An email reached me about a new initiative in Mithras studies. This is led by Dr. Csaba Szabo, who has just created a new research group in Hungary, at the university of Szeged. This will undertake the “Remithra: reinventing Roman Mithras. Materiality and appropriations of a Roman cult in Central-Eastern Europe” project. The project has been funded by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences over five years to do something really very useful.
The aim of the project is to use modern methods to collect – and digitize! – all the material evidence for the cult of Mithras in the Roman provinces on the middle and lower Danube. This includes Pannonia Inferior, Superior, Moesia Inferior, Superior and Dacia.
These provinces contain an immense amount of archaeology and other primary material for the cult, and the results of the project must be of considerable scientific and scholarly interest.
There is a project website here, with full details of the project and its participants. And a nice logo!
Our existing information is either scattered in journal publications, or else very elderly and focused primarily on major artwork-type images. So this is solid stuff, which can only do good. Well done Dr. S.
Btw, our local Byzantine Catholic parish posts photos of icon pictures on the fronts of their parish bulletins.
The other week was the Sunday where they read the parable of the Prodigal Son, and the icon picture showed various scenes from the story.
And in the lower right-hand corner, there’s a small picture of a servant killing the fatted calf. Obviously a calf is a lot smaller, but the pose was very similar to the tauroctony pose. (Presumably because people killed or sacrificed bulls in that pose.)
Apparently there’s not a single “stereotypical” Sunday of the Prodigal Son icon, and there’s various ways to portray killing the fatted calf (only included sometimes).
I don’t know why one of the icons had a guy killing the fatted calf with a big sword, for instance.
I suppose that there are more or less standard ways of killing cattle – pulling its head back and cutting its throat, and doing so from behind in case it gores you?