Cult of Mithras

Noah Blough

Mrs. Hatmaker

Latin 3, Period -6

December 16^th, 2010

The Cult of Mithras

In ancient Roman society the state religion was polytheistic. This means that the Roman people did not focus their worship on just one god. However, due to the fact that worshiping numerous god can be hard to do, many people joined cults that focused their attention on one god. This did not mean they did not believe in the other gods, they just believed they connect more with one deity. One such deity was Mithras, whose cult was an early rival of Christianity.

Much like the cult, the origins of the god Mithras are mysterious. Many scholars believe that Mithras was first worshiped in Persia or what is now Turkey. He was one of the many gods that did not start out as a Roman god but was adapted over time. It was believed that Mithras killed a bull and when he did, the first man and women came out of the bulls blood, with all other things of nature. From then on, Mithras was the messenger between man and the of life, different gods depending on which religion. Mithras main role is to defend mankind against the god of the dead, which again depends about which culture Mithras was being worshiped in.

The Mirthras cult was consisted only of men, no women were allowed to join. The temples of worship are now called by scholars, mithraeum. They were either in caves or in places that were built to replicate a cave. This is because Mithras was supposedly born in a cave and the people who worshiped him wanted to acknowledge this belief. Most mithraeums were found on the Roman frontier such as the border of Germania and at Hadrian Wall. This implies that there was heavy worship among Roman soldiers. This is most likely because the Roman legion was the vitality of the Roman Empire and they drew the connection to Mithras who is the vitality of mankind.

Very little is known about the initiation ceremony. It is believed that people who were applying to the cult needed to experience three elements of pain and discomfort. These were most likely heat, cold, and hunger. After a person has entered the cult, they progress through different levels. The average amount of levels for a person to get through is four. People who are more religious would have been able to get to level seven of worship. Each level was represented by a totem, such as a raven or a soldier, and would also be associated with a planet, such as Mercury or Saturn. For example, the first level was Corax and its totem was a crow and its planet was Mecury.

To conclude, not much is know about this cult because it was kept very secrete in Roman society. Though what scholars know of this cult backs up the idea on how open Romans were in including other peoples religion into their own.

Work Cited

http://www.romanarmy.net/mithras.htm#ref12

http://ecole.evansville.edu/articles/mithraism.html

Mithras killing the bull whose blood creates all living things.

Temple to Mithras in Germany

The Cult of Cybele

Adina S.

Ms. Hatmaker

Latin 3

16.12.2010

The Cult of Cybele

The Cult of Cybele began in Asia Minor. Cybele was a goddess known as a healer and a protector from enemies, and was considered responsible for good crops and military victories. She was also referred to as Magna Mater. Her home was Mount Ida, near the city of Troy. In 194 BCE, a temple was built on the Palatine Hill. New games were initiated to celebrate her. Her popularity grew very quickly and by the end of the Roman Republic the cult of Cybele had become one of the most important. Her temple was visited by some of the most powerful people of Rome.

According to myth, Cybele discovered that her lover Attis was unfaithful. Jealous, she made him go mad and mutilate himself under a pine tree, where he bled to death. Regretting what she had done, Cybele mourned her loss. This however, caused a lot of negative aspects to Cybele’s cult. Cybele's religion was a bloody cult that required its priests and priestesses and other followers to cut themselves during some rituals. The priests even castrated themselves at their initiation. Festival days were celebrated with the goddess going through the streets, and having people banging cymbals and drums, wearing bright attire and heavy jewelry. This caused a very negative view of the Cult from the Roman Christians. By the 4^th Century Emperor Valentinian II banned the Cult and passed laws that allowed secret followers to be punished. Those who still followed the cult were tortured, forced to commit suicide, or buried alive. This caused the Cult to go extinct by the 6^th Century AD.

Sources:

http://www.dl.ket.org/latin2/mores/religion/cultcybele.htm

http://www.mythencyclopedia.com/Cr-Dr/Cybele.html

Adina S.

