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Roman Religions
Companion to Roman Religion edited by Jorg Ruepke (Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World: Blackwell) provides a comprehensive treatment of Roman religion within its cultural, social, and historical contexts. Written by international experts, this volume offers a new approach, directing its focus away from the gods and concentrating on the human-figures of Roman religion. The book addresses the media through which religion was experienced and shared, including epigraphy, mosaics, wall-paintings, drama, and poetry, and provides, for example, the first ever history of religious motifs on coins. Placing the various discourses and practices into a larger geographical and cultural framework, this volume also considers the cults, gods, iconography, rituals, and texts that were exported widely throughout the empire, revealing the sprawling landscape of Roman religion. Judaism and Christianity are firmly placed within a strongly historical approach, covering the period from the eighth century BC to the fourth century AD.
Contributors to this volume: Cecilia Ames, Clifford Ando,
Nicole Belayche, Frank Bernstein,
Olivier de Cazanove, Ulrike Egelhaaf-Gaiser, Denis Feeney,
Friederike Fless, Karl Galinsky, Richard Gordon, Rudolf Haensch,
Stefan Heid, Peter Herz, Frances Hickson Hahn, Marietta Horster, Ted
Kaizer, Annemarie Kaufmann-Heinimann, Hartmut Leppin, Jack N.
Lightstone, Attilio Mastrocinque, Katja Moede, Eric Orlin,
C. Robert Phillips III, Athanasios Rizakis, Veit Rosenberger, Jorg
Rupke, Michele Renee Salzman, John Scheid, Christopher Smith,
William Van Andringa, Jonathan Williams.
Excerpt: Roman Religion
Why dedicate a book of over five hundred pages to a
religion as stone-dead as that of one of thousands of ancient
Mediterranean cities?
For the choice of the city, it is easy to find arguments.
Rome was one of the most successful cities ever to build an empire,
which comprised millions of square kilometers and lasted close to a
millennium. It was and is a cultural and religious center, even if
the culture was frequently Greek and the religion is known nowadays
as Catholic Christianity. Finally, Rome remains a tourist center, a
symbol of a past that has succeeded in keeping its presence in
school books and university courses. And yet, what has this all to
do with Roman religion?
"Roman religion" as used here is an abbreviation for
"religious signs, practices, and traditions in the city of Rome."
This is a local perspective. Stress is not given to internal
differences between different groups or traditions. Instead, the
accent is placed on their common history (part I) and range of media
(part II), shared or transferred practices (part III), and the
social and institutional context (part IV).
Many religious signs were exchangeable. The fourth-century
author of a series of biographies on earlier emperors (the so-called
Historia Augusta) had no difficulties in imagining an emperor from
the early third century venerating Christ among the numerous
statuettes in his private rooms. Gestures, sacrificial terminology,
the structure of hymns were equally shared among widely varying
groups. Nevertheless some stable systems, sets of beliefs, and
practices existed and were cared for by specialists or transported
and replicated by traveling individuals. They were present in Rome,
effective and affective, but a set of beliefs, a group, or even an
organization had a history of its own beyond Rome, too. Here, the
local perspective is taken to ask how they were modified in Rome or
the Roman period (part V).
"Rome," the name of the city, finally, is merely a cipher
for the Roman empire. In the long process of its expansion and
working, the religious practices of the center were exported, in
particular the cult of the living or dead emperors and the cult of
the dominating institutions, the "goddess Rome" (dea Roma) or the
"Genius of the senate" (Genius senatus). This was part of the
representation of Roman power to its subjects (see chapter 22), but
at the same time it offered space for the activities of non-Roman
local elites to get in touch with the provincial and central
authorities and to distinguish themselves from their fellow-citizens
(chapter 23). As communication between center and periphery — and
other attractive centers in a periphery that was marginal in
administrative terms only — these activities touched upon the
religious practices in the city of Rome, too. "Roman religion"
cannot be isolated from the empire, at least for the imperial
period, if we take for granted the character of earlier Rome as a
Hellenistic city on the margins of Hellenic culture (Hubert Cancik,
p.c.). Again, that perspective holds true in both directions. The
history of Mediterranean religions in the epoch of the Roman empire
must acknowledge the fact that Persian Mithraism, Hellenistic
Judaism, and Palestinian Christianity were Roman religions, too. It
is the final section of this book that explicitly takes this wider
geographical stance (part VI).
