ABSTRACT
Of all the mystery religions, Mithraism is the most opaque in its myth and theology but the most transparent and accessible in its structure and activity as an association. The reason for this accessibility to modern research is twofold. First, Mithraism’s initiates met in distinctive, uniform, and thus easily recognizable chambers. These mithraea, as we term them (their original users, for ideological reasons to be explained below, called them “caves”), reveal much both about their functioning as meeting places and about their symbolic intent as sacred space. Second, Mithraism’s chosen medium of expression was visual art. Hence there survives a mass of sculpture, many pieces still carrying dedicatory inscriptions which, in the habit of the times, are as garrulous about the worldly standing of the dedicators as about the power of the god. Accordingly, we have been able to recover – what we have not for any of the other cults – widely distributed and fairly representative samples of Mithraism’s actual membership. To these two primary factors we may add Mithraism’s practice of keeping its cells small and of expanding by cloning new communities nearby, each with its own mithraeum and cult apparatus. As a result, the volume of recovered data, structural, icono-graphic, and epigraphic, is out of all proportion to the actual size and strength of the cult. 1 While the import of much of the iconography remains quite enigmatic, that of the physical structures and (even more) of the epigraphy is to a large extent self-revealing.
