the bronze album,on the assumption that its blocks of names represent
annual recruitment.
MITHRAISM AND THE MITHRAEUM
The principal lesson that the Virunum albateach us about the propagation
of Mithraism seems at first one of almost breathtaking banality: it was a
matter not of spreading the word but of topping up the membership. The
Mysteries of Mithras were mediated in and through a mithraeum, which
was both a physical structure of limited size and the group of individuals
that assembled there (qui convenerunt). Accordingly, the first responsibility
of a mithraeum was to perpetuate itself, to keep the numbers up, to keep
the roof over its head (bronze album: vi conlapsum impendio suo restituerunt;
marblealbum: a solo impendio suo restituerunt). The bronze albumgives us
an unprecedented view of one mithraeum’s recruitment, annually recorded
over a span of eighteen years, in pursuit of this end.
The cult of Mithras (i.e., the Mysteries of Mithras considered as an
institution rather than a road to salvation, though, parenthetically, it was
just as much the latter as the former) was the sum of its mithraea, neither
more nor less. The mithraeum was the unit both of propagation and of
self-perpetuation. Here, then, is the matrix within which Mithraism
renewed itself. Here, too, is the real reason why Nock was right in scout-
ing the possibility of a “holy Mithraic church” (see above, Mithraism and
Conversion). On a second look, therefore, the lesson of the Virunum alba
is not banal at all.
Again, I emphasize that the mithraeum was a physical structure, no less
than a group of members. This is by no means a trivial or adventitious
matter. Rather, at issue is the role of the mithraeum in the ideology of the
Mysteries. The mithraeum, as Porphyry informs us, was “a model of the uni-
verse,” and it was designed on that principle so that initiates could be
inducted there into the mysteries of the soul’s entry into and departure
from mortality (see above, Mithraism and Conversion). The mithraeum
was thus no mere container of the Mysteries and their initiates, but part
and parcel of the mysteries transmitted, an indispensable instrument of ini-
tiation—one might even say, of salvation itself. Literally keeping the roof
over one’s head meant symbolically keeping the universe in place. Hence,
I suggest, the importance of the painted ceiling in our alba,probably the very
same one renewed in the rebuilding of 239 CE(V1438; see above, n. 2 and
New Evidence from Virunum). Ceiling decorations of mithraea are cosmic
or celestial, e.g., the stars of the Capua Mithraeum (V180) and, especially,
the zodiac of the Ponza Mithraeum (Beck 1976–1978).