An Ancient Religion
Roman religion did not grow out of nothing. Italy, above
all in its coastal regions, was already party to a long-distance
cultural exchange in the Mediterranean basin in a prehistoric phase.
The groups that were to grow into the urbanization of the Roman
hills did not need to invent religion. Religious signs and practices
were present from the ancient Near East, via Phoenician culture, at
least indirectly via Carthage, and via Greece and the Etruscans.
Speaking an Indo-European language, these groups shared a religious
"knowledge" in the form of names or rudimentary institutions in the
area of cultural practices that we call religion. Even if historians
of Roman religion do not any longer privilege the distant common
heritage of Celts, Romans, Greeks, Persians, and Indians over the
intensive cultural exchange of historical times and the immense
diffusion of practices from the non-Indo-European Near Eastern
cultures, some constellations might find an explanation in those
distant areas by comparing cultures more isolated from each other
in later times.
Cultural exchange — as said above — was not restricted to
the founding phases. It is hard to overestimate the diffusion of
religious practices within and from the Latins, Umbrians, and
Etruscans. In detail, the range is not clear at all. There are
definite similarities, a shared culture (or, to use a Greek term,
koine), in votive and burial practices. To say the same for the
architecture of sanctuaries is neither contradicted by the evidence
nor massively supported. We can suppose that many characteristics of
the gods, the fascination of statuary and anthropomorphic
representation, were shared. The very few longer non-Latin texts
demonstrate surprising similarities in calendrical practices (the
Etruscan tegula Capuana from the fifth century BC) or in priestly
organization and ritual detail (the Umbrian tabulae Iguvinae from
the second to first centuries BC). Unfortunately, non-Latin Italian
languages ceased to be spoken (and especially to be written) in the
first century BC and the first century AD as a consequence of Roman
domination. Latin antiquarian writers adduce many instances of the
borrowing of middle Italian practices and symbols in order to
explain contemporary Roman institutions.
The continuous presence of self-conscious Greek writers is
not the only reason to pay an ever-growing attention to Greek
influences and their (frequently deeply modifying) reception. From
the beginning of the great "colonization" — that is, especially from
the eighth century — onward, Greeks were present in Italy and served
as translators of the achievement of the earlier civilizations of
Egypt and the "fertile crescent" of Anatolia, Syria, Mesopotamia,
Palestine. Anthropomorphic images, temple building, and the alphabet
came by this route. Influences were extensive and continuous.
Despite the early presence of the alphabet it was not before the
third century BC that Rome started to adopt Greek techniques of
literary production on a larger scale. Many of the rivalries of
Italian townships of the second century BC —frequently resulting in
large-scale temple building — were fought out in terms of Greek
cultural products. Competing with Roman elites meant being more
Greek. Much of what provincials thought to be Roman and adopted in
the process of Romanization during the following centuries stemmed
from Greece.
The "Greece," however, of this intensive phase of cultural
exchange — intensified by Roman warfare and plunder in Greek
territories — was Hellenistic Greece, a cultural space that faced
large territories. In the aftermath of the expansion by Alexander
the Great (d. 323 BC) and on the basis of the earlier establishment
of Greek ports and trading centers on Mediterranean coastlands, this
Hellenistic culture had developed techniques of delocalization, of
universalizing ancient Greek traditions. It offered grids of
history, a mythic geography that could integrate places and
societies like Rome and the Romans. Greeks thought Romans to be
Trojans long before Romans discovered the usefulness of being
Trojans in talking with Greeks.
Religion for a City and an Empire
Roman religion was the religion of one of hundreds of
Mediterranean cities. It was a Hellenized city and religion. Yet it
found many a special solution, for reasons of its geographic
location, local traditions, immigrants. The most important
contingent factor, certainly, was its military success. At least
from the fourth century BC onward, Rome organized an aggressive and
efficient military apparatus, managing hegemony and expansion first
within Italy, then within the Mediterranean basin, finally as far as
Scotland, the northern German lowland plain, the southern
Carpathians, the coast of the Black Sea, Armenia, Arabia, and the
northern edge of the Sahara. Preliminary to that was the
orchestrated growth of the Roman nobility through the immigration
of Italian elites.
