SS STUDIES epitep BY John R. Hinnells Volume I© 1975 Manchester University Press ‘While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in the individual papers belongs to their respective authors, and no paper may be reproduced whole or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher Published by the University of Manchester at the University Press Oxford Road, Manchester a3 grt UK ISBN 0 7190 0536 1 USA Rowman and Littlefield Publishers 8r Adams Drive, Totowa, N.J. 07512 ‘us ISBN 0 87471 557 1 Library of Congress cataloguing-in publication data International Congress of Mithraic Studies, 1st, Manchester University, 1971. ‘Mithraic studies. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Mithraism—Congresses. I. Hinnells, John R., ed. IL. Title wt 1585-157 1971 295 T7310 UK IBN 0 7190 0596 1 us ISBN 0 87471 557 1 Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd, Frome and LondonContents Preface by Sir Harold Bailey Editor’ introduction Abbreviations Votume I 1 The second stratum of the Indo-Iranian gods H. W. Bailey camprince 2 The concept of Mitra in Aryan belief P. Thieme TésinceN 3. Mitra in India J. Gonda urrecur 4 Mithra, Lord of Lands A. A. Jafarey TEHRAN AND RAWALPINDI § Mithra in Iranian history Richard N. Frye stmRAz AND HARVARD 6 Die Sonne das Beste Ilya Gershevitch cammripoe. ge £ B 7 Religious subjects on Achaemenid seals A.D. H. Bivar Loxpon. 8 Mihragén among the Irani Zoroastrians M. Boyce LONDON 9 Modern Iran: its origin and growth J. A. Boyle MANCHESTER 10 First plenary discussion 8 119 125vi Contents 11 Mithra in the Kusdna period HH. Humbach maiz. 12 The role of Mithra among the deities of the Kusdna coinage David W. MacDowall purHam 13 The Dura Mithracum +F. Cumont 14 Franz Cumont and the doctrines of Mithraism R. L. Gordon gast ANGLIA Vouume IT The role of the Roman in the and. ice of Mithraism C.-M. Daniels newoasTLE UPON TYNE, 16 Mithra and Me ic A.D. H. Bivar Lonpon on the scene Ee Hinnells MANcHESTER fi Ti Abeta fist z = J.P. Kane mancnesrer 19 Second plenary discussion 20 Some peculiarities not hitherto fully understood of ‘Roman’ Mithraic sanctuaries and representations W. Lentz MARBURG 21 Mithra-Verehrung, Mithras-Kult und die Existenz iranischer Mysterien Carsten Colpe BERLIN 22 Cautes and Cautopates, the Mithraic torchbearers Martin Schwartz CALIFORNIA 23 Mithraic grafiti from Dura-Europos E. D. Francis vate. 24 A magical Time god M. J. Vermaseren AMSTERDAM 25 Mithraism and Gnosticism Ugo Bianchi BoLocxa 26 A Mithraic figure from Beirut R. D, Barnett sriisn museum 135 142 151 215 & 378 424 457Contents vii 27 The idea of the judgement of the dead in the ancient Near East 4S. G. F. Brandon 470 28 Some thoughts on Isis in relation to Mithras R. E. Witt tonpow 479 2g Mithraism and the Gundestrup bowl H. R. Ellis Davidson campripoz 494 30 Mithras and Christ: some iconographical similarities A. Deman BRUSSELS 507 List of plates 518 The plates between pages 524 and 525 Index of modern authors 525, Index of Mithraic sites 534 Index of references to monuments in CIMRM 537 Index of texts discussed 540 General index 544a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.Editor’s introduction xiii The obvious signs of discontinuity between Oriental and Western traditions (the absence in the East of any Mithraic bull-slaying or cultic grade struc- ture, both basic to Roman Mithraism) have generally been ignored or ex- plained away. The possibility that Mithraism was a new creation using odd Iranian names and details for an exotic colouring to give a suitably esoteric appearance to a mystery cult has never been examined. Even if this theory in its starkest form proves unacceptable, it is one which needs careful thought, and if modified may prove the most acceptable solution to the question of the origins of the Roman cult. Put simply, one must ask if the Roman Mithras was the Mithra of Iran in name only. If Cumont’s assumption—that the Roman cult was a continuation of Iran- ian religion—is correct we cannot necessarily assume that Zoroastrianism is the best guide to the theological cradle of Mithraism. The Indo-Iranian element of the Vedas, Magian, Median of Saka cults, remnants of Iranian culture in Armenia, these are some of the alternative solutions which con- tributors to these volumes have considered. Attempts to establish the origins of Mithraism may be both futile and un- necessary. Perhaps Roman Mithraism can only be understood by a study of its own survivals, monuments, inscriptions and temple structures, and the light they cast on its own internal history and social structure. Any com- parisons that can be made may perhaps have to be limited to contemporary cults or traditions within the Roman empire, State and mystery cults (in so far as these can be reconstructed) or Gnosticism. Whichever alternative may ultimately turn out to be the right approach, with the present state of our knowledge all are valid lines of enquiry. ‘The First International Congress cannot be expected to have revealed the solution to such fundamental issues. If it did no more than provoke scholars to reassess their presuppositions, then it has achieved all that the organisers could have hoped for. In future studies and meetings we may hope for a clearer picture of the method proper to the study of Mithra. With this consciousness of the number of basic questions still to be answered, the organisers of the First Congress and the Council of the Society for Mithraic Studies were honoured and delighted to receive the invitation of the Imperial Pahlavi Library to convene the Second Congress in that historic country under the patronage of Her Imperial Majesty, Farah Pahlavi, the Shahbanou of Iran. Such a generous invitation offers to the community of Mithraic scholars the opportunity to wrestle with these problems once more, to pool their knowledge and the fruits of their research in lively and close discussion. ‘This generous patronage is warmly appreciated by all involved in the subject. It is my personal pleasure to record formally the deep gratitude of all in- volved in the First Congress to the Imperial Pahlavi Library for bestowing upon that Congress the honour of official incorporation into the Twenty-fifth Centenary Celebrations of the founding of the Persian Empire by Cyrus thea You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.xviii Abbreviations Dd Dk DkM DLZ EMM EMSP EPRO ERE EVP GBd GGA GM GPW HMV HTR MII MSG MSS MTU Mx Datastan i denik Dénkard Dinkard, ed. D. M. Madan, Bombay, 1911 Deutsche Literaturzeitung S. Wikander, ‘Etudes sur les mystéres de Mithras’, Vetenskaps- societeten i Lund, Arsbok, 1951, pp. 5-46 M. J. Vermaseren and C. C. van Essen, Excavations in the Mith- acum of the Church of Santa Prisca in Rome, Leiden, 1965 M. J. Vermaseren (ed.), Etudes préliminaires aux religions orientales dans ’ Empire romain J. Hastings (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, Edinburgh, 1908-21 G. Morgenstierne, Etymological Vocabulary of Pashto, Oslo, 1927 Greater (or Iranian) Bundakifn Gottingen Gelehrie Anzeigen A. D. Nock, ‘The genius of Mithraism’, JRS xxvu, 1937, pp- 108-13 Grosses Petersburger Worterbuch M. Boyce and I. Gershevitch (eds.), W. B. Henning Memorial Volume, London, 1970 Harvard Theological Review Indogermanisches etymologisches Werterbuch Inscriptiones Graecae, Berlin, 1924~ Indo-Iranian Journal Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae, H. Dessau (ed.), Berlin, 1892-1916 Inscriptiones Mithriacae Duranae Journal asiatique Journal of the American Oriental Society Journal des études anciennes Journal of Hellenic Studies Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society ‘Journal of Roman Studies Kiéthaka-samhita Khotanese Texts P, Thieme, Mitra and Aryaman, New Haven, Conn., 1957 Mahabharata L. Campbell, Mithraic Iconography and Ideology, Leiden, 1968 F. Cumont, The Mysteries of Mithra, repr. New York, 1956 Maitrayaniya-samhité M. J. Vermaseren, Mithras, the Secret God, London, 1963 Miinchener Studien zur Sprachevissenschaft F. Saxl, Mithras. Typengeschichtliche Untersuchungen, Berlin, 1931 Miénig i Xrada You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.2 H.W. Bailey ¢. 2000 8.c., who drove a chariot an impossible distance of 150 km in one day, would set the chariot somewhat earlier, but it may be legendary. The second date is given by the treaty? between Suppiluliuma I of atti and Kurtiwaza of Mitanni about 1375-50 8.c. Here there is the well known list of four names equivalent to the Vérupa-, Indra-, Mitrd- and Nésatya- attested in the Rgveda, and three of them also in the Avesta. We can therefore set the existence of this theonymic structure with the no longer novel chariots between about 1500 and 1400 B.c.4 A survey of these synchronous theonyms indicates that an optimum ter- restrial social structure has been celestified. This caelestificatio is not patri- archal nor monarchical but ecarchical. This olxagyéa,* as the Greeks called the ‘rule of the House(hold)’, is the system called in Iranian the rule of the katak-xvatdyén, ‘rectors of the House’.? 4 The treaty between Yatti and Mitanni is noted in A. Kammenhuber, Die Arier im Vore deren Orient, 1968, p. 145. 4 Date. The Afvind, the two chariot-riders, are basic in the structure; they accordingly assure the synchronic interpretation that the theonymic structure was from about 1500 B.C. But the naturistic gods benefit by contamination. The Sun, Sérye-, worshipped before the invention of the war chariot, is given a seven-horsed chariot. The old epithet of Dyaus, the esd, is carried over to the new theonyms. The fire, Agut-, is given the highest title of the ‘Master of the House’, the samrdj- ‘general director’. 5 cadlestifcatio. This concept, which transfers terrestrial social structures to the celestial world, has often been tacitly assumed. Note the following incidental statements. H. Laders, Varuna 1, Géttingen, 1951, p. 140: the Indus name was given to the celestial waters. ERE, sv. ‘Celts’, p. 282, col. 2; there was reflection on the divine plane of what takes place in primitive society. E. Lamotte, Histoire du Bouddkisme Indien 1, p. 763: ‘dieux . . . congus & Vimage et & la resemblance de la classe bourgeoise dont ils adoptent le double vétement’. H. Liders, ZDMG xom, 1939, p. 103, the vidyd-dhara- ‘magician’ was later placed among the deva-yonayas "god-born ones’. O. Schrader and A. Nehring, Reallexikon 1, Berlin and Leipzig, 1917-29, goa, ‘himmlische Abbilder irdischen Recken’. B. Branston, The Lost Gods of England, p. 130, of Indo-Europeans: a patriarchal social system was transferred from earth to heaven. Geo Widengren, Muhammad, the apostle of God, Uppsala, 1955, p. 213: God is imagined after the model of Iranian rulers. R. E. Witt, Isis in the Graeco-Roman world, London, 1971, p. 17: the Egyptian after-life an exact copy of earthly life. M. Molé, 117 mt, p. 292 ‘projetée sur le plan mythique, l'image de cette société’. R. Hauschild, Asiatca, Festichift P. Weller, p. 258: ‘die arischen Gétter—das Spiegelbild der indischen Kénige’. W. Geiger and E. Kuhn, Grundriss der iranischen Philologie 1, Strassburg, 1896~1904, p. 633: ‘die himmlische Hierarchie ist nach dem Muster eines orientalischen Monarchen und seinen Granden aufgefasst’. K. Geldner, Der Rig-Veda 1, 1951, p. 271, on RV 1.190.3: ‘Brhaspati, der vergdtt- lichte Priester’. H. Junker, Vortrige d. Bibl. Warburg, 1921~23, p. 176: ‘Gleichsetzung des himmlischen Herrschers mit dem irdischen SahinSah’. G. Dumézil, Mythes et diewx des Ger- mains, Paris, 1998, 116: ‘. . . mythes, od se transpose, dans le monde divin, I'usage des Somines’ H. Ladder, Venues i, Gbctingen, 1956, 700, of Soma: ‘se haben tha dann auch ihren Gottern dargebracht . . . in den Himmel versetzte . . ‘ cikarkhia, This word occurs in a technical Persian sense, ‘Rule of the House’, in Theo- phulaktos Simokattés 11,18 in his History of the reign of Maurikios, 582-602 a.c., written during the reign of Herakleios, 610-640: tév 8 tis to0 Migeduov olxagylas yerduevov dijyov S° * Agaaxiéov ‘him born of the oikarkhia of Mihrin, but of the family of Arsakid” (see Marquart, Eraniahr, Berlin, 1g0t, p. 71). The word olxagzla ‘government of a house’ is used by Gre~ gorios Nazianzenos, who died about 390 4.c., in a non-technical sense. 7 The corresponding Parthian word is Aatak ‘house’, Arab-Persian gadag, Armenian Katak, rendered in Syriac by byt. The rector and rectrix were named in Zoroastrian Pahlavia You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.10H. W. Bailey epithet fakrd- ‘able, strong’, which in the Buddhist texts from about 500 B.¢. in Pali sakka-, even replaces the proper name /ndra-. The activity of Indra- is cited in RV v.33.6 djo nrmndni ca nytdméno dmartah ‘the immortal one pro- ducing force and acts of skill by the act of nart-’. Indra is tuvi-nymad- ‘strong in acts of skill or power’. Since Iranian nar- in Pari nar- ‘be able’, Avestan hu- nayo-tat- ‘skill’, corresponds in meaning to Old Indian fak- ‘be able’ in the adjective fakrd-, it is evident that Old Indian éndra- as a name has an accent shifted from *indrd-, attested in indriyd-m ‘faculty’, from a base equivalent to Sak-. In rudrd-22 we see the youthful ranger of the mountains bearing bow and arrows, like a wild beast (mrgd-) and like all hunters being a medicine man, a leech (bhisdg-). He is called also fared- in the Atharcaveda, from a base to be aati, $0 archaic *indrd- corresponds to dvdgo- (in compounds), with drip, dv8gd¢ (also Armenian ayr, ain have a-). In later Indian -ndr- (to -ndar-) arose from nr-, as in the name vaifedndara- (quoted from an inscription by J. Wackernagel, Altindsche Grammatik 1, Gottingen, 1896, p. 181), and sindara- ‘fine’, connected with Vedic sindra-. The trisyllabic value of indra- indicates that at this stage *indara- was pronounced. The proposal of A. Sihler, “Word- initial semi-vowel alternation in the Rigveda, Language xivtt, p. 61, to posit a pause before indra- symbolised by x-V, is less attractive. For the early pre-Vedic development of -rr- to -ndr-, whence Vedic -nd-, one can cite RV andé- ‘egg’ for ‘seed’, later Epic anda-. Later Nistint and Dardic Indo-Aryan attest an origin *éndrd-. The forms are quoted in R. L. Turner's Comparative Dictionary of the Indo- ‘Aryan languages t, p. 50, No. 1111. Here we find Kaliga éngrak, Lahnda dadrd, Pabai éluk from *dluk from *éxdruk (G. Morgenstierne Indo-Iranian Frontier Languages tt, 3; 9), Orissa andird ‘male’, Noristini Waigali wfdo < *dfa from *an(d)ra- (NTS 2.228). The origin is evidently *d-ard- ‘the swollen or swelling thing’, from the base nar- ‘to swell’, attested in Tranian Ossetic ndrd ‘fat’, nérsun, ndrst ‘to swell’. For é- with a word of swelling note the word RV é-pyaya- ‘to swell’. For the sense of éndd- there is the Old English bealluc (from *bhol-n-: Pokorny, p. 121) from bhel- ‘to swell’. The manuscript tradition of RV vi.23.6 réndyd and ‘ndrya ‘dclightful’ can be seen in the second edition of Max Miller, Rig-Veda—Samkité, 1, London, 1890-92, p. 56. 8 rudrd-. The theonym rudré- is a specialised use of the adjective nidré- ‘ranging? in rudré- vartani- ‘ranging widely’, an epithet of the travelling Afcind. One is remined of the Old Engl. wwid.si8 ‘wide-travelling’ and Old Norse vid-forull. With of occurs RV 1180.8 vf-rudra-, used Of the stream of the séma- juice. The base red- is in Reveda rédas-, used of the surfaces of the sky and earth in the dual rédast. This was equated (BSOAS xn, 1948, p. 326) with Avestan raobah-, Sogd. red, ZorPabl. 168, New Persian dy ‘face’ as an ‘extension’ (naturally to be separated from Old Indian réha- ‘elevation’ from rodh-: rudhe, which, however, may be in Persian ka-nid ‘well with steep banks’). Similarly Ossetic Digoron ris, Iron ris ‘check’, refers to the ‘expanse’ of the face. The Graf Leyduevoy Gothic ludja ‘face’ should not be adduced for Iranian. Sayana has both dravana- and drdvana- ‘running’, as well as rav- ‘to roar’ in glosses to nudré-. Fuller details are given in BSOAS xxrx, 1966, 1p. 521, with reference also to W. ‘Wiist’s monograph ‘Rudra’ m. n. pr., Worthundliche Beitrége zur arischen (indo-iranischen) Kul- turgeschichte und Weltanschawung tt, Munich, 1955, on the name rudrd-, there connected with Latin rullus = agrestis. Add Sayana RV vit.95,6 rudrah dubtha-drévako devel. One of Rudré-'s epithets is RV x.92.5 rudréna yayind ‘Rudré- the ranger’. For the hunter ranging in the forests, as the hunter docs in the Sudhana poem (BSOAS xxix, 1966, p. 521, anwicaran), notice also the ranging nomad in RV x.179.2 ordjdpatim cdrantam. Oxsetic uses auiny dzilém ‘we range in hunting’ (Narty kiddfytd, 1949, p. 328). I now see this base raud- in Yidgha lire trusts "to flee? fall’. In the Mahdbhdrata, just as the ddityd-, used of the sun, has been multiplied into twelve dityé-s ‘suns’, so the name Rudrd- has been increased to eleven Rudré-s, each with his name. Thus we have mrga-:pidha- ‘hunter of beasts’, sarpa-, nirrt-, alaikopid, ahi-budhaya-, pindkin-,a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.14 H.W. Bailey The title vdruna-29 is that of a functionary exercising the work called var-, concerned with some form of early law and custom. He with Mitré- and Aryaman- is a cetdr-, that is, a disciplinary officer. The action of var- is prominent in the Iranian system, in Avestan varah- ‘oath’, ZorPahl. var ‘oath’, varastén ‘place of oath and ordeal’, Ormui ywar, Yidgha wor ‘oath’. Elsewhere there is the less specialised Niristani A’kun wéri ‘word’. Old Indian has the isolated vratd- ‘authority’, with the many Indo-European words as Hittite weriya- ‘call, put in charge’, Greek éoém ‘speak’, Old Prus- sian wer- ‘to swear’ (Pokorny, 1162). The form corresponding to Indian vdrupa- has not yet been pointed out in Iranian (of which much has not yet been published). But it is to be noted that the suffix -una- varies with -ana- in the same meaning. Thus Old Indian édruna- ‘tender’ is Iranian Avestan tauruna-, but Sogdian trn *tarana-, Greek tégny; in Ossetic the second vowel cannot be decided in Digoron tdrnd and Iron taéryn. Similarly Old Indian drapa- ‘wild? is Avestan auruna-, and Avestan fratauruna- ‘entrance’ has been compared with Old Indian pratarana-. Hence Avestan varana- ‘(religious) con- viction’ as an assertion from the Indo-European yer- ‘to assert’ can be placed beside Indian RV vdrupa-. By the introduction of samgirah (acc. plur.) ‘promises’ into RV x.98.9 prd yé mitrdm ... aryamdpam . . . samgtrah. . . vdrunam mindnti the poet may intend a second vdrupa- in an abstract sense. The epithet nésatyd,*° in the dual, refers to the asvind who as saviours bring back safely to the House. The word occurs in the plural in the Hatti- understand it to mean ‘house-official’, as the word send-pati- means ‘officer of a troup’. Sayana rendered RV 1.57.7 by satim palayita ‘protector of the good ones’. The connection earlier proposed, arya-mdn- ‘having care of the wealth’ of the House, still seems to be likely. ‘© pdnes-. The sciivitis of Virwpe- indicate some social Sanction ouch we guardian of customs, like a Latin id-dex or Oscan med-diss. The nomad Hungarian had two officials, gula and karxan, in judicial cases (J. Nemeth, ‘Ungarische Stammennamen bei den Bashkiren’, 15, Acta ling. Acad. Scient. Hingar. xv1, 1986, quoting Konstantinos Porphurogennetos). The base nar- (1) ‘to assert’, (2) ‘to make oath’, is attested in Old Persian emnar- ‘to convince” in the phrase Behistun 4.42 tya mand krtam ornavatém ‘let my work convince’, and 4.49 nai-fim ima vreavétaiy ‘this does not convince him’. The same meaning is in Ossetic Iron udd sé jé yxés béurnydid ‘then his word convinced them’. Digoron wmsn is in V. Miller's dictionary, Osetinska-Russkd-Nemekij slovat, Leningrad, 1927-34, but Barasbij Bajtuyan did not use it. ‘The same sense is expressed by Digoron druigas, drdgds, irudeds, irdgds ‘convincing’, as in such a phrase as kéndd di drudgis ‘let it convince you’, construed with the locative pronoun. This is the causative sense ‘make to believe’ beside the intransitive in ear- of Sogd. urn- ‘to believe’, ZorPabl. virrav-. Derivatives of this var- are Saka Khotan goar- (see KT 6. p. 78-9), haura-, probably ‘commander’ (Anaali Istituto orient. Napoli 1, 1959, pp. 127-8). It is familiar in ZorPahl. cdvar, vdcartkdn, Sasanian inscr. of Kartér ’wb'ply “unbelief” *dvdcarth (P. Gignoux, JA, 1968, p. 337); DEM 705, pp. 13-14 odvarth f vidir, 15 aodoarth { apérik databar, Turfan Parthian w'wryg (A. Ghilain, Essai sur la langue parthe Louvain, 1939, pp- 79, 119), Armenian an-vauer ‘untrustworthy’, New Persian bavar “belief”. A different word, but of the same form, actually shows the variation of -una and -ana-: AY. 10.9.7 Paippalide text varuno, Saunaka text varand ‘the name of a tree’. 30 ndiatyd is formed by orddhi initial vowel from *nasati-, in form like Vedic vasatt- ‘dwelling’, either by -a-, if -i- is kept, or by -ya- if ~i- is extruded. In form ddityd- shows the same ambi- guity. The Avestan ndhatlya- indicates contact -{- > -Oy-. The gloss ndsika-prabhava- ‘nose-a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.18 H.W. Bailey The caelestificatio3® of the oikarkhia entailed a reconciliation with carlier naturistic mythology. Hence the duplicates. Savitér- the drover impinges upon Sfrya- the sun god; and Strya- is called also ddityd-. In the Avesta MiOra- travels with the Hoar xéaéta-, the bright sun, and this separate state is still clear in the Zoroastrian Pahlavi text the Bundahiin of the ninth century A.c. Indra- the Sakrd- ‘strong’ is not only the rector of the House, the samrdj-, but must also show prowess as the strong champion against the strong one called zyt-rd- (whose name may be from Indo-European yal- ‘be strong’), @ kind of monster transferred to the sky. From this conflict the Avestan abstract vareBraynya- ‘defeat of the strong one’ received the general meaning ‘victory’, No fewer than nine supporters of the sky are named, somewhat crowding one another: in the Rgveda there are Varuna-, Mitrd-, Visnu-, Indra-, Agni-, Séma-; in the Avesta, Ahura Mazdé, Sponta Mainyu and the fravasayé. In the Rgveda 1.89.10 dditi-, the pdtni- of the Atharvaveda, becomes dyails ‘sky’, atmosphere, mother, father, son, the All Gods, birth and generation. The functionaries of the Indo-Iranian religious cult have titles which do not show features induced by the concept of the House.? In the Rgveda these man’, A possible parallel can be seen in Indo-European dem- ‘to fit together’, thence ‘to Gothic *dem-ro- ‘to build’ (Pokorny, p. 198), For the difference of the variation in suffixes note in Old Indian rd. beside ~i- in dukrd- and hici- 3 cadlstfiatio. The old naturstic epithet deed. ‘shining to the new celestial beings. F, Robert, Homire, Paris, 1950, pp. 163-4, similarly wrote of a “Compromiscnte la religion slympienne eles rigons cal anterteure in Greece, The Sun Stine ie forced into action by Sait (RV 1.95.9 sf sb), but also by Indré Varun (RY w82. alge sireaton) ‘Mi6ra- joins the Sun: in the GBd 171.2 haro 16 tik némeréé hear bavét ‘he is every day till midday with the Hoar-sun’, Similarly the Pahlavi Rivdyat to tbe Dd, ato,§ 15 Mlbe pa rp ther tres ‘kad hear 22 andar & rien Savet Mit apt ‘partet pat fap sardérth | dimdn | Shrmazd hat devin drukin miOran-dru&an kundt ‘and MGdra by day moves in front of the bright Hear; when the bright Hear enters by the shining place (window) ‘Mira turns back. At night he exercises lordship over the creatures of Abura-mazda against the dév-demons, the injurers, and the enemies of Midra.’ The doubts about Indra- in RV m.12.5 dm sma prohdnti kha séti ghordm wtém dhur naish astity enam ‘of whom they ask, the horrific ane, Where is he? And they say of him, He docs not exist’, might echo from a transition period before Indra- was established. The refrain is sd jandsa indrah ‘he is Indra, you people’. Further diar- ‘fire’ in Iranian is called the son of Ahura Mazdi and Spandérmat is his dct ‘daughter’ (Pabl. Riv Dd, 10, § 4). 