Julius Caesar and Mithraism

[T.C.]

I know it's Franz Cumont's hypothesis but apparently no archeological data back his claims:


Maybe I missed something. I would be interested in archeological data showing that were bull sacrifices in Rome before Mithraism.

Oh right! I understand the point now. I searched online for Attis + bull after reading the quote from FPtM, and found a brief description of Attis.

Searching again, I see the link between Attis and Cybele. I didn’t know the story.

Sorry everyone. It turns out I was strong-man-ing Cumont’s theory without even realising it.

I understand the context of @Michael B-C’s posts better now.

 

[mkrnhr]

From a rapid look at the depictions in the file attached below, it seems bovine (bull) sacrifice or slaughter in Rome was traditionally done with axes and hammers, not knives.

 

[Joe]

I know it's Franz Cumont's hypothesis but apparently no archeological data back his claims:

At least one of the people who countered Cumont's idea that the bull symbolism means that Mitraism came from Persia, was Prof. David Ulansey. In his book The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World he claims that the evidence suggests that the tauroctony is actually a celestial and zodiacal motif:

Ulansey's text labors to advance an alternative thesis, that the symbolism of the tauroctony is almost entirely celestial and primarily zodiacal, and that its central scene of slaying the bull has clear ties to the precession of the equinoxes. Towards this end Ulansey musters overwhelming evidence, and it is safe to say that on this point his arguments are decisive in favor of the fact that the imagery present relates to the zodiac signs and neighboring constellations, and the ages-long motion of precession.

 

[Pierre]

From a rapid look at the depictions in the file attached below, it seems bovine (bull) sacrifice or slaughter in Rome was traditionally done with axes and hammers, not knives.

Good find. It was done with axes or hammers (for smaller animals) and the blow was aimed at the neck or the head.

 

[mkrnhr]

Good find. It was done with axes or hammers (for smaller animals) and the blow was aimed at the neck or the head.

The mithraists didn't need to invent a practice or a symbol from scratch, it is more likely that they subverted what was existing before (if I recall well, bull sacrifice is present in the Odyssey, when Telemachus went searching for his father for instance), by introducing some modification (the stabbing for example) and infusing it with the meaning they wanted to (the bull representing Julius Caesar or the good protector of the people per stoic writings) while disguising it in a more cosmic significance, which also have been borrowed too. OSIT

 

[Niall]

I don't think we can say - not yet anyway - that Mithraism was 'an anti-Caesar cult that re-eneacted his assassination' as part of its 'consciously evil rituals' (much less that this 'something' later becomes what we know as freemasonry and is central to modern-era events like the French revolution). If Mithraism (specifically, this 'late Roman' form of Mithraism) begins only after Caesar's assassination, then Pompey cannot have 'brought it to Rome' because Pompey died before Caesar - which also implies that Caesar's final resting place at the foot of a statue of Pompey is unlikely to mean he was 'pointing to the secretive cult behind his killing'.

(On that issue, Caesar was assassinated in the Curia Pompey, which is where the Senate was temporarily meeting while the Curia Iulia was being built. Is it unusual then that he would fall below a statue of Pompey in a building that was dedicated to its patron and financier? From paintings of Caesar's assassination, there seems to have been only one (large) statue on the Senate floor - one of Pompey, naturally.)

The assassins, if some of them were indeed wearing Phrygian caps as they danced out of the Senate on the Ides of March, would thus have been members of something in existence, not something started afterwards. It's possible, I suppose, that they were members of some semi-secretive club, and that it was subsequently 're-ordered' to include 'Caesar slaying rituals'. Then, later, narrative about Phrygian caps on some assassins' heads was penned in order to retroactively leave a signature on the assassination. But you can see here that I'm having to make two additional assumptions to make things chronologically consistent.

