Fitz Jenő (szerk.): Religions and Cults in Pannonia. Exhibiton an Székesfehérvár, Csók István Gallery 15 May - 30 September 1996 – Szent István Király Múzeum közleményei: A. sorozat 33. (1998)

It is true, though, that in the present state of research we cannot adhere to the theory any longer, according to which the cult of Mithras came directly from the East, transferred through soldiers of the Orient army, as e.g. those of the 15th legion. Not a minor cause of this is the fact that we did not find any buildings from the republican or early imperial period in the East which could have been the predecessors of the characteristical cave sanctuaries with the cult picture of the bull-killing Mithras. Many facts point to the direction that the veneration of Mithras came primarily from the Orient to Rome, where it was adapted to the Roman demands primarily as for the requirement of loyalty to the Imperial house, and here it became the mystery religion known to us (MERKELBACH 1984, 149). From Rome resp. from Italy was the newly organized cult brought to the provinces along the Danube and the Rhine. In this extension imperial functionaries, government officials, among others customhouse officers and other citizens from Italy (CLAUSS 1992, 254). This proves that we cannot speak of a "religion of soldiers" any longer. An analysis of the followers of Mithras on ground of the inscriptions (CLAUSS 1992, 268) gave the result that the participation of soldiers, except for Britannia, was never above 20 per cent (differring from the devotees of Dolichenus, among whom about 40 per cent were soldiers). This statistic seems to reflect also in the epigraphic material of Carnuntum. If the bestowers of the votives in the third Mithraeum, except for a centurion of the 14th legion who donated an altar, were civil persons, the votives of the first Mithraeum came from soldiers, who must have been, in spite of statistics, the main responsibles for the transport of the cult from Italy and for its initiation along the Danube. Astonishing results can be gained from the recent research, which was since the 70s promoted by international Mithras congresses. This was not only valid for the social structure of the initiated, the expansion of the cult and philosophical background of Mithraism, but is evident also in the representation of the bull-slaying in the cult pictures, in which researchers sought for a long time past the key to the secret of the Mithras mysteries. The critics of the purely Persian interpretation, according to which the Roman Mithras was the helper of the supreme heavenly deity, Ahura Mazda, and in the bull sacrifice we have to see an act of the Iranian cosmogony, which would make the earth fertile, led to new ways of interpretation. Among those the theory of an astral symbolical concept gives the most plausible explanation. It starts from the fact that for every element of the cult picture (from bull, scorpion, dog through snake, raven and crater to the twins) there is an accordance among the constellations. It was deducted that the cult picture contained the most important constellations of the heavenly equator and the summer zodiacus seen on the sky when the beginning of the spring was in the bull and the beginning of the autumn in the scorpion and so the slaughtering of the bull would mean nothing but the end of the bull asterism as spring constellation. Hidden in the allegory of the bull-slaughtering was the knowledge of the precession of the equinoxes illustrated, that astronomical phenomenon about the shift of the spring and autumn point through the whole zodiac in the course of 25.900 years, detected about 130 B.C. by the Greek astronomer Hipparchos of Nicea. The discovery of this heavenly movement was a revolution for the belief of many centuries in the immutability of the routes of stars and planets. The precession could become the object of a religion inasmuch as a deity was thought to be the originator of this alteration of the cosmic structure starting from the heavenly axis.This god was identified with Mithras, which was equated with the star constellation Perseus over the constellation Taurus7

. Mithras-Perseus, who appears in the bull-slaughtering as the executor of the precession and thus as lord of a new age, was thought at the same time the ruler of the heavenly axis. This domination over the rotating pole was expressed symbolically in the pictures of the so-called Mithras legend, namely in the scene where Mithras rotates over Sol kneeing before him the shoulder blade of an ox, which is provably the Egyptian symbol for the constellation of the Great Bear. It can be assumed that with the help of the precession theory we shall find further, till now unintelligible details of the picture cycles and so we tried when building the new exhibition of the Mithras monuments in the Museum Carnuntinum to point to its particular astral symbolistic aspect - not least with the aim of displaying the theme for discussion and for solving the till now open questions in the Mithraic iconography. 7 The detailed display of this theory based on literary, astronomical and historical facts can be found with D. ULANSEY, The origins of the Mithraic mysteries: cosmology and salvation in the ancient world. (Oxford/New York 1989). 41