Public cults
Suppose that we view the Roman empire of the first four centuries AD as a market in which assorted religions competed for business. In business, enterprising firms raid each other for useful ideas and marketing strategies.
Did the upstart Christian firm borrow from pagan salesmanship, or vice versa, or was there a two-way flow of borrowings? Or did the rival firms not compete, but rather follow different strategies independently?
This article will survey the field, gradually narrowing the focus to the most plausible candidate for a source of pagan influence on Christianity (or vice versa) â Mithraism, or, as its contemporaries called this religious cult - the âMysteries of Mithrasâ.
Weâll begin with the big picture, retaining the metaphor of businesses competing for custom. We could see competing pagan firms as the innumerable cults of the gods and goddesses across the empire.
But in fact almost all those cults were not in competition at all. They are better seen as complementary enterprises - the locally controlled branches of a multi-national.
The firmâs function was twofold: (1) to secure and retain the goodwill of the gods and thereby the wellbeing of the empire and its communities; and (2) to preserve the socio-political order through appropriate activities, principally the festivities of the local religious calendars.
The prime method of getting (and keeping) the gods âonsideâ was blood sacrifice. The glue which kept each level of society in its proper place was the system by which imperial and local élites fed and entertained the masses (the famous âbread and circusesâ) in return for respect and acquiescence in the divinely sanctioned order of things.
It is not difficult to see how emperor-worship, a franchise for which rival cities competed avidly, fits into this picture: the emperorâs powers of benefaction were of an order that seemed to eclipse those of mere mortals.
Mithraism: a rival?
Mithraic meeting place ('Mithraeum') at Carrawburgh on Hadrian's Wall
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The Mithraists were worshippers of the âUnconquered Sun God Mithrasâ, as the inscriptions call him. We know a good deal about them because archaeology has disinterred many meeting places together with numerous artifacts and representations of the cult myth, mostly in the form of relief sculpture.
From this evidence we know that the cult was the last of the important mystery cults to evolve and that it thrived in the second and third centuries AD and waned in the fourth as élite patronage was gradually transferred to Christianity.
The cult was limited to men (not a good strategy for maximising market share), popular with the military (hence over-represented in the frontier provinces), with a large constituency in the city of Rome and its port Ostia.
It consisted overwhelmingly of those a notch above the absolutely poor, a religion of the reputable but not of the élite. While Christianity developed hierarchically and strove to form and maintain a single Church - at least in principle - Mithraism remained comfortably local.
We know of no Mithraic authority higher than the âFatherâ presiding over his group of thirty or so brother initiates: no Mithraic bishops or pope, and no orthodoxy to define and squabble about.
Typically, the Mithraic meeting place was a medium-sized room, furnished with solid platforms on the longer walls. On these 'side-benches' the initiates reclined for the cult meal, which was their principal ceremony.
This cult meal was both an actual feast and a ritual memorial, unlike the Christian eucharist which developed solely into a sacramental ritual. In the Eucharistic sacrament, Christians memorialise Christâs self-sacrifice by partaking of Christâs body and blood in the form of bread and wine.
The Mithraists in their cult meal memorialised the feast which Mithras and the Sun shared as they reclined on the hide of the bull sacrificed by Mithras in the sacred story. One needs only add, because of rampant misinformation, that the actual killing of a bull played no part in Mithraic ritual.