These processes had consequences for the shape of religion
at Rome. There is a strong emphasis on control, of both
centralization and presence (see chapters 21 and 16). Public rituals
were led by magistrates, priestly positions filled by members
of the political elite, mass participation directed into
temporary and then more and more permanent architectural structures
in the center of Rome. At the same time, religion remained
independent in a peculiar sense: gods could be asked to move, but
not ordered to do so; priesthoods could be presented with
candidates, but co-opted them in their own right; the transfer of
public property to imported gods was the subject of political
decisions, but their rituals were not. Being not directly, subjected
to political decision, religion offered a powerful source for
legitimizing political decisions; it remained what Georg Simmel
called a "third authority."
The dominant Roman model for religion was not expansionist;
it was rather absorbing. Numerous "gods" — that class of signs the
centrality of which within a set of social interaction makes us term
these practices a "religion" — in the forms of statues, statuettes,
images, or mere names, were imported, and — what is more — stories
about these gods, practices to venerate them, molds to multiply
them, knowledge about how to build temples for them, even religious
specialists, priests, accompanied them or were invented on the spot.
For the ancient metropolis, a city growing to the size of
several hundred thousand inhabitants, maybe close to a million by
the time of the early empire, the usual models to describe the
religions of Mediterranean cities do not hold. Surely, publicly
financed cult — sacra publica, to use the ancient technical term —
held an important share. The large buildings of public temples did
provide an important religious infrastructure. So did the publicly
financed rituals. Yet the celebrations of many popular rituals were
decentralized. This holds true for the merrymaking of the Saturnalia
(not a public holiday in the technical sense!) lasting for several
days, and for the cult of the dead ancestors and the visits to the
tombs during the Parentalia. We do not know how many people fetched
purgatory materials from the Vestal Virgins for the decentralized
rituals of the Parilia, the opening of the "pastoral year." Many
"public" rituals might have remained a matter of priestly
performance without a large following. The life-cycle rituals —
naming, leaving childhood, marrying, funeral — might utilize public
institutions, but were neither spatially nor temporally coordinated.
In times of personal crises, people often addressed deities and
visited places of cult that were not prominent or were even outside
of public ritual. Indeed, the growing importance of the centralized
rituals of the public games — to be witnessed especially from the
second half of the third century BC onward — were meant to
compensate for these deficits of "public religion." Hence the "civic
cults" (or "polls religion") does not form a sociologically useful
category.
Neither does "pantheon." The idea of "pantheon" as a
concept for the history of religion derives from the analysis of
ancient Near Eastern and especially Greek mythological text. These
seem to imply the existence of a limited group of deities (around
ten to twenty) that seem to be instituted in order to cover the most
important needs of the polity. Internal coherence is produced by
genealogical bonds or institutions by analogy to political ones: a
council of the gods, for instance. For Greece, the omnipresence of
the Homeric poems gives plausibility to the idea that local deities
were thought to act within or supplement the circle of the around
twelve most important gods, even if these were not present in the
form of statues or individually owned temples. For Rome and Italy
this plausibility is lacking. The aforementioned centralizing
rituals might further the idea of such a "pantheon" — technically,
by the way, a term to denote the exceptional case of a temple owned
by "all the gods." In contrast to the frequently used term di
immortales, designating the gods as an unstructured ensemble, the
circus processions would present a definite number of gods. Yet we
do not know whether the order of the gods was fixed or subject to
situational and individual decisions. Even if tradition — that is,
precedent — had its share, there was no codified body of
mythological tales that would constitute an order of gods or even an
inner circle of divine figures. The multitude of gods venerated in
the city of Rome was always increased by individual decisions —
those of generous members of the nobility and victorious generals
investing parts of their booty, as well as those of immigrants with
a foreign ethnic background. Likewise the decrease in number was due
to individual neglect of cultic performances or lack of interest in
maintaining and repairing sanctuaries.