11.30.2010

Curses and Religion in Late Antiquity

Curses have been found to be used for revenge, marriage, love, competitive rivalry, or for witnesses in court. They influenced actions or happiness of others. The curse was supposed to appeal to a god or another supernatural being in order for them to carry out the curse; usually to hurt or impair an enemy.  This was done by invoking multiple deities into the curse. Repetition was also used in curses, along with magic words, drawings, sacrifices and the location chosen to bury the tablet. Some were even written backwards. The curse was often written on lead tablets, however this didn’t exclude them being on other materials such as wood, papyrus, and stone. Those written on lead tablets and stone have been better preserved over the years. Curses have been around for a long time. Today archeologists are still discovering several curse tablets and they are very helpful, as “they provide much unexplained evidence into the religious beliefs and practices, language, private lives of citizens, and the influences of ancient magic arts.” (http://www.archaeologyexpert.co.uk/ArchaeologyAndCurses.html)

In the Roman state, religion was also very important. They had sacrifices and rituals to keep a good “relationship” with their gods, and encouraged others to “identify their own gods with Roman gods who shared some of the same characteristics.” (Religion and Romanization, 61)

The Jerusalem Temple was destroyed by Roman forces at the end of the Jewish revolt of AD 66–70. This didn’t, nevertheless, stop the Jews from rebuilding the Temple and continue to worship. “Hostility to Rome for the destruction of the Temple did not prevent Jews within the Roman and Byzantine empires integrating into mainstream culture, but the Christianization of the empire, and not least the adoption of Palaestina as a Christian Holy Land.” (http://www.ocla.ox.ac.uk/sect_jjw.shtml)

Constantine ended the persecution of Christianity by issuing the Edict of Milan in 313. Therefore the Pagan religion was no longer the only acceptable religion in the state. While the temples were shut in 356 there is still evidence that traditional sacrifices occurred. Under the ruling of Julian, Roman Emperor from 355 to 363, however, the temples were reopened and State religious sacrifices were legalized. There were a few back and forth’s until finally Theodosius made it illegal again, once and for all ending “an era of religious toleration.”(Wikipedia) He also stated Rome to be a Christian Empire and with the edict of Thessalonica created several laws against pagan practices. However, it took until the 7th century for the population to abandon some of their pagan customs. This leads to believe that cursing and sacrifices, though made illegal were around for centuries after, and most likely adapted into Christianity in different forms.

Sources:

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianization#Late_Antiquity_.284th-6th_centuries.29

-http://www.ocla.ox.ac.uk/sect_jjw.shtml

-http://www.archaeologyexpert.co.uk/ArchaeologyAndCurses.html

-The third Cambridge Latin book Page 42, 61-62.

Noah Blough Picutre

http://www.the-romans.co.uk/g7/35.curse_tablet.jpg

Photo 1 Noah Blough

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3273/2711394484_d87abb8d9f_o.jpg

Pictures to go.

A picture of a curse tablet.


And a picture of Sulis Minerva.

Roman Curses in Antiquity

Noah B.

December, 1, 2010

Curses in Antique Rome

In Ancient Rome, throughout the empire, people used curses to generally invoke harm onto other people, to invoke good luck in a person or object, and occasionally, to recover objects. Ancient Roman cures did not necessarily mean to bring harm onto someone as they do in modern time, a curse was just a term for anything that invoked a god or a deity.

Invoking one or more gods was the beginning of the curse. If not god was to be invoke, then the curse would not work, or so the Romans believed. When the god is invoke in the first part of the cure, the statement is asking the god to do something, such as harming someone, as asked by the person writing the curse. When writing a cure, the author of the curse, may invoke as many gods possible to make the curse more powerful, however, some people believed by invoking a god that was not related to the task being asked of him or her, it would bring bad luck to the author. So to make the curse more powerful, but not to bring bad luck upon themselves, many Romans asked gods of different religions, but who had the same main role. For an example, if someone want to write a curse asking for plentiful crops they would probably invoke Ceres, the Roman Goddess of grain, and then the author would probably look to another culture, such as the Greeks, and invoke the Greek Goddess of grain, who would have been Demeter. In Roman culture the most common culture that a juxtaposed deity would come from, would be a Greek god. But, with Gaul being taken over by the Roman Republic, and soon completely conquered by Ceaser's new gods were somewhat introduced into curses. However, the big change occurred when British were introduced into into the with Ceaser's expositions to Britain in 54 and 55 B.C, and the eventual conquest completed by Claudius 90 years later, lead to more gods discovered, and these new British gods started to replace the Greek gods in the late empire, especially in the Northern Gaul and when Britain was conquered Britain. In Roman Egypt and sometime also on the Italian Peninsula Egyptians gods would be invoke alongside Greek and Romans.

