cyberspace. Indeed, hardly a week passes but someone claims to have unlocked the
secret of its meaning – it has become a sort of pastime. In view of that willful reduc-
tion of Mithraism to this one “mystery,” it may be as well here to insist right away
that there is plenty else to say about this cult of the “Persian Sun” (Dracontius, Romulea
10.538), and to announce that I shall be ignoring astrology and star-maps
completely.
Just a word, too, about neologisms. In my view, it is best, where possible, to avoid
the term “Mithraism,” since it falsely suggests that the cult was somehow a separate
religion. This is one aspect of the older view of the “oriental religions” that sup-
posedly exposed the failure of traditional civic cult (the term “oriental religions”
now survives only as a docket-name for classifying artifacts in Roman provincial arch-
aeology). At least in later antiquity the cult was known as the mysteries of Mithras.
Porphyry, for example, in the mid-third century, explicitly names it ta tou Mithra
mysteria(De abstinentia 2.56, 4.16), and frequently mentions both initiands and the
process of initiation. This term was used earlier, in the 180s, by the anti-Christian
writer Celsus (apudOrigen, Contra Celsum6.22). It is, however, mainly a Christian
term, being first found in Justin ( 1. 66; Trypho 70, written under Antoninus Pius).
Both Christians and Neoplatonists had their own reasons for highlighting the ini-
tiatory aspects of the cult. Although expressions denoting “worshiper of.. .” were
common in antiquity (e.g. Hermaistai, Poseidoniastai, Hercoleiat Delos, Mercuriales
at Rome,Martensesat Beneventum), Mithraists preferred to give themselves a dif-
ferent name, based on a ritual gesture, the hand-shake: they called themselves by
the Greek word syndexioi, those bound by the hand-shake. It would be absurd for
us to follow them on this point; but I only fall back on “Mithraism” where the most
neutral term, “the Roman cult of Mithras,” would be intolerably clumsy. It would,
however, be pedantic to object to another common neologism, “mithraeum,” in the
sense of a cult room or complex dedicated to Mithras. The proper Mithraic word
was spelaeum, cave, with reference to Mithras’ act of killing the bull, though they
often spoke neutrally of templum. Anyway, “mithraeum” is at least calqued on the
Greek word mithreionused by the fifth-century church historian Socrates. Finally, I
detest the word “tauroctony” (which denotes the image of Mithras killing the bull),
since it is so clearly part of an academic tendency – admittedly difficult to resist –
to use what look like technical terms but are often falsely reassuring reifications or
simplifications; but it is sometimes unavoidable.
A net has been defined as a series of holes with string round them: an apt metaphor
for any story about the Roman cult of Mithras. Mithra (in ancient India Mitra) was
the Indo-Iranian god of the contract. His cult was introduced into Anatolia by the
Achaemenids after Cyrus’ defeat of Croesus of Lydia (546bc). As a result the god’s
name was known in Greece during the classical period, to Xenophon for example,
but, as far as we can tell, without any details of his cult (notoriously, Herodotus
thought he was a goddess [1.131.3]). With Alexander’s conquest of the Persian empire,
the raison d’être of Iranian cult, the symbolic reinforcement of Persian rule, was
removed; no grand temple to Mithra survived into the Hellenistic world; his cult
seems to have continued there only within particular Iranian families and in numer-
ous, but isolated, localities. It is unlikely that there will ever be enough evidence
394 Richard Gordon