These findings corroborate the earlier characterization of
Roman religion. Of course, Roman religion was an "embedded religion"
(see the introduction to chapter 25 for further methodological
considerations). That is, religious practices formed part of the
cultural practices of nearly every realm of daily life. Banqueting
usually followed sacrifice (chapter 19) and building a house or
starting a journey implied small sacrifices and prayers, as did
meetings of the senate, parades, or warfare. Religion, hence, was
not confined to temples and festivals; it permeated, to repeat this
point, all areas of society. Yet politics — to concentrate on the
most interesting realm in this respect —was not identical with
religion. Many stories, the huge number of non-public rituals,
individual "superstitions" (doing or believing more than is
necessary), the complicated procedures for installing priests: all
this demonstrates the independence of the gods and the possibility
of distinguishing between religion and politics, between res sacrae
and res publicae, in everyday life. It was religion thus
conceptualized, thus set apart, that could be used as a seemingly
independent source of legitimization for political action. This set
the guidelines for liberty and control and explains the harsh
reaction to every move that seemed to create an alternative, a
counter-public, by means of religion. To define these borders of
religion — one might say, from without — the technique of law was
employed, developing a body of regulations that finally appeared as
an important part of the law collections of late antiquity (see
chapter 29) and were of the utmost importance for the history of
religion in Europe.
If the Romans did not export their religion, they certainly
exported their concept of religion. Of course, the outcome varied
from area to area. The impact of particular Roman religious signs
(names and images of deities, for example) and practices (rituals,
festivals) was small in the Hellenized territories of the
Hellenistic east, even if Mishnaic Judaism can hardly be imagined
without the impact of Roman law and administration. Yet for parts of
northern Africa and the more northern European provinces of the
empire, the diffusion of stone temples and plastic images, of
writing and permanently individualized gifts to the gods, the
permanent visibility of votives, and the self-representation of the
elite by means of religious dedications — these traits (by no means
exclusively Roman practices) fundamentally changed
Religion
In terms of the history of religion the afore-mentioned
process is no "history of reception" or Wirkungsgeschichte. For
reasons of disciplinary traditions and political history, the end of
the fourth and the beginning of the fifth century offer an easy
borderline for this book. Publicly financed polytheistic religion
was ended, and non-Christians (with Jews as a special, frequently
not privileged exception) were discriminated against for the filling
of public offices. Yet cultic practices continued for centuries,
Christians being perhaps not willing or able to stop them or to
destroy the architectural infrastructure on which they were the
performers. As transmitted by texts, ancient — that is, Greek and
Roman — religion, together with the polytheistic practices in Judah
and Israel described in much less detail in the Bible, offered the
typological alternative to Judaism and Christianity and formed an
important pattern on which to describe and classify the practices of
"heathens" in the colonial expansion of Europeans. Thus, "religion"
could be coined as a general term encompassing Christianity and its
illegitimate equivalents: Asian, American, African, and Australian
idolatries.
The latter process, to be dated to early modern times,
implied that our perspective on religion is informed by
Christianity, a religion that developed from antiquity onward, and
furthered by centuries of theological faculties within European and
(in this perspective) lately non-European universities, a complex
and well-ordered theory to reflect on its beliefs and practices:
theology. Yet the ancient history of religion is no field to be
analyzed within the framework of the standard topics, the loci
communes, of Christian dogma, even if many of them found their
counterpart (and origin) in ancient philosophy. By the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the independent discipline
of "comparative religion" or "history of religion" tried to supplant
this scheme with series of topics like gods, beliefs, temples,
rituals, priests. These are helpful as appealing to common sense,
but ahistorical if applied as a system.
What is described as "Roman religion" in this book is of an
astonishing variety. Various are the phenomena, from Mithraic caves
to hilltop Capitolia, from the offering of paid services by
divinatory specialists (harioli) to colleges of freedmen whose
members met on a monthly basis. Various are the social functions,
from the pater familias who led the sacrifice to his own Genius, and
thus underlined his position as head of the family, to
neo-Pythagorean convictions that informed the preparation of one's
own burial and offered the prospect of a post-mortal existence.
For the purpose of a historical analysis, "religion" is
conceptualized by the authors of this book as human actions and
communication. These were performed on the presupposition that gods
existed who were part of one's own social or political group,
existed in the same space and time. They were to be treated by
analogy to human partners and superiors. That offered space for
wishful projections and experiments. What was helpful as regards
human superiors should be useful in dealing with the gods, too. What
was assumed to function among the gods should offer a model for
human behavior, for consuls and kings.
