CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Institutionalized Religious
Options: Mithraism
Richard Gordon
Attracting Attention
If the sun is the source of all life, the contrast between light and darkness is one of
the most basic natural provocations to the human imagination. Greek and Roman
“civic religion” made extensive use of it for a variety of symbolic statements. Civic
sacrifice was performed typically soon after dawn; the Olympian gods, tokens of an
ordered universe, shimmered and gleamed; light connoted life, ordered normality,
and salvation; darkness suggested unreason, disorder, fear, mystery, trickery, death.
But perhaps no ancient cult made more overt use of the contrast than the Roman
cult of Sol Invictus Mithras, Mithras the unconquerable sun. Christian apologists
such as Firmicus Maternus scoffed that his adherents worshiped a Sun-god speluncis
abditis... obscuro tenebrarum squalore, in hidden-away caves, in pitchy darkness (De
errore5.2). Such a paradox caught the eye, and the imagination. What is the point?
Well, come in and find out.
Paradox – mild, easily resolved paradox – is an attraction for a cult not anchored
in the secure and familiar framework of the annual calendar of celebrations imposed
by civic religion. Like the cults of Cybele and Attis, of Isis and Harpocrates, of Jupiter
Dolichenus, of Sabazius, the Roman cult of Mithras paraded its exoticism. For
example, whereas Greco-Roman religion, having no acknowledged history, acquired
its authority through the weight of tradition, some Mithraists at least claimed
that their cult had been founded by the prophet Zoroaster (Porphyry, De antro
nympharum6). Instrumentalizing the Stoic, and later Platonic, claim that the reli-
gion of certain “civilized barbarians” – the Egyptians, the Phrygians, the Brahmins,
the Persians – offers insight into the paradigmatic religious beliefs of primitive man,
they claimed that the cult of Mithras possessed greater authenticity than civic cult.