37 The official titles are archaic and hence of disputed meaning. The following include personal views. The kdri- ‘celebrator’, dyi- ‘instructor’ (BSOAS xx, pp. 41-4), bhfgu- is from an adjective by shifted accent *birgd-, connected with Iranian barg- ‘to honour’; dtharcan-, the apotropacist par excellence, is not a fire-priest but occupied in driving away demons (TPS, 1956, p. 90), dngiras- is ‘announcer’ or ‘chanter’, connected with Vedic angosin- ‘singing’ and RV dngisd- ‘song’ (BSOAS xx, pp. 52-3). The kavi- occur in Saka Khotan kai, plural Ad as epithet of both rrispira- ‘princes’ and of drya- ‘religious nobles’ (= monks), hence a double role, which may be an archaic feature (Asia Major, n.s., 1, 1964, 253 Saka Documents, text vol. 33). The title occurs in the phrase artaxiér { kai 4h (Bahnan Yait, ed. Anklesaria, Bombay, 1957, 1.9). The brakmdn- ‘the practiser of brdkman-, bfh-' is connected with Saka Khotan balysa-, Tumsuq bérsa-, bérza-, translating Bud, Sanskrit sarva-jta- ‘omni- scient’ (K'T'6.225-30). In ulig-, Avestan usig-, one can see again an ‘incantator’ named by thea You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.26 P. Thieme idea is that to cheat a Mazdayasnian out of his contractual claims is ten times as great a sin as breaking an international treaty! 10. With this I hope to have shown that there is no necessity to use ‘con- tract’, when itstands for mitra/miOra, ina ‘rather broad sense’, that would be: ‘fiir jede Art freiwilliger oder auch natiirlicher sozialer Bindung’, as, on occasion,” Prof. Lentz thinks even I am ready to do. I say ‘contract’ and I mean ‘contract’ in its strictest sense, let there be no doubt. 11. After reconstructing a Proto-Aryan appellative noun mitra ‘contract, compact, treaty’, we can reconstruct certain idioms. ‘To break a contract’ is in the Avesta either mi6ram jan ‘to smash a contract’ or mi®rem druj ‘to belie a contract’ (actually: ‘to show, by breaking a contract, the contractual vow one has given at the conclusion to have been a lie’ or ‘to turn it into a lie’). Both idioms have reflections in Old India. The first one is a rather pale one: it is in the name of a demon Mitraghna m., formed like Avestan vorabragna ‘the smashing of defences, victory’, Vedic goghna n. ‘the killing of a cow’: it must have meant originally ‘the smashing of a contract, act of faith- lessness’ and afterwards have been masculinised like *vytraghna n. into a god. *Vrtraghna/Old Iran. Vorobragna m. ‘god Victory’, into Mitraghna m. ‘demon Contract-breach, Faithlessness’. In Mahabharata 9.42 28 ff. Namuci calls Indra mitrakan! ‘smasher of [your] contract, contract-breaker!’, where the older texts have him use mitradruh-. This mitradruh m. lives on even in later classical Sanskrit—besides mitra- droha, mitradrohin—and is understood there as ‘he who harms his friend’ (yo mitrasydpakére vartale: Kullika on Manu 3.160).8 It must be realised, of course, that in classical Sanskrit there exists only a mitra n. ‘friend’? and a root druk ‘to harm’ ( jighdmsdydm Dh. P.). In the older language druh is still used in the sense ‘to deceive, to harm by deceit’ (like Old Iranian druj) and ‘mitra n. in the sense of ‘contract’. That Old Indian mitradruh, before it was re- interpreted in the light of later speech usage as ‘harming one’s friend(s)’, was used exactly like its Iranian counterpart miOradryj in the sense of ‘break- ing one’s treaty by deceit” becomes evident from the role it plays in the story of Indra and Namuci. Indra invited the demon Namuci (thus the story in MS 1.3.4 [vol. 4, P. 43, 11.8 J ‘Let us be friends (sakhd) !" Then Namuci said, ‘I shall not kill thee,’ and Indra said, 7 Indo-Iranica, Mélanges . . . G. Morgenstierne, Wiesbaden, 1964, p. 111. ® Possibly the above-mentioned replacement of mitradruh- by mitrahan in the Mahdbhdrata is due to the fact that, to a speaker of post-Vedic Sanskrit, the latter inherited and reinter- preted term (‘slayer of a friend’) sounded more forceful than a ‘harmer’ or even than & ‘deceiver of a friend’. For the rest, if the author of the Mahdbhdrata verses did not any longer understand the expressions mitradruh and mitrahan in their original sense, he was perfectly aware of the fact that Indra broke his contract (bibheda samayam, 42.28) and thereby com- mitted a heinous sin, as terrible as the murder of a brahmin (brakmahatya). * See above, § 3, and n. 2.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.30 P. Thieme man as partner [marriage], hardly ever between two women) can indeed be wrathful—of course, for the benefit of the faithful contract partner. It is interesting that Mitra in this role appears here in the company of ‘Wind? (vdpu). On several occasions in the Avesta Mitra appears together with the ‘victorious winds’ (vdla vereOrdjand, Yt 10.9, 13.47).22 17. RV vu.63.gab, ‘These two (Mitra and Varuna) have many snares (in which to catch a cunning transgressor), they are fetterers of untruth, difficult to circumvent for the deceitful mortal.’ As stated (above, § 15), I should on principle decline to accept the sug- gestion that Mitra is said to have many snares only for the reason that he happens to be grouped together with Varuna, of whom such snares are a characteristic attribute. The argument should run the other way round: they are grouped together because both have snares, both fetter untruth and both are difficult to circumvent for the deceitful mortal. Of course I could not be quite so sure if I did not have the Avesta. Here we find corresponding statements, if not in an identical wording: Tt 10.104, ‘[Mifra,] whose long arms seize the liar (?); even if he (the culprit) is in the east of the [eastern] frontier*? he is caught, even if he is in the west [of the western frontier], he is struck down . What is said in the Avesta of Mira, ‘Thou art bad and very good to the countries (according to whether they break or keep their treaties)’ (71. 10.29) must be taken, in its gist, to be valid for Rgvedic and Proto-Aryan belief also. 18. In the Rgceda Mitra and Varuna do not, in general, do their fighting themselves, The fighting is done by Indra, who is depicted as their heroic executive, so to speak: RV x.89.9, ‘Sharpen thy strong weapon, Indra, . . . against those who are without contract, who betray a contract, who betray agreements, a true word (varupa, that is: an oath or a solemn promise) !* Once only it is said of Mitra and Varuna that they mount their fighting chariot: RV v.63.1, ‘Guardians of the truth! ye mount the chariot, ye whose nature is truth (or: whose establishments are/come true?)! in the highest heaven; to him whom ye help here (on earth), Mitra and Varuna! the rain streams wetness rich with honey (sweet and life-giving) from the sky.’ In my view we should not belittle the significance of such a concept simply because it only occurs once in the Rgveda.28 If the Rgvedic poet says so explicitly, then Mitra and Varuna can be thought of as taking their stand on a fighting chariot. That it is legitimate to think so is amply borne out by % On the construction: Thieme, BSOAS xm, 1960, pp. 260 f. = KI. Schriften 1, pp. 987 f. % Thieme, W. B. Henning Memorial Volume, London, 1970, p. 449- % Cf, however, AV tv.29.1 and 7!The concept of Mitra in Aryan belief 31 the Avesta. It is well known in what glowing colours the Mikr Yait paints Mi6ra as a fighting hero on his chariot (Yt 10.67 ff, 124 ff), smiting the demons and men that break their contracts—as a ‘guardian of the truth’, as the Rgveda would put it. As Mitra and Varuna mount their chariot ‘in the highest heaven’, Mira is ‘driving his chariot from the luminous house of praise (paradise)’ (17. 10.124). 1g. When fighting on his chariot, Mira is accompanied by VaraOragna, god Victory (7? 10.67): he runs in front of his chariot in the shape of a wild boar of miraculous properties (Y¢ 10.70). The name of this god has left rather faint traces in the Rgveda. It seems evident that he was replaced by Indra, an Aryan god but not one of great significance, it appears, in Proto- Aryan times. To put it more accurately: *Vptraghna (‘created by the ahuras’ is an epithet of VoraGragna in the Avesta) was amalgamated with Indra in the Rgveda, The role of Indra, who is a daeva, as the fighting helper of the Adityas cannot be Proto-Aryan. He has taken the place *Vrtaghna held in Aryan times as the heroic companion of Mitra in his fight against deceit, and has even enhanced this role: he is no longer the helper only of the battling Mitra, he has usurped the fighting completely, or almost completely, as we have seen, If on the Mitanni tablets (fourteenth century 3.0.) Mitra and Varuna, Indra and the two Nasatyas are invoked as treaty-protecting gods, we cannot have a list of Aryan, but only of Indian gods.24 20. In the Reveda Mitra alone and Mitra and Varuna together bring rain, luxuriant vegetation and thereby health. RV v.63 is a wonderful description of the breaking of the monsoons which is celebrated as the work of Mitra and Varuna: RV v.63.6, ‘Rain splendidly talks his language, that is rich in wetness, bright [through lightning], vehement [through the storm]. ‘The rain winds (marut®*) clothe themselves in clouds—by your magic ye (Mitra and Varuna) make the sky rain, which is reddish [through heat lightning], spotless (still without clouds).” The idea that Mitra brings rain, vegetation and health, presented here ina highly poetical manner, turns out to be of genuine antiquity when compared with expressions of the Mihr-Yaft that speak of him as ‘replenishing the waters’, ‘through whom the rain falls’, ‘through whom the plants grow’ (Yt 10.61). As Mitra gives health, those who ‘live by his vow’, that is, keep their contracts, are ‘without illness’ (RV m 59.3). Mira is asked to give ‘swiftness %4 Thieme, ‘The “Aryan” gods of the Mitanni treaties’, JAOS ixxx, 1960, pp. 301-7 = KI. Schriften 1, pp. 396-412. Here my conception of Aryan Vytraghna and his relation to Indra is stated in detail (op. cit., pp. 311a-314a). It is based, of course, on the comprehensive investigations of E. Benveniste and L. Renou in their Vetra et VrOragna, to which it adds only few, in this context irrelevant, modifications. 25 = mar-it ‘blowing from the sea’: Thieme, in Asiatica, Festschrift F. Weller, Leipzig, 1954, 665 = KU. Schriften 1, p. 148,32 P. Thieme to the teams [that is, the chariot horses]’ and ‘firmness to the bodies [of men]’ (171 10.94). It becomes, then, evident that Mitra in bringing rain and vegeta- tion exercised what we may call ‘cosmic functions’ already in Proto-Aryan times. Our problem is this: what do rain and vegetation have to dowith contracts and treaties? Putting the question in this way almost means answering it. According to an archaic, widespread, possibly world-wide belief, a king’s moral behaviour is responsible for his people’s welfare, in particular for their health and for the fertile climate of his country. Examples from ancient literature will readily come to everybody’s mind. I recall a few famous instances only: a misdeed of King Romapida resulted in a severe drought (Rémdyana 1.9.8.); King Agamemnon’s misdemeanour towards Apollo’s priest brought down a disastrous plague on the Greck army before Troy (beginning of the liad) ; King Oedipus’s sins, unbeknown to himself, caused a pestilence in his realm, which could only be terminated by his atoning for them by self-mutilation (Sophokles). A king without blame, on the other hand, brings blessings to his country: plenty of grain, fruit, sheep and fish, as Odysseus expounds in a desirably full and sober statement (Od. x1x.109 ff). The most essential contract, a contract of a thousandfold sacredness (1 10.117), is a treaty between countries, concluded, of course, between their kings. A king who breaks his treaty exposes his whole country to the wrath of Mitra: ‘He wrecks his whole country, the knave who deccitfully breaks his treaty...” (Y¢ 10.2). The converse of this is that Mitra bestows blessings on the country of the king, who is faithful to his treaty. Instead of drought and pestilence, which are the natural consequences of a king’s wrongdoing, he lets the rain fall, the plants grow, gives strength to the bodies. No explanation in terms of nature mythology is called for. Not as an original ‘sun god’, but as the guardian of the sacredness of contracts, i.e. of royal treaties, Mitra comes by his cosmic role. 21. Weshall feel tempted to place in this context the oft-repeated epithet of Mifra in Yt 10 vours.gagyaoti ‘of broad cattle pastures’. Indeed, there are passages in the Rgveda where Mitra and Varuna are connected with the garyiiti® ‘cattle pasture’, because they make it fertile through rain: AV 1.62.16, 4 no mitravarun’ ghytair gavydtim ukgatam madhva rajamsi sukratd ‘Mitra and Varuna, sprinkle our cattle pasture with ghee (that is, make through rain the growth of the grass luxuriant), the spaces with honey!”. . . 26 The difficulty of reconciling the apophony of Vedic -garyiti (redactional? according to Wackernagel, Altindische Grammatik 1, § 18c, § 271 ‘edic’ according to Katyayana, iit. on Pap v1.1.79, for goyiti) and Avestan -gaayaoi is discussed by E. Benveniste, JA, 1960, should have to think, in the second constituent of the second member of the compound,The concept of Mitra in Aryan belief 33 Similarly, RVvu.62.5, vurg.6, Yt 10.112 (gaoyaotaie) also belongs here.2? ‘There is, however, a difference between a fertile or meagre cattle pasture and a ‘broad cattle pasture’ (Rgvedic uri gavyilti). ‘The latter concept (as ‘was recognised simultaneously and independently by E. Benveniste?® and myself®) is, very distinctly in the Rgveda, associated with the idea of safety (abhaya). My explanation is that gavyiiti was that particular kind of pasture which lay around the settlement and the fields (ksetra: RV v1.47.203 Joi0ra Ys 1.16, 2.16, Y¢ 8.42): at a time when peace was secure, it could be kept broad, the cattle could be allowed to graze freely (Avestan vasd); at a time when hostile attacks and raids were threatening, the cattle had to be kept near the village or even to be crowded within the hedge which enclosed it (cf. RV v1.47.20). Mitra, it appears, would be vouru.gagyaoti for the same reason: he frees from ‘narrowness’ (amhas/qhé): RV 11.59.24, 1V.55.5, Yt 10.22,30 because he creates (kr: RV vut.77.4, 1%.78.5, 1.85.8) ‘broad cattle pastures’ by bestowing the safety of peace. The strict relation between the concepts ‘contract, treaty’ (mitra n.) and ‘peace’ (ksema m.) seems obvious. It is made explicit in RV 1v.33.10 (cf. also vut..82.5, 1.11.14). The epithet vouru-gaoyaoti, then, is of particular suitability (and so, of course, is vasd.gaoyaoti ‘whose cattle pastures are according to wish’ = who bestows pastures where the cattle can graze freely: Yt 10.60), when given to Mi@ra, the guardian of contracts/treaties, who, on occasion, is addressed: ‘Thou rulest over the peace and non-peace of the countries’ (1% 10.29). Though the corresponding vedic expression urugayyiili is not attested as a qualification of Mitra (it only is applied to other gods that exercise a protecting function, Soma and Heaven and Earth), its Proto- Aryan prototype has a good claim to be considered as qualifying Mitra already in Proto-Aryan times. It is noteworthy that the term urvi gavyiti ‘broad cattle pasture’ is indicated as a boon of Mitra and Varuna in RV v.66.3—unfortunately the formulation of the verse is, like the whole hymn, rather obscure. There can be no doubt, however, that it stands for ‘safe protection’ here too.3t In Yt 10 the often-repeated epithet voury.gaoyaoti insistently recalls the most essential function of the Aryan god Mitra ‘Contract, Treaty’: that he brings about and above all guarantees and secures peace, through the promise of his rewards for those faithful to their treaties and, no less, through the menace of his punishments for the contract-breakers. because it would not have been recognisable in the first one (gao-). Uncompounded gazyaoti would have to be explained like uncompounded saedayand. Anyhow, the eponaacton ot Proto-Aryan term ga-ga cannot be doubted, ® Cf. Thieme, MA, § 24 A, 1960, pp. 426 ff. 3 BSOAS xs, roo, pb. 297 f. (= KX. Seeiftn i pp. 3041). *% Thieme, MA, § 34¢. 31 GF, Benveniste, op. ct, p. 427.34 P. Thieme Appendice Mitra n. in the Rgveda 1. Since Vedic mitrd n. is given iendship’ in the PW (s.v. mitra ga), in Grass- mann, Worterbuch zum Rig-Veda, Leipzig, 1873, (s.v. mitra 12), and in Geldner's Reveda translation (here occasionally ‘Freundesbund’: 1%.97.30¢), the acceptance of ‘contract’ (Thieme, Fremdling, pp. 139 £.; H. W. Bailey, TPS, 1953, pp. 21-423 ‘Thieme, JAOS, txxx, 1960, p. 307a (= KI. Schriften 1, p. 4o2a); Oldenberg, Noten on vit.96.6c, 1V.33.10d) still seems to be looked upon with suspicion by some even today. It may be helpful, then, to substantiate my dictum that ‘contract’ ‘emerges from the passages in question’ (above, p. 22, §4), by analysing some of them. RV x.108.gcd 4 ca gicchiin mitrém en& dadhima- ~thd gaviim gépatir no bhavati ‘And he (Indra) will come, we shall make/conclude (did) a contract (2greement/compact) with him: then let him be the cattle-lord of our cattle!” ‘The Panis, wishing to avoid a fight, speak to Sarami, who has come as Indra’s in search of the cattle they keep in hiding. Their words point to two essen- tial features which characterise a contract that makes for peace or even friendship: the threatening situation of potential enmity and imminent fight between the two Parties, and the offer of terms: ‘he will be the lord of our cattle’. RY x.34.14ab mitram krqudhvam khdlu myléta no: mA no ghoréna caratabhi dhrynd “Make (ky) a contract (agreement/compact of peace), show mercy! Do not attack us (abhi + car) boldly with your wild/unfettered (aggressiveness: cabhicéra)!” A player, wishing to give up playing dice, addresses the dice wanting them to make peace with him, to conclude a non-aggression compact. It is not a situation where a friendship in the proper sense of the word could be concluded, but a situa- tion where a weaker man appeals (by humbling himself: ‘show mercy!", namasd “by obeisance’ so to speak; cf. below, § 20n RV vi.96.6) to the mightier who threaten with ‘wild/unfettered (ghora) aggressiveness’, to show mercy and to agree not to attack him, or to undertake never to attack him again, Cf. AitBr 11.4.6: tam [agnim] yad ghorasamsparsam santam mitrakrtyopsate tad maitram ripam ‘that they sit [reverently] near Agni (the fire), who/which is of wild/ cruel (ghora) touch, through making (kr) a contract (after making a contract) [with him] (or: through making him their contract partner/friend by contract), that is, his (Agni’s) friendly (contract-created /contract-appeased) form.’ 2, Although a mitra is often concluded (did/ky) between former or potential enemies it is also made between friends, characteristically as a pact of assistance. RY vin.g6.6ed {ndrena mitrésp didhigema girbhir ‘dpo nAmobhir vpsabhim vigema “Might we succeed in wishing to conclude a contract with Indra through [our] praises, might we succeed in approaching the bull with [our] obei- sances!" Oldenberg, Noten t, p. 11, n.1:'mit Indra lasst uns Freundschafisbund zu schliessen suchen’. This, certainly, is not far off the mark. The relation to be founded, however, is not quite that of friends of equal standing, connected by cordial feelings, but thata You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.The concept of Mitra in Aryan belief 37 6. Even Katyayana, the Varttikakira (third century 3.c.), who in his own lan- guage knows only, of course, a mitra n. ‘friend’,? appears to understand correctly the sense of Vedic mifradheya.* From his udrtt. 3 on Pépini v.4.96 it becomes evident that he wants to interpret mitradheya as: ‘the making (karman: Pép v.4.36) into a friend/ into fiends (mime }* chat is brought about (yelie: Pay v.4.96) by meaning speech (ale piiribeht Pin 435) ‘that is, ‘the conclusion of a friendship by = ‘a compact of 7. A contract will be the more sacred the lew it can be enforced, The highest moral obligation to keep his promises and agreements, consequently, is on the king, who has no human authority above him: RV 1.97.30 rij n4 mitrém pré min&ti dhfrab ‘a King, he (Soma) doesnot deocive (break by deci) his contract, (being) wise (in contradistinction to a deluded king) . Geldner’s expression ‘Freundesbund’, though better than his usual ‘Freund- schaf’, can hardly be accepted as really adequate. A king docs not only, not even preferably, conclude ‘pacts of friendship’, but rather ‘contracts’ obliging him to reward services, to extend protection, to lend assistance, to refrain from aggression and maintain 8. Ordinary people seem to be more likely to betray their allies and contract Partners: RY. x.89.Bed pré yé mitrdésya varunasya dhama yojam né j4nd minénti mitram ‘who deceive (violate by deceit) the law of Mitra (god “Contract”) and Varuna (god “Truthful Speech”) as people deceive (violate by deceit) an alliance (yuj f.), a contract." Yet the breach of a contract has terrible consequences: ARV x.52.sab samin sy bode chfkapfta éo0 it mitré Digan anti virdin He (Mitra?) (or: it [the guilt?]) slays the men who have fallen into guilt against this Sakapita"! after a contract was concluded [with him] . . .’ 9. mitra n. may be the object of sddh ‘to effect, to bring about’. It seems inter- changeably used with the usual did/ky ‘to make, to conclude {a contract]’: RV 1.96.16 Spas ca mitrésp dhisind ca sidhan ‘the waters and the dhisand effect a contract [between themselves]" 7.GE. above, p. 22, § 3 ® Only in the Yajurseda, chiefly the White YV, is Kityiyana a Vajasancyin: Thieme, Indian Culture wv, (1937-8), pp. 189 ff. = KI. Schriften 1, pp. 552 f. © Patafjali, Mbh (Kielhorn) 1, p. 28t, 1. 13, names mitrakarana ‘making into a friend’ as one of the meanings of upa + sthd tm. ‘to approach {for one’s own advantage]. 10 It is possible, here, to understand ‘deceive a contract-created friend (mitra m.)’, ‘deceive an ally’ (yuj m.)': Thieme, ZDMG xev, 1941, pp. 88 ff. = KU. Schriften 1, pp. 13 ff. But as terms of comparison with dhdma n., both yuj £. and mitra n. are certainly the most suitable. 11 Sakapéta appears to be a name (less convincing: an adjective qualifying Mitra, as con- sidered by Oldenberg). Possibly the name (‘cleaned with faeces’) characterises its bearer as contemptible, nevertheless a contract even with such a one must be kept sacred. Cf. 11 10.2," .. do not break a contract, Spitama, neither the one thou wilt conclude with him who is characterised by untruth (a nou-Mazdayasnian), nor the one with him who is characterised by truth, whose religion is thine own one’,38 P. Thieme Geldner: ‘schliessen Freundschaft’, with apt reference to x.g0.6 ed, sig jdnate ménasd sim cikitre/‘dhwarydeo dhisindpal ca deoth ‘they come to an understanding with their mind, theyhave agreed’ (sam +- cit, cf classical Sanskrit samkela m. ‘agreement’). It appears, however, that there is an idiomatic use of sddh in the sense of ‘to effect [a treaty by serving as a witness at its conclusion)": RV 1.56.7 mah{ mitrésya sidhathas téranti piprati puim: pari yajfidm nf sedathub ‘Ye [heaven and earth} effect/bring about the truth of the contract, as the great ones, helping, saving (= protecting [its truth]): ye have sat down round the sacrifice (as witnesses).” ‘The invocation of earth and heaven as witnesses in taking oaths or pronouncing truths (Buddha) is so well known a custom that I need not prove it here. On the other hand, the sacrifice is a re-enactment of an original ‘covenant’ between gods and men: e.g. RV 1.24.12 (¢f. in particular the convincing discussion in H. P. Schmidt, Vedisch vrata und awestisch urodta, Hamburg, 1958, pp. 24 ff.). RV m5.gab ddhiyy agnir minusigu vikyv Apim garbho mitra rténa stdhan!? ‘Agni was placed in the settlements of man, the foetus of the waters, effecting the contracts through truth (= through observing the truth as a witness)..." Cf, v1.34.8 sddhann rténa dhivam dadhdmi ‘I am creating a thought (poem), effecting it/bringing it about through truth (= by my insight into truth)’. ‘The trandationof mab presupposes of nurse the sandhisequcnce ied téna to stand for mitrd | rténa (Pp. mitréh | rléna) according to Ws , Altindische Grammatik, 1 § 267 (cf. RV 1v.18.4a sd rdhak for sd pdhak) (Pp. sdh rdhak), vu.88.1¢ yd im for yd im (Pp. yah im): Thieme, ZDMG txxxx, 1965, p. 219 = KI. Schrifien 1, p. 222). Since Agni is often called mitra ‘friend by contract, ally’, the possibility of the Pp.’ interpretation of the sandhi being right cannot be excluded: ‘effecting as our] ally, [the sacrifice] (cf. 1v.1.9¢) through truth’. This is unfortunate, but it is the kind of situation we often face when trying to wring evidence from the Rgveda. It would be wrong not to acknowledge the not infrequent existence of such ambiguities, but it would be equally wrong to desist, on their account, from trying at all. ‘The word mitrd n. is a good case in question. Even if we are unable to interpret every one of the many problem passages with complete certainty, it would nevertheless be a mistake to deny that the evidence, taken in its entirety and weighed in its cumulative bulk, is sufficiently clear and strong to give a firm basis for the following assertion: mitrd n. in the Rgveda is not ‘friendship’ and not even ‘conclusion of friendship (alone)" but is rather “contract (of peace, of friendship, of non-aggression, of assistance, of offering obedience and humility (namas), of ending an hostility)’. The mitré n. plur. of RV 11.5.3 I suspect, may find a support in a midra n. in the Avesta (which has, in the sin- gular, a midra m. only). I offer the following for discussion: Mrogeutd a nea mifrli vouru.gaoyaoitia: mifra vouru.gaoyacite ime né aurvantd aspa para mifri8a nayente 14 Geldner translates rténa sddhan in 11.5.3 by “der auf dem rechten Weg zum Ziel kommt’, referring in the note to stdhow rise in vi.948, which he render ‘es mit der Wahrheit vollendend'’, referring in the note to 11.5.3. Ob well, let it go. . 