Without doubt, "gods" were important symbols, either in
direct representation or by their assumed existence behind the
attempts to communicate with them ritually. Methodologically,
however, it is important neither to engage in a debate about their
existence nor to expect to find them or their traces empirically.
Thus, the lack of a chapter on "gods" is intentional. Analyzed as
"signs," the "gods" have neither an essence nor biographies. To
represent the immortal god in social space, one has to produce new
or use established signs, and these signs vary according to the
media used. Narratives are an important medium, for example in
historiography or epic (chapter 10); images could appear on coins
(chapter 11), on reliefs (chapter 12), or independently as
sculptured statues (chapter 15); and conventions of representation,
of the use, and of the audience vary from genre to genre. Rituals
(part III), too, are an important — perhaps the most important —
means of not only communicating with the gods but demonstratively,
publicly performing this communication, of defining the respective
god by the strategy and content of the communicative approach
(animal or vegetable sacrifice, female or male name, choice of time
and place). Rituals stage-manage the gods' existence and one's own
piety at the same time. Thus, it seems important to concentrate on
the human actors in the center of the book (part IV): on ordinary
individuals, on members of the changing elites, on those, finally,
who made a living out of religion.
If the renunciation of a chapter on the gods prompts an
explanation, the lack of a systematic treatment of "cults" should
prompt another. "Cult" as applied to ancient religions is a very
convenient term, as it takes ancient polytheism to pieces that are
gratifyingly similar to the large religious traditions like
Christianity: defined by one god, be it Venus or Mithras, supposed
to be connected to a specifiable group of persons, be it loosely or
densely organized, characterized by common interests or social
traits, be it women or members of the military, Syrians or freedmen.
Without doubt, voluntary religious associations existed, but they
were not necessarily exclusive, they did not necessarily concentrate
on one god, and certainly, the sum of their activities did not
comprise all or even most of ancient religious practices. According
to socio-historical research, there was hardly a significant
difference between the followers of the god Silvanus, a forest-god
by name, sometimes venerated by colleges, and the god Mithras of
Persian origin, whose exotic features were thematized in the cult of
small and strictly hierarchical groups. Neither the sum of
individual choices, ever changing or keeping within the limits of
familiar or professional traditions, nor the identity of the name of
a god from one place to another justifies speaking of "a cult" in
the aforementioned sense. Thus, part V deliberately illustrates the
wide spectrum of religious groups or options and does not attempt to
map ancient polytheism as the sum of different "cults."
Any further reading should start with ancient sources, many
of the literary texts being access ible in the bilingual editions of
the Loeb library. There are no "scientific" accounts of Roman
religion from antiquity, but some extensive descriptions exist in
different literary genera. The most fully preserved account of Roman
ritual is given in Ovid's commentary on the Roman calendar (Libri
fastorum VI), written in late Augustan times and trying to integrate
traditional Roman worship, the cult of the emperors, and the natural
cycle of time. His near contemporary, the Greek Dionysius of
Halicarnassus, dedicated a long section in his Roman Antiquities to
religion (2.63-74, trans. E. Cary). Varro's Antiquities of Divine
Things survived in fragments only (a shorter self-quotation might be
found in his On Latin Language 6); the polemical usage of it by the
Christians Tertullian, in his To the Nations, and Augustine, in his
City of God (books 4-7), give the best idea of its contents and
later reception. From the first half of the third century, Minucius
Felix's dialogue Octavius offers another polemical and informed view
on early (rather than middle) imperial Roman religion (trans. and
comm. G. W. Clarke, New York 1974). The most important documentary
texts are the acts of the Secular Games (new ed. and comm. for the
Augustan games: Schnegg-Kohler 2002) and the protocols of the Arval
Brethren (ed., comm., and French trans. Scheid 1998b).
Religion is central for a number of institutions discussed
by the Greek politician and philosopher Plutarch in his Roman
Questions; his account of Isis and Osiris (trans. and comm. J. Gwyn
Griffiths, Cambridge 1970) is not only an ethnographic piece, but a
contemporary perspective on a cult flourishing widely in the Greek
and Roman world. Tacitus' Germania shows how a Roman viewed foreign
cultures (and religion) at the turn of the first to the second
century AD (trans. and comm. J. B. Rives, Oxford 1999).
