some did, some didn’t. This is merely a truism about life in any religion with
an ethical component. What matters is that the model of a converted life
was set before the initiates as something to which to aspire or, at the very
least, as an ideal to be acknowledged.
In chapter 1, Leif E. Vaage rightly questions Arthur Darby Nock’s con-
tention that Mithraism (paceRenan) could never have taken Christianity’s
place because it was an altogether different religion, since unlike Christian-
ity it did not demand “the adhesion of the will to a theology, in a word faith,
a new life in a new people” (Nock 1933, 14). All those things (theology, faith,
new life) are in fact demonstrable in Mithraism, and again Vaage is right—
and shrewdly right—in seeing the distinction not in body-and-soul com-
mitment per se but rather in the champions and enforcers of that
commitment, namely, their high profile and survival in the annals of Chris-
tianity, on the one hand, versus their low profile and disappearance from
the records of Mithraism, on the other. Nock was right, though, on one
point: that Mithraism, in Christianity’s default, “could not have founded
a holy Mithraic church” (Nock 1933, 14). That is so, however, not because
of the nature of Mithraism, that it was not a faith to which a man could
“belong... body and soul,” but because there was never in Mithraism the
centripetal will to create such an entity. What it did create, the very differ-
ent matrix in which it perpetuated itself, we shall see in due course.
MITHRAISM’S POPULARITY
Mithraism, then, was a cult which not only (a) did not proselytize but also
(b) did not publicly advertise itself, yet (c) did offer a religious experience
both profound and peculiar. It is difficult to explain how such a cult could
have sustained itself without adducing a fourth characteristic: (d) its social
conformity. It is agreed by all that Mithraism flourished because it appealed
to, and so could reproduce itself within, the structures and networks of
Roman society, most obviously, of course, the military, but also the civil
service (see, for example, the customs bureaucrats at Poetovio in Pannonia;
Beskow 1980) and the familiaeof the great (see Gordon 1972a; also
Liebeschuetz 1994). Mithraism as a loyalists’ religion is well emphasized in
Merkelbach’s study of the cult (1984, 153–88). We infer this understand-
ing, of course, not directly from the testimonies of the initiates, but from
the known facts of the status and occupations of the members, as pre-
served in the epigraphy of mithraea across the length and breadth of the
empire. We are fortunate now to have this record thoroughly tabulated
and expertly analyzed in Manfred Clauss’s Cultores Mithrae(1992).