A. D. Nock illustrated the problematic nature of the source materials documenting the cult of Mithras by means of the following analogy (Nock 1964: 58)
imagine the situation of scholars of twentieth-century Christianity who had the following materials at their disposal: the plans and designs of a few churches, often with bare and undecorated walls; a few altars and paintings; some fragments of glass windows; a few lists of baptized congregation members; and more than seven hundred images of a person affixed to a cross.
There would be major problems in reconstructing Christianity from such fragments, as indeed it is difficult to understand Mithraism from similarly scattered remains.To Nock’s analogy I would like to add yet another: Augustine, in one of his tracts (De haeresibus), discusses a total of eighty-eight different Christian “heresies”. Although Mithraism did not operate with a distinction between “orthodox” and “heretical”, the analogy suggests that we recognize a plurality of diverse developments also within this religion.
The cult of Mithras originated in either Rome or Ostia. Although there is evidence in favour of the idea that a specific person created the cult, an “unknown religious genius” to quote M. P. Nilsson (1974: 675), there is no agreement on the validity of such a hypothesis. Mithraism clearly combines innovative elements with existing traditions: it contains elements familiar from Oriental Hellenistic mystery cults, references to an astrological cosmology and a number of Iranian names and terms, including key concepts such as nama, “salvation”. The crucial question of how Mithraism arose nevertheless remains contested despite the numerous conferences and seminars and the copious scholarly literature devoted to resolving this issue.
From its place of origin the cult spread from Britain to the Black Sea area, a process that lasted three centuries during which the Roman Empire underwent major changes. This means that Mithraism, despite a number of important recurrent elements, also changed again and again.
One factor that ensured the mutability of the religion was the lack of supra-regional organization: members were part of flexible, small-scale congregations. Speaking of Mithraism in the singular is an inevitable simplification: we have little choice but to reduce a complex tradition in this way, but need to be aware that any synthesizing account glosses over the diversity of the cult.Modern interest in Mithraism arose with Franz Cumont’s work Textes et monuments figures relatifs aux mysteres de Mithra (1896-9), in which he presented the sources documenting the cult for the first time, divided into literary texts, epigraphic sources and archaeological evidence. Cumont’s hefty introduction strongly influenced the direction in which research was to head over the next half century. Cumont’s authority was due both to his remarkable mastery of the sources and to the image he projected of his work as a definitive account that left no questions unanswered. The fact that his introduction was translated and reprinted in nearly unchanged format in successive French (1913), English (1956) and German (1981) versions of his book over the following decades contributed to the dominant position he held over the field; it remained the only presentation of its kind for many decades. Cumont regarded the cult of Mithras as a result of Iranian influences, and postulated that Mithraism embraced a dualism between the forces of good and evil and even contained eschatological elements.
Over time the number of available sources increased substantially, and these were made available between 1956 and 1960 as the Corpus Inscriptionum et Monumentorum Religionis Mithriacae edited by M. J. Vermaseren. As a result, Vermaseren quickly acquired a status within Mithras scholarship equal to Cumont’s, without, however, being accused of the same dogmatic rigidity that arguably characterizes the latter’s work. The two volumes of Vermaseren’s collection (here, as is customary in the literature on Mithraism, abbreviated CIMRM) remain to this day the standard reference, and sources will wherever possible be referred to by means of the number assigned to them there.1 Vermaseren’s fundamental contribution to the field stimulated a flurry of research.
A survey published in 1984 documenting the sources and literature that have appeared since Cumont’s work lists nearly five hundred titles (Beck 1984).2International Mithraism conferences held in 1971 in Manchester, 1975 in Teheran, and 1978 in Rome resulted in the publication of large conference volumes (Hinnells 1975; Duchesne-Guillemin 1978; Bianchi 1979). A specialized Journal of Mithraic Studies was founded in 1976 and appeared in three volumes until publication was discontinued in 1980. Two questions dominated the conference volumes as well as the journal; together, they indicate why neither scholarly initiative was continued after the first few years. First, many individual contributions constituted narrow studies concerning details of a putative Iranian connection that was never proven;3 secondly, much space was devoted to rather unconvincing discussions of astrological interpretations. The central proponent since the 1970s of astronomical-astrological understandings of the central cultic relief, where Mithras is shown killing the bull (Fig. 19.7), and of other sources, Roger Beck, has only had limited success in convincing other scholars of this line of research. Major attempts in this direction have been interpretations of the person of Mithras as symbolizing Orion (Speidel 1980) or Perseus (Ulansey 1989).4
Other, more recent, scholarly initiatives include detailed critiques of Cumont’s work by R. L. Gordon; Robert Turcan’s study of the influence of philosophy on Mithraism and Reinhold Merkelbach’s comprehensive overview of Mithraism are based in part on this aspect; as is Jaime Alvar’s research which places Mithraism within the broader category of mystery religions.