The middle part of the curse tells the god or goddess what is being ask of them. In the times before Christianity was the predominate religion in the Roman Empire, curses tended to be more direct, because there was no or little fear of being punished. The main body of the curse was usually accompanied by a spoken portion that the author would say aloud as they were writing out the curse. This process would be done to help amplify the prayer to the gods and they believe this would make it more likely that their prayers would be observed and completed. The second action the author might do while writing the curse is to make some sort of effigy, especially in the curses that involve harming people, and the person invoking the curse would mark on the effigy where they wanted the person hurt or killed, while they were saying and inscribing the curse. This practice again was to help amplify the curse to the gods so that their curse would be acted upon.

The final part of the curse is the part where the author would promise something in return to the god, for their services. The item given depended on who was the god, where the person who was asking the favor lived, and how costly the curse was, as in does it ask for a small favor such as praying a rabbit would stop raiding the garden or is the curse asking for the god to decimate out an army. The most common bribe would have been wine for minor deeds and for major deeds a sacrifice might have been in order.

To conclude, curses in Rome before 1 A.D were different that curses after that time period because, it was before Britain was conquered by the Romans so the use of Romanized British gods was very limited and instead Greek and Egyptian gods were used more frequently, Christianity was not around so people were more subtle about their curses that invoked hurting people by not drawing effigies of people who they wanted dead and not directly referring to the death, and finally, because with Christianity people started to view curses as pagan and the practice eventually became less wide spread.

*All information came from http://curses.csad.ox.ac.uk, Cambridge Latin 3 Book, or In Class Notes

Adina S.

11.30.2010

Curses have been around for a long time. Today archeologists are still discovering several curse tablets and they are very helpful, as “they provide much unexplained evidence into the religious beliefs and practices, language, private lives of citizens, and the influences of ancient magic arts.” (http://www.archaeologyexpert.co.uk/ArchaeologyAndCurses.html)

Curses have been found to be used for revenge, marriage, love, competitive rivalry, or for witnesses in court. They influenced actions or happiness of others. The curse was supposed to appeal to a god or another supernatural being in order for them to carry out the curse; usually to hurt or impair an enemy.  This was done by invoking multiple deities into the curse. Repetition was also used in curses, along with magic words, drawings, sacrifices and the location chosen to bury the tablet. Some were even written backwards. The curse was often written on lead tablets, however this didn’t exclude them being on other materials such as wood, papyrus, and stone. Those written on lead tablets and stone have been better preserved over the years.

“We know from Greek tragedy and a couple of other sources that the Greeks had a very simple curse for people. They could just pray to a god to destroy someone completely: "Destroy so-and-so and his entire household." This is what I would call the nuclear bomb of curses, just a complete eradication of somebody. But none of all the classical curse tablets from Athens call for the complete destruction of the victim. This may be because in most ancient cultures and the Athenian one in particular, there was a strong scruple against killing a member of one's own city.” (Christopher Faraone)

In classical Athens magic was chthonic religion. Therefore, at the time, if one was killed due to a curse, the punishment was treated and punished equally as any other murder would have been. Apparently some believed that if they had done something wrong or evil, it could be made undone by sacrificing something to a god; essentially a bribe. This means that bad people can go unpunished.

In the Roman state, religion was also very important. They had sacrifices and rituals to keep a good “relationship” with their gods, and encouraged others to “identify their own gods with Roman gods who shared some of the same characteristics.” (Religion and Romanization, 61) For example, Celtic Sulis and Roman Minerva combined into Sulis Minerva, a goddess who even had a temple built in her honor. Even Emperors were regarded as divine. Once they passed, it was common to make them into gods, which included building a temple in their honor them. Some may consider it odd that religion could harm people, but “Romans tended to see their gods as possible allies in the struggles of life.” (42) It seemed only logical to them that if they wanted to hurt someone they could ask for the help of a powerful god. Superstitions, magic, and religion were also cause for more careful actions; wearing amulets, evil eyes, marriage only on certain days, and keeping a general wariness of signs from gods.

Sources:

-http://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/1/777777122300/

-http://www.archaeologyexpert.co.uk/ArchaeologyAndCurses.html

-The third Cambridge Latin book Page 42, 61-62.

Note: I don't know how to double space on this. But on my Word it was just short of two pages.