"Welcome to Heaven, Please Watch Your Step": The "Mithras Liturgy" and the Homeric Quotations in the Paris Papyrus

I. Introduction

The "Mithras Liturgy,"¹ the most famous (or infamous) of all the material in the Papyri graecae magicae (hereafter, PGM), occupies lines 475–820² of the Paris Papyrus, an eclectic collection of charms, rites, and various recipes, which is alternatively designated PGM 4. Complex in content and structure, the Liturgy opens with an opening prayer, then describes the ritual in what is by far the longest portion of the text, and closes with instructions for preparing and performing the ritual. The aim of the Liturgy is to furnish a revelation for its practitioner, guiding him through a complex series of divine realms into the presence of the highest god who is affiliated with the noetic sun, referred to as Helios Mithras. This revelation is to be dictated aloud and performed either for the benefit of the practitioner himself or for a "fellow-initiate."

Mithras, the god who sits at the top of this particular cosmology, was one of the more notable of the deities around whom a mystery cult developed, perhaps because of the sheer strangeness of his devotion. The god himself was a Roman creation, originally worshipped in Ostia and in Rome,³ though many of his trappings seem to have been drawn from Mithra, a Near Eastern deity. Despite an external similarity there seems no concrete evolutionary connection between the two gods.⁴ The central focus of the mysteries seems to have been the tauroctony, the mythical bull-slaying scene in which the god is placed in a context of generation and rebirth, a depiction of which has been found in all mithraea.⁵ While the limited nature of the archaeological evidence does not afford sure interpretation of this scene, the images of fertility accompanying it (often grain pours from the dying animal's body) hints at the salvific character of the mysteries through the image of life arising from death.⁶

The Mithras Liturgy has posed numerous problems for its commentators. The most prominent issue, one as old as the scholarly discussion of the text, is how a god connected with a Roman mystery cult came to play a pivotal role in a ritual found in an Egyptian library. An accompanying difficulty is the issue of "religion" versus "magic": should the Liturgy be considered a "religious" text based on the perceived sentiment of its contents, or a "magical" one based on its context and the numerous instances of voces magicae it contains? Further, arguments that try to resolve either of these problems often are forced to ask how "Egyptian" the text is. The regional identity might seem a category simple enough to formulate, but this is deceptive; one must remember that at the time the PGM materials were produced, Egypt had been under foreign rule for centuries. Cultural interaction and amalgamation were facts of daily life even in the face of ideological separation.⁷ As such, reliance on distinct bipolar cultural models only obscures the complex social reality in which the Paris Papyrus was produced.

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on these issues through a redaction-critical examination of the Mithras Liturgy and its placement in the Paris Papyrus. Within this larger document, the Liturgy is positioned between two similar sets of Homeric quotations whose immediate purpose is unclear, for some quotations seem curiously out of place: some are divorced from their ritual context while others stand alone, with no indication offered as to why they are included in the papyrus. I shall demonstrate rather than being the result of a random scribal mistake, the redactor of the Paris Papyrus included these quotations to form a thematic unity with the Liturgy. It is by no coincidence, I argue, that the Mithras Liturgy, a ritual intended to invite divine revelation, is surrounded by a series of Homeric quotations, each of which describes the Iliadic hero Diomedes or the goddess Athena, who helps him. Equally important to this theme of human-divine interaction is the source of the quotations: Homer, by the imperial period, was himself seen as...