Here again, then, we have a radical difference from early Christian
communities, in whose propagation physical structures played no obvious
part, because they were not an essential component of the thing propagated.
It is interesting, too, to note how with Mithraism both the practical (loca-
tive) consideration of sustaining a certain number of participants, which
determined a particular room size, and the ideological (utopian) consider-
ation of what that room was all about, go hand in hand. Ignore either, and
the propagation of the Mysteries remains indeed a mystery.
A NEW MITHRAEUM?
In the two Virunum alba, do we have an example of the propagation of a
new mithraeum out of its parent? Piccottini (1994, 50) argues plausibly
that we do: that the marble albumrepresents the translocation of a num-
ber of members of the original mithraeum and the foundation of a new
mithraeum built “from the ground up” (a solo). The reason for the translo-
cation would be simply that the old mithraeum was oversubscribed. The
new mithraeum was not intended for new recruits (there are no new names
on the marble album) but to accommodate the overflow. No missionary
zeal here!—but, rather, a steady accretion through kin and social networks
of precisely the sort that Rodney Stark (1996, 14–21) now postulates for early
Christianity and which scholars of Mithraism have all along assumed for
this cult (see below on the recruitment of kin).
Piccottini’s account (1994, 44ff.) rests on the reconstruction of the
marblealbum,which severely limits the number of names in its columns.
The remains of only three columns are actually preserved on the two frag-
ments. An initial column must be postulated to the left in order to accom-
modate selected members from years prior to 184 CE. Q. Septimius Speratus
is the first name in the third column. At the end of the preserved part of
the second column are traces of M. Marius Zosimus. Since a mere three
names separate these two men in the bronze album,and since the marble
albumfollows the order of the bronze without exception (disregarding the
names omitted), it follows that the second column of the marble album
could have contained at most, below Zosimus, the three names that sepa-
rate him from Speratus in the bronze album.The other columns must have
been proportionately limited, leading to the conclusion that the marble
albumrepresents a selection of the membership of the bronze and not the
surviving membership ca. 202 CE.
Nevertheless, the possibility that the marble albummight represent
the surviving membership in 202 CEcannot be entirely excluded. On this
scenario, there would have been no migration, no new mithraeum, and
On Becoming a Mithraist 187