PROGRAMME AND ABSTRACTS - Università degli Studi di Messina

elief for the cult-statue. We may take ‘condensation’ and ‘narrativity’ as the two keynotes of
the cult, for which a short-hand, also in antiquity, was ‘mystery’. ‘Condensation’ legitimated
the ritual concentration upon the interior of the building itself, which is manifested in a variety
of internal arrangements, which specify the quality of the intended difference from the classic
temple. Moreover, the normative or parade-offering in civic cult, the sacrifice of a bull/ox,
having been idealised in the cult’s foundation-myth, has no place in the temple itself, and thus
no longer supports a specific socio-political system. The other aspect of self-differentiation is
narrativity, which keyed ritual practice closely to the founding-myth. If the podia on either side
of the temple were the locus of communal eating, the central aisle and the cult-niche area were
the stage for ritual. The rituals actually performed certainly differed in detail from temple to
temple, though the main ones were legitimated by reference to elements of the myth. The paper
will concentrate on the analysis of the iconography of selected rituals, including the banquetscene
of Mithras and Helios/Sol. The central role of the myth for ritual practice is also clear
from the Mithraic practice of creating free-standing sculptures or reliefs depicting individual
scenes, some of which are addressed as deities to whom votives could be offered; the two
torch-bearers appear likewise in plural forms in the temple, and as votive-deities in their own
right. Slogans and acclamations functioned as oblique commentaries on the specifically
Mithraic identities formed and reformed in ritual.
On Typologies and History: “Orphic Themes” in Mithraism
87
Wed 16 th , 11.40, Classroom 5
Bianchi’s tripartite model of ‘mystic cults’ in the Greek and Roman world is a deservedly
celebrated feat of synthesis. Its strength lies in the model’s value in focusing attention on
central features of religious systems or constructs: cosmology: pro- or anti-cosmic?; salvation:
intra- or extra-mundane? eschatology: individual or collective? At the same time, no typology
can be more adequate than the empirical evidence on which it is based. Bianchi himself found
that Mithraism hardly fitted into his tripartite scheme and had to invent a new sub-type, the
“cosmosophic mysteriosophy”, to accommodate it. This analysis assumed a great deal, above
all, the typological coherence of the cult over its range and over time – the then commonlyaccepted
legacy of Cumont’s approach (backed by the implicit model of an idealised
Christianity). Since then, with the ever-increasing weight of new finds and increased awareness
of the partiality and misrepresentations of the literary sources, many former assumptions have
been questioned, among them the supposed link between cosmic order and the grade-system,
soul-journeys, and the ‘theology of the Lion-headed God’. Local differences have come to
appear central, making the very idea of a single or coherent cult appear problematic. Bianchi’s
model of Mithraism depended heavily on Numenius (ap. Porphyry, de antro) and Celsus, both
writing in the last quarter of the second century; and upon what he understood as Orphic
‘influences’ upon the cult. This contribution will conclude that these influences represent not
the temptations of “mysteriosophy” i.e. a substantive ‘convergence’, but form part of the
constant reinterpretation and extension of elementary Mithraic themes by individual appeal to
widely-available didactic literature, including the Rhapsodies. Such re-interpretation by no
means followed a single direction.
Wed 16 th , 15.40, Classroom 8