The recent opening of the new Bloomberg staging of the Walbrook Mithraeum, more than six decades after the discovery of the head of Mithras, in its day hardly less media-ised, forms a fitting backcloth to the appearance of two new books on the god and his images. They could hardly be more different from one another, yet both illustrate the search by younger scholars for strategies to outflank the oppressive weight of previous scholarship on the topic of Mithra/Mithras, a story that goes back proximately to Franz Cumont's opus magnum, Textes et monuments (1894–99), and, more remotely, at least to Vincenzo Cartari's Le imagini de i dei de gli antichi (1556¹; 1566²), if not to late antique commentators such as Lactantius Placidus.

Images of Mithra is the first of a series of books, Visual Conversations, edited by Jaś Elsner and beautifully produced by Oxford, intended to advertise the gains to be made in the study of material/visual culture by collective or team-work. Elsner's own part-chapter on Mithraic art in Art and the Roman Viewer (1995) represented a milestone in the understanding of such iconography, and his inspiration is often here perceptible. Five young archaeologists/specialists in ancient material culture, who have been working together on the project ‘Empires of Faith’, financed by the Leverhulme Trust and based between the British Museum and Wolfson College, Oxford, re-open the question of the relation between ‘Roman’ Mithras and the other Asian Mithras, Mihrs, Miiros, Mitras whose worship can be traced from the second millennium. The aim is to challenge both the modern settled conviction that ‘Roman’ Mithras has no meaningful antecedents in Hellenistic Asia Minor and the Persian empires, but also to find alternatives to Cumont's story of a literal transfer. I found many of the procedural claims in the jointly-written Introduction stimulating: how are we to conceptualise a(n ancient) ‘god’? If we can no longer believe in old ideas of ‘divine personalities’ or ‘quasi personhood’, let alone Dumézilian functions, what possible alternatives are there? Images must be taken as implying or enabling many possible meanings or interpretations rather than being reduced to one ‘true’ one. At Erfurt, we emphasise the constructedness of all such figures, whose ‘existence’ is instantiated through variable investment of resources, imaginative, material and performative — investment that operates on a dialectic of attempted closure constantly undermined by the impossibility of controlling evocations. This is a brave, experimental, lively book; if I am to single out individual (albeit anonymised) contributions, I would pick out the chapters on Bourg St Andéol and Antiochus’ monuments in Commagene. Interestingly enough, a very similar attempt to re-open the ‘Asian question’, by Jaan Lahe of Tallinn, is soon to appear in German.

Olympia Panagiotidou, on the other hand, a former pupil of P. Pachis in Thessalonike, was trained in the History of Religions and, like her teacher, has embraced the cognitive science of religion (CSR), a growing field that attempts to combine insights derived from various types of psychology (cognitive, developmental and evolutionary) with religious studies. Her take on the Roman cult of Mithras is thus deliberately ahistorical (166), the aim being to use insights derived from various traditions within CSR to describe how adherents could have come to a new understanding of the world/cosmos and how they might have made sense of their experiences at initiation. Where it does not consist purely of detailed exposition of CSR claims, the text is correspondingly in the conditional mood — ‘might have/could have’ being the commonest formulations. CSR is attractive to P. because, as she claims, its empirically-based models of perception, apprehension, behaviour and interaction allow one to move beyond common-sense formulations (54), affording ‘well-educated guesses about the underlying cognitive processes of past agents’ (ix). Given the well-nigh total loss of significant written sources emanating from Mithraic temples as opposed to secondary (i.e. literary) sources, all with their own slant, this might indeed represent a methodologically precious gain, comparable to the kind of proxy data regularly used in studies of the Roman economy. Conversely, P. views her book as providing an empirical confirmation of the CSR theories she draws on.

The argument proceeds over five chapters. The first, on the ‘world view’ of the cult, focuses on the ways in which the Mithraic temple, taken as a symbolic representation of the cosmos, may, through ritual practice and mnemonic reinforcement, have produced a new sense of cosmic order and the individual initiate's place in it. The second, on identity-construction, uses Lakoff and Johnson's idea of conceptual metaphors to suggest how initiation was integrated into other life-stories available to adherents but also yielded a ‘new strategy of existence’ (66). The most difficult chapter, ch. 3, attempts to show how sensorimotor experiences during initiation together with metaphorisation might have effected a conceptual fusion between the static space of the temple and a universe conceived as in constant pluriform motion in order to impart the subjective reality of heavenly ascent. The standardised representation of Mithras killing the bull is the focus of the almost equally difficult fourth chapter, in which a plethora of modern interpretations, all based on the idea that the scenario is an astral map, are allowed, by the same token, to be possible alternative Mithraic interpretations too; what is definitively excluded, on the other hand, is the idea of an authoritative guiding narrative. Finally, Harvey Whitehouse's much-criticised dichotomy, between ‘doctrinal’ versus ‘imagistic’ modes of religiosity, is drawn upon to suggest that Mithraic communities, though only loosely organised, forged close internal relations thanks partly to the ‘dysphoric’ initiatory experiences but mainly due to the insistence upon secrecy, which installed an effective boundary between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.