18 Trad.+ wifagjand; cf, 10.53 uiti anjand.The concept of Mitra in Aryan belief 39 ime n6 ugra bizavalé karata mira scindayeinti 43 pascaéta dif fraspayciti mifrd ... “Thus are the boastings (agjand £.) towards Mifra (god Contract) of broad cattle pastures: ‘Ah Midra of broad cattle pastures! ‘These swift horses of ours lead /bring (us) away from Mira (from our contract/contractual obligations); these strong arms of ours cut to pieces our contracts/treaties (mifra)with a knife (a dagger or a sword). ‘Thereupon, Mifra knocks them down . ..” 14 Trad.: ugra. bazava, The above proposal is Bartholomae’s.J. Gonda uTREcHT 3 Mitra in India Before sketching the figure of the ancient Indian Mitra it seems expedient to recall Renou’s short but luminous exposition! of the relations of this god to his greater companion. Both divinities are usually praised together; even in the Rgvedic hymns dedicated to Varuna, Mitra, though remaining in the background, is not absent. The praises may be addressed to two names; they are, though not completely indiscernible, undivided. It is very difficult to distinguish between individual features and functions.? Thus the epithet ‘supporter of cultivators’ is given to both of them and either of them. Both gods constitute a ‘duel unitaire’ which was also a ritual reality: the Maitra- varuga was the officiant in charge of recitations to Varuna and Mitr: In the Rgveda a considerable number of characteristics, relations, activities are, indeed, ascribed not only to Varuna alone but also to Varuna and Mitra. The predilection for the compound Mitravaruna in the dual number shows the closeness of their association. Varuna as well as Mitra-Varuna are vested with the authority of universal kingship, guarding the Rta, upholding the law and maintaining the observances; he and they are credited with omniscience, especially in human affairs. It is not only Varuna’s wrath of which the poets are afraid (v.62.4). The sun, who is Varuna’s eye, is also the eye of Varuna-and-Mitra; like Varuna alone, the two gods, regarded as one, have ‘spies’ who see everything. Varuna sends rain, and the dual deity sends rain, both of them causing the waters to flow down; the course of the sun is the concern of Varuma alone as well as of both gods as a duality.4 He is 1L. Renou, Etudes oédiques et pigindennes vit, Paris, 1960, p. 3- # "Rien ou presque rien dans le texte méme ne nous aide & dissocier les deux fonctions; bien ‘au contraire, elles se présentent confondues A un degré presque égal A celui des Aévin’ (Renou, loc, cit.) ° For references see K. F. Geldner and J. Nobel, Der Rig-Veda abersetzt rv, Register, Cam- bridge, Mass., 1957, pp. 104 ff and 133 fi, All relevant Vedic texts are discussed in detail in The Voli God Mine, Lekiea, 1g7 “See also A. Bergaigne, La Religion védique ra, Paris, 1883, pp. 117 ff.Mitra in India 41 and they are expected to extend his (their) protection to his (their) worship- pers. In some other cases, however, a function or phenomenon is said to be in the province of both gods which in post-Rgvedic texts will appear to belong to Mitra’s range of action: they are invoked at daybreak and extend their favour and protection. Moreover, the typically Mitraic epithet ydlayajjana-, to which I shall have to revert, is also given to Varuna and Aryaman, but never to these gods alone. On the other hand, some typically Varunic features—his wrath roused by the infringement of his ordinances, his severe punishments, the snares or fetters with which he binds the sinful and from which the poets want to be delivered—are conspicuous by their absence as soon as the poets address themselves to the dual divine personality. Varuna, moreover, is alone as the god who resides or moves in the waters. It is exactly these two features which continue to arrest the attention of the poets of the Atharvaveda, Insisting, however, on the sinister and pernicious sides of the god’s character, they suppress any thought of pity and forgiveness, with the result that the differences between their Varuna and the picture the Veda gives us of Mitra are greater than they appear to be in the Reveda. But, as $B 1.4.4.10 has it, ‘Mitra and Varuna are two deities, and two ir.’® Thus they are, for instance, at v.4.t.15 declared to be man's ity-in-duality is one of the indications of the important role duality has played in the religious, mythological and philosophical con- ceptions of the ancient Indians and other Indo-European peoples.® In their line of thought the component parts of any duality tend, on the analogy of man and woman, day and night, etc., to be viewed as complementary.® ‘The time allotted to me does not allow me to say more on Varuna! than that the explanation as Truc Speech!! unduly neglects other important aspects of his character and that Rta, the concept with which both gods are so closely associated, should not be regarded as merely (verbal) Truth (German ‘Wahrheit’), but rather as the normal, regular, and hence right, natural and true course, structure and order underlying and determining all cosmic, SL. in Festgabe fir H. Lommel, Wiesbaden, 1960, p. 125- CL. also $B w.1.4.1 ff. The view presented by K. Bohnenberger, Der altindische Gott Varina, ‘TObingen, 1893, p. 85 (‘Geht man vom Re[eeda] aus, so scheint mir bei der absoluten sachlichen Identitit von Varuna und Mitra eine Spaltung einer urspriinglich einzigen Gottheit in awei Gatter die einfachste Erklirung zu bieten, . .") failed to take into account the existence of dual deities in general and the frequency and importance of the Vedic duality MitrivarupA in particular, 7 The two arms, eyes, etc., of the same person are (rightly) conceived of as complementary, not identical (a8 is supposed by H. Laders, Varuna, Gdttingen, 1951-9, P. 642). "For some particulars sce J. Gonda, Reflections on the numerals ‘one’ and ‘two’ in ancient Indo-European languages, Utrecht, 1953, pp. 5 ff. * So it cannot be maintained that Mitra is Varupa’s duplicate. 18 I deliberately reject any attempt at demonstrating Varuna’s ‘original’ character as a god of the waters (Liders), of the chthonic regions (J. J. Meyer). See also F. B. J. Kuiper, in HG vu, p. 115. 11 Liders, Varuna, passim; P. Thieme, MA, passim.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.44 J. Gonda invoked as particularly interested in the established order of things (dharman), Mitra is associated with the closely associated satya ‘that which is really existent and in agreement with fundamental being, what is true, real and essential, truthfulness in mind, speech and action’ (e.g. TS 1.8.10.2). The explanation of the commentator Mahidhara, ‘Mitra instigates the king to speak the truth’, takes only one side of the satya concept into account. From RV vu.82.5 it may be inferred that Varuna, who represents the static aspects of sovereignty, owes his secure position to Mitra’s good offices and well balanced intervention. When Varuna, the king’s prototype, has assumed a body in the newly consecrated ruler, those officiating at the consecration, while concentrating their thought on the Rta, have become faithful to Mitra, the god who, protecting the ceremonies and supervising the realisation of the Rta in these, puts all things right. At a definite stage in these rites the king is called mitravardhana: it is not my contention that the usual translation (AVS 1.8.2, etc.) ‘increaser of friends’ is incorrect, but another interpreta- tion, viz. ‘contributing to the fulfilment of those functions which are Mitra’s’, would suit the occasion very well, because the king is responsible for the preservation of order. The inhabitable world is indeed protected or preserved by this god ($B v1.5.4.14). On the other hand, the Veda student who is believed to protect his teacher and by resorting to him for study clears off a debt is ‘Mitra according to the established order of things (dharmand)’. It is then not surprising that the god should be propitiated by correct and virtuous conduct (VS 39.9). As the god who puts things right, who supervises the contacts between man and the powers surrounding him, Mitra is invoked to vindicate man’s honour and honesty (RV x.12.8), or to bring undertakings, such as the baking ofa pan (TS 1v.1.6.2), to a happy conclusion: when the pan is put on the fire it belongs to Varuna, but Mitra is implored to prevent accidents (7S v.1.7.33 VS 11.64). It is, quite intelligibly, in his province to save a disagree- ment and to arrange disputes (7S 1.1.8.4), but it would be incorrect to say that this is his main, central or original function. It becomes now clear why Mitra should be called upon in ritual acts for atonement or appeasement of evil; why, for instance, Mitra, after receiving a white animal, is willing to appease Varuna, an act which obviously is not in need of reciprocation on the latter’s side (7S 11.1.9.) ; why the first stanza of the only Mitra hymn should be recited in expiation of rain falling in the sacrificial milk (7B 1.56.7)! or why the formula ‘Mitra must be propitious to us’ is prescribed in an expiation for averting evil (VaikhSmS 5.1); and why in the Atharvaveda he is in company with other benevolent deities invoked for the devotee’s advancement and continued prosperity, for deliverance from distress and victory over enemies. 49 See the remark made by H. W. Bodewitz, Jaiminlya-Brahmana t, thesis, Utrecht, 1973, P17Mitra in India 45 Mitra, who maintains and restores order, and sees with never-closing eyes (RV 1.59.1), is also the god of the good or benevolent look. Gazing at an object with the eye of Mitra is a ritual technique to annihilate the evil in- fluences which might adhere to it, to thwart any form of evil damaging it (e.g. XB 6.14) or to prevent the person or object looked at from nursing any feelings of fear. Mitra’s eye establishes order and friendly relations (4pSS 1.17.9; MSS 1.2.1.29; AsvGS 1.24.14). The act of looking with his eye is a ritual means of effecting ‘appeasement’ (Santi), because, as the commentator Uvata (on VS 5.34) observes, the god’s eye is ‘free from evil, kind and auspicious’. This is no doubt why a hide of a black antelope believed to neutralise evil influences could be called the eye of Mitra (HGS 1.4.6). It strikes us, moreover, that some texts (VS 36.18; MSS 1v.3.41 ff.) are quite sure of the reciprocity of the effects of this gazing with Mitra’s eye: ‘All beings must regard me with the eye of Mitra; I regard all beings with the eye of Mitra,’ ‘These traits of the god’s character are, generally speaking, in harmony with the scattered statements made about him by the Vedic poets. Mitra procures the much desired spaciousness even from distress or narrowness, and free approach to an easy living, because his benevolence and protection fall to the share of his worshipper (RV v.65.4 f.). He is a helper and saver in the event of danger and difficulties (x.126.1 ff.). His right guidance is praised (t.go.1), for walking in his way is walking the right way (v.64.3). In the only complete Vedic hymn dedicated to him (RV m1.59), the signi- ficance of which, denied by Geldner®0 and Meillet,*! was rightly vindicated by Thieme,®? that mortal man who exerts himself for Mitra is aided by him; he will not be slain or overpowered; distress and disease will not reach him. Abiding by the line of conduct of the Aditya, man prays for his continued favour and benevolence, because this god, most propitious and a king of good rulership, has been born as a disposer. The assistance of Mitra, who sup- ports the cultivators, assures gain and illustriousness, which leads to fame. For Mitra, whose might manifests itself in protective presence, all mankind keeps itself in check. He supports all the gods. Mitra, among gods and privileged men, has provided refreshments for the man who is prepared to receive the gods at sacrificial sessions. In this condensed and somewhat free translation of this hymn I have deliberately omitted two places containing the verb ydtayati and the related adjective ydtayajjanah, to which I turn now. As already observed by Renou®? the compound ydtayajjana- (RV 1.136.3, etc.) is one of these rare epithets which seem to have been characteristic of 9 Geldner, Der Rig-Veda 1, p. 406. 4 Meillet, "Le dieu indo-iranien Mitra’, JA, 1907, pp. 143 ff, p. 146. 2 Thieme, op. cit., p. 39- % Renou, Etudes védiques Vit, p. 4-48 J. Gonda the god under discussion and which therefore may furnish a clue to an under- standing of his character. The meaning of the root yaf- contained in ydtayat- has been convincingly established by Oldenberg® and Benveniste:25 ‘to arrive at its natural place, at its destination, to occupy its proper position’. The compound yatayajjana- may therefore characterise Mitra, not, as was suggested by other translators, as ‘die Menschen einend oder vereinigend’ (Grassmann, Geldner), ‘der die Menschen zum Nacheifern anspornt, namlich in Freundschaft und Treue’,2® or ‘die Leute zum Vergleich bringt’,2? but rather as ‘causing people to occupy their proper and natural position, placing people in their own or in the right position, assigning them their proper place,®8 marshalling them in the position which is their support, sub- stratum or proper place etc.’. There is no reason to re-interpret, with Renou,2? this general meaning in a special social or military sense: ‘faire s’aligner les hommes (pour la guerre)’, because RV v.72.2 may express two comple- mentary rather than opposite thoughts: “Through your (divine) function and observance (vratena)®9 you (viz. Varuna and Mitra, grant) a lasting position of peace-and-comfort; through the principle of norm-and-stability (dhar- mand) you assign people their right and proper place.’3! The epithet is applied to Mitra alone at RV 1.59.5, where Thieme’s translation ‘causing people to make (mutual) agreements’, or ‘causing them to abide by their contractual terms’ is untenably based on that meaning of the root yal- (viz. ‘to join, unite’) which was rightly rejected by Oldenberg. Mitra, ‘who is to be approached with reverence’, is said here ‘to bestow his favour upon the singer (of his praise) and to place people in the right position, to install them in a place which is their true destination’. I for one would prefer a translation of this tenor to ‘qui fait s’organiser les hommes’,®8 although this activity may be implied, According to the traditional interpretation, supported by etymo- logical considerations and mentioned by the commentator Sayana,®5 for whom Mitra was the Sun, the compound even describes him as ‘the one who every morning incites people to their own or respective activities’. The 2¢H. Oldenberg, in Fadagermeische Forchompe xx, 1912-13, pp. 107 f 2% E, Benveniste, in Indo-lranica, Mélanges . . . G. Morgenstierne, Wiesbaden, 1964, pp. 21 ff. See also J. Gonda, ‘Ayatana’, Adyar Library Bulletin xxm, 1969, pp. 1 ff. 38 Geldner, Der Rig-Veda t, p. 191- 27 Laders, Varna, p. 38. Meillet, loc. cit., p. 1483 ‘qui fait tenir leurs engagements aux hommes’. Bergaigne’s (0p. cit. mt, p. 1 translation was: ‘surveillant les hommes’ 48 Cf. B. Schlerath, Das Kénigtum im Rig- und Atharcaceda, Wiesbaden, 1960, p. 41: den Volkern den rechten Platz an’. #9 L, Renou, Vocabulaire du Rezeda, Pondicherry, 1958, pp. 44 ff.; Eudes védiques xm, p. 107. 8 See J. Gonda, The Savayajias, Amsterdam, 1965, p. 290. 31 Rather than ‘en vertu de la loi humaine, vous faites s'organiser les hommes’ (Renou, Bwudes Védiques v, p. 83). 82 Thieme, op. cit., PP. 39, 41, 42, N. 30, 54- 8 Renou, Eudes védiques V, p. 66. 8 yauayati: prayataam kérayati, Sayana on RV 1.59.1; cf. the same on 1.136.3. 28 See also Rearthadipikd, ed. Lakshman Sarup ut, Lahore, 1943, P. 730-Mitra in India 47 epithet occurs also vit.102.12, where the poet, praising Agni, compares him to Mitra, who is described as ydtaydjjana-; although the adjective may also apply to Agni, I am not convinced of the correctness of the translation *(Agni) qui fait en sorte que les hommes prennent rang comme (l'exige) Mitra!’®* At v.3.9 Agni, said to know the Rta, is the subject of the verb yétayase; this can hardly mean ‘Vergeltung tiben’ (Geldner) or ‘rentrer dans le rang (les dettes)’ (Renou), but may rather be supposed to have the above meaning—which is in harmony with the preceding words, ‘When wilt thou, attentive one, cast a gracious look upon us’'—and to constitute another indi- cation of some similarity, in this respect, between Agni and Mitra. The meaning of yétayati was also discussed by Geldner®? in connection with RV m1.59.1, exhibiting at the very beginning of the Mitra hymn the words mitré jdndn ydtayati, which have been supposed to be meant as a sort of definition of Mitra’s nature.38 The meaning of the first quarter of this stanza is probably: ‘He who names himself Mitra causes men to occupy their natural position,’ with all implications which in an archaic society that idea might have had. I am even inclined to concede that among these implica- tions may be that of ‘they organise themselves’ (Renou), but I am not con- vinced of the necessity to translate ‘causes peoples [sic] to make mutual arrangements’ (Thieme).3? The passage TaittBr 1.7.2.3 adduced by Geld- ner40—which is clearly a variant‘\—in favour of his interpretation is far from presenting a difficulty,2 because the words mitré jdndn kalpayati mean ‘Mitra arranges, disposes men, sets them in order, brings them in a suitable condition, etc,’.43 The same sense seems to be conveyed by the non-causal, active verb yatati in RV vn.36.2, ‘He who names himself Mitra marshals people (men) in their normal (i.e. good and correct) position’, or ‘He marshals men . . . (therefore) calling himself Mitra’;#4 and v1.67.3, ‘Arrivez ici, 6 Varuna- Mitra . . ., vous qui (mettez) & leur-due-place les groupes humains comme deux (patrons) travailleurs (mettent leur-due-place des ouvriers) qui sont aux gages’ (Renou).45 With this interpretation the use of the verb at v.66.6 is 3 Renou, Etudes nédiques xmt, p. 81; here Sayana explains m. na y. as sathdyam iva hatalo- ‘trujanam. 37 Geldner, Der Rig-Veda, 1, pp. 406 f. 38 Renou, Ehudes oédiques vi, p. 8. 3° At AfoSS u.11.22 this stanza is used in case rain falls upon the sacrificial fire. 49 Geldner, loc. cit. 41 Cf. M. Bloomfield, Vedic Concordance, Cambridge, Mass., 1906, p. 716. 42 Mention may be made of Caland’s antes (dpSS ‘1.26.7 =) RV m.g9.1a: ‘Mitra den Menschen ihren Platz an’ and (ApSS rx.2.6 =) TaittBr m.7.2.3: ‘Mitra . . . bringt die Menschen in gute Ordnung’. 43 ‘makes them fit or capable for the accomplishment desired’ (commentator). 44Cf. Renou, Etudes védiques tv, p. 98. 4 Better than ‘die die Menschen zusammen (halten)’ (Geldner), but I have my doubts about the bracketed adjective in the note at Emdes védiques vn, p. 52: ‘l'idée sous-jacente . . . est celle d’une organisation (contractuelle) du travail’.48 J. Gonda in harmony: “That, O Mitra (and Varuna), we (the poets) and (our) patrons may arrange ourselves!® under thy (and Varuna’s) rulership, which is of greatest width and grants numerous protections’.4? The meaning of ‘arranging’ may, of course, be wide and admit of a variety of religious (cf. vi.1.10), economic, social (cf. v.48.5) and military (cf. 1.95.7) applica- tions.‘® Thus, I am convinced, the meaning of VS 27.5; TS 1.1.7.2, etc., is not ‘contend thou with the Friend by way of friendship’ (Griffith), ‘vie with Mitra in friendlyhood’ (Keith), or ‘wetteifere mit Mitra an Freundschaft’ (Geldner*®), but rather ‘set yourself to cultivate friendly relations with Mitra’.5° One of the serious difficulties with which we are confronted is the appel- lative function of the stem mitra-. This occurs not only beside the proper name but also, if we may believe Geldner and especially Renou, even as a ‘double entendre’ or ‘sens superposé’.5! In many places, moreover, trans lators disagreed: in recent times the proper name is—it would appear to me, rightly—preferred where Grassmann, a century ago, proposed the meaning ‘friend’,9* and often even an individual translator hesitated between both possibilities.S? From the methodological point of view it is, in my opinion, inadmissible to evade the problem—or rather, only part of it, because the ‘ambiguous’ passages cannot be eliminated—by the suggestion that we have to do here with a case of accidental homonymity;54 by the supposition that the appellative and the proper noun are, it is true, etymologically related, but not identical ;55 or by the assumption, on the basis of the hypothesis that the Vedic Mitra was a sun god,5¢ that the meaning ‘friend’ was the secondary one, because ‘seine im Veda wie im Awesta hervortretende Rolle als Schiitzer von Vertragen und Freundschaftsbiindnissen gut zu Mitras Sonnennatur passt’.5? However, Oldenberg, who held this view, failed to found it on a complete semantic examination of all relevant texts. “Not, with Thieme, op. cit. p. 39% ‘arrange ourselves mutually’, Renou, Etudes védiques ¥, p. 66: ‘nous nous organisons’. 47 See also, for example, RV vut.95.12, ydtatam ca mitrinah, ‘faites en sorte que les (alliés) aient leur place convenable’ (Renou, Etudes védiques xv1, pp. 64 £.). 48 See also RV 1%.92.33 X.13.5- 4 Gelder, Der Rig-Veda, 1, p. 406. 8 The compound mitradheya- will be discussed elsewhere. 51 Compare Geldner, Der Rig-Veda, m, ¢.g. on, or in, RV 1.58.6; 1.9133 194-193 m.11.145 1.5.35 V.3.2; vil.84,1; Renow, Etudes védiques x1, Paris, 1964, p. 88 (RV'1.67.1 ‘double sens’); p. 111 (RF 11.4.3 ‘sens superposé & titre secondaire’); xm, Paris, 1964, p. 98 (RV 1v.6.2), B. 414 (RV v.16-1); x1, Paris, 1968, p. 68 (RV x.7.3), et. H. Grassmann, Worlerbuch zum Rig-veda, Leipzig, 1873, pp. 1038 f. 88 See, for example, Geldner, Der-Rig-Vedo, on, of in, RV 1.94.15, V.3.2; V1.8.93 vm.B4.1, ete. Thus I. Gershevitch, AHM, p. 30. 5° H, Humbach, ‘Der iranische Mithra als Daiva’, in Festgabe fr H. Lommel, Wiesbaden, 1960 B Pp % n. 5. also Bergaigne, op. cit., m, p. 196. oH Olen, ‘Dic Religion des Ved, Stuttgart and Berlin, 19234, pp. 46 ff, 182 ff.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.Mitra in India 51 divine figure out of consideration. After reconsidering all relevant Vedic— that is, not only the Rgvedic—texts, 1 have arrived at the conclusion’? that the assumption of the mere meaning ‘Contract (contract)’?3 is nowhere self- evident or a necessity. There is, as far as I am able to see now, no place where this translation is, by exclusion of all other interpretations, the only pos- sibility.?4 This is not to deny that Contract? was here and there implied, and that it is, or may have been, one of the god’s aspects,’ or to assert that the use of this term renders a translation nonsensical.77 It would rather appear to me that the Mitra of the texts is the god who puts things right, who, while maintaining Rta, regulates the contacts between men and the divine powers. Varuna, much less active than, for in- stance, Indra, is a guardian of the Rta, that untranslatable’® term which may be approximately described as that supreme and fundamental order-and- reality which conditions the normal and right, natural and true structure of cosmos, ritual and human conduct.’ His companion or complement Mitra is likewise concerned with the Rta—and, like him, a possessor and promoter of Rta, but rather as its maintainer, as the one who keeps its manifestations in the right condition, who stabilises, redresses, adjusts, re- stores. As may be expected a priori, this character of the god has many sides— his friendliness, his willingness to protect the worshipper, his relations with fire and daylight—which as a rule do not come to the fore simultaneously, but have in definite contexts or milieus a tendency to be given special significance and prominence.® As to the relation between the proper noun and the appellative I would hesitate to subscribe to Renou’s*! opinion: 72 It will not escape my readers that the present article is also meant to correct and supplement some statements made in Die Religionen Indiens 1, p. 82. 73 ‘Vertrag’, P. Thieme, Der Fremdling im Rg-Veda, p. 108. 74 The pseudo-etymologies given by Yiska (Nirukia, ed. Roth and Sarup, 10.21) do not show any inclination on the author's part to explain Mitra as the god of contracts or alli- ancea: ‘Mitra is (s0 called] because he preserves (trd-) from destruction ((pramiti-) or because he runs (drav-) measuring (mi-) together (i.e. equalising), or as deriving from the causative of mid- “to be fat’. The same author refers to the identification of Mitra and Agni (7.18; ef, 12.16). 7 The term Covenant should in any case be avoided. 78 As to the special relation between Rta and verbal truth, this comes to the fore in the later parts of the Reveda and the Athareaveda (e.g. AV 1.10.3); see also Renou, ‘Varupa dans V’Atharvaveda’, in Festgabe fir H. Lommel, p. 123. 77 The etymology defended by Meillet did not have the general approval of the experts (sce M. Mayrholer, Kurzgefasztes etymologisches Worlerbuch des Altindischen tt, Heidelberg, 1963, pp. 633 £.). ‘See iny remarks in Die Retigionen Indens 1, pp..77 Laders, op. cit., p. 478 and elsewhere, and Thieme, op. cit., are too fascinated by the belief that Rta stands only for ‘verbal truth’, © A discussion of all Vedic texts which may shed light on the god’s character appears in The Vedic Ged Mitra. I cannot enter here into a discussion of the much debated etymology of his name (see, for example, M. Mayrhofer, op. cit. 1, p. 64; Renou, Ehudes eddigues wv, p. 98). In my opinion, which I hope to set forth elsewhere at greater length, a relation with mayas- ‘restoration, redress, refreshment’ seems not improbable. % Renou, Vocabulaire, p. 51.52 J. Gonda ‘Mitra- “ami” nous semble clairement sortir de mitrd- “alliance”, en dépit des proportions numériques. Et c’est du sens d’“ami” que sort 4 son tour “le dieu Mitra” comme “le demon Vrtra” sort de ortrd- “‘ennemi”.’ The co- existence of personal and impersonal representations of the same idea and the difficulty of separating their chronological relations on one hand and the Iranian figure of the god Mitra on the other seem to suggest a more cautious formulation: as far as the Veda is concerned, there is a god Mitra and an appellative mitram which expresses the main idea the god stands for: the maintenance, without wrath or vengeance, of right, orderly relations, the actual manifestations of which were, first and foremost, alliances and active benevolence.82 821 need not dwell here on the semantic transition ‘alliance, “friendship” ’ > ‘ally, “friend’*” stated by Renou, loc. cit. See now Gonda, The Vedic God Mitra, Leiden, 1972.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.Mithra, Lord of Lands 55 tioned yazatas Mithra should have received some attention, at least in Yt12.2 ‘There is one point to note in these references. He is, more or less, pacific. The only exceptions are ¥7 6, in which his ‘easily brandished mace falling on the heads of davas’ is adored, and Yis 13 and 14, where one recalls the on- slaughts in which Varo@rayna and the Fravagis accompany him.3 Although he is the most glorious of the spiritual yazatas in Yt 19, all he does is to catch the Kavyan X*aronah when it flees for the first time from Yima’s hand. What happens next we are not told, but we know that it is @raétaona and Korosispa who catch it when it escapes for the second and the third time from Yima.* Wide pastures, Mithra is easily provoked, says the yait in his honour, and yet frequently invoked. However, the epithet with which he is frequently in- voked is not awesome at all. And it is none of the attributes mentioned above, all of which are used but once, twice or at most a few times. Mithra is mentioned no fewer than 170 times in the extant Avesta—126 times in 11 10, He bears the famous, apparently appendix, title of vouru- gaoyaviti—thaving wide pastures’, or grasslands—111 times, often at the cost of metre.5 Mithra of Wide Grasslands. Important; yet, to my knowledge, hardly any studious attention has been paid to this aspect of him. It has rather been taken for granted, much in the same way the liturgists of the Orthodox Zoroastrian schools did when they reduced the Avesta in writing and produced it in commentaries, Gaoyaoiti is mentioned once in Yt 8, twice in Yt 10 and what amounts to once in the Yasna. That is all. Y¢ 8 speaks of the waters gushing forth to Joi8ra and gaoyaciti after TiStrya throws back his adversary in a hoof-to-hoof fight.¢ The yait in honour of Mithra connects the word quite naturally with its hero.? The Yasna uses an identical phrase—foi0ra, gaoyaciti and a few others—ten times.® A point to be noted here is the absence of the term véstra, of which one hears so much in the Avesta. In the Rgveda gavyiiti occurs twelve times. It comes once with Mitra, once with his elder twin Varuna, thrice with both of them and again thrice with 2 It still holds true. The Indo-Iranians, whatever their present religions may be, do the same in their hymns, extolments and eulogies to their favourite divinities, 9 766.5; 13.485 14-47. 4 7119.35, 96, 38. § This pada of eleven syllables and the akin always stick out of the fairly regular stanzas of eight syllables. When chanted, they must have warranted an emphatic departure from the specific tune every time they intruded in the beginning or in the middle of a stanza. * 718.42. 1 T1086 112, #71 1.16 (6/3), beginning with nivaidayémi); 2.16 (2/3, salina with ayésd yéiti); 3.185 22.18 (6/3, beginning with ayésé yéit); 4.21 (6/3, beginning with doatbaydmahi); 6.153 17.16; 59.16; 71.20 (2/3, ending with yazanaédé) ; 7.18 (6/3, beginning with afaya dadami).56 A. A. Jafarey Soma, which gladdens Mitra, among others, and which is, incidentally, the only one to bear the title of urugavyati.? The others are Usas, the Agwins, Agni and Yama. Five of these instances have uroi to qualify their width. ‘The instances in the Rgveda show that the term was, more or less, connected with the Indo-Iranian gods—rather more with the Iranian deities and with none of those who had a pure Indian origin. 2, Aryan lands Not a warrior, Let us go over some of the functions of Mit(h)ra again. Alone, or aided by Varuna, he replenishes the waters by pouring rain,2° but hardly like Indra and TiStrya, who do it with much thumping and dumping. It reminds one of the rather thunderless rains—also the snowfalls—of the Iranian plateau and farther north. Mit(h)ra is peaceful, benevolent, helpful and a protector. He provides safe and comfortable dwellings with cattle and cattlemen.1? He is kind and very forgiving.13 He is very hard to provoke.1* He does not harm.15 He is definitely not a warrior. In fact, he waits on Varuna in peace and leaves the bloody battles to Indra,!8 who readily lops limbs and smites down those who wreck the Truth and break the contract.17 Master of all. This is evidently the description of a cowherding people, the primitive Indo-Iranians, who grazed and raised their cattle rather peace- fully in the grasslands kept green by the rain-making Mit(h)ra, who was also kind enough to unite them.!® His good name, whether it means unity, con- tract or friend, shows that he did play a prominent part in uniting and con- tracting the Aryans into an ever-growing friendly community. The process, which seems to have begun from neighbouring houses, grew into a binding force that gradually brought clans, tribes and countries together. He helped to create a confederation of the Aryan lands and therefore had every £ RY 1.25.16 (Varuna); mSa.16 (Mitra and Varuna); v.66.3 (Mitra)*; va.Ga.s (Mitra Varuna); vu.65.4 (Mitra and Varuna); vi.77.4 (Ulas)' 6 (A3wins) ; =Si 1%.78.5°, 1.85.8", rx.go.4 (Soma, the last as urugauyiiti) ; 7.008 (Agni's pastures of ail); x.14.2 (Yama), The five marked * are qualified by ure. 30 Yt 10.61; RV m.5.43 v.62. 68.5; V.69.25 vu.62.5; Vn.64.2, 45 VuL65-4. Tt 10.4, 5, 54> v 32 Y¢ 10.4, 28, 30, 48 Tt 10.140. MU RV x.12.5. 48 RV v.64.3. 1 RV vu82.5, 17 RV x.898, 38 RV van. 8 71 10.17, 75, 83, 843 RV vn.gt.r9.Mithra, Lord of Lands 57 right to become the head of those lands*® and master of all he surveyed from his ultra-modern palace above Hara the high. We may as well part here with the Vedic people, who, a little before the contraction, chose their own way and elected Indra as the new leader. 3. Farmlands Settled farming. The advent of ZarathuStra shows that gagyaoiti type of pastures were no longer in favour, perhaps over-grazed and left behind and therefore no more accessible. The community had advanced considerably— advanced on new lands and advanced in new techniques. A new term, astra, was used more and more, The people related to it were vdstrya, and since they took pride in showing their wealth in small and large cattle, they generally added ffuyant to their professional name. The Yasna, the Visprat and the Vendidad—all definitely Zoroastrian in culture—abound in vdstra and its derivatives. The Gathas mention véstar,2? the founder or promoter of vdstra. Whoever he symbolises, he was a greater benefactor than the fabulous Yama who promoted the gazyiiti society. He seems to have championed the change to véstra culture. I derive the word from vas/vds ‘to habitate, to settle’. Vastra is, therefore, settled farming and cattle-raising as against gaoyaoiti, natural pastures of grass- land. Vastra, meaning fodder, etc., is an evolved term of the later Avesta, par- ticularly the Vendidad. 4 War lands Divided world. Times have changed. Gaoyaviti has given way to vdstra. But it does not mean much to the ‘people of the yasts’. Vastra is seldom mentioned in the yatts, It occurs once in the longest of them? and that too while describing a consolidated confederation of Aryan lands, most probably related to the Zoroastrian society. In fact, the word, wherever used in the yaits, refers to this particular society.24 Ffuyant ndstrya is mentioned twice in the yafts—10 and 14—and appears out of place and as interpolation in both the in- stances.25 This is evidently because the yaits, although post-Zarathuitrian in com- position or perhaps re-composition, belong to a rather different culture. The 49 74 10.78, 99 and particularly 145. 1 71 10.50, 51. 8 Ts 27.13; 29-1. T1014. 24 11 8.29; 19.89, 100; 19.54. % Yt 10.60; 14.61. The person least concerned with cattle-raising and farming is Verobrayna.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.Richard N. Frye sumraz AND HARVARD 5 Mithra in Iranian history The use of theophoric names as an index to the historical conditions of a religion is, of course, beset with many difficulties.! The chance occurrence of a name, compounded with the name of a deity, in an inscription could be misleading, but the repeated appearance of various theophoric names, yet compounded with the name of the same deity, could be used as an indication of the popularity of that deity in naming children. Therefore, it may be of some importance to determine the relative frequency with which names in Mithra are found in a certain epoch, as compared with other theophoric names, and also in other periods. If we examine the evidence, scant though it is, we may be able to come to a few tentative conclusions. If we look at the theophoric names in the Aramaic inscriptions on green chert mortars, pestles and plates from the ‘treasury’ at Persepolis, we find those composed with Mithra in the majority, five out of sixteen: ’rimir, dimtr, mirk (var. mrtk?), mtrprn, mirpt.2 The ‘god of the Aryans’, Ahura Mazda, appears only three times: mzddt, mzditr and mzprn, while arta also appears three times. The Iranian elements, including names, in the Elamite tablets from the fortifications at Persepolis have been ably elucidated in a series of articles by I. Gershevitch, and they too present a similar picture, although the problems they raise are far more complicated than the Aramaic tablets.3 All the Mithra names in the Aramaic inscriptions are found in the Elamite tablets: Irdami8$a (rfa-mi#ra?), Dadami8Sa, Miaka, MiSparna (?), and Mitrabada (also Mi8Sabadda ‘protected by Mithra’), plus many others. If one added the theophoric names in baga-, which might apply to Mithra, then we would have overwhelming evidence of the popularity of 1 This paper is almost fully in accord with that of Mary Boyce, ‘On Mithra's part in Zoroastrianism’, BSOAS xxxu, 1969, pp. 10-34, and I do not repeat what is well stated there. 2Cf R. Bowman, Aramaic Ritual Texts from Persepolis, Chicago, 1970, index. Other theo Phoric names are bgbrm, bept, huemdt, mhdt, mzdds, meditr, mepra, wrt, *ridt, "tbren, *rtbriom, ° Cf. I. Gershevitch, ‘Iranian nouns and names in Elamite garb’, TPS, 1969, p. 165, where references to his other two articles are given.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.64 Richard N. Frye may have been too slow for Darius when he says in the fifth column of the Behistun inscription, ‘those Elamites were rebellious, and by them Ahura Mazda was not worshipped. I worshipped Ahura Mazda, etc.’ Why should the Elamites worship Ahura Mazda at all unless Darius felt that all inhabitants of Persis should do this? The picture of religion at Persepolis conforms to the general henotheism in the Near East at this time, and Mithra is obviously a very popular deity, but the question is: was there a special cult devoted to him? I suggest the answer is no, in the sense of a Mithra Gemeinde, but there may have been a special fraternity, possibly in the army, devoted especially to Mithra. I say this because in the Mithra Yait Mithra is worshipped with haoma containing milk (1? 10.6 and 88), and he helped his worshippers defeat the enemy (10.5 and 8-10). Of course, one might say that the Yast applies to everyone, but the violence of Mithra against oath-breakers would fit well with military traditions. One cannot deny the existence of militaristic allusions in the Mithra Yait (24, 35-6, 39-40). Therefore a special group of Mazda worshippers may have been attached to Mithra as their ‘patron saint’. Admittedly there is sparse evidence of a Mithra cult in Persepolis, but there is nothing to contradict the assumption that primarily the soldiers stationed in Persepolis had their own cult of Mithra, which could have been something similar to the Knights of Malta in Christianity. In other words, I suggest there is no reason why such a kind of special organisation or cult should not exist within the Mazdayasnian religion at Persepolis. There is also no reason why such a cult should not have existed elsewhere in Iran under the Achaemenids. To turn to literary sources, Herodotus (1.131) tells us that the Persians adopted the cult of a female deity from the Assyrians and Arabs, the Greek Aphrodite, but he calls her Mitra, which is a curious error. In both the Anabasis and the Cyropaedia Xenophon tells us that the Persian king ‘swore by Mithra’, while Quintus Curtius, 1v.13 (49) 12, says that at the battle of Gaugamela Darius ITI called upon the sun and Mithras as well as the eternal fire for victory. Other authors, such as Aelian and Pseudo-Callisthenes, testify that the Persians swore by Mithra, so one may safely conclude that such was the case in Achaemenid Iran. The implication is that most, if not all, Iranians swore by Mithra, and not just the king or the army. Thus the ancient role of Mithra as the guardian of contracts and oaths is still pre- served in the Achaemenid period. Further, Duris of Samos (c. 280 p.c.), in fragments preserved in Athenaeus, tells us that at the festival of Mithra, and only at this one, the king became drunk and the Persians danced. This would be the Mithrakéna, originally celebrated at the autumn equinox, but the date of which has shifted through- out history (see the paper by M. Boyce in the present volume). This cele-Mitkra in Iranian history 65 bration remained among the most popular festivals of the people, called the Mihragén holiday, until recent times. I wish to stress strongly that in this brief paper I am not concerned with theories about pre-Achaemenid Mithra, which may be proposed from a study of the Mithra Yait or the Vedas, Nor is the speculation about whether Ahriman or Mithra kills a bull germane to the historical sources about Mithra in Iran. It well may have been that daeva worshippers or Ahriman propitiators made sacrifices to Mithra, but I cannot find evidence for them, hence I must refrain from speculating about possible aberrant sects or strange cults with Mithra in them. In the Seleucid period we find very little in classical sources about Mithra in Iran except in Strabo, who was born in the first century 3.0. in Asia Minor. He tells us in his Geography (xv.732) that the Persians honour the sun, which they call Mithres, as well as other deities. He also says (x1.530) that the satrap of Armenia used every year to send 20,000 foals to the Mithracéna, which, everyone has assumed, was the Mithrakéna. He also says that all the Persian cults were found also in Media and in Armenia. The only new item in Strabo is the identification of the sun with Mithra, as on the statue erected by a local king, Antiochus (69-34 8.c.), at Commagene, where Mithra is identified as Apollo, Helios and Hermes. This identification is what one might expect from the Hellenistic age of syncretism. Most scholars would agree that the identification of Mithra with the sun, although it may have had its roots in pre-Achaemenid times, is primarily a development of the Hellenistic period or even later. If we turn to the ostraca from Nisa in the homeland of the Parthians, we find the same picture as at Persepolis under Darius; theophoric names with Mithra are more in evidence than those of other deities. The forms of the names are different in Parthian than in Old Persian, but the popularity of Mithra is still in evidence. We have names such as: prydt(y)mtr, *trwmtr(k), "rymtrk, ‘rkmirk, mtrssn, tyrymtrk, mirdwxt, rinwmtr, bwrzmtr (brzmtrk), rikwmtr, mirbwozn, mtrprdt and, of course, mirdtk, while a vineyard was called mtrynn.4 In the Greek Avroman documents from the first century A.c. we have the names Muaddrns, Mewiddtnc and Migafdydaxoz, which testify to the popularity of Mithra theophoric names in western as well as eastern Iran. I repeat: this tells us little about Mithra worship or a cult dedicated to Mithra, but the names do indicate that Mithra was neither proscribed nor unpopular among the people. Whether they indicate more than that is difficult to ascertain. If one wanted to make a generalisation based on insufficient evidence, yet a conservative and likely surmise, it would be that the henotheism of Achae- menid times continued down to the beginning of the Christian era, with a 4 The frequency of names in the Nisa ostraca with Sasan in them as bxtssnm, sinbuoxt, srwissn is extraordinary. It shows the importance of the name Sasan in Parthian times, and a cult of the deified ancestor, both of which suggest that the eponymous ancestor of the Sasan- ians was indeed eponymous and not just the father of Papak.66 Richard N. Frye new syncretism (if that is the proper word) in Hellenistic times of identifying Mithra and other deities with Greek or Semitic counterparts. In the late Parthian period (the first two centuries of the Christian era) syncretism is no longer the mode, but saviour cults and universalist monotheisms replace the henotheism of the past. The story of Mithra in Iran, I suggest, should follow this general pattern. One might expect Mithra to develop those qualities connected with oaths and with truth as opposed to deceit, as his theistic features in time inevitably would be more and more assumed by Ahura Mazda or Ohrmazd. In Sasanian times Mithra is not mentioned in the imperial inscriptions, but the word appears as the name of the month. From the Parthian period the word mifr as ‘sun’ came into use. Again, it is not my intention to discuss the philological development of Sanskrit mitrd ‘friend’ to New Persian mihr ‘friendship, love’, or the ramifications of the word mihr ‘sun’. Suffice it to say that in the Sasanian period Mithra has already assumed the forms or mean- ings by which the New Persian word mifr had coalesced various homonyms. The Sogdians swore by Mithra (’mydry), as did other Iranians in both cast and west. Theophoric names with Mithra continue to be found, especially on Sasanian seals, but not in the same high proportion as in Parthian times. The doanda:mtr'wxlmedy and mirbwéyt ‘saved by Mihr’, are frequent appellations, as are formulae with the name of Mithra, as for example [’m miy, literally ‘pax Mithra!” It is clear that by the late Sasanian period the name of Mithra is a household word, in fact so ubiquitous that we find in Mazandarani, a Caspian dialect, the expression even to this day mikr kardan, or mihrhd korden, which means to invoke Allah in time of fear or fright by saying the b’ismillah. The Armenian word mehean for a pre-Christian temple which has left no trace in Iranian, but which A. Mcillet reconstructed as *mai§rydna, and the Parsi Dar-i Mihr for a fire temple, are further indications of the important place of Mithra in the minds of the Armenian as well as the Iranian peoples. When we turn to late classical authors such as Porphyry (d. ¢. 304 A.c.), or even an earlier Plutarch (d. 120 4.c.) we find a confusion of Iranian beliefs and practices with Western Mithraism. In his Isis and Osiris (x1v1.3690) Plutarch says that Mithras was called ‘the mediator’ by the Persians because he was between Ohrmazd and Ahriman. He continues that the Persians pro- pitiate the evil spirit by pounding in a mortar an herb called omomi and calling on Hades and the darkness. They mix the liquid with the blood of a killed wolf and take it to a place where the sun never shines and throw it away. Porphyry (De antro nympharum v1, ed. Nauck) reports that Zoroaster dedicated a cave to the worship of Mithras, for it suggested the form of the world to him and afterwards the Persians conducted religious rites in caves. I do not wish to go into problems of what Western Mithraicists took from Iran, and what they added to the Western mysteries of Mithra, which will be discussed by others. But I would like to say that the reports of a WesternMithra in Iranian history 67 Mithracum from Susa, Khuzistan, and from Warka in Iraq are without foundation, as far as I can see.5 In Warka the main evidence is a mould which shows a bull with the legs of a figure flying over it, the top of the mould being broken away (see plate 7). The nearest iconographical parallel to this enigmatic piece comes from Minoan Crete, and since the clay mould from Warka was found in 1928 out of stratigraphic context, its interpretation could range wide, least of which would be a Western Mithracum. In conclusion, from the historian’s point of view, the history of Mithra in Tran appears as a normal development from Avestan times down almost to the present, with changes and development, but within the framework of the Mazdayasnian religion. The aberrant forms of cult in Western Mithraism are not found in Iran, unless archaeologists or ethnologists one day uncover traces of some of the practices of Western Mithraism in the mountains of Kurdistan. * On Susa see L. Campbell, MI, pp. 52, 196. On Warka, H. Lenzen, Abhandlungen der deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft, No. §, Berlin, 1958, p- 20.