Book Review: “Mithras-Orion: Greek Hero and Roman Army God”
A window into the mysteries at the end of Rome
Anybody with some baseline knowledge on the Roman Cult of Mithras will know that the central problem in the study of the cult today concerns the identity of Mithras himself. And yet, for several decades from the start of the 20th century, this problem was thought to have been firmly put away by the first Mithraic scholar Franz Cumont. He and his successors assumed that the Roman cult could be properly thought of as a continuation of the earlier Persian worship of Mithra, god of truth, light and treaty.
But then, in Tehran, in the year 1975, at the Second International Congress of Mithraic Studies, this theory was by academic consensus discredited. It was decided that what was a mostly Western Roman cult evidently only founded in the mid-2nd century could not be equated with the original eastern cult not referenced in Roman literature for 70 years at that point.
Thus, the decision was made to consider only the evidence from the Roman cult on its own merit. In addition, the suggestion was made, based on the huge amount of astronomical symbolism present everywhere in the Roman cult imagery, that we should view the cult’s ideology as primarily astronomical, and crucially, that we should the assume the identity of the…