Separately, given that we know who Caesar's enemies were, and what their ideological beef with Caesar was, I don't see the need for 'exposing a secretive group' that linked those enemies together. It's kind of like today's situation in the US; Trump sees his role as defending the constitutional republic from bankruptcy, war, decay, etc., and his enemies also see their role as 'defending the constitutional republic'... from Trump! Once you can see the general situation, do you need to establish that the Cheneys, Clintons, Bushes, Nulands, and Kagans are all part of a specific club? Trump's run as a 'populare' effectively 'busted wide open' the existence of this 'secretive cult'!

 

[Joe]

Whereas Franz Cumont, had assigned the origins of Prudentius' "repugnant rite" to the dark prehistory of the Phrygian cult of Cybele, independent but complementary studies of the epigraphic evidence by R. Duthoy (1969) and J. B. Rutter (1968) demonstrated that in its earliest attested form the taurobolium was some sort of bull chase, and that the vast majority of surviving inscriptions, from the second and third centuries A.D., refer to what had become essentially a conventional bull sacrifice. Prudentius' description, concluded both, applies only to a final transformation in the character of the rite, and is to be associated primarily with the collection of fourth-century inscriptions from Rome commemorating taurobolia conducted in the sanctuary of the Phrygianum on the Vatican[5].

So, the taurobolium as practiced in the Cult of Cybele was an innocuous bull chase. Predentius “repugnant rite”, i.e. the taurotoctony refers to a late (Roman) and radical transformation of the initial rite:

That excerpt from Fourth-century Taurobolium by Prof. Neil McLynn seems to be saying that the vast majority of actual references to taurobolium came from the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD and are associated with the temple of Cybele and Attis at the Vatican Phrygianum. There doesn't seem to be much evidence that tauroctany and especially "sacrifice wells" were a widespread practice. I read elsewhere that the "repugnant rite" claim is generally interpreted as a later overdramatization designed to present Mithraism in a bad light by Christians.

Here's the relevant page from McLynn's book. If anyone has access to Jstor, I would be interested to see how that last paragraph finishes:

 

[Adobe]

Bull blood bath ceremony scene from the Rome series. (I don't think this scene time dates anything. It's just in the series as a roman ceremony) (it's just a movie so I'm sure the bull was not harmed...at least I hope not)

 

[Pierre]

At least one of the people who countered Cumont's idea that the bull symbolism means that Mitraism came from Persia, was Prof. David Ulansey. In his book The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World he claims that the evidence suggests that the tauroctony is actually a celestial and zodiacal motif:

I didn't read this book. Persian Madzeism was already celebrating the spring equinox as the victory of Mazda over Ahriman.

How Ulansey came to the conclusion that the tauroctony has an astrological meaning, I have no idea.

"its central scene of slaying the bull has clear ties to the precession of the equinoxes", I'm puzzled by this statement because the precession of the equinox occurred in Taurus between 4,320 and 2,160 BC i.e. way before the emergence of Mithraism.

Of course, the Ides of March occur close the spring equinox but it could be coincidental.

 

[Altair]

Here's the relevant page from McLynn's book. If anyone has access to Jstor, I would be interested to see how that last paragraph finishes:

It's an article. The full version is attached.

 

[Joe]

Separately, given that we know who Caesar's enemies were, and what their ideological beef with Caesar was, I don't see the need for 'exposing a secretive group' that linked those enemies together. It's kind of like today's situation in the US; Trump sees his role as defending the constitutional republic from bankruptcy, war, decay, etc., and his enemies also see their role as 'defending the constitutional republic'... from Trump! Once you can see the general situation, do you need to establish that the Cheneys, Clintons, Bushes, Nulands, and Kagans are all part of a specific club? Trump's run as a 'populare' effectively 'busted wide open' the existence of this 'secretive cult'!

I think this is an important point. As per Collingwood, all history is the history of thought, and history is the re-enactment in the historian’s mind of the thought whose history he is studying. If we're trying to understand the motivations and actions of 'elites' in the past that created the events of history that we are trying to understand, it's important to try to understand the same of the 'elites' today because it's reasonable to assume that the underling dynamics are similar.