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.Die Sonne das Beste 71 a strict sun god, but merely to the Manichaean Mithra of the Parthians and the Sogdians being in reality the Third Messenger of Mani’s pantheon. Although within that pantheon the Third Messengers solarity was but loose, to Parthians and Sogdians comparing it with Mithra’s solarity it must have seemed enormous. And so, having identified that god, and with him his solarity, with Mithra, and thereby greatly increased Mithra’s solarity, these Manichecs allowed themselves to be carried away by their new discovery that Mithra was so solar, to the extent that before long they were actually referring to the astronomical sun as ‘God Mithra’, using this appellation as a common noun. That their headlong rush into solarisation of Mithra had indeed very little to do with Mithra as he had been up to the appearance of Mani, but was the direct outcome of his having been identified with the Manichaean Third Messenger, is shown, at least in the case of the Sogdians, by the fact that non- Manichaean Sogdians unperturbedly went on calling the sun ‘sun’ and not ‘God Mithra’, and referred to Mithra, in so far as they referred to him at all, only when signing a contract or confirming good faith,? exactly as any fifth century 3.c. worshipper of Mithra might have predicted. But by flooding Mithra with total solarity under the impact of the Third Messenger’s only partial solarity, the Sogdian and Parthian Manichees in- evitably transformed also the Third Messenger into a sun god in the strict sense. Mani would have been greatly surprised at this, and would have told them they had become plus royaliste que le roi. For he, who must surely have known best, never thought of the Third Messenger in terms of a sun god even in the loose sense, but only, as is hardly surprising, in terms of a messenger god. That this is so is clear from the fact that when he, a Persian grown up in Babylonia, decided personally to introduce his religion to Persians, well before it reached either Parthians or Sogdians, he taught them to call the ‘Third Messenger not ‘Mithra’ but ‘Narydsanha’—by the name, that is, of the god who in the Avesta is described as Ahura Mazda’s, namely the chief god’s, messenger. I said Mani knew best, not only because he knew all about the gods he had himself invented. He knew best also about the Persian pantheon from which he had put it into his mind to select suitable gods for Persians to identify with the gods he had cast as characters in the religious play he had composed. His selection from the Persian pantheon is authoritative, as well as revealing, not only because as a Persian he was familiar with the functions attributed by Persians to each of their gods in the third century .c., but also because Mani, being as it were a professional syncretist with vast experience of many re- ligions, had a trained eye for sizing up gods, their essence, and their acces sories. However, even if one knows best, one may sometimes be forced to fall back * Ch W. B, Henning, ‘A Sogdian god’, BSOAS xxv, 1965, p. 248.72 Mya Gershevitch on the second best. With the Third Messenger Mani had no problem when he introduced him to the Persians. The god was a messenger, and the Persians had a messenger god, Naryésanha. But when the turn of the god he had called ‘Living Spirit’ arrived, Mani ran into difficulties. For this god was his dnucovgyds, and the Persians had indeed a demiurgic god, but that god was Ohbrmazd himself. Ohrmazd’s name was not available to Mani as a Persian replacement of the name ‘Living Spirit’, because within Mani’s syncretistic canvas Ohrmazd had to be the god he had named ‘Primal Man’, first son of the only god unborn, which unborn god was the chief of all gods whom Mani had named ‘Father of Greatness’ but to the Persians had intro- duced as Zurvan—on whom, as a matter of fact, he had modelled his ‘Father of Greatness’. Thus debarred from employing Ohrmazd as Persian stand-in for the Living Spirit, Mani would have been fully entitled to give up, and introduce the Living Spirit to the Persians simply as ‘the Living Spirit’. The Parthian and the Sogdian Manichees, who missed the privilege of receiving instruction from Mani personally, did in fact call the Living Spirit just that—in their own languages, of course. But Mani had a kind of mania, of wanting Persians to accept every one of his gods as if he were a god they had long known but had failed to understand properly until Ae came along and explained to them exactly what the god was about. Accordingly, as the Persian pantheon in- cluded no demiurgic god other than Ohrmazd, whom Mani could not use for the reason I have explained, Mani took a second look at this artefact of his, the Living Spirit, with a view to deciding which of his aspects other than the demiurgic could suitably be matched by a god belonging to the traditional Persian pantheon. ‘As a dnuuovgydc the Living Spirit was of course teeming with aspects, as he was the god who had virtually made everything under the sun, and had made even the sun itself. ‘Ah’—one hears Mani say to himself—‘the sun, that’s it. True, Livy isn’t much of a sun god; he would be one only within the loosest of definitions. Let’s take another look at the Persian pantheon. Good Heavens. I haven't got Mithra! Which part is he to play in my drama. Why didn’t I think of inventing a god of contract when I contrived my plot years ago. It won't do to introduce one now, of course; a prophet must never have second thoughts, once his religion has been broadcast. But surely I cannot leave Persians without Mithra? Let’s see. He is after all a bit solar. It’s that early rising habit of his. He isn’t really much less solar than Livy is in Livy’s own loose way. The Persians will make eyes when I tell them Mithra is demiurgic! Never mind. Livy will be pleased, to be invoked by so famous a name. Dear Livy.’ And so Persian Manichees ever after called the demiurgic Living Spirit ‘God Mithra’, on account of that speck of a sun-spot which Mani knew cither god had. This, of course, is the reason why Porphyry, who died aboutDie Sonne das Beste 73 thirty years after the year 274 in which Mani suffered martyrdom, has that extraordinary piece of information that it was Mithra who had been the demiurge of the universe. It is a piece of information which can have come about only through a Manichee who was a western Manichee, telling Por- phyry: ‘Do you know what the Persians call our Living Spirit, the demiurge? Mihryazd, they call him. That’s MiSgac, you know, the one about whom Plutarch wrote, saying he is a Mealrnc.’—‘How interesting,’ said Porphyry, now almost glad at having been interrupted in his work by the visit of that Manichee. It had been hard going, anyway, this research into the antrum nympharum, which au fond he considered dull and a trifle below his dignity. Now at least he had something to enliven it with. Porphyry’s demiurgic information on Mé@gas is about as pertinent to Mithra as the whinny of the race-horse Nijinsky is to the dancer after whom that horse was named, But the Persian Manichees never turned their Mithra, the Living Spirit, into the astronomical sun. There just was not enough light in the Living Spirit for such a thing even to occur to them. And they evidently did not mind that Mithra was now a demiurge. ‘The Parthians and the Sogdians, however, did mind, and would not stand for such nonsense. ‘What? Mithra a demiurge? You Persians must have mis- heard or misunderstood Mani, or given him wrong information.’ Accord- ingly the Parthians, and later the Sogdians, simply called the Living Spirit, as I have said, ‘Living Spirit’. The result, of course, was that they found themselves precisely in the position in which Mani had not wanted the Per- sians to be, namely in the position of Iranian Manichees from whose Iranian pantheon Mithra was missing. So this time it was convertees, and not Mani, who, from the opposite side, looked round in Mani’s pantheon to see which of its gods had attributes that would justify their calling him Mithra. They found no god of contract among Mani’s characters who would have solved their problem. Instead, taking a hard look at the Third Messenger, they asked themselves whether Mani had really hit the nail on the head by calling him Naryésayha, seeing that he had that extraordinary thing, the sun, as dwelling place. Would not Mithra fit the Third Messenger’s bill far better than Naryésanha? Some Parthians said ‘yes’, and some said ‘no’, with the result that the Third Messenger is referred to as Mithra in some Parthian texts, as Narydsagha in others. The Mithra supporters must have been the majority, because the converters of the Sogdians to Manichaeism were almost certainly Parthians, and we have seen to what extremes of solarisation of Mithra the Sogdian Manichees went, in flagrant contrast with non- Manichaean Sogdians. Here, then, is the upshot of what we have seen so far: (a) that the fact that the Parthian and the Sogdian Manichees saw in the Manichaean god they called Mithra a sun god in the strict sense of the term in no way shows, and in74 Mya Gershevitch the case of the Sogdians can virtually be proved not to show, that before Manichaean missionaries arrived, Mithra had been in any way more solar to the Parthians and the Sogdians than he appears in the Avesta; and (6) that the fact that the Persian Manichees referred under the name of Mithra to a Manichaean god who was a demiurge not only does not prove that before the Persians met Mani their Mithra had been a demiurge, but it also does not prove that before the Persians met Mani their Mithra had had no con- nection whatever with the sun, in other words, had lost, or never had, what tenuous connection with the sun Mithra may be argued to have in the Avesta—our policeman’s connection, I mean, or some suchlike. For had the Persian Mithra had no connection whatever with the sun, Mani would have had no excuse for identifying him with the Living Spirit. Apart from these two upshots, the tale of Mithra’s vicissitudes in Iranian Manichaeism is instructive because here, unlike in Western Mithraism, we have texts. These texts not only provide concrete evidence as to the kinds of accident that could befall genuine Mithra from the moment he came in con- tact, even on his very own home ground, with an alien religion; but they also permit, because we have Western Manichaean texts to compare them with, a certain amount of reliable detective work as to how and why the things which happened to Mithra in Iranian Manichaeism did happen. Lastly, before we turn to the Gathic verse, the tale just told holds a warn- ing. Never rush to conclude, from the fact that a god’s name is used as a common noun to denote the astronomical sun, that that god must have been sun god much earlier. In such matters it is safe to go back in time only as far as is vouchsafed by unequivocal evidence presenting itself either, and pre- ferably, in the form of datable statements in earlier texts, or in the form of an identical development in another part of the world requiring the postulate of common inheritance. Even such a postulate, to be sound, must be as rigorously required as is the postulate, say, of the existence in Indo-European of a word for ‘father’ of the form pater: the proof that a word closely resem- bling Latin pater existed long before Romulus and Remus clamoured for a father lies in the Vedic poets’ using for ‘father’ pitar; what is more, the dis- tance between Rome and the Punjab assures us that when, more than seven centuries before Romulus and Remus were born, the Vedic poets used pitar, the communities the latter addressed had already for centuries used that word in the meaning of ‘father’. But the Sogdians who became Manichaean had never, before their conversion, used the phrase ‘God Mithra’ in the meaning of ‘sun’. Their so doing after their conversion was demonstrably a freak of an accident. Is it anything but another freak, or a consequence of the same freak, that the Yidgha communities in the Pamir region refer to the sun as mir? Does the Yidgha usage declare the original Mithra a sun god any more than the original Ahura Mazda is declared a sun god by the present-day use in theDie Sonne das Beste 75 likewise north-eastern Sanglechi dialect of ormézd for ‘sun’, or indeed by the seventh century A.c. Khotanese use among Sakas who had settled in Central Asia of urmazde for ‘sun’? One would require reasons of a much more solid kind than have hitherto been offered, before one could confidently say that the total solarity of either god, as suggested by these common nouns for ‘sun’, must have been a characteristic, respectively of Mithra and Ahura Mazda, already in Avestan times, It is one thing to be a sun god. It is quite another to be a god whose attributes include one that is capable of serving as pretext for people to turn him into a sun god. Only within this latter definition can ancient Mithra be called a sun god, his Avestan attribute capable of serving as pretext being that he appears before the sun rises. But then you must call also the Avestan Ahura Mazda a sun god, his attribute serving as pretext being that he uses the sun for his eye. To me either Avestan attribute is a mere by-product of some- thing much greater and profounder, and more characteristic of ancient Indo-Iranian thinking, than a preoccupation with even the sun. But if you say the two attributes make these gods sun gods in the Avesta, I will undertake to bring you, by the next Mithraic Congress, sun gods galore. We are now ready to consider the Gathic verse you have before you, Zoroaster’s ipsissima verba. The verse was composed at some time during the first half of the sixth century 3.c., while the information which the Avesta provides on Mithra was put together in the second half of the fifth century B.c, even though much of it must by then have been common knowledge for many centuries. The verse is of interest in respect of what I have said so far, because if per- chance the word ‘sun’ in it were Zoroaster’s way of referring to Mithra, then all the non-solar conclusions I have drawn from the Manichacan solar evidence, and in my book from the Avestan, non-solar evidence, will be just one huge error. That ‘sun’ in this verse means ‘Mithra’ was the view proposed by the late Professor Lommel in the article referred to in the hand-out, For translation Lommel accepted the standard version, represented above by Maria Smith’s English, though she merely took it from carlier translators. Everybody relies ‘on it, except Humbach. Lommel’s reasoning was beautifully involved, an ingenious succession of decoded taboos. His starting point was that when the Vedic Mitra kills Soma, this is a veiled allusion to his having killed Primal Bull. The Indian priestly poets dared not spell out the brutal truth. But neither, of course, would they have had any brutal truth to conceal had Lommel never seen a Mithraic relief. The reliefs, regarded by him as representing an Iranian myth, and the Indian myth, taken together, satisfied Lommel that already in the Avesta Mithra must have been tauroctonous. As the Avesta says absolutely nothing ofa You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.78 Mya Gershevitch not make this so clear as docs Humbach’s. Its wording does not exclude, as exclude one must, that the beholders here envisaged of the cow and the sun may themselves be good. We now look to the bottom of the hand-out, where in line d of the Younger Avestan verse there occurs again the phrase ‘to see’, or rather ‘not to see’, ‘the cow with evil eyes’. Humbach, of course, knew this, and duly referred to the verse, but he was content, as his predecessors had been, to leave it at that. ‘The Younger Avestan verse is simple enough, a nice little cursing formula. But it also invites a simple enough conclusion. The conclusion is that, if the world were just—which, of course, it is not—to see with eyes the earth and the cow would be a prerogative of good people only. Miscreants, the verse scems to say, do not deserve to see cither, and not to see either is a privation that makes a good punishment. Look now at 2b of the Gathic verse, where we have both good people and bad people. Here Maria Smith and Humbach are in agreement: ‘he who makes good people wicked’. This is surely a nasty thing to do, whether you think that makes here means misrepresents good people as being wicked, or take makes to mean turns good people from being good into actually com- mitting evil. But what the Gathic text in fact has is what my Latin transla- tion has: two accusatives plural. The meaning could just as well be ‘he who misrepresents evil people as being good’. ‘This would be a misrepresentation even wickeder than the reverse; it would constitute not merely slander, but a deliberate attempt to sow confusion in the listener’s mind, pervert all up- right doctrine, destroy what 1a is concerned about, the very definition of doctrine. I am prepared to bet that Zoroaster had this meaning in mind; but as the reverse meaning, the one which Maria Smith and Humbach offer, would also suit a perverter of doctrines, I would not exclude that Zoroaster may have intended to kill two birds with one stone. It is just the kind of thing a poet of his quality—for he is a superb poet—would do. You may or may not like my reversal of 2b; but you are not likely to forget it, because it is amusing. More than that, it makes one muse and look at an- other accusative in the verse, namely aéiétem in 1b, the pessimum in my Latin translation. The Avestan word suffers from the same ambiguity as pessimum, that is to say, it could be either an accusative neuter or an accusative masculine. In the latter case it would mean ‘the worst man’, or ‘a very bad man’, Maria Smith and Humbach took it for a neuter, hence her ‘worst- thing’ and his ‘gar Schlimmes’. Try, however, my ‘very bad man’, and con- sider that the immediately following word vaénaphd is the infinitive, or one of the infinitives, of the Avestan verb for ‘to see’. Anyone with a smattering of Latin will then immediately try whether an accusative with the infinitive would perchance make sense. And what will he get? (1a) That man destroys doctrines (1b) who says that the-man-who-is-very-bad, or the-worst-of-men, sees (2a) the cow and the sun with his horrid eyes.Die Sonne das Beste 79 And now you do not have to know another word of Avestan. By relying on no more than common sense, one may confidently say that ‘seeing the cow and the sun’ was an idiom, perhaps even an idiom invented ad hoc by Zoro- aster, for ‘going to Paradise’. For that man would indeed be a perverter of doctrines, sowing unholy confusion in the minds of his innocent audience, who maintained that Paradise is the place where the worst of men go.4 It follows, of course, with mathematical precision that in the cursing formula at the bottom of the hand-out, lines ¢ and d mean ‘may he go to Hell’. I would say that that was the original idiom, from which the Gathic one was deduced by antonymy only secondarily. Originality and priority of the Hell idiom are suggested by the internal rhyme of zm ‘earth’ in line with ggm ‘cow’ in line d. The two lines have the ring of a primitive folk- distich. A poet intent on extracting from it an antonymous idiom for ‘going to Paradise’ could not have contented himself with omitting the word not. For there would still have remained the word earth to exclude the Paradise. The word earth had to be replaced with a word denoting something that is higher up than the earth. And the sun was no bad choice, especially as according to Avestan belief the Paradise, referred to as ‘the quarters of Truth’, is ‘sunny’ (x*anvant, of. AHM, pp. 153 £.). Well, I hope to have made it very difficult indeed for anybody who even knows not one word of Avestan ever to think that Lommel has made it in the least likely that Zoroaster had any inkling of a Mithra either tauroctonous or un-godly. This should restore confidence in the proposition that the Younger Avestan authors’ showing no inkling of a tauroctonous or sun-godly Mithra cither is not a squeamish act of concealment or plot to deceive us, but a guarantee that, up to the fifth century ».c. at least, Mithra had neither slayed Primal Bull nor been solar. And I have already said in my book that it defies comprehension why anybody should doubt the antiquity and authenticity of the Sasanian Zoroastrian tradition that Ahriman, and not Mithra, had been the slayer of Primal Bull. But then, I suppose it is part of scholarship to amuse oneself in one’s spare time with sawing off the branch on which one is sitting. 4 The same men, viz. the polytheists, are described as ‘worst’ (afifié, m. nom. plur., not n. acc. plur. as usually taken) also in another passage (verses 3-5) of the same Gathic poem (7s 32), where Zoroaster, instead of addressing himself to the polytheists, apostrophises their gods: ‘But you gods all are a manifestation of evil thinking, and he who so-much wor- ships you (is a manifestation) of falsehood and dissent [pari as per C. E. Bosworth (ed.), Jran ond Islan, p. 284, with n. 54]. Duplicitous will prove (lit. are in future) (men's) deeds for which rumour gives you credit in the oecumene. Through-the-fact-that you have ordered these (deeds, by) doing which the worst men wax darlings of the gods (dafo.oxit) (spite their) shunning Good Mind, (despite their) recoiling from the Lord Mazda's commandment (xratu) and from Truth, through-this-fact you have cheated man of good life and immor- tality, jot ae (there has cheated) you gods (of good life and immortality) the Spirit evil through evil thinking and expert (x/ayd) in (the kind of) activity in which with evil speech he gives instruction to the adherent(s)-of-Falsehood.” We learn from this passage that Zoroaster viewed the gods as mere ‘Hirgespinste’, and their orders as mere superstitions. This was a pretty advanced notion to entertain in thea You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.Die Sonne das Beste 81 that satisfied the majority of both Zoroastrians (unmoved by the outrage of the strong- minded minority) and polytheists: ‘the gods Zoroaster had declared “manifestations of evil thinking” were not the gods whom you gentle gods-worshippers worship, stern Mithra, juicy Haoma, windy Wayu, swashbuckling Wrthraghna and the rest. They were demons. Stern Mithra and the juicy, windy, swashbuckling rest were reverend also to Zoroaster!’ And so yazata, the plain gerundive of the Avestan verb yaz- ‘to revere’, found itself suddenly raised in the Younger Avesta to the exalted position of general word for ‘god’. As such it acted as deus ex machina to the desperately sought circumvention of Zoroaster's stern prohibition to ‘lassify the gods and Ahura Mazda under a single heading. Under the new noun’s gerundive command the rampant polytheism familiar to all readers of the Younger Avesta rushed in, to swamp and grotesquely distort the most astounding piece of sustained concentration and sound original reasoning in the history of Iranian thought. What makes that piece so ad- mirable will be explained on the occasion referred to above. Te must have broken the hearts of Zoroastrians of intellectual integrity to watch the Church force Ahura Mazda to his knees before stern Mithra, windy Wayu and other reverends (see AHM, p. 53). But they at least had the satisfaction that, before the daévas were triumphantly led over the prophet’s dead body into the Church he had founded to dismiss them forever, they were made to suffer the indignity of being subjected to a process of ‘dedaivification’. ‘Their satisfaction would have been even greater had they known that this process was to be busily resumed twenty-five centuries later, as soon as the giants of Iranian philology had re-echumed from the Gathis the ineluctable fact of Zoroaster’s absolute monotheism, Addendum. Proto-Lranian, beside daica, had baga for ‘god’. The latter word held the field in ‘Old Persian and Sogdian. In the Avesta it is much rarer than yazata, and happens to occur defining by name only Ahura Mazda, Mithra and the Moon. That this docs not mean that ‘Zoroaster classed Mithra with Ahura Mazda under the common heading baga is shown by the Middle Persian and Parthian Manichacan terminology (derived from the Zoroastrian) in which invariably Ohrmaad is a baga but Mihr a yazata, This consistent distinction ceases to seem curious as soon as one realises that only through dedaivification could ancient rian ir tome’ Sak tribes iy Achacmenian tines, CE ag Oxede (Deed spit (Word and Spirt in Ossetic’, BSOAS xvn, 1955, pp- 483-6), whose short i- goes against the assumption that the word is a late borrowing from Persian fzad (Benveniste, Etudes sur la langue ossite, p. 132). Postscript After the above paper was delivered, on the first day of the Congress, certain considerations occurred to me in the light of what was heard on subsequent days, which it may be worth putting on record. The Iranian lands which Mithra is said, in the Avestan hymn to him, to survey, cover an area which roughly includes the western part of present-day northern Afghanistan, and, adjacent to its north, the Soviet territories from Marv to Samarkand, which latter city was in ancient days the capital of Sogdiane. Here Mithra was the unsolar god of contract as which Professor Thieme has shown him to appear also in the Rigveda. The material culture suggested by the Avestan texts is that of a sedentary population of cattle- breeders. As the greater part of the hymn to Mithra harks back to a period much earlier than the fifth century s.c. when the hymn was composed afresh (with utilisation of many earlier verses) in its extant form, the Iranians to whom Mithra was the god of contract must have been sedentary long before even the sixth century 3.c.82 Ilya Gershevitch To the north of the area just described nomadic Iranians moved, the Sakas. They had the free run of the Eurasian steppes from the Tarim basin in central Asia to the Danube, in their journeys along which they skirted Lake Aral and the northern shores of the Caspian and the Black Seas. The ‘westernmost Sakas between the seventh and the fifth centuries .c. were the Scyths. The easternmost Sakas were the ancestors of the later inhabitants of Khotan, whose language is known to us in the form it had between the seventh and the tenth centuries a.c. It is the Saka language in which the word for ‘sun’ is urmazde. In India the Sakas were known as Sakas. In the Punjab and in Sind Sakas established themselves in the first century B.c. A little later, swept into power by a Saka wave of invasions, the Kusana rulers appear in Bactria, with whose early coinage, and that of their immediate predecessors in Bactria in the first century a.c. Dr MacDowall’s paper is concerned. Dr MacDowall drew attention to two developments within that coinage: the appearance of Zeus with a rayed head, and the replacement of the legend HAIOC next to Helios’s figure, with the legend MIIPO. The former points to an identification of Ahura Mazda with the sun, the latter of Mithra. As the former identification agrees with the Khotanese word urmazde for ‘sun’, one can hardly avoid attributing the rays of the rayed Zeus to a Saka conception of Ahura Mazda as a sun god, which would thus be attested already six centuries before Khotanese urmazde appears. But the latter identification, that of Mithra with Helios, is also attested elsewhere in ancient times (apart from the Manichaean evidence discussed in my paper) in a context which firmly restricts it to Sakas. The evidence in this case comes from Indian sources. Certain Purdpas refer to a sun cult centred on an idol: the sun god Mihira in human form. This cult is described as having been imported into north-west India ‘from the country of the Sakas’, and the god, apart from his name being in Middle Iranian form, is attended by certain deities who are closely linked with Mithra in the Avesta. A valuable study of this Mithra worship of Saka origin was made by I. Scheftelowitz in Acta Orientalia x1, 1933, pp. 293-333, who concluded that the Avestan Mithra owed a great deal to Saka influence. It was this conclusion, since it conflicts with the Avestan god’s unsolarity, which caused Scheftelowitz’s article to receive less attention than it deserved. In a recent book Heinrich von Stietencron (Jndische Sonnenpriester, Wies- baden, 1966) remedied the situation by showing that the two main Purégas concerned represent two distinct immigrations of Iranian priests into India. It was the earlier alone which introduced a Saka cult of Mithra as sun god, free of Zoroastrian influence, as Zoroaster is not mentioned in connection with it and the priests adopted the Vedas in the absence of a scripture of their own. The Purdna from which one gathers this is dated by von Stietencron shortly before the fifth century a.c., and the author reasonably supposes thatDie Sonne das Beste 83 the cult entered north-west India in the wake of the above-mentioned Saka invasion of the first century s.c. The later immigration, by contrast, was of Zoroastrian priests equipped with their own scripture. Like their Saka pre- decessors, however, they soon adopted Hindu beliefs and, though retaining a few Zoroastrian terms and tenets, devoted themselves to a cult of the sun god Mihira as their Saka predecessors had established him in India. Thus the Zoroastrian trappings which had induced Scheftelowitz to draw conclusions from this solar Mihira cult on the nature of the Avestan Mithra appear to be secondary accretions to a cult of different, nomadic Saka origin. It was natural for von Stietencron to assume that the same Saka worship of Mithra as sun god is represented also by the present-day Yidgha use of mir for ‘sun’, and by the use of ‘God Mithra’ for ‘sun’ among the Parthian and Sogdian Manichaeans, If in my paper I did not refer to von Stietencron’s view, this is because where the Sogdians are concerned—among whom only Manichees, to our knowledge, identified the sun with Mithra—I do not consider it tenable. However, one cannot be equally sure about the Parthians, whose Manichees, after all, were the ones who converted the Sogdians, so that with them one may start afresh. The amount of extant non-Manichaean Parthian literature is meagre and does not help. There is room, however, for Saka influence among the Parthians, because the Arsacid rulers of Parthia were Parnians, and the Parnians were a Saka group coming from east of the Caspian, which invaded Parthia in the middle of the third century B.c. Even though Zoro- astrianism seems to have been the State religion under Arsacid rule, there is no excluding that its Mithra may have been viewed by the Parnians and their descendants in a different light from that in which he appears in the Avesta. I therefore realised, as soon as Dr MacDowall brought up his rayed Zeus, that I had been unfair to von Stictencron in suggesting that Khot. urmazde, Sanglechi ormézd, Yidgha mir, and even perhaps the Manichacan Parthian use of ‘God Mithra’ for ‘sun’, need be no more than ‘freaks’, It took the rayed Zeus to make me realise this, because if there is confirmation that Khot. urmazde represents a solar conception of Ahura Mazda which existed among Saka tribes already in the first century a.c., then there is no good reason for doubting what the Kusina coins and the Purdnas suggest, viz. that a parallel worship of Mithra as sun god existed among other Saka tribes at about the same time. Can we attribute this solar conception of Mithra to Sakas of a period pre- ceding the turn of the Christian era, if we leave in abeyance the Parnian in- vasion, whose effect on Mithra is anybody’s guess? As at so early a period no texts link solar Mithra with Sakas the answer ought to be ‘no’. On the other hand one may even in the absence of statements in texts go back to an earlier time, if one and the same striking fact, presenting itself in two different parts of the world, cannot be reasonably explained except by a postulate ofa You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.86 Ilya Gershevitch from an earlier, simpler cult of Mithra, of which the Armenian legend has preserved independently significant features. At Dura Mithra is found sculptured on bullback, painted on horseback. ‘We have seen in the course of this Congress how elegantly Mithrologists can account for the bull as a non-Iranian intruder,® while Iranologists, to whom especially in horse-breeding Media a Mithra on horseback would present no surprise, court ridicule whenever they try to explain the tauroctony as Iranian. It therefore seems to me reasonable to suppose that in the Mithraic community of Dura, the nearest we know to Iran, the syncretistic cult as known to us from the reliefs had not yet ousted all recollection of the Median- ised Saka god’s deeds on horseback. Of these deeds the Armenian legend, if my view is correct, has preserved only the most gripping—Mithra’s dis- appearance, complete with horse, inside a rock, from which, as we might put it, he is ‘reborn’ once a year. Similarly, seeing that the two torchbearers, even though their names be Iranian,® are comfortably explained as deriving from conventional foreign patterns (see AHM, pp. 151f.), it seems reasonable to suppose, on the strength of the Armenian story, that their Iranian motivation lay not in bearers but in torches; in other words, that originally the solar Mithra with whom we are now concerned dwelt alone inside a rock artificially lit (on the paradox see the third and fourth paragraphs below). His solitude in the Armenian cave further suggests that the banquet on the reliefs was a secon- dary elaboration of the notion that Mithra stored food inside the rock which held him enclosed.? It would have gone against the grain of the Iranian sense of hospitality if sooner or later the thought had not cropped up of in- viting a few guests to Mithras’ High Table. Enclosed on horseback inside a rock : mounting a bull in or outside a cave. Could it be that the foreign bull’s Median precursor had been a horse not yet subject to ritual murder? Let us quickly turn away from this thought, to the artificially lit rock. The ceilings of Mithraea were often decorated with stars. Here Professor Lentz’s fascinating paper comes to mind, in which he compared the Mithraeum with © Mr Shefton’s paper on the Nike reliefs was particularly revealing, but other speakers also offered suggestions which deserve full consideration, The impression one is left with is that the tauroctony accrued to Mithras through a variety of forcign influences. Once it had accrued to him it would be natural for non-Iranian Mithraists, or even Iranian ones, pro- vided that they were not Zoroastrians, to introduce Ahriman into the Mithraic pantheon without troubling much about what else he had done apart from murdering Primal Bull. ‘Another bull-slayer, let’s have him,' would have been the motto, a supporting consideration being that Ahriman’s deed was followed by the same effect as Mithras's (though in Ahri- man's case the effect had been unpremeditated; see AHM, p. 64), namely that of ensuring, through the bull's death, a future supply of animals and plants. This would explain why no nasty connotations seem to be attached to the Mithraic Deus Arimanius. & For note 6a sec after note 11 on p. 89. 7 The Armenian Mehr’s appetite for manna reminds one of the Avestan Mithra’s concern for storing libations in Paradise for consumption (see AHM, pp. 89, v. 32; 183 £.; 204, middle).Die Sonne das Beste 87 Yima’s Var. The Var built by Yima as a refuge from the deluge according to chapter u of the Avestan Vendidad is in that chapter in no way associated with Mithra. But its lighting arrangements may concern us. They consist of ‘independent lights (= natural ones) and lights dependent on matter (= artificial). For stars, moon and sun (i.e. the natural lights) are seen (in the Var) (only) once (a year, artificial lights being used during the re- mainder of the year), and they (viz. the inhabitants of the Var) consider a day what (in reality is) a year’ (Vd. , 40 f.). The second sentence is just what Arch-giant Mehr may have thought, when once a year the rock opened, letting in the light of the heavenly luminaries, and he rode out for his harvest of manna. Professor Humbach rightly remarked, in the discussion which followed upon Lentz’s paper, that Afrdsiyab (the Avestan Franrasyan) took refuge in an underground fortress lit by artificial stars, moon and sun (cf., for example, A. Christensen, Les Kayanides, Copenhagen, 1931, p. 88). The notion of a cave or crypt with artificial lighting arrangements for mythological heroes seems thus well enough attested among the mountain people of ancient Iran. It may have been contaminated, on ground trampled by Scythians for twenty-eight years, with some story about the sun god Mithra ‘entering’ night. Admittedly the Armenian Mehr is a mere arch-giant, and not a god. But precisely the Armenians had, attested from the beginnings of Armenian literature in the fifth century a.c., a word which etymologically means ‘Mithra-temple’, which yet they never use in this sense, but only in the generic sense of ‘temple’.# When Agathangelos actually wants to refer to a temple of Mithra he says, without, of course, being aware of this, ‘the Mithra-temple (mehean) of Mithra (mrhakan)’ (cf. Hiibschmann, Armenische Grammatik, p. 53). In this word for ‘temple’, therefore, there lies, enshrined as a fossil, a forgotten god Mithra, just as in the legend we find a Mehr of whom. it was forgotten that he had once been a god. In the legend, of course, one may attribute the oblivion to the predominance in Armenia of Christianity for nearly 1,500 years. But in Sasanian times, and quite possibly much earlier, the use of Arm. mehean/Middle Persian *mihrydn as a generic term makes good sense only if the Mithra still worshipped, the Zoroastrian one, was not the Mithra who had once been exalted in temples called ‘Mithra- temples’ by means of the word which the Armenians borrowed as mehean. That Mithra would have been the Saka sun god whom the mountain dwel- lers of Media had adopted, and fitted into their own somewhat sinister folk- lore of horsemen swallowed up by cavernous rocks. ® The word mehean has long been recognised as a borrowing from Middle Iranian * Be latter is thought to cont of Afr plu a mfx 2d thus coresponding in formaon to to as it were. I should like to improve on this explanation by defining yn as anise ‘Middle Persian outcame of Old Persian dina. Old Persian * MiOra-déna would ea a predictable term for ‘Mithra-temple’, seeing that Old Persian has Daiva-ddna for ‘Daiva- temple’; see JNES xxut, 1964, p. 35, app. vit. (See also p. 357 of this volume—Ed.]88 Iya Gershevitch If in the fifth century a.c., and quite likely earlier, the Armenians used a Mithra-containing term for ‘temple’ without regard to its Mithraic denomin- ator, and this in all probability because Middle Persian *mihryén meant no more than ‘temple’, then the modern Zoroastrian term Dar-i Mihr or Bar-i Mihr ‘the Gate or Court of Mithra’ will have the same non-Zoroastrian back- ground of a Mithra long forgotten whom we may call the Saco-Median. At the time when ‘Mithra-temple’ came to mean ‘worship-temple’, the phrase ‘Gate or Court of Mithra’ would pari passu come to mean ‘Gate or Court of worship’. In this sense the Zoroastrians applied the fossilised term to their own places of worship. Naturally sooner or later the presence in it of what looked to them like the name of their own god Mihr would force them into aetiological speculations as to why a place which ought to have been called ‘the Gate of Ohrmazd’ takes its name from a god Zoroaster never even mentions.® And now for the raven of the Armenian legend, who guides Mehr to his artificially lit ‘Var’. After the above-quoted description of the lighting arrangements in Yima’s Var the author of chapter 1 of the Vendidad reports that, when Zoroaster asked Ahura Mazda, ‘Who took the Mazdayasnian religion to the Var built by Yima?’, the god replied, “The bird kariiptar.’ It does not seem to have ever been suggested, no doubt because never before last July was a whole coachload of Mithrologists taken to Hadrian's Wall, that even on purely linguistic grounds karjiptar would make an excellent candidate for the Avestan word for ‘raven’, hitherto believed to be missing. ‘The name is readily explained as meaning ‘the black-winged’, karii- being the expected Avestan compound form of *kréna ‘black’ (Sanskrit ysna), and -plar belonging to Avestan (hu)patar(sta) ‘(well-)wing(ed)’ (on which see AHM, p. 270). When I put this view to Professor Schwartz he recalled that a similar name, also involving ‘black’, is used for another member of the crow family, the magpie, in the present-day Waxi dialect of the Pamir region. Back in Cambridge I found what he meant, Waxi kirZépt ‘magpie’, which G. Morgenstierne, Jndo-Lranian Frontier Languages pp. 221, 527, though he does not refer to karsiptar, connects with *kréna. Conceivably kirZépe is from a suffixed *krJipirdi, whose unstressed -piréi was successively reduced to *-pts¢, “pid, and -pé.10 ‘The folkloristic motif of an artificially lit, enclosed abode to which a raven takes a religious message thus appears to be pan-Iranian, attested in the east **A perplexing anomaly’ Professor Boyce aptly calls this terminology, nevertheless using it as a prop for even more perplexingly grafting Mithra on the astonished Zoroaster himself (BSOAS xxxu, 1969, pp. 26 ff.). Cf. above, p. 79, 2. 4. 10 Popularly the name karfiptar may have been associated with Aarkdsa ‘vulture’ (lit. “hen-eater’), as if it were *kar(k)sip-tar, with the noun of agent of a verb *fip- as second compound term. The metathesized *karpittar is especially likely to have been so understood (cf. Avestan pifant- said of a falcon), seeing that its Pasto outcome gurbsta means ‘eagle’ (sce Morgenstierne, NTS xi, 1940, p. 263).Die Sonne das Beste 89 of Iran through the Avestan Yima myth, and in the west through the Iranian-looking Mehr legend of the Armenians, who would be most likely to have received it from the Medes. Accordingly it would no longer be an entirely baseless procedure if one assigned an Iranian origin both to the spelaeum of Western Mithraism and to the combination of the spelacum with a Mithras that is solar. This Mithras, being a Medified Scyth, would have nothing or little to do with the Avestan Mithra of the sedentary population of Iran, although in theory, of course, once the two had met on western Iranian soil they might have influenced each other. Dr Francis’s interesting explana- tion of the Dura grade ctegewrrs as meaning ‘ratifier of pact’ is of special relevance to this question. In the hoary past of Indo-Iranian prehistory one would naturally assume that there was only one Mithra, a god of contract who was closely associated with the god in charge of Truth represented by Varuna in the Rigveda and by Ahura in the Avesta. Both gods used the sun as an eye to detect contract- breakers and truth-infringers,!! but at the time of the Indo-Iranian immi- gration into India and Iran nobody had as yet thought of turning either god into a sun god on account of the peculiar use he was making of the sun. This thought occurred only after the emigrants had left, to those Indo-Iranians who had remained behind, as they took to roaming about the steppes of Eurasia, destined to become known as the nomadic Sakas. 11 In the Rigveda the sunis the eye of the dvandvadeity Mitrivaruna, cf. AHM,p. 4. There are traces also in the Avesta of the Indo-Iranian dvandva association of Mithra with Ahura (cf. AHM, pp. 44 ff., and the correction in JNES xin, 1964, p. 12, n. 1, a footnote in the thirteenth line of which the reader ia asked to replace the words ‘generally referred to by his epithet Varuna’ with the revised warding ‘soon to recede before his offspring Varuna’). One may therefore suppose that, if in the Avesta Ahura Mazda alone has the sun as his eye, this ‘was a survival from a time when he and Mithra, in their capacity of one single dvandva deity, shared this privilege. [The reader is also asked to take note of, and kindly forgive, a mistake in my AHM, p. 68, n. 3, line 3, for the discovery of which I am greatly indebted to Dr Witt: the correct reference in that line is xtv, 1925, pp. 181 £] [being the additional footnote to p. 86, attached to ‘names Iranian’, see p. 86.) The new explanation of the -pates of Cautepates which Profestor Schwartz offers in the present volumes is admirable, As regards his identification of Cautes with Arm, kotak, etc., this is realistic in so far as the latter adjective meant ‘diminutive, small in size’ (never ‘youthfully heroic’ or similar) and the size of Cautes is indeed small. However, it could scarcely have occurred to Iranian Mithra-worshippers to invoke their god as ‘small’ until Mithraic reliefs began to display to them diminutive torchbearing Mithrases. Did this really happen already in the Old Iranian period (preceding Alexander's invasion), when the diphthong au of the Iranian *kauta, which in Schwartz's opinion underlies Caules, would not yet have suffered ‘monophthongisation to 6? It may be thought that it did, on the strength of Schwartz's interpretation of the name. But if the torchbearers were introduced after Alexander's invasion (cf. AHM, p. 71 n.), the derivation of Cautes from the Avestan Mithra's constant epithet ‘zou. ganzaoti (with omission of couru, see AH/M, p. 151 n.1) would have the advantage that in 1 term of age-old rifual invocation no closing of the diphthong need be expected.A. D. H. Bivar Lonpon 7 Religious subjects on Achaemenid seals In the art of the ancient Graeco-Roman world, as students of Classical archacology are well aware, it was customary to represent the deities in human form. This anthropomorphic attitude was already noted by the historian Herodotus,! who realised that it did not accord with the belief of other ancient peoples. To distinguish them from the ordinary human figures in artistic representation the Graeco-Roman deities are differentiated in certain cases by their nudity, and more particularly by their attributes. These attributes are naturally familiar to archaeologists concerned with the interpretation of Classical art. With regard, however, to the deities rever- enced in other religions of the ancient Near East, the identifications are by no means always so clear, and research is progressing in many quarters as to their characteristic features. Amongst the branches of iconography which still offer scope for such research is that concerned both with the deities of ancient Iran and with those of the various nations of the Near East which, during the fifth and fourth centuries B.c., lived under the rule of the Achaemenid monarchy. ‘Until the last three or four years the present writer adhered to the view, which was perhaps also that of the majority of students, that, as Herodotus asserts, the ancient Persians did not visualise their deities in human form, and consequently did not sanction their representation in this way in their artistic creations. On the other hand, the art of Iran from the Achaemenid period onwards is celebrated for its skill in the rendering of animal figures, and played a major role in the development of the artistic movement known as the ‘animal style’. There seemed reason to suppose that certain renderings of animal figures in Iranian art, and particularly in the rich medium of scal engraving, were intended to indicate symbolically the presence of deities, and 1 Herodotus 1.131: IHégaas 62 olda réuowt towwside yopévors, dydiwara piv xa vnods xal Bwpods odx dv rdum roerpérove Weveofa, didd xai rola noutor wool Sandan, de wi tual Dont, Gu otx deOgonopuéas érduuoay rove Deo; xardzxeg ofa You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.94 A.D. H. Bivar Here the writer’s thanks must be recorded to Dr E. D. Francis for an interesting point raised in the discussion of the oral version of this paper. The foregoing discussion was based on the old photograph of the hunting fresco reproduced by Rostovtzeff shortly after the discovery, and before any ques- tion of restoration entered into the reckoning. In this photograph, though certain streaks can be seen in the background behind the boar, there is no definite indication of an arrow having struck him, and between the lower streak and the neck of the boar the surface is eroded. Ancient evidence is therefore lacking for the interpretation of this streak as the traces of an arrow which has struck the boar. In hand-drawn copies of the fresco subsequently published!