Mystery cult

PANTHEON - ACHITECTURE & LIGHT
👉 Direct link to the Book: tinyurl.com/2p8eyr4p

The new book by Marina De Franceschini and Giuseppe Veneziano, published by Rirella Editrice, is entitled “Pantheon. Architecture & Light”. It is about their discoveries of Archaeoastronomy in the Pantheon: the Arc of Light and the Square of Light.

They are sacred illuminations that can still be seen today and had a very precise symbolic meaning. The book traces the millenary history of this extraordinary building, a masterpiece of ancient Roman architecture, which still today has the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world.
It is the first of the Series "Studies of Archaeoastronomy", volumes with full color pictures, which explain the discoveries of Archaeoastronomy made by Marina De Franceschini and Giuseppe Veneziano in the Pantheon and in other Roman buildings, such as Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli, Castel Sant'Angelo and the Grotto of Tiberius in Sperlonga.

✅ In English and also in Italian language.


A new Mithraic inscription was reported in March 2015 to have
been seized by the police at Timişoara in Romania. We propose here to
describe briefly the discovery and the main features of the monument before
turning to the text of the dedication and concluding with a brief discussion
of its place in the religious life of the province. The inscription is the second
known dedication of Dioscorus, recorded already on a remarkable monument
discovered in the 19th century in Apulum (Alba Iulia) in a mithraeum.
The recently found monument will open new horizons in the interpretation
of the role of religious individuation in the mysteries of Mithras.

Mystery Cults in Visual Representation in Graeco-Roman Antiquity aims to fill a gap in the study of mystery cults in Graeco-Roman Antiquity by focusing on images for investigating their ritual praxis. Nicole Belayche and Francesco Massa have gathered experts on visual language in order to illuminate cultic rituals renowned for both their "mysteries" and their images. This book tackles three interrelated questions. Focusing on the cult of Dionysus, it analyses whether, and how, images are used to depict mystery cults. The relationship between historiography and images of mystery cults is considered with a focus on the Mithraic and Isiac cults. Finally, turning to the cults of Dionysus and the Mother of the Gods, this work shows how depictions of specific cultic objects succeed in expressing mystery cults.

Over the course of the second century CE, worship of the Persianate god Mithras swept across the whole of
the Roman Empire. With its distinctive traces preserved in the material record—including cave-like sanctuaries
and images of Mithras stabbing a bull—the cult has long been examined to reconstruct the thought-systems
of Mithraism, its theology, through such monumental trappings. This volume starts from the premise that, like
much “religion” in the Roman world, the cult of Mithras must be examined through its practices, the ritual
craft knowledge which enabled those rites, and the social structures thus created. What did Mithras-worshippers
do? How do we explain the unity and diversity of practices observed? Archaeology has the potential to
answer these questions and shed new light on Mithras-worship. Presenting new discoveries, higher resolution
archaeological data on finds and assemblages, and re-evaluations of older discoveries, this volume charts new
paths forward in understanding one of the Roman Empire’s most distinctive cults.

The papers of the Tienen conference are to be seen in the light of the concern for methodological innovation. The title ‘Small Finds’ was intended as a pragmatