(Persian), Heliodromus(Sun-runner), Pater(Father). These names, in this order, are
certainly attested at Santa Prisca on the Aventine in Rome (sayad 200), and the
sequence confirmed in the Mitreo di Felicissimus at Ostia (c.ad 250). In both
temples the hierarchy is correlated with the planets, thus forming a notional “ladder”
from Here to There, which, according to Celsus, was the path taken by the soul
(Celsus apudOrigen, Contra Celsum6.22). How widespread the grade organiza-
tion was outside central Italy is uncertain; the cult vessel from Mainz mentioned
earlier shows at least Miles, Heliodromus, and Pater walking in a procession; and
the numerous wall-graffiti at Dura, insofar as they have been published, repeatedly
mention all the grades except Heliodromus (cf. Francis 1975b). My own view is that
they were usual if not universal. But their significance in constructing a specifically
Mithraic ritual and moral identity, as well as a post-mortem hope, cannot be over-
estimated. In the mithraeumof the Castra peregrinorum in Rome we find the wish:
Leo vivas cum Caedicio patre, “Best wishes on becoming a Lion under Caedicius as
Father!” (AE1980, 49f.). Tertullian (though I prefer generally not to use Christian,
because usually polemical and hence potentially distorting, evidence) mentions a
ritual in which the Miles has to reject a proffered crown because “my crown is Mithras”
(De corona15); and Porphyry tells us that when the Lions were made to wash their
hands in honey they were instructed to “keep their hands pure from everything that
causes pain, is harmful and morally offensive”; and then they had to cleanse their
tongues “of everything sinful” (De antro15). In placing such emphasis upon per-
sonal ethical demands the cult of Mithras is clearly part of the revolution in religious
sensibility generally referred to as “the second paganism” (Versnel 1981b; Veyne
1989, 1999). In this connection a very recent find at Huarti/Hawarti near Syrian
Apamea is of great interest. Just beside the cult niche of the mithraeum, dating from
the later fourth century, is a fresco of part of a city wall, surmounted by several ghastly,
grimacing, decapitated heads, each pierced by a spear (Gawlikowski 2004). Nothing
comparable has ever been found in a western context, and in my view the likeliest
explanation is that this scene represents the contract-breakers and sinners, demonic
and human, whom Mithra slaughters in the Mithra-YaBt. That is, contact with Sasanian
Persian religion through, say, Nisibis brought late antique Roman Mithraists for the
first time into contact with genuine Iranian traditions relating to their god. Much
must have been incomprehensible to them; but the Mithraic tradition of moral purity
meant that they could recognize at least the motif of the destruction of the wicked.
Nilsson suggested in 1950 (Nilsson 1988: 667–79) that the cult of Mithras, like
the later religion of Mani, was created by an individual of genius, working from
rituals and myths derived from one of the Anatolian cults of Mithra(s) and blended
with astrological theory and Greek ideas about initiation. Even if that, or something
like it, were true – and we shall never know for certain – the case of Huarti/Hawarti
makes clear that innovation was always possible, and welcome. Moreover, Origen
observes that “among them [the Persians] are rituals of initiation (teletai) which are
interpreted rationally by the erudite, but enacted directly by the common, rather
shallow people” (Contra Celsum1.12). “Rationally” here means allegorically, and
wherever allegory is institutionalized, we can expect to find a wide variety of inter-
pretation and understanding. That just such a luxuriant divergence existed in Mithraic
Institutionalized Religious Options 399