* an unmistakable arrow is plainly represented here, broken in the same manner as that which has struck the nearby gazelle. A colour photograph of the original as it is at present at Yale also shows a less clearly defined arrow actually in contact with the boar. Since this contact is plainly absent in the earlier photograph, the detail in the fresco in its present state must owe some- thing to restoration, justified or otherwise; it is here maintained that the understanding of the iconography demands that the boar should not have been the victim of the divine arrows. Indeed, the link between the rider deity and Verethragna was already appreciated by Rostovtzeff,.” who cites the well known account of the hunter god given by Tacitus!® and the dis- cussion of it by Sir Aurel Stein.19 Granted that the rider god in the fresco partakes of the character of Verethragna, it becomes impossible to regard the accompanying boar merely as one of the quarry. This is perhaps a sufficient digression on the development of animal sym- bolism in the later religious art of the Hellenistic East. The origins of its vocabulary lie in a far earlier period. That the Iranian patron may have been inclined to see, in the wild boar studies of the Graeco-Persian gem engraver, the personality of Verethragna, may perhaps be conceded. What can be deduced of other Iranian gods? Here the question is complicated by the pro- cess known as religious syncretism. Since the peoples of antiquity accepted as fact the material existence of the deities to whom their worship was offered, and since they were at the same time aware that different nations reverenced different gods, there were only two ways out of the impasse. Either the religious vocabulary and observances of the dominant nation had to be im- 35 M. I. Rostovteeff, Dura-Europus and its art, plate xvut, 1; Rostovizeff, Brown and Welles, plate xv, 1. 48 E.g, Rostovtzeff, Brown and Welles, plate xv. 47 Op. cit, p. 113. 4 Annals xn, 13: Interea Gotarzes afd montem, cui nomen Sanbulos, sola dis loci suscipiebat, praccipua religione Herculis, qui tempore stato per quielem monet sacerdotes ut templum iuxta equos venatui adornatos sistant. Equi ubi pharetras telis onustas accepere, per saltus vagi nocte demum vacuis Pharetris multo cum ankelitu redewnt. Rursum deus, qua sileas pererraverit, nocturno visu demonstrat, reperiunturque fusae passim ferae. 39 Old rouies of Western Iran, London, 1940, p. 3433 id., ‘An archacological journey in Western Iran’, Geographical Journal xcu, 4, 1938, p. 336-a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.Religious subjects on Achaemenid seals 97 form. The interpretation of its administrative meaning presents little diffi- culty. From the frequent occurrence of the theme of ‘the lion and its prey’ on coins of the various Syrian cities, such as Byblos, Citium in Cyprus, and above all at Tarsus, in particular on the coins which bear the name of the satrap Mazaeus, there is little doubt that the sculpture must represent the seal of the Syrian satrapy. At the same time the subject is of very wide occurrence, and its implications must be more than purely local. J. Boardman’s recent survey of pyramidal stamp seals of Lydian manufacture includes eleven examples.27 ‘The well known scaraboids from Taxila in the Punjab®® illustrate the same theme. Here indeed, as on certain of the coins of Mazaeus and on the stélé from Athens, the victim of the lion is a stag and not a bull. Yet since the renderings with the bull and with the stag alternate on the coins of Mazaeus without any seemingly fundamental change of meaning, it can reasonably be maintained that the broad iconographic meaning of the two ‘types’ is iden- tical, and that the variation in this detail has only subsidiary importance. Such indeed was the conclusion reached by Hartner on the basis of a hypo- thesis rather different from that to be developed here.2? ‘The motif of the slaying of the bull occurs even on the staircases of the Apadana at Persepolis. In discussing the appearance of our subject there, Herzfeld placed emphasis on the solar symbolism of the lion, a point of considerable merit. Yet his contention that the purpose of the scene was to symbolise the festivities of Né Raz, when the king was personally in residence at Persepolis and delegations may have come from the provinces bringing gifts, can no longer be regarded as indisputable. Herzfeld himself later gave up that view in favour of a different theory, that the celebrations depicted on the sculptures of Persepolis were those which took place at the feast of the Mithrakéna.® There is little reason to doubt that the lion-bull sculptures at Persepolis convey a precise meaning, but the problem of their interpretation is a complex one, and a final solution is not yet in sight. It is also a fact that exactly the same group appears in several important sculptural contexts of ancient Greece. The theme therefore had its place in the iconography of more than one ancient religion, whatever allowance must be made for the effects of syncretism. Neither of the foregoing appearances of the group can be fully explored here. In investigating the meaning of the lion-bull group, the easiest starting- point is the coinage of Tarsus (see plates 4¢ and d) which is probably its ¥ John Boardman, ‘Pyramidal stamp-eals in the Persian Empire’, Jran vit, 1970, 41 Nos. 43-54. 8G. M. Young, ‘A new hoard from Taxila (Bhir Mound)’, Ancient India 1, 1946, p. 33 and plate x, B, 1 and 3. ‘Willy Harner aod Richard Ettinghausen, “The conquering lion, the life-cycle of @ Oriens xvm1, 1964, p. 164. . E, Herafeld, Hran in the ancient East, p. 258. 0B. E, Herafeld, The Persian Empire, Wiesbaden, 1968, p. 7, citing Strabo x1, 14, 9.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either 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reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.218 R. L. Gordon to purify and then destroy it by fire in order to create a perfect cighth and last age. If it can be shown that there is no adequate justification in these four cases on the basis of present evidence for Cumont’s habitual practice of explaining the (unknown) Mithraic by the (partly unknown) Magian, two conclusions can be drawn. First, the ordinary ‘strong’ theory that Mithraism was simply the Western incarnation of a cult historically maintained by the Magian diaspora in Anatolia will no longer need to be taken seriously. A fortiori, it will not be possible to believe that such an Anatolian cult mediated to Western Mithraism some Iranian popular, or military, cult akin to Zoro- astrianism. Secondly, it will be very difficult even to maintain that there is a coherent Zoroastrian base to Western Mithraism, whether or not we assume that Zoroastrianism to have been based largely on knowledge of actual practice or upon knowledge of the Magian literature current in the East under the name of Zoroaster, some of which certainly described Zoroastrian beliefs, sometimes accurately. Nevertheless, it can be shown that in some respects the Mithras of the mysteries was conceived with attributes similar to some of those of Avestan Mithra; and there is evidence of continuity be- tween one of the Anatolian cults of Mithra (which we havenoreason to suppose to have been part of a coherent Zoroastrian cult) and some of the Western evidence for the cult of Mithras. But the relationship of the various gods, and especially the intention of the Western cult, were quite different from any cult of which we have any evidence in the East prior to the third century A.c., and in that sense it may be argued that the Western mystery religion was a new creation. Before we turn to consider these four points, it is worth discussing Cumont’s motives for believing that the Western mysteries were wholly Magian, were imported into the West without material alteration, their rituals and beliefs ‘fixés par une tradition séculaire’.® Some Iranian scholars have used the possibility to support various theories about Iranian popular belief otherwise difficult to substantiate.19 At the time when Cumont was writing Textes et monuments it also seemed attractive to argue that the appearance in Hellenistic times and later of mystery religions which concentrated upon offering salva- tion for the individual soul was due to a specifically ‘oriental’ tendency to produce mysteries of the dying-rising-god type. The historical problem of accounting for these cults was neatly evaded. What could not be explained by the presence of ‘orientals’ in the West could be accounted for by contrast- ing the self-confidence of the fifth century B.c. with the individualism and ° TMMM 1, p. 7. 1 Cumont was himself inclined to do this: TMMM 1, p. 12; Mages hellénists 1, Brussels and Paris, 1939, pp. 73-8. More recently, R. C. Zachner, The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism, London, 196, pp. 98-1443 G. Widengren, Dis Raion Trans, Stuttgart, 1965, pp. aa2-32. Against: M. M. Boyce, ‘On Mithra’s part in Zoroasrianian’, BSOAS xx, 199, pp. 10-49 at PP. 15-1Cumont and the doctrines of Mithraism 219 uncertainty of the third century, by which time cults catering for individual Angst lay ready to hand in the lands opened up by Alexander.11 But undoubtedly the most important consideration for Cumont was the disparity between the demands of the ideal historical description which he wished to write (because that was the object of scientific Religionsgeschichte) and the direct evidence available about Western Mithraism. The mass of cult reliefs were really of very little help in this task. So he took up suggestion that had been current in the earlier literature on the subject,!? and set out to establish it more firmly than had been possible before his own collection of Mithraic material and the translations by Darmesteter and West of the Avesta and the Pahlavi Zoroastrian texts.19 Cumont was plainly trying to achieve two ends at once. If he could show that the divinities represented in the Western iconography were in fact the same divinities as appeared in the Magian or ‘orthodox’ Zoroastrian texts (he was never keen to exclude the possible relevance of any Iranian evidence), and that the Mithraic claim to be a Persian religion was true in the strongest possible sense, he could then argue from these established elements to un- known aspects of Mithraism. So he would achieve the historical description he desired. The solution of the question of historical origins was also to be the solution to a far more difficult and complicated question, con- cerning the character of Mithraism. Nothing less than the ‘strong’ theory was really sufficient. Unless the whole of Mithraism was borrowed from a religion of which we had some independent knowledge, there would be no compelling reason to accept any inference about any aspect of the religion that was not evidenced directly in the Western material and confirmed in the East. And this would prevent the kind of reconstruction which Cumont aimed at. (Geo Widengren has also seen that a ‘strong’ theory alone permits further ‘discovery’ about Western Mithraism, although his own version of the theory has received no general approval.) ‘The modern study of Western Mithraism owed its existence to this desire to create a religion, to dress up the pathetically bare bones of the Western 14 The best exposition of this view is Cumont, Les Religions orientales dans le paganisme romain, Paris, 1929*; cf. W. Lameere, ‘Sur la Tombe de Franz Cumont’, Alumni xvu, 1947-8, PP. 99-158 at pp. 107-15. 18], de Hammer, Mémoire sur le culte de Mithra, Paris, 1833; Fr. Windischmann, Mitkra, Bin Beitrag eur Mthengshichi des Orient, Leip, 1857, pp. 72 f.; Zoega, op. cit., pp. 123 £3 Darmesteter, ‘Le Zend Avesta’, Annales du Musée de Guimet, xxi-xximi, 11, p. 443- 18 There had been no significant work on Mithraism between Lajarde and Cumont's ize essay written in 1889 (Lameere, p. 110). 14 See his attack on Wikander, ‘Stand und Aufgabe der iranische Religionsgeschichte’ 1, Numnen, 1, 1955, Pp. 47-132 at pp. 89-96; Religionen, op. cit., pp. a0 ee and most fully, je Mitral syste i the Greco-Roman work. i Fei ¢ if mando roman Rome, 1966, pp. 433-55. Some of these claims, which are often based upon ical fictions as well as alleged structural parallels, have been rejected by R. N. Frye, ‘Problems in the study of Iranian religions’, in Religions of Antiquity (E. R. Goodenough memorial), Leiden, 1968, pp. 586-7. [See addendum, p. 248]Cumont and the doctrines of Mithraism 221 possess a great deal of the information about the cult which was positively demanded by Cumont’s conception of his task.2 Let us turn to Cumont's four basic points. His identification of the leonto- cephaline god as Zurvan is an interesting example of his method.2! Noting the snake which encircles the deity in a number of representations, and the god’s possession of a staff and keys and his stance on a globe, he observed that these imply a god concerned with time and with power. But he im- mediately leaped to the unwarrantable conclusion that this symbolism referred to infinite Time and supreme or primary cosmic power. It was then a simple matter to point to the evidence that the Persians and Magi believed in such an entity, whom they called Zurvan.%? The argument is a complete petitio principii, because it assumes the specific significance of the symbols, which is precisely what requires independent proof. To some extent, no doubt, Cumont’s argument depended upon his other contentions about Ohrmazd/Jupiter and Ahriman/Areimanius, but that is not how the dis- cussion in Textes et monuments is presented.?8 Cumont simply assumed at every critical point that the Magian evidence was relevant, and proceeded to argue as though this were an established fact and not merely a working hypothesis. Wikander pointed out firmly that none of the evidence cited by Cumont links the leontocephaline cither with Iran or with Mithraism:*4 the Orphic and other evidence relating to monstrous figures does not allow one to con- clude that the Mithraic god was called Saturn or Aion, nor does the icono- graphical evidence in the West conform very satisfactorily to what little we know about the Iranian conceptualisation of Zurvan. What evidence there is for the name within Mithraism is very different. Curiously enough, no statue of the god is known in the West with a dedication other than to Mithras himself, with the sole exception of a statue at York in all probability dedicated to Arimanius (see plate 7b).25 Now if the god was called Arimanius 2 See my ‘Mithraism and Roman society’, Religion u, 1972, pp. 92-121, for a possible approach. 41 For his general attitude towards symbolism, TMMM 1, pp. 70-43 Symbolisme funéraire, Paris, 1942, introduction; Lameere, art. cit. p. 143," la seule méthode éfficace consistant éclairer les monuments par les textes et ceux-ci par les monuments’. Note the strictures of A. D. Nock, ‘Sarcophagi and symbolism’, AJA t, 1945, pp. 140-70, and, less straightfor- wardly, H.-I. Marrou, Journal des Savants, 1944, pp. 23-37- 3 TMMM 1, pp. 75-84. 2% Where the equation Zurvin-Saturn-Kronos is clearly intended, by its obvious truth, to prepare the reader for further identifications with Zoroastrian deities, %4 Op. cit. pp. 33-6. 28 CEMRAT 093 (York): better reading in RIB G4t. T take the reading of the second line to be Arimani(o) V(S.L.M.). The form Arimanes is actually found in Hesychius (ed, Latte, Copenhagen, 1953) I.s.v.; Agathias, On the Reign of Fustinian 1.24; and in two passages from. Plethon quoted in Mages hellénisés 1, pp. 25-4. This is a hellenisation of the Middle Persian Ahriman, whereas the usual Mithraic form is the Greek reproduction of the Old Persian. form Ahramanyas, Areimanios. This is used by the fourth century 2.c. sources on the Magi, uae222 RL. Gordon a very long stretch of Cumontic wall falls flat. A farrago of ideas would be revealed which could not in any circumstances be made to fit the evidence about Magian thought. Attempts have indeed been made to suggest a char- acter for the Ieontocephaline, purporting to explain how Arimanius might have acquired temporal attributes, but they must be dismissed as imagina- tive fictions.2¢ No doubt the York dedication cannot be pressed too hard, because the dedication of a representation of one god to another is found both in Mithraism and outside quite commonly.27 But the inscription is the only epigraphic evidence for the name of the leontocephaline, and it may well be accurate: it is only the Cumontic tradition which insists that Arim- anius must have been the god of evil in Mithraism and so testify to the existence in the mysteries of a structural dualism of the type familiar in its strict form in Sasanian Zoroastrianism, which then forced the conclusion that the leontocephaline was another god, namely Zurvan.®® It would be more in keeping with the evidence to accept the possibility that the name of the leontocephaline was Arimanius and that, from the iconography, the god was concerned with time, seasonal change and cosmic power. We can make no further statement about the god’s role in the economy of the cult, and certainly have no right to assert that he was conceived as highest god, as Cumont did, on the basis of the Iranian material relating to Zurvan.2 In other words, Cumont’s initial assumption about the origins of Mithraism caused him in this case (and, I think, in others) to arrange the available evidence in terms of preconceived categories (Zurvan, Ohrmazd, Ahriman and then the rest of the Iranian ‘popular’ pantheon), which simply did not and perhaps indicates a literary origin for the Mithraic god, I sce no reason to assume that J hisd-connury Mita in York new the contemporery Middle Persian name (wich docs not appear in any text known to us of that century). fe Aa ientace maybe Bund in]. Dashes Giri, Gab ad Va ie Zosecons- anism: Survvals and Renewals, New York 1966, pp. 111-17 at 116 ‘(Ahriman) though cruel, no longer has the demonic character which was his in the dualistic system of the Iranian religion . (the humanheaded and lionheaded types are) merely two variations on the theme of the ‘Aion-Serapis-Zeus-Helios-Mithras-Hades-Ahriman identity, without a dualistic opposition’. ‘The idea that the leontocephaline was Abriman was revived by R. C. Zachner and Duchesne- Guillemin, but neither troubled to examine the assumption that Areimanius must be functionally in Mithraism the Ahriman of Zoroastrianism under some guise or other, 1 For example, CIMRM, 951-25 ont; 1052; 155-6; 1547-8; shape a136.219-20 8.2 torso of Hercules reused as a Mithraic dedica ‘the general point of A. D. Nock, Gnomon, 1958, pp. 291~5 at 204. % This mistake unfortunately mars the argument of M. Boyce, ‘Some Reflections on Zurvanism’, BSOAS xxx, 1957, pp. 304-16 at 314-16. 2 The different ideas relating to this figure are exhaustively discussed by R. C. Zachner, Zurean, @ Zoroastrian Dilemma, Oxford 1936, who, however, shares the mistaken belief of Cumont, Mages helénists, 1, pp. 62-78 that Zervanism was a distinct and self-conscious Zoroastrian heresy (for Cumont the object of this stress was to detach Mithraism still further from Zoroastrianism even in Anatolia). A more realistic, less-Christianised view is M. Molé, ‘Le probléme des sectes zoroastriennes das les sources pehlevis’, Oriens 13/14, 1960-1, pp. 1-28 (and elsewhere). See also R, N. Frye, The Heritage of Persia, London, 1962, p. 221.Cumont and the doctrines of Mithraism 225, other, facing in opposite directions. Sol is designated Sancto Domino Invicto Mithrae, Jupiter fragmentarily . . . sancto . . . maximo.36 But both monument and dedication are unparalleled, since Mithras never otherwise rides in a chariot, except one that explicitly is not his own: this must be evidence of learned pscudo-Mithraism or of the type of syncretism found in the invoca- tion at Dura of Zeus—Helios—Mithras Tourmasgade: similar cases are known from Rome itself.8? At any rate, no argument about Mithraic Jupiter can be based upon it. ‘There is in fact no reason whatever to identify this god as Ohrmazd, except, of course, that ‘Mithraism is an Iranian religion’, which is precisely what needs to be demonstrated. Although it is true that Ohrmazd was believed in Iran to have fought the daevas in the first round of the cosmic conflict,38 it is not necessary to suppose that this is the myth represented in the Mithraic iconography, since the motif was absolutely banal in Graeco- Roman culture, as in parts of Anatolia.*° No one points to an Iranian basis for the scene in which Saturn hands over power to Jupiter. At best Cumont simply showed that one of the scenes was compatible with a Zoroastrian myth (there was no Magian material on this point), not that there was no convincing alternative. In considering whether his case is plausible, we must take into account the absence of this god from the rest of the myth cycle, the total lack of evidence about his ethical character, or of an association with light or with particular types of animals—all of which are defining characteristics of the god in the Magian literature. These considerations, of course, raise the basic question whether Western Mithraism adopted a cosmic dualism of the type supposed by Cumont. He did not believe that the Magi accepted an ‘orthodox’ Zoroastrian position which involved shunning Ahriman and all his works in ritual matters.4° 3 CIMRM 332: the reading of CIL v1.82 is not wholly supported by the drawing there, from Ms. Berol. Lat. AGt fg. A further argument against the belief that any generalisation about ‘Mithraic Jupiter can be based on the monument is the presence of a Ganymede (?) below Jupiter. Of course this does not mean that the monument cannot have come from the same ‘shrine as CIMRM 334 (M. J. Vermaseren, ‘A unique representation of Mithras’, Vig. Christ. 1¥, 1950, pp. 142-4) but these multiple idiosyncrasies ought to make one suspicious. 37 J. F. Gilliam, Preliminary Report of the Ninth Season of Work at Dura-Europos ux (The palace of the Dux Ripae and the Dolicheneum), New Haven, 1952, ed. M. I. Rostovtzeff et al., pp. 115-17,No.974. Lunderstand the Zeusor Jupiter of CIMRM 27 bis, 473,475, 2006and perhaps 1419, as an attempt to express the cosmic sovereignty of Mithras. Compare the late fourth century CIMRM 365A (sanmus) and the altered inscriptions from the Terme di Caracalla (436!-*) which apply the epithets of Sarapis kesmokrator to Mithras. I do not think that this usage provides evidence for the name of the Jupiter figure in Mithraism, 38 TMMM 1.157. This established Zoroastrian dualism, ‘so it is that in all the things in the world a dual opposition can be seen, antagonism and strife, rising and sinking, and mixture ‘everywhere’ (Bd tv.1g, trans. R. C. Zachner, The Teachings of the Magi, London 1956, p. 49)- Cumont was thus using a Zoroastrian episantion for the giant-killing scene in spite of deny- ing that the Magi believed in Zoroastrian dualism. 