For the religion of the imperial period the most
interesting texts stem from genera of fictional literature: book 11
of Apuleius' Metamorphoses on the cult of Isis (comm. J. Gwyn
Griffiths, Leiden 1975), Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana,
Lucian's Alexandros and The Syrian Goddess, and Aristeides'
autobiographical Hieroi Logoi. One should not forget the Christian
New Testament, in particular the Acts of the Apostles, and the early
acts of martyrs, which narrate the confrontations of Christians with
the Roman administration in provincial centers. Finally, the emperor
Julian's Letters attest the project of an anti-Christian revival and
Neoplatonic modification of traditional cults.
Cicero, prolific author, rhetor, politician, and
philosopher from the late republic, deals frequently with religion,
yet his On the Nature of the Gods (comm. Andrew R. Dyck, Cambridge
2003—) is more revealing for the history of Hellenistic philosophy
than for Roman practice. The same does not hold for the subsequent
On Divination (comm. A. E. Pease, Cambridge, MA, 1920-3, repr.
Darmstadt 1963). The speeches On His House and On the Reply of the
Haruspices do give interesting insights into the fabric of religious
institutions. Other important sources are less easily accessible.
Livy's Roman history remains basic to the history of republican
religion. Religious information, however, is widely scattered. The
lexicon of Festus, abridging the Augustan Verrius Flaccus'
alphabetic account of his linguistic and religiohistoric research,
has not been translated so far. Beard et al. (1998) offer good
commentary on a selection of sources for the late republican and
early imperial period; Valantasis (2000) does so for late antiquity.
Literary as well as archaeological sources are extensively
documented in the Thesaurus cultus et rituum antiquorum (ThesCRA)
(Los Angeles, 2004-6). For reliefs Ryberg (1955) remains essential,
frequently supplemented by Fless (1995). Schraudolph (1993) and
Dräger (1994) publish numerous Roman altars; sarcophagi are shown
and interpreted by G. Koch (1993) and by Zanker and Ewald (2004).
Muth (1998) offers a glimpse into private mythological mosaics.
Recent monographic accounts of Roman religion are given by
Beard et al. (1998) and Rupke (2001 [2007]); shorter introductions
are offered by North (2000) and Scheid (2003). The manual of Wissowa
(1912, repr. 1971) remains indispensable (for a recent assessment of
Wissowa's achievements see Archiv fur Religionsgeschichte 5, 2003).
For monographic accounts of the religious history of individual
provinces see now the series Religion der römischen Provinzen (Belayche
2001; Spickermann 2003, 2007; Kunz 2006; further volumes arc
forthcoming).
The best guide to recent research is given by survey
articles every three to four years organized by epochs and provinces
(Belayche et al. 2000, 2003, forthcoming).
For the concept of religion see J. Z. Smith (1978, 1990,
1998) and Gladigow (2005).
Many chapters of this book offer frequent references, usually to the most important type of "reading," the reading of the ancient evidence. This is mostly available in annotated and translated form, as far as standard literary texts are concerned; often conveniently put together into multi-volume corpora, as far as inscriptions are concerned; often widely scattered, analyzed without image or photographically represented without analysis, as far as archaeological evidence is concerned. Here, the attempt is made to provide the interested reader with direct references, even if these refer to rather specialist publications.
Lord of the Cosmos: Mithras, Paul, And the Gospel of Mark by Michael Patella (T&T Clark) demonstrates the ways in which the Roman Imperial religion imbues Paul's letter and subsequently Mark's Gospel. Mark resonated in the imperial capital and beyond because of its inherent participationist theology, a theology probably augmented by Paul and possibly introduced by him. In his own writings, Paul draws from Mithraic vocabulary and symbolism. Mithraism itself functions within the cosmic framework outlined in Plato's Timaeus. Pauline theology, with its Mithraic overtones, coheres with the Markan theme of Christ's cosmic victory over Satan; Paul and Mark share a similar view of Christ's salvific act. With the Bartimaeus pericope (10:46-52), the Markan Gospel demonstrates that believers, by their call to discipleship, participate in that victory. This whole process is signaled by the baptism with its divine communication and actions of descent and ascent, a strong Pauline concept.
