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8. On Becoming a Mithraist: New Evidence for the Propagation of the Mysteries
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INTRODUCTION Against the charge of proselytizing, no religion of antiquity can mount a more credible defence than Mithraism. It was the most self-effacing and retiring of the “dynamic” cults (to use MacMullen’s term [1981, 112], where it seems almost a misnomer). Unlike Isism or the cult of the Magna Mater, Mithraism had no public presence or persona, and appears rigorously to have denied itself all opportunities for self-promotion and display which might win it adherents or at least the acquaintance and passive admiration of the masses. How, then, did it recruit, or, if that is too proactive a term, accrete? The contrast could not be more extreme: on the one side, the conspicuous temple thronged by the devout or the merely curious (one thinks, for example, how remarkable in appearance and how frequented was the complex of Iseum and Serapeum in the Campus Martius at Rome; see Turcan [1992, 109 f.] for a good description); and on the other, the typical urban mithraeum tucked away in a suite in some apartment or business block and clearly intended, like modern club rooms, “for the use of members only” (see White’s descriptions [1990, 47–59]). In its withdrawal from the public arena, Mithraism likewise denied itself those occasions of pomp and ceremony, pageantry and procession, of which perhaps the best example, despite its fictional setting, is the Isiac procession to the Ploiaphesia at the climax of Apuleius’s The Golden Ass (11.7–11; see, further, Turcan 1992, 104–20). These were the events by which typically On Becoming a Mithraist New Evidence for the Propagation of the Mysteries Roger Beck 8 175 08_vaage.qxd 2006/03/24 9:42 AM Page 175 the dynamic cults advertised themselves and proclaimed (I use the word advisedly) their gods. They were also the occasions of recruitment, or so at least they were represented. Again, the example from The Golden Ass is instructive. The miracle wrought on Lucius (11.12–13) may have gained only a single Nockian “convert,” but it—and the entire pageant in which it is set—won something of more abiding importance: the acknowledgement by the awestruck crowd of the goddess’ majesty and effectiveness. Isism was sustained in good part by that admiring but personally uncommitted corona. What drew and retained the corona (since miracles are unreliable) was, in a word, spectacle—the more exotic, the better (see MacMullen 1981, 18–34). Even the culturally alien and rebarbative, like the galli of the Magna Mater, could play their part. The aim was the promotion of the deity, and the means was showmanship; which should not be seen as detracting from the seriousness of the enterprise. Alexander of Abonuteichos , we may accept, was no less sincere for being a brilliant impresario (Remus 1983, 159–73, 203f.). All of which is to say that cults of this type may not have proselytized systematically, but they certainly proclaimed systematically. No mission, but plenty of public message. It is worth recalling that great public events of miracle or of confrontation , if not of pageantry, are ascribed to Christianity by the ancient sources and postulated by modern critics as a major cause of its transmission and growth (see MacMullen 1984, 25–29; also M. Smith 1978). I leave it to others to judge whether this was actually so or not. Rodney Stark’s demonstration (1996, 3–27) that growth through family and social networks at the rate of 40 per cent per decade (a mere 3.42 per cent per year) will account for the increase in the number of Christians over the first three centuries, renders the great conversion occasions redundant as a causal explanation; though this is not to say that they didn’t take place. The more important point, however, is that, as related, the scenario of the acknowledgement of the deity’s power by witnesses to great public encounters is essentially the same for Christianity as for the self-advertising pagan cults. I am persuaded by Richard I. Pervo (1987) that the accounts have more to do with meeting a benchmark of edification, excitement, and proper form in the narratives of the faith’s propagation than with how the faith was actually propagated. Pervo’s thesis is that, in this regard, the canonical Acts are indistinguishable from the apocryphal. Their episodes are of the sort that Christian, no less than pagan, readers expected in prose narratives about heroic figures. Hence they are no different in kind from the...