P. herself notes that CSR has so far found little favour within the world of Classical Studies, and this study is not likely to alter that. One can indeed, without much loss, simply skip the CSR expositions. There are, though, five more substantial problems with the book (and I have many minor quibbles). First, the claim that adherents all over the Empire will have attained a more or less coherent view of the order of the cosmos conveyed not by the kind of conventional listing in verse of the zodiacal signs we know from dipinto 13 in the mithraeum beneath Santa Prisca on the Aventine (c. a.d. 220), which began ‘primus et hic Aries astrictius ordine currit’, ‘and first here runs Aries, strictly in order’ — a text P. never refers to — but through ‘initiations’ and the alleged cosmic structure of all Mithraic temples. Now it is true that a tiny handful of excavated temples were indeed decorated to allude to the aspects of the represented cosmos — I myself once attempted to generalise this to all temples. But the great majority of Mithraic meeting-places make no such reference, and in some indeed the inner walls were painted to recall domestic interiors; and I now believe that Maarten Vermaseren was right to criticise me for vastly exaggerating the prevalence of a thought that certainly was available yet not often taken up.

Secondly, P. simply assumes the validity of the claim that the familiar representation of Mithras killing a bull is ‘in fact’ a map of a segment of the zodiacal circle and, where that does not quite fit, some other neighbouring constellations. Since Roger Beck has afforded her some assistance in the writing of the book, this will hardly surprise; what does surprise is that this (in my view) contestable hypothesis should be taken for granted without argument as though it were now a heuristic datum on which one can build further hypotheses. It may well be that there were such efforts to relate image to cosmos, yet the one plausible literary example known to us, in Porphyry's De antro 24, bears no relation to the claim that the scene as a whole ‘is’ a map of an arc of the zodiac. Porphyry's source related that Mithras holds the dagger ‘of Aries’, the sign that is the ‘nocturnal house’ of Mars (= Ares), i.e. in which the planet attains its greatest influence; while he rides on a bull, ‘which is the sign of Venus’ —there must be a lacuna here, to the effect that the nocturnal house of Venus is Taurus but its solar house is Libra. This convoluted reasoning is given as the grounds for claiming that Mithras’ ‘proper place’ is the two equinoxes, in Aries and Libra.

Three other problems can be noted more briefly. One is the unquestioned assumption that the aim should be to intuit or limn ‘the experiences’ of adherents, rather than start with the prime movers of these small groups, namely the organisers, whom I call the ‘mystagogues’, whose drive, enthusiasm and money, as I have tried to show on several occasions, were crucial, since their individual ideas inspired and dominated decoration, equipment and ritual. The idea that we could ever be in a position to reconstruct ‘experiences’ at this distance is surely delusory. Then again, P. takes over Luther Martin's dictum that there was no ‘dogmatic’ Mithraic myth, which to my mind renders the development of narrative scenes framing the bull-killing scenario quite unintelligible (the ‘dogmatic’ being a mere shibboleth), yet later finds herself forced to allow narratives in by the back door. Finally, we need to question the assumption, fundamental to so much work on Roman Mithras, that we have a key to it in the claim that it was a ‘mystery cult’. P. even goes so far as to claim that ‘secrecy’ provided the binding force that kept such groups together. Yet there was evidently plenty of information about the cult in circulation — as Justin says about a supposedly Mithraic ritual, ‘you either (already) know, or you can find out’. The only sources that refer to the cult as ‘mysteries’ are either Christian or Neo-Platonist, both of them with their own reasons for representing Mithras-worship as such; and entry rituals do not make a ‘mystery’. There were no Mithraic ‘communities’, there were only small groups brought together under different auspices by more or less enthusiastic and inventive mystagogues, some of whom might have tried out the ‘mystery road’ — but that was simply their own personal choice.

Despite all this, I find myself in whole-hearted agreement with several of P.’s claims: an integrated set of Mithraic doctrines is a chimera; there were no standard rituals of initiation; we cannot generalise from single instances; we cannot confirm any inference about what ‘Mithraists’ saw in the bull-killing scenario, or how they interpreted it; during transmission narratives could have undergone mutations and transformations; there was no Mithraic ‘design-team’ negotiating all the details. One rather regrets that she did not start from there.