The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire: Mysteries of the Unconquered Sun (review)

Reviewed by: The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire: Mysteries of the Unconquered Sun Alison B. Griffith (bio) Roger Beck. The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire: Mysteries of the Unconquered Sun. Oxford University Press. xvi, 288. US $39.95 To read Roger Beck’s latest tome, the fruit of a long career of distinguished scholarship on the Mysteries of Mithras, is to undergo an acutely humbling experience. The book will challenge even specialists well versed in previous scholarship on the cult; however, it is and will remain an influential interpretation of the Mysteries. Beck begins by redescribing the Mysteries with a concise template centred on the initiate’s experience of two axioms (Deus Sol Invictus Mithras and ‘harmony of tension in opposition’) through motifs, domains (the sacred story of Mithras, the cosmos, the sublunary world, and the destiny of human souls), structures (the cult icon, mithraeum, [End Page 222] and grade hierarchy), and modes of activation (ritual, perception of iconography, exchange of words, and ethical behaviour within the context of the mysteries). Beck’s concern is not what the Mysteries mean, but how they mean, and towards this end he proposes and defends a ‘symbolic idiom’ in which the constituent elements of this template communicate, that is a ‘language of astronomy/astrology or star-talk.’ Porphyry’s description of the Mithraic Mysteries in De antro nympharum 6, which states that the Mithraic cave is an image of the cosmos, or universe, acts as both entrée and anchor to Beck’s discussion. In the opening chapters Beck skilfully summarizes and critiques previous approaches. In the absence of texts that might reveal Mithraic theology, twentieth-century scholars have laboured, often in vain, to decipher the manifold symbols of Mithraic iconography so as to deduce from them doctrine or belief. Beck laudably canvases the problem of referents – in the case of the Mysteries these may be Graeco-Roman, Iranian, or celestial – while evaluating the relative success and failure of the major assays utilizing this approach. In redefining ‘doctrine’ vis-à-vis the Mysteries of Mithras, Beck liberates scholars from the conviction that Mithraic doctrine was an explicit, coherent, and discernible body of ideas. On the contrary, argues Beck, Mithraic doctrine was what could be interpreted or explained by anyone in the cult, and what prevented it from being utterly inchoate was the specific framework in which it operated (the domains, structures, and modes of activation). This definition of doctrine as a ‘loose web of interpretation’ lends itself well to a cognitive approach (chapter 6) wherein religious representations are a product of our – that is, Homo sapiens’ – mental and neural processing capacity. Culture and context become involved only in negotiating legitimate representations. To relocate Mithraic doctrine to the minds of its followers ‘deproblematizes’ the search for doctrine from monuments. The bulk of the book is devoted to close analysis of the ‘Mithraic Mysteries as Symbol System.’ In the first of three chapters so entitled (chapter 5), Beck justifies and then adopts a Geertzian approach to the mithraeum as constructed space, engaging in ‘thick description’ of the mithraeum-as-cosmos based on the model established by Plato in the Timaeus. His comparison to the sacred construction of terrestrial space by the modern Chamulas of Mexico will perhaps irk methodological purists, but it stimulates the reader to consider conceptions of space in cultic contexts and introduces the discussion of the mithraeum as a symbol system whose components both represent and are celestial geography (chapter 7). Beck’s espousal of religion as a cognitive enterprise is fundamental to his most provocative claim, that Mithraic symbols functioned as language signs communicating in a distinctive idiom, or ‘star-talk’ (chapter 8). That such a language could be understood at some level by all initiates is deftly and convincingly argued from several ancient authors. Beck then revisits [End Page 223] the bull-slaying icon to understand, from the viewpoint of exegete and interpreter, what its constituent parts communicate, both individually and in relation to each other (chapter 9). Readers lacking Beck’s grasp of ancient astronomy will find much of this chapter and the last, concerned with a now lost helicoidal model of...

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