Author: Roger Pearse

A truly interesting article at Past Horizons:

Temple of Mithras to be restored to its original location.

Plans to dismantle and move the  reconstructed Roman Temple of Mithras to temporary storage, ahead of a more  faithful reconstruction, will begin on the 21 November 2011 by Museum of London Archaeology.

The temple, which is located at Walbrook Square, was discovered by chance in  1952 by archaeologist WF Grimes as the site was being prepared for  redevelopment.

On the final day of excavation – September 18th 1954 – the marble head  of  the god of Mithras was unearthed.  Several more amazing artefacts,  including  some sculptures, were later found – these are now on display  in the Museum of  London’s Roman gallery.

The temple was dismantled at that time and the Roman building material put  into storage.  In 1962 the temple was reconstructed on a podium adjacent to  Queen Victoria Street, 90 metres from its original site, nine metres above its  original level and set in modern cement mortar.

In December 2010, Bloomberg LP, purchased the Walbrook Square site to build  its new European headquarters building. Listed building consent was granted for  the dismantling of the current Temple of Mithras reconstruction and expert stone  masons have been commissioned by Bloomberg to carefully extract the Roman stone  and tile from the 1960s cement mortar. The temple is due to be carefully  packaged up and moved to storage for the second time.

Bloomberg LP will restore the temple to its original Roman location and in a  more historically accurate guise. Upon completion of Bloomberg’s new  development, the new reconstruction of the Temple of Mithras will be housed in a  purpose-built and publicly accessible interpretation space within their new  building.

There are two rather splendid pictures too — one of the original excavation, and the other is an aerial shot of the rather forlorn looking current site.

The Museum of London Archaeology site has the same article here.   The MOLA (terrible acronym, sets your teeth on edge) site is well designed and looks like a good one with which to keep abreast of excavations in London.

The Museum of London site is rather less good, largely aimed at school-children, although I did find this reasonably useful article on the Mithraeum here, and one showing some of the finds here.  (On the other hand a bad article on Mithras is here, mistakenly supposing  that Mithras was the same as Mithra).  There is an image of a Tauroctony from the site here.

A correspondent drew my attention to this interesting statement in a current handbook.  He also added some glosses (in square brackets) to make it generally comprehensible:

Cumont’s [late-19th- and early-20th-century] reconstruction suffered a mortal blow at the first conference of Mithraic studies, held in Manchester in 1971 (GORDON, 1975), and has not been revived since.  The past twenty-five years have instead given rise to many—mutually exclusive—theories on the origin and nature of the Mithraic mysteries, which virtually all share a stress on the absence of [clear] links between [Iranian] Zoroastrianism and [largely post-Christian Greco-Roman] Mithraism.^[1].

That seems to hit the nail on the head.

The Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible is not a handbook that I have encountered before.  But the material on Mithra/Mithras — present in this volume because of the names Mithredath (Ezra 1:8) and Mithradates (1 Esdras 2:12) — seems interesting.  It is a digest of secondary literature, naturally enough, and I found that it was particularly useful for Mitra, the Persian deity, and nicely drew together the various seemingly contradictory elements that make up the aspects of this god.

1. ^[1]H. J. W. Drijvers & A. F. de Jong, “Mithras,” Dictionary of deities and demons in the Bible (Eerdmans/Brill, 1999), p. 579↩

In the Budapest National Museum, there is a rather splendid bronze plaque depicting a tauroctony.  Julianna Lees has uploaded to Picasa this photo, which I came across this evening.  (I hope that link works, by the way: for some reason it isn’t at all obvious what the URL is).  She gives the date of the item as 213 AD.

While looking at it intently, something caught my eye.  Along the bottom are seven figures (you’ll have to click on the image to see it full size).

Now the number seven in the cult of Mithras always reminds us of the seven grades of initiation.  Is this, perhaps, what we are looking at?

Notice that all of them seem to be wearing armour.  And each of them has something different over their right shoulder.  The third from the left has horns on his head and has something — a torch over his shoulder.  The third from the right has a caduceus behind him and a winged helmet.  The middle one seems to have a bird on his head — a crow?

I am by no means sure of what I am looking at.  But once again it highlights the possibility of gaining more information from a comparative study of the monuments.