Today, too many people correctly 'feel' or perceive that something is very wrong with the path on which society is set, and then look for evidence to prove that feeling correct. The result is that they tend to engage in too much pattern recognition and see *conscious* conspiracies where there are none and ascribe conscious intent to people where none exists. All that can do is encourage people further in the 'seeing' of conspiracies which end up being more about belief than actual truth.

As the adage goes, I don't want to believe, I want to know, but to do that, I'm going to have to rein in my emotional drive to fit the facts around my belief and instead turn my belief into a working theory or hypothesis, but always be open to correcting it and allow the facts to lead where they suggest, rather than where I want them to.

 

[Pierre]

That excerpt from Fourth-century Taurobolium by Prof. Neil McLynn seems to be saying that the vast majority of actual references to taurobolium came from the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD and are associated with the temple of Cybele and Attis at the Vatican Phrygianum

Cumont claimed that the origins of the Taurobolium (bull sacrifice) were to be found in the cult of Cybele, McLynn demonstrated that it was not possible since the first reference to Taurobolium (as bull sacrifice not as bull chase) dates back to the Handrian era (ca. 70-130 AD). i.e. at last 50 years after the emergence of Roman Mithraism.

Over a few centuries the symbolism of the bull according the cult of Sybele had drastically morphed. Why?

 

[BHelmet]

The pattern recognition thing is tricky. I think it is built into the human brain. I also think the pattern recognition is more the cause and not the effect of looking for validation of pet theories. Yes people are suggestible and that plays into things as well. But trying to observe objectively is both helped and hindered by pattern recognition. And the fuss over Caesus/Jesar was itself a theory looking for patterns at some point. But it was also born of 2similar patterns overlayed and matched and noticed.

Are these patterns just cooked up (vague boiling frog reference) out of irrational flights of fancy or are there really a group of actors throwing logs on a fire under a pot full of frogs? In the final analysis, maybe those actors are talking to each other or maybe not but does that matter to the frogs?

It is possible to say, “I won’t get sucked into recognizing this pattern because it is a reflection of extreme conspiratorial thinking.” And even that is a kind of pattern recognition.

Sayings are born of both pattern recognition and objectivity. They don’t say “politics makes for strange bedfellows” because the various actors are operating in isolation unbeknownst to each other even if they have separate aims. IMO of course.

I guess all I am saying is that pattern recognition is a double edged sword like so many things in this world.

 

[Joe]

It's an article. The full version is attached.

Thanks. It's pretty interesting. He writes about the taurobolium, not the tauroctany, and the cult of cybele, not mithraism, as allegedly practicing the 'bull blood shower' ritual that supposedly appeared in the 4th century and marked a change from the normal bull (and other animal) sacrifices associated with the cult of cybele up until the 3rd century.

In doing so, he argues that the only real source for the claim about the 'bull blood shower' (from a Roman Christian poet called Prudentius) is dubious at best, while also admitting that the evidence for what really went on is "isolated and inconclusive".

"The use of an actual cellar in the fourth-century rite is not of course excluded such arguments, and indeed remains a distinct possibility (cf. below, 320-321). But the shower of blood belongs to the world of fantasy: Prudentius' account, I submit, derives ultimately not from any knowledge of the mechanics of the but from the spectacle of the tauroboliate's bloodstained clothes and dark talk of a subterranean mission. It thus corresponds almost exactly with the Thyestean banquets and promiscuous orgies that pagans conjured from reports of what went on behind the dosed doors of the Christian Eucharist."

He also points out that evidence for such cellars or wells that would have been appropriate for such a ritual is non-existent.

The literary evidence therefore tells us more about Christian audiences than about the taurobolium itself. Nor, despite an assiduous search for examples of the 'fossa sanguinis' (as Prudentius' pit has been termed), has the poet received any reliable support from archaeology.

Several candidates have been disposed of by other scholars: thus the well in the forum 1968) or the pair of storage pits at a rural shrine near Aezani 43-45). More promising has seemed the cramped cellar excavated by Guido Calza in a corner of the precinct of Cybele; but this narrow room, enclosed within a tower in the city wall and hidden discreetly behind the temple of Attis, can hardly have accommodated the spectacular proceedings described by Prudentius.

