to found his mithraeum– a small affair in a private house – by contact with the
troops of L. Verus in the periodad 162– 6.
It seems unlikely that the individual Mithraist needed to bring with him more
than the memory of a relief of Mithras killing the bull, and his own experience of
initiation. An actual tauroctony, simple or complex – a number of easily portable
examples are known – would simply have been a bonus. The moments of Mithras’
“biography” required for cultic purposes were few in number and easily memorable.
The minimal architectural requirements of a temple, when it came to be required,
could hardly have been simpler: an aisle, with two lateral podia. The layout of the
cult niche was optional, as was the extent to which temple and image provided
information about other elements of the hieros logos, and stressed local or individual
interpretations. Evidently, too, one could name the god as one pleased: for example,
among the six inscriptions certainly or probably from the mithraeumin the house
of the tribuni laticlaviiin Aquincum (Aquincum V) where the name of the god
survives, we find, in their likely historical order, Sol Invictus, Invictus Mithras,
D(eus) S(ol) I(nvictus) M(ithras), Sol Invictus Mithras(twice), and Invictus Mythras
Nabarze(AE1990, 817, 820, 814, 818f.; ILS4260).
Similar considerations apply to the question of whether the mysteries employed
normative written texts that could have served as the basis for standard rituals
and have been a main means of reliable colportage. Individual congregations
certainly did possess texts of some kind: fragments among the graffiti of the
second and third phases at Dura, and the discrete verses of the lower layer of
dipintiat S. Prisca in Rome, make this certain. But of what scope? And what status
did they have?
The key factor must have been the degree of literacy of the founder(s) of each
community. In any given instance, the basic narrative material encoded in the com-
plex cult image, the hieros logos, need not have been committed to writing. But
it may often have been, especially in Italy. The existence of written texts is well
documented in other telestic cults. The authority of the book in general – not
necessarily, but plausibly, a Mithraic one – is acknowledged in a Mithraic context
by the well-known images of “Magi” on the faces of the piers of the cult niche at
Dura, phase III (c.ad 240). Such images of scrolls served as emblems of membership
in the cultivated class: they imply a claim to rhetorical, legal, or technical education
(one Mithraic dedicator at Speyer in Germany was a public haruspex, diviner: AE
1990, 757; another, at Martigny, was a flamenand former duovir: AE1998, 867).
In the narrower context of Mithraism, the images allude to arcane, esoteric – in
that sense “bookish” – wisdom. For example, a tantalizing reference at Dura on the
Syrian frontier to pyroton asthma, fiery breath, as the “baptism of (the) holy ones”
(niptron hosion), is said to be a doctrine of the Persian Magi (CIMRM68), which
implies a whole gamut of speculation unknown to us from western evidence; and
that in a mithraeumapparently used exclusively by “simple soldiers.”
As for S. Prisca, the literary quality of the painted verses does leave something to
be desired (Vermaseren and van Essen 1965: 187–240). But it is rather the effort
to express oneself in a literary mode, in a carmen sacrum, a ritual hymn, that should
attract our attention. I see no difficulty in taking these dipintias excerpts from a
Institutionalized Religious Options 401