59 Cf. M. L. West, Hesiod’s Theogony, Oxford, 1966, p. 936; H. Seyrig, ‘Combat contre Vanguipéde’, Syria xv, 1998, pp. 165-73. “© TMMM 1, pp. 138-9. aot226 R. L. Gordon Because there are five Western dedications to Areimanius, he supposed that this reflected the inverted omomi cult which Plutarch in De Iside et Osiride 46 says the Persians offered to Hades-Areimanios.4 But it is one thing to perform sacrifices which ritually reproduce the separation of the cosmos, and of the world (because Plutarch’s Areimanios was a creator god too), into ethically inverted camps, and quite another to set up dedications to an evil god inside a Mithracum, dedications which in four out of five cases were statues (though of whom we can say in only one case)—in other words, lavish dedications.42 If we believe Euboulus’s statement that Mithras was creator and father of all, and lord of coming into being, can we possibly believe that Roman Mithraists had the same conception of Areimanios as that detailed by Plutarch ?48 Either Mithras was creator (in which case the world must be basically good) or Ohrmazd and Ahriman were creators of the good and the evil parts of the cosmos respectively, and Mithras’s creative functions were confined to a limited responsibility for producing rain, quickening shoots and foetuses and ensuring safe emergence into the world, as in the Avesta.44 ‘These are surely alternatives—there is no way of reconciling them. By what method do we reject the only direct*S evidence for the Western belief of the mysteries—Euboulus—in favour of Plutarch, whom we know to be describing imagery and ritual relating to Magian Ohrmazd and Ahriman irreconcilable with the Mithraic evidence? For Cumont to shift ground, and argue that although Plutarch’s evidence is not precisely relevant something rather similar must be behind the Mithraic dedications to Areimanius, docs not help matters. Although he and Bidez made the point well that the beliefs ascribed to the Magusaeans are inconsistent, so that one must assume a number of different interpretations and myths held by different Magusaean ds po, ome:! 83s (York); 17735 1775 (Carnuntum). Ta spite of Un rite zervanite’, 74 coxv, 1930, pp. 287-96 rerntns th bot dacuonof the implications of Phar words, 42 Only 1773 is merely an altar. 322 records the dedication of a signum arimanium. 833, 28 noted above, is a statue of the leontocephaline god. The other two inscriptions are on statue 49 Euboulusap. Porphyry, Deaniro aympharum6,cf.24. Plutarch’s implication thatthe animal creation was divided between Ohrmazd and Abriman is the only part of his discussion which can be directly compared with the Mithraic position, 4 On these functions, F, B. J. Kuiper, ‘Remarks on the Avestan Hymn to Mithra’, 117. v. can be confirmed from our archaeological knowledge of Mithraca: it is reasonably clear that he knew quite a lot about the western cult. I feel that M. Boyce, ‘On Mithras in the Mani- chean Pantheon’, A Locust’s Leg, London 1962, pp. 44-54, is sufficient answer to I. Gershe- vitch's hypothesis that the notion of Mithras as creator of all can only be owed to direct contact with Persian Manichacism in the third century a.c. (Gershevitch, AHM, Cam- bridge, 1959, pp. 32-3 and sce pp. 72 ff, 125 ff. above). The basic fallacy is the assumption that Western Mithraism was only some result of ‘natural evolution’ from Zoroastrianism, instead of a self-conscious new cult with its own independent purposes.Cumont and the doctrines of Mithraism 227 groups in Anatolia and farther east, 4 it will not do to use this fact to support. the argumentum ex silentio. That would be to allow the (unverified) assumption that Western Mithraism was a genuine Magian religion persuade us that even when the Magian evidence does not provide the proof we seek, we may properly argue from the Mithraic evidence back to the Magi. Would that all proofs were so easy. Again, it cannot be argued that Euboulus’s language is not the actual language of Mithraism but of philosophy, because we have no grounds whatever for making that distinction here: ‘creator and father of all’, ‘lord of coming into being’ are, of course, the cliches of the philo- sophical schools,4? but it cannot be shown that they were not also concepts current—at some level—in Mithraism. The date of Euboulus is frankly un- known, but the tendency is to place him in the late second century a.c. ;48 and the earlier we place him the less convincing does it become to argue that his evidence simply shows that Mithraism developed its beliefs some- what once it had passed from the Magi into the West (itself a view Cumont did not favour). ‘The real point is surely that we know nothing of any importance about Western Areimanius. We know that dedicatory statues were set up to him in Mithraea: if they were not the leontocephaline statues, then we do not know the iconographical conventions relating to the god. There is not obviously an area in Mithraea consecrated to the maintenance of the omomi cult, nor is it readily credible that the same building was used for the cult of Mithras and of an evil Areimanius. We have no idea of the significance of the discovery of heads of Sarapis in the Mithraca at London (Walbrook), Emerita and Santa Prisca, because we do not know how marked was the association either of Sarapis or of Areimanius in Mithraism with the Under- world: indeed, if one could generalise from the recut inscription from the Baths of Caracalla in Rome there would be no association between the two gods at all.{® The mere name Areimanius, granted that we have nothing 4 Mages hell. 1, pp. 62-3. “7 Cf. for example, Maximus of Tyre 20.12; Philo, De Opif. Mundi 7; 10; 215 72-53 1953 Atticus ap. Euseb. Praep. Eoangel. xv.6.1~-3; Apuleius, De dogm. Platonis 1.11; cf. Corp. Herm. 4.125 215 25-6; 31 ete. The implication of this usage is that Mithras was actually supreme god in Mithraism. Cumont, TMMM 1, p. 26, cf. p. 276; F. Jacoby, s.v. ‘Euboulos’ (No. 15) PW m3, 1915, pp. 878-9. The suggestion that Kronius (one of Porphyry's sources for De anire), who prob- ably wrote in the late second century a.c., used Euboulus unfortunately cannot be proved : Praechter, PW x1, 8.v. ‘Kronios’, cols. 1978-82. © CIMRM, 8:8 and 1 (Suppl.), fig. 253 = W. Grimes, The Excavation of Roman and Medieoal London, London, 1968, plate 48; 873 = A. Garcia y Bellido, Religions Orientales dans U’Espagne romaine, Leiden, 1967, pp. 137-8, No. 10; 479 = C. C. van Essen and M. J. Ver- maseren, ESPM, pp. 134 f. The two inscriptions on the stone from the Caracalla Baths are (CIMRM, 463.1-2 = Moretti, No. 194) els Zeds| Sdgaats|"Hhuos| Koopoxpdrg| dveberros and du “Hile| peyddqp| Lagdaids| owrige| xdoveodécy | éxnxdy | ebegyéry | dveweijre -.. ‘The name of Mithras in the first has been recut over ‘Sarapis’, and likewise in the second. But at least it may be observed that Sarapis did not immediately remind Mithraists of Arei- manius.228 R. L. Gordon else, obviously can tell us nothing about the god’s conceptualisation in Mithraism. And we therefore have no grounds for believing that there was a dualist structure in Western Mithraism in any way comparable with any belief testified for Iran or the Magusaeans. There may have been, naturally, but there is no way at present of showing it. A fortiori, cosmic dualism cannot provide support for any theory of the Magian origin of Mithraism. But it may be worth observing that the name Areimanius is one which one might expect to be preserved by an esoteric cult claiming to be heir to Persian wisdom, because the existence of this deity had so struck the fourth century Greek writers and thus Hermippus, whose work seems to have been the main source of knowledge of these matters under the empire.5° But there is no reason to suppose that this esoteric god was simply lifted unchanged out of one of the Greek sources any more than to suppose that Roman Mithras was not conceptually and functionally very different from any historical Mithra in the East. This raises the third problem. At first sight, the evidence of Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride, and of some Armenian writers, that Mithras was conceived by the Persians as mediator between Ohrmazd and Ahriman, and that he was supposed to occupy the middle area of the universe between their respective realms, seems ex- tremely close to the Mithraic evidence.5! But Cumont also believed that in the mysteries Mithras was a mediator in a different sense: between human beings and the unapproachable and unknowable god (presumably his Saturn/Kronos, but it is not clear). The physical mediation was supposed to be confirmed by the identification of Mithras in Babylonia with the sun god Sama: in the West the symbol was the sun in the middle of the hierarchy of planets, in the so-called Pythagorean order.5? We have already seen that it is difficult to reconcile what Plutarch says 50 Diogenes Lacrtius, Vit. philosoph. 1.8 quotes Hermippus first in a short list which pro- ceeds to the fourth century writers Eudoxus and ‘Theopompus: this implies that Diogenes (or his source) did not use the earlier writers but the second century 3.c. Hermippus. For his industry, Pliny, NH xxx.3-4, and Miller, FHG mr, pp. 53-4; Mages hell. 1 pp. 6-31 and G. ‘Messina, Der Ursprung der Magier und die zarathustrische Religion, Rome, 1930, pp. 13-55 dis- ‘cuss in full this Greek tradition. 81 TMMM 1, pp. 39-40; 306; 310. Plutarch, De Iside et Os. 46 (3692) (Zoroaster on Ohrmazd and Ahriman) xai xgodanepalvero vir pdv Lomévas geoti udducta tay aloOntar, tov 8 iunadiy, cnxéry nal dro, nécor S'dupoty rdv MiBony elvat: 513 xai Midgny Hégcas dv Meatrny dropdtovow . . . c. 47 (370AB) describes how this metaphysical opposition was translated into physical terms, with the sun in the centre, Note that here Obrmazd is the organiser and creator of the cosmos. Cf. Eznik of Kotb, De Deo 11.9, ed. L. Mariés and G. Mercier, Patrol. Orientalis, Paris, 1959, xxvuz.3, section 190) (sun as arbitrator between Ormizd); and Mages hell. 0. pp. 73-4 (where the Manichaean text is not relevant to this problem: sce Boyce, op. cit n. 45 above). This mediation of Mithras is not : J. Hani, ‘Plutarque en face du dualisme iranien’, REG uxxvn, 1964, pp. 489-525 at 494-5 (which is mostly a rehash of Cumon 82 TMMM t, p. 303, n. 25 pp. 114 £.; 231; ‘La théologie solaire du paganisme romain’, Mém. pris. par divers savants, x1.2, 1913, pp. 447-79 at 476 f. His warning that in Mithraism ‘Mithras was never simply equated with the sun (TMMM 1, p. 200) is an oversimplification.230 R. L. Gordon ‘true’ Mithraic order, the one upon which the grades were based, was to our knowledge a unique order in the ancient world. It is worth listing this arrangement: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury (from the fixed heaven to earth), Now this order is quite unlike any known from Babylonia (which anyway do not set the sun in the middle), but it is very close to the order of sidereal rotation, the one which is usual in Greck horoscopes. By contrast, in the cuneiform Seleucid texts the order is Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, Saturn, Mars. The only difference between the order of sidereal rotation and the Mithraic order is that in the latter Saturn has been removed from its third rank and placed first.5? In other words, the most obvious hypothesis is that the Mithraic order is a conscious adaptation (50 as to correspond to some preconception about Saturn) of an astronomical planetary order that was commonplace in the Graeco-Roman world at least from the fourth century 8.c. but which is unknown in Babylonia. Because this order is used in Mithraism as a basis for the organisation of the reli group,*# it would not be unreasonable to argue that this fundamental aspect of the cult of Mithras we know in the West was not a Magian but a Western invention—unless it can be shown (as it has not been) that the astronomical ideas of the Magusaeans were Greek.5! We do not understand the significance of the appearance of the planets in the order of the weekdays in Mithraism, unless it concerns the ritual organ- isation of the year in some way.®° At any rate, there is no reason to suppose that this too is anything but a Greek invention, since it is based upon an arrangement of the heavenly bodies according to their distance from the carth (which is not the Babylonian practice) and since it presupposes know- ledge of the twenty-four-hour day.6! Yet another order appears on the Brigetio plaque (see CIMRM II, fig. 448, mon. 1727), whose significance is equally uncertain, though it might be linked to a horoscope of some kind. At least it is clear that the planetary sun in Mithraism was the sixth and not the fourth from the earth : this evidence is particularly reliable because itis the 57. O, Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity, Providence, Rhode Island, 1957, pp. 168- 70, who is not of course interested in this Mithraic problem. 88 As has been revealed by the Mithraca di Felicissimo at Ostia (G. Becatti, Scavi di Ostia WH: 1 Mitre, Fame, 1B PP 105-12) and Santa Prisca (van Essen and Vermaseren, ESPM, Pp. 179-86. On both, note Cumont, CRAL, 1945, pp. 401-7 and 415-18 (which fails to appreciate the significance of these finds). 89 T do not think it can ever be done satisfactorily. Because the Magi were supposed to be the founders of astrology, a mass of adventitious astronomical/astrological material cir- culated under the name of Zoroaster (collected by Bidez and Cumont, Mages hell. 1, pp. 158-232). We cannot tell a ‘genuinely’ Magian idea from an adventitious Greek one ithe Magi adopted Greek astronomical and astrological ideas. Cf, W. and H. G. Gundel, Astro- logumena: Die astrologische Literatur in der Antike und ihre Geschichte: Sudhofts Archiv, Wiesbaden, 1966, pp. 40-51 and pp. 6o-6 on the whole question. 9 Ifso, unis would accord with some of the suggestions made on pp. 358 of this volume by Professor W. Lentz. Cumont’s view (RHR, ont, 1931, pp. 46-50) is not adequately supported by evidence. 1 O. Neugebauer, ibid.; “The Egyptian Decans’, Vistas in Astronomy 1, 1955, PP. 51f-a You have either reached 2 page thts unevalale fer vowing or reached your ievina tit for his book.232 RL. Gordon centrality is quite different from, and does not obviously presuppose, Plu- tarch’s idea that Mithras was situated between Ohrmazd and Ahriman, In so far as this imagery connects Mithras with the planetary sun, he is not in the middle of the planetary hierarchy. ‘The second item precludes the supposition that Mithras was set in the middle of the universe, but seems to be crucial to Mithraic thought because it links him to the problem of seasonal change (and so to the maintenance of the cosmic status quo) and to Mithraic anthropology (the plight of the soul). Porphyry, perhaps quoting Kronius, remarks, ‘They assigned to Mithras as his proper seat the line of the equinoxes . . . he is set on the line of the equinox with North on his right, South on his left.’66 That is, Mithras is placed on the celestial equator facing west. It is the sun’s passage through the celestial equator which gives rise to seasonal changes, in particular the equinoxes, which are, as it were, the astronomical symbols of the seasonal changes on earth. This image of Mithras thus separates him from the sun but stresses the significance of their relationship for human life. Anthropology is involved because Porphyry explicitly links Mithras’s location on the celestial equator with the descent and ascent of souls into the world and back to heaven: in some way Mithras was responsible for their experience.®? If Mithras was set on the celestial equator he cannot have been imagined to have been set in the middle of the universe, as Cumont thought. Even if we could believe that Ohrmazd and Ahriman were respectively above and below the universe (and we have no evidence that they were in Mithraism), we could not say that the Mithraic view is compatible with Plutarch’s state- ment about the role of Mithras in Magian thought. The celestial equator is an imaginary line on the plane of the terrestrial equator at the limits of the universe.6® So far from being in the middle, Mithras, according to one image at least, was on the outside of the universe: there seems to be no satisfactory way of reconciling this with Plutarch’s implication of a physical meaning for peofrys. We have no reason to suppose that there were other Magian ideas about Mithras’s physical location: if there were, we do not know of them. As before, we have no right to use the mere possibility that © De antro 24, ‘rG ev obv Mido olxelav xabédgay vip» xara ras lonueglas nérazay’ . . . xeard tov lonegevor 8 térancras reinclor év Seki wdv Exo vd fdgeia, éy dgurregg 8 rd véra....” Porphyry supports this by referring to the knife of Aries (the zodiacal sign associated with the beginning of spring) and the bull of Aphrodite (the planet Venus is regularly associated with the sign Taurus). [See addendum, p. 248.] Olid: verals 5 el plrecw lobes wal daub yerkoous xagitanlvais shai Eraber bid. 16 éepédxeaDau nal atrds xvedua . . . xal tiv obolay Exe touaseny. 08 F. Buffidre, Les Mythes d’Homére, Paris, 1955, p- 430, Big 4 andl 451, 6, 10 has wail diagrams: see also pp. 459-5, and D. R. Dicks, Barly Greek Astronomy to Aristotle London, 1970, pp. 17-185 id. ‘Solstices, Equinoxes and the Presocratics’, JHS ixxxvi, 1966, pp. 26-40, who points out the relatively sophisticated astronomical knowledge required to conceive the equinoxes and to date them, and that this knowledge was available neither to the Greeks nor to the Babylonians until the fourth century .c. (which would further compromise Cu- ‘mont’s theory).234 RL. Gordon Mithraism not only believed in (a modified version of) the Frasegird but had adopted a theory of eight ages governed by the planets, the seventh of which belonged to Mithras equated with the sun: this age brought the universal conflagration which heralded the establishment of Ohrmazd’s new creation,?1 It cannot, of course, be doubted that some Magi at least believed in the Fraiegird, and further that several different versions of the events at the end of the world were current in the Hellenistic East before they assumed the form in which we now have them in the Jamdsp-Namag and the Wahman Tait. ‘These ideas formed the ultimate basis of the oracle of Hystaspes and supplied images for much of the apocalyptic of the period.” But we cannot simply assume that the Western Mithraists accepted every doctrine ascribed to the Magi in the Greek and other sources, and must enquire what evidence of this eschatology (which should be of central importance) we have in the West. And we should note that it is not any of the evidenced versions of the apocalypse which Cumont ascribed to Mithraism, but a special one involving a theory of planetary ages, with the Sun/Mithras playing the role of saviour. Originally there were two items which Cumont believed supported his theory; and then the Dieburg relief provided another. The first is a text of Tertullian which was supposed to show that Western Mithraists believed in the resurrection of the body, and plausibly therefore in the whole Fraiegird.?8 Cumont adopted a reading of this passage which seemed to allow him to argue that ‘Mithras’ was the subject of each clause up to continentes, but Rauschen’s 1905 text made it clear, on the basis of new readings, that the subject throughout sections 3-5 was diabolus. The phrase concerning Mithras relates, strictly, only to the sign made on the forehead.”4 But it still seems to be held that sections 4 and 5 concern Mithraism, even if the subject is still Sasanian Zoroastrianism,’ Types of Redemption, J. Z. Werblowsky and C. J. Bleeker (eds.), Leiden, 1970, pp. 223-30. 7 RHR cm, 1931, pp. 31-64 (art. cit.) The ages were supposedly guaranteed by Celsus’ mention (Origen, Contra Celswn v1.22) of metals associated with planets in Mithraism. But this is quite inadequate evidence for such a claim. In fact no more than four ages were ad- matted by the Magi, of 3,000 years cach. This is a clear instance of Cumont forcing the evidence to fit the Mithraic. 12 E, Benveniste, ‘Une apocalypse pehlvie’, RHR cvt, 1932, pp. 337-80 (I owe this refer~ ence to Mr J. R. Hinnells); H. Windisch, Die Orakel des Hystaspes: Verkandel. koninkl. Akademie van Wetenschappen te Amsterdam: Afd, Letterkunde, No. xxvui.3, Amsterdam, 1929, pp. 26-40. 73 TMMM 1.324 Tertull. De Praesc. haer, 40.15 ‘Sed quaeritur, a quo intllectus interpretetur corum, quae ad haereses faciant. A diabolo scilicet, cuius sunt partes intervertendi veritatem qui ipsas queque res sacramentorum divinorum idolorum mysteriis aemulatur. (3) Tingit et ipse quosdam utique credentes et fideles suas; expositionem delictoram de lavacro i, si adhue memini Mithrae, signat illic in frontibus milites suas. Celebrat et panis oblationem et imaginem resurrectonis inducit et sub sladio redimit coronam. (5) Quid, quod et swmmuom pontifcem in unis muptiis statuit? Habet et virgines, habel et continentes. ..” (ed. Refoulé, CCL 1, 1953)- 74 Cf. F. Dolger, ‘Die sphragis der Mithrasmysterien’, Antike und Christentum 1, 1929, PP- 1Cumont and the doctrines of Mithraism 235 technically the devil, as in the rest of the list.75 In fact there can be no doubt at all that section 5 docs not refer to a Mithraic Pater (for which anyway summus pontifex would be an extraordinary title) but to the Flamen Dialis, of whom Tertullian uses the same phrase elsewhere in similar reference to the special prohibition upon divorce.?8 In the same pamphlet he gives a list of pagan continentes which includes not only the Vestal Virgins and other (Greek and barbarian) priestesses but the Egyptian priest of Apis: there is no reason whatever to think that section 5 contains any information about Mithraism.?? Then what of section 4? Whatever may have been Tertullian’s opinion, the text is for us quite indeterminate and therefore of no value in itself. I think that Refoulé was right to print a full stop after milites suos.”8 Obviously panis oblationem might refer to the Mithraic meal briefly mentioned by Justin Martyr—but it is by no means certain that the phrase refers to mystery cults at all. Tertullian’s use of oblatio implies that he meant here ‘offering to God/gods’, and we have no right to assume what Justin does not say, that Mithraists offered the water and bread of their ceremony to the god. On the other hand, the offering of various kinds of farinaceous con- coction was commonplace in traditional Greek and Roman religion.”® The reference to ‘winning a crown under threat of the sword’ is an extraordinary way of referring to the incident in a Mithraic initiation ceremony described at least ten years later by Tertullian in De corona: we cannot even be sure that he knew of the ritual as early as 200 A.c., for it is exactly the kind of item that he might have picked up from Saturninus’s De coronis, for exam- ple.89 In the initiation ceremony the whole point lay in the rejection of the 78 For example, by M. J. Vermaseren, The Mithraeum at S. Maria Capua Vetere, Mithriaca 1, Leiden, 1971, pp. 40-2; Dilger accepted that section 5 was irrelevant, but still thought 4 ‘was Mithraic (p. 88). 7% De monogamia 17.3, Idolis certe et monogamia et viduitas apparent. Fortnae Muliebri coronam non imponit nisi univira, sicut nec Matri Matutae. Pontifex Maximus et Flaminica nubunt semel.’ There seems to have been some contemporary interest in this priesthood: Aulus Gellius, Noctes Alticae x.15, especially sect. 23. W. Pétscher, ‘Flamen Dialis', Mnemosyne 1v.21, 1968, pp. 215-39 at 230 ff, 7 De monogamia 17.4 ‘sunt et quae de tota continentia indicent nos, virgines Vestae et Iunonis Achaicae et Dianae Scythicae et Apollinis Pythii. Etiam bovis illius Aegyptii antistites de continentia. infirmitatem Christianorum iudicabunt.’ The list shows that mysteris in De praesc. haer. 40.2 is not to be taken narrowly. Of. A. D. Nock, ‘Eunuchs in Ancient Religion’, ARW xx1m, 1925, pp. 25- 3 His is the only text to do so, so far as I have found. Tfntin, Apl 85, Bre ye Soros nal norte Wharog rileras.. per "dnsléyen ron, 4 éalevacbs 4 wetet Sovonde, For Tertstlas's wae of hie’, Carn Cir. 2.3 ad Unormt 11.8.6; Virg. vel. 13.2; De exhort. cast. 11.1; Chr. Mohrmann, *Btudes sur le Latin des Chrétions mt, Rome, 1965, pp. 366-70. The evidence for sacred meals in mystery religions is doubt- ful (A. D. Nock, Early Gentile Christianity, New York, 1964, pp. 72-6), but I do not think that we need think only in terms of sacramental meals. ‘Liba’ made from flour were offered to the gods at the Paganalia/Sementivae (Ovid, Fasti1.665) and at the Matratia (Varro, Ling. ta 5-106). Similar offerings were made at the Fornacalia, the Vestalia and at other festivals, the hellenistic period, Theocritus Jdpll 15.115-18 (offerings to Adonis) a He quotes Saturninus in De corona vn.6-7, and seems to owe much of his material about Pagan use of crowns to him. 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