Manfred Clauss The Roman Cult of Mithras

Manfred Clauss, The Roman Cult of Mithras: the god and his mysteries, revised edition,
translated by Richard Gordon. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press (in USA, Routledge),
2000. ISBN 0 7486 1230 0 (hb), 0 7486 1396 X (pb). Price: 45/$63 (hb); 17.32/$24.95
(pb).
The only general account of Mithraism available in English was until very recently the
translation by T. MacCormick (1903) of Frantz Cumonts Mystres de Mithra, which itself
first saw the light as the Conclusions of a work published in 1899. The English edition has
been more or less continuously in print since 1956 (most recently reprinted in 1995), but is
now reported by Amazon as not available. It is inevitable that after a century, with the
progress of archaeology, much of this book has become hopelessly out of date and besides,
Dover found it cheaper simply to reprint the translation without making any attempt even to
incorporate the changes introduced by Cumont into the second French edition of 1902. A
competitor, by Maarten J. Vermaseren, Mithras, the secret God (Chatto, 1963), although wellillustrated and highly competent, was quickly allowed to go out of print, and is now quite
unobtainable. The only alternative, Robert Turcans Mithra et le mithriacisme, which first
appeared in the Que sais-je? series (no. 1929) in 1981, is only available in French. It is
therefore extremely welcome that the Edinburgh University Press decided in 1988 to
commission a translation of the introduction to the cult published in German in 1990 by
Manfred Clauss, the professor of Ancient History at the University of Frankfurt am Main.
Clauss book is a model introduction, pressing no special theory, favouring no
particular interpretation, but concentrating on the main source of evidence for the cult, the
archaeological remains, and attempting to combine it sensitively with the few items of literary
evidence (itself often very hard to interpret) that happen to survive. After a brief glance at
different contexts, the Iranian background, the religious situation in the Roman Empire, in
particular the mystery religions, the book goes through the main problems one by one: there
are chapters on the spread of the Roman cult, the adherents, the temple and its furniture. Then
come two chapters on the narrative of the sacred legend which can be deduced from the
reliefs (no literary version survives), and on what we can deduce about Mithraic ritual; a
chapter on surviving cult utensils helps to fill out the gaps in the latter. The next chapter deals
with the seven Mithraic grades and some other more obscure positions in the cult, followed by
an account of Mithraic ethical teaching, and the gods relation to the other members of the
Roman pantheon. The final chapter discusses the relation between Mithraism and Christianity,
and the end of the cult. The book is illustrated with 124 figures, mainly photographs inserted
into the text.
For the translation, the author has changed or inserted several passages to take account
of errors and of several new and important archaeological finds since 1990, such as the
Virunum album (published in 1994), and provided a new preface for an Anglo-American
audience. The translator has, in full agreement with the author, altered some other passages,
inserted references to Vermaserens Corpus where they were missing, provided a substantial
additional bibliography of works in English, and rewritten the captions entirely, incorporating
in them references to recently-published mithraea which could not have been inserted into the
body of the text without altering it more than was desirable. The captions thus offer a kind of
internal commentary on the text, occasionally implying disagreement, more often supporting
and illustrating its statements and claims. One plate has been substituted, but otherwise the
illustrations remain as in the German edition. The German edition was intended for the
general reader; the translation is intended to cater also for students who need references to the
archaeological material, and to provide a handy reference-work for scholars who wish to
know the standard view on some question.
Clauss book was written in the late 80s, alongside his substantial volume on the
epigraphic evidence for the cults membership (Cultores Mithrae, 1992), not long after the
publication of Reinhold Merkelbachs Mithras (1984), which has never been translated into
English, and which made dramatic, and often quite unverifiable, claims about the nature of the
cult and its doctrines. Merkelbach did discuss the Iranian side of the question quite
thoroughly, but his main interest was in showing that Mithraism is a mystery cult deeply
dependent upon a Platonic view of the universe. It is therefore to be understood as ultimately
a Greek religion, not an Iranian one at all (which of course had been Cumonts main claim).
But, apart from this central idea, Merkelbach propounded many theories of often startling
originality, and it was Clauss intention soberly to confront Merkelbachs wilder ideas with the
actual evidence. But he did take over from Merkelbach the idea that the Roman cult of
Mithras was founded not in the eastern Mediterranean but in the West, more particularly in
Rome or Ostia.
Because Merkelbach was his main point of reference, Clauss took little interest in
what was already in the late 1980s becoming an important point of reference for AngloAmerican scholars, the idea, already canvassed in the 19th century, that the Mithraic cultrelief, with its standardized representation of Mithras killing the bull, was a kind of map of the
heavens between two points. The attraction of this view lay in the possibility of revealing the
real meaning of the cult-icon, either as a reference to a particular part of the year, or by
equating Mithras with a particular constellation. This discussion was capped in 1989 by the
ingenious argument of David Ulansey, in The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries (1991,
1998), based on the view that Mithras is to be identified with the constellation Perseus, that
the cults main secret was the revelation of the precession of the equinoxes. For twelve years
now this view has divided opinions, some hailing the book as a revelatory advance in the
interpretation of the mysteries of Mithras, others damning it as charlatanism and spoof
scholarship. Clauss has never taken this line of argument about the significance of the cultrelief at all seriously, and he has made his view of Ulansey abundantly clear in a recent issue
of the journal Klio, but he chose not to enter into details in revising the German text for the
translation, probably because to have done so would have required much more extensive
alterations to the planning of the book than he felt were justified. Despite this, the book
remains an excellent and reliable general introduction to Mithraism, providing a sound basis
of knowledge for those who wish to equip themselves before tackling more contentious
modern theories, such as those of Ulansey. In the bibliography, I have included a section on
these astronomical readings of the cult-relief: a reading of one may seem convincing, but a
reading of five will most likely lead to the conviction that they all contradict one another, that
none is evidently preferable on grounds of argument or inherent probability, and that the
basic premise is therefore probably in error.
Richard Gordon
<michra @ gmx.de>

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