PROGRAMME AND ABSTRACTS - Università degli Studi di Messina

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these dangers is a dead who, through his wrath and phobos, evokes a demon which menaces
the guilty and everyone hampers his thirst for revenge. The other one is a murderer who is, at
the same time, victim of the obsessive memory of the felt and caused terror and of the provoked
violence. This murderer experiences the lussa and the oblivion of his own identity. He is
threatened by someone else’s revenge lust and anger and is dominated by a miasma which can
infect everyone who is close to him. As a consequence, the terrific power of alastor consists of
the impossibility to forget and embodies frightful dangers of the failed oblivion. These
dangers, as well as the norms created to embank them, have a religious origin, but they also
express social and political issues especially in the Archaic and Classical Age. The extreme
deformation generated by the violence makes the norms mentioned essential instruments used
by every culture to think and to preserve itself both collectively and individually.
Luther H. Martin, University of Vermont, USA
The Mithraic Diaspora and the Continuity of Cult Identity, Second-Fourth Century A.D.
Given the entropic nature of information in transmission, the dispersion of any social group
raises the question of their trans-geographical and trans-generational identity. Especially given
the dynamics of the dramatically increased commercial, political and social mobility and
interchange during the early centuries of our era, we might question whether any widespread
identity among cults claiming a common name had any historical basis beyond certain
superficial features or whether such an identity is the imaginative construction of modern
historians based on those ostensibly identifying features? A dedicatory inscription for a
mithraeum on the Greek island of Andros instantiates the spread Mithraic groups, even to
remote and unlikey parts of the Empire, and provides an interesting case study for the question
of cult identity. The Roman cult of Mithras was the most widely distributed cult of the Roman
imperial period and the most fulsomely documented. While this cult does exhibit migratory
degradations, i.e., local and regional variations, it nevertheless transmitted its distinctive
identifying feature—the ubiquitous tauroctonous image—with a high degree of fidelity. Given
the absence of even the idea of any centralized leadership or administration for Mithraism that
might have controlled the integrity of the image, its faithful transmission seems to have relied
upon the cognitive biases and enhanced memories of its initiates. In this paper, I will explore
three cognitive theories for the stabilization and transmission of social information, the
“cognitive attractor theory” of Dan Sperber, the “modes theory” of Harvey Whitehouse, and
the theory of “self-normalizing memes” of Richard Dawkins. I will suggest that none of these
theories alone are sufficient to account for an accurate transmission of the Mithraic tauroctony
but that together they can provide a plausible basis for a historiographical account of its
ubiquity.
Xicoténcatl Martinez-Ruiz, Lancaster University, The United Kingdom
Tue 15 th , 16.00, Classroom 14
Entering the Heart (h•dayam): Outlining an ‘iterative schema’ in Abhinavagupta’s Vārttika
This paper aims to provide a suggestion on this problem: How can Abhinavagupta contend for
articulating in one single commentary (a circulated text, i.e. the Mālinī-vārttika or MVV) the