these Mithraea that we've been talking about, whether it's in Romania or Britain or Austria or in Syria, what does this all tell us really about the worship of Mithras? I think what the diversity and similarity tells us is that we have some basic tenets or some basic materials and even bags of showmanship tricks that are shared, that are, as I say, spun in different ways and given different significances. So let me give you a couple of examples of that. In my own neck of the woods in the Danubian region, and particularly between Apulam and a couple of other sites where the primary worshippers all seem to be members of the imperial custom system, they develop a very unique way of dedicating to Mithras. They dedicate to the transit of the god. Now, I have no idea what that actually

is. In one of these Mithraea, it comes alongside a statue that shows Mithras in his Persian hat and trousers with a bull slung over one shoulder, and he's striding and walking with it, so he's transiting the bull. So maybe it's something like that. But this kind of dedication, this practice, really only comes in Mithraea populated by people who learn about the cult in a customs milieu. Now, if we look a little bit more widely in the Mithraea Mopulum 3 that I excavated, there was a little box made of tiles buried under the floor. And in that box were the remains of a feast and sacrifice that happened at one moment

before the floor surface was laid. And there are similar boxes, commemorative boxes, with the remains of feasts under the floors of Mithraea in Britain, Carabrough, some in Germany, Dura Europis in Syria, really throughout the Roman Empire. But not every Mithraeum has this. And it's interesting that the Mithraea where customs officials worshipped, they don't all have this. In fact, my Mithraeum at Apulam is the only one of those customs Mithraea that has this box. And so it's a perfect example of how someone comes in with a dedicatory practice learned in one milieu, dedicating to transitus in the customs milieu, combines with a ritual expertise of how you found a Mithraeum with a particular rite that is

commemorated in a box under the floor. that expertise comes from a different milieu, and they blend together to create something new at that site. Another example of the bag of tricks that a Mithras worshiper or a Mithras community charismatic leader might use comes from Tinen, and then from a newly excavated sanctuary to Mithras at Hawarta in Syria at Tinan. They made this big crater, this mixing bowl, and inside of the bowl was a hollow ceramic tube that ran up to the edge and ended in a snake head, so that if you warmed up the contents and boiled the contents of this pot,

warmed up the contents and boiled the contents of this pot, the snakehead would squirt out boiling steam and spit boiling steam of the contents of the urn, right? It's kind of a cool special effect of a spitting snake. Well, in Huerta, and so far it's the only other site where this has been found, there's a similar vessel with that same hollow tube that lets the snake spit. And so that's one of the things that shows how showmanship, how technologies of wonder and that bag of technical tricks might be shared within the context of Mithras worshipping experts. That's amazing. Can we just call it ancient magic, as it were? It is. It's special effects. And there's a real interest in special effects in worship of the high Roman Empire, too. Absolutely, especially with religion. And perhaps you can then see why

maybe some early Christians, perhaps, could we say, saw Mithras worship as quite a threat because of its popularity? It's true that Mithras worship spread across the Roman Empire, but this is again one of those modern myths. The 19th century scholar Ernst Renan once said, well, if the world hadn't become Christian, it would have become Mithraist. And this is one of those myths that we still often live with today, that Mithraism was really popular. And it's true it had widespread, but each one of these communities, each one of these sanctuaries could house about 25, 30 people at a time. And even if you have five or six of these in a town of several thousand, you're not looking at a majority of the town. You're looking at a handful of people participating. So yes, it's widespread, but it's never like a majority cult. And even if

it were, the fact that it's mostly for men means half the population of the Roman Empire couldn't participate anyway. So it was never going to be an everyone participates in this, a mainstream thing. It's these little subgroups and sub communities that pick it up and run with it and finally matthew to wrap this all up do we know anything about how mithras worship dies down we know that in the late fourth century emperor theodosius bans pagan worship in the empire we see many of these places like the serapium in Alexandria burned to the ground by early Christians. Do we think that Mithras worship is significantly affected by this too? So recently, my colleague David Walsh has argued that looking at all of the ends of Mithrae and when they go out of use, that it really has very little to do with the advent of Christianity. Very

few of these Mithra sanctuaries meet violent ends. And we have to remember that even when things burn down, it's not necessarily a sign that it's Christians doing the burning. It's an indoor cult. There are indoor sacrifices. These rooms are lit with oil lamps. Things catch fire in the ancient world. So we don't really see a violent end to Mithras worship. In fact, what we see, if we look at all the Mithraea across the empire, not just the ones from the 3rd, 4th, and 5th century, but the ones from the 2nd century too, each Mithraea community, each sanctuary, kind of has a fixed lifespan of maybe three to four generations of worshippers. And this is exactly what we might expect in communities and cults focused around charismatic leadership,

right? So whoever's in charge of the community, it's that person with their bag of tricks and expertise that holds it together. And when they die, you know, they've got a successor. Maybe the successor keeps things up. Maybe their successor keeps things up. But eventually, there's just a centrifugal force when you have a cult and a form of worship in a community that's based on individual leaders, charisma, and even social groups that themselves tend to fissure and change as we move into late antiquity. So I think that that's a much better explanation than seeing Christianity ending Mithras worship, especially because one of the things we're finding archaeologically now is that there are more late antique Mithras sanctuaries than we thought there were,

and the ones that we do have seem to continue on a little bit later, certainly past Theodosius ending pagan worship in the Roman Empire, or at least trying to, making a statement that now we shall end this. And that's just not what happens. Matthew, this has been a brilliant chat. You've come on the show at short notice, you've debunked these myths surrounding Mithras worship and Christianity. And you've talked all about Mithras worship. It's been absolutely enlightening. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

And Merry Christmas. Thank you so much. Happy holidays. Happy solstice. Happy feast of sol in victus. And happy Saturnalia. Happy Saturnalia. And thanks for having me to talk about a subject dear to my heart. Thank you.