Patella shows that the Markan presentation of Jesus' death, the
climax of the narrative, brings the act of divine communication full
circle. At the baptism, God communicates to creation, and with
Jesus' cry from the cross, creation replies in despair. Jesus' death
is not the end of the story, however. The women at the tomb realize
this fact and are awestruck at its significance, which is the reason
that they do not tell anyone what they have witnessed. The notice to
meet Jesus in
The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire: Mysteries of
the Unconquered Sun by Roger Beck (
A study of the religious system of Mithraism, one of the 'mystery
cults' popular in the
Religion of the Mithras Cult in the
Roger Beck’s new book on Mithraism is a somewhat unusual product. To start with, the title is rather odd. What does it mean to talk about the religion of a cult if that cult is not a religion in itself? Beck also realizes the problem and even proposes three definitions of religion. In the end, he explains that his “study of the ‘religion’ of the Mithras cult is thus a study in cognition, a study of how the initiate gets to know his mysteries in the context of the life and physical environment of the mithraeum” (2). To call such a cognitive process “religion” is not very helpful. Moreover, anyone who is interested in “hard facts about the cult, its membership, and its physical remains” will be equally disappointed (3). This is somewhat disappointing, as students of early Christianity would have been interested in possible parallels between Mithraism and the emerging church. However, this is a book about the interpretation of the Mithraic mysteries, but mostly without the scholarly apparatus to go with it. On the other hand, the reader is served a rich menu of all kinds of methodological and hermeneutical considerations. These are not without interest, but they are often overly long and more the stuff of articles than of a book. In chapter 2 Beck surveys the previous approach to Mithras, which he faults as undervaluing (1) the literary evidence as against the monumental and (2) the mithraeum as against the figured monuments. Instead, he takes his point of departure in Porphyry’s De antro 6, which he takes as reliable evidence (85–87) and which suggests to him that the mithraeum itself, symbolizing the universe, was a store of esoteric meaning. The content of this “store” has to be deciphered by focusing on astral symbolism, as the basic constellation correspondences of the tauroctony are evident. In other words, the mithraeum communicates meaning through the medium of that symbolism (chs. 3–4).
In chapter 5 Beck wants to apply Geertz’s famous definition of religion to the Mithraic mysteries. The application is hardly successful, and neither is the comparison with the symbol system of the Mexican Chamulas. However, Beck interestingly explains what he calls Mithraism’s second axiom (the first is: DEUS SOL INVICTUS MITHRAS), namely, “harmony of tension in opposition,” which he firmly locates in the Platonic tradition.
After an interlude on the cognitive approach to religion (ch. 6), Beck proceeds with a cognitive exploration of a useful blueprint of the Mithraic cave. In the end, he concludes that we cannot recover the subjective experience of the initiate (ch. 7). That is certainly true, but we can recover his narration of that experience, if only we had the necessary sources, the lack of which is a major problem of Mithraic studies, it seems to me.
Having established that the common symbolic idiom of the mysteries is the language of astrology/astronomy (in Beck’s idiom, “star-talk”), he surveys a number of ancient authors, such as Origen and Augustine, about star-talk, which, as he notes, “can be heard as a language of figurative discourse” that can convey theological truth (ch. 8). From this perspective he once again looks at the tauroctony and the celestial helix, but his subsequent exposition (chs. 9–10) that the mysteries contained “idealizing cosmological speculation” (238) is too technically astrological/astronomical for me to summarize here.
What Beck wants to show is that the “Mithraic mysteries, across their axioms, motifs, domains, structures, and modes, communicated symbolically in a peculiar idiom” (7). I think that he is right in this respect, but he certainly could have expressed himself in a more understandable manner. In any case, one is left wondering how often a Mithraist took in the full cosmological message of his mithraeum. Were the mysteries a bit like a Roman-Catholic Mass that one participated in every time one convened? Unfortunately, Beck is not interested in such questions here, although they seem relevant too for our understanding of the “religion” of the Mithraic cult.
Presumably, this book is important for highly advanced
specialists of the Mithraic world who are at home in its esoteric
symbolism. Beginners would be better served by first reading Beck’s
collected articles in
Beck on Mithraism: Collected Works with New Essays (Aldershot,
2004) and M. Clauss,
The Roman Cult of Mithras: The God and His Mysteries (trans.
Richard Gordon;
Jan N. Bremmer
University
Groningen
Headline 3
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