If the site is to be associated with the late antique taruboloium at all (on the strength of its associations with Cybele and the epigraphic evidence for Ostian taurobolia in the second and third centuries: cf. Duthoy 1969 25-27) it would again suggest that what went on underground was a secret rite on a modest scale, comparable therefore to other mysteries. The same applies to our most persuasive (but still inconclusive) archaeological evidence, the square stone-walled pit excavated at Neuss in the Rhineland (an area devoid of taurobolium inscriptions),29 which is demonstrably associated with Cybele and has been securely dated to the early fourth century. But the cellar is only 1.4m deep, which together with the apparent lack of provision for drainage makes it highly unsuitable for a Prudentian shower-bath.

The only furnishings, a stone table and basin set into the corner, suggest an altogether more domestic ritual, which perhaps involved (to judge from the sets of steps, far the most impressive aspect of the structure itself) a staged descent and reascent. The Neuss cellar thus again leads us away from Prudentius towards the more typical pattern of mystery cults, and the sort of underground ritual implied (separate from but perhaps associated with the killing of the bull) would be appropriate for the cult of Cybele and compatible with the suggestions made earlier, and would provide a possible starting-point for the poet's fantasies. But our isolated and inconclusive evidence cannot be pressed. The mechanics of fourth-century taurobolium remain a mystery.

 

[Joe]

So, the taurobolium as practiced in the Cult of Cybele was an innocuous bull chase. Predentius “repugnant rite”, i.e. the taurotoctony refers to a late (Roman) and radical transformation of the initial rite:

In its latest form, recorded by Prudentius, it involved standing in a pit under a metal grill, on which a bull was killed, thereby experiencing a shower of blood.[6]

Just to be clear, it doesn't seem that Predentius' "repugnant rite" was the tauroctony and the tauroctany did not involve a "bull blood shower". It seems the 'repugnant rite' he referred to was, allegedly, part of the taurobolium (bull sacrifice), and the taurobolium was associated with the cult of goddess Cybele. There are no literary and epigraphic sources for the taurobolium that make any reference to Mithras.

The link referenced above (6) is from Tertullian on tauroctony, and states:

The taurobolium was an ancient ritual associated with the cult of Cybele in all but five of the inscriptions that record it. In its latest form, recorded by Prudentius, it involved standing in a pit under a metal grill, on which a bull was killed, thereby experiencing a shower of blood.

The literary and epigraphic sources for the taurobolium have been collected by Duthoy.6 None of them make any reference to Mithras. The ritual is associated with the cult of the Great Mother, the Magna Mater, Cybele. Duthoy makes the point that the ritual of a baptism in bull's blood, as described by Prudentius, seems to be a late evolution, probably in competition with Christianity.7

A single inscription from Pesaro associates Mithras with the taurobolium.8 This seems to be a forgery, however.9

There is, therefore, no evidence associating the taurobolium with Mithras.10

The association is widely supposed, probably because it is suggested implicitly in English by Franz Cumont, who suggested that the cults of Cybele and Mithras were associated, and included a discussion of the taurobolium.11 In the complete French text of the TMMM, however, in a footnote not included in his abbreviated version, Les mysteres de Mithra and so not translated in the English, he explicitly rejected the idea that the taurobolium was part of the Mithraic liturgy

Further, the paper by McLynn (as noted in previous post) makes the case that the "bull blood shower" claim made by Predentius against the cult of cybele is likely fantasy, although he does admit that there isn't much evidence to press the case, although the case that can be made is based on their being scant evidence for any such practice, at least in the cult of cybele.

So it seem the only thing we can level at Mithraism in this context, at least for now, is the supposition that the tauroctany is a reference to the assassination of Caesar because Caesar was associated with the bull. Then again, the bull was associated with many people and groups over many years, and the sacrifice of bulls and other large animals was common practice in secret religions/cults. The main thing that stands out, in this respect, about the Mitraic reliefs is that they do not depict a 'standard' bull sacrifice. For me, there IS something weird about it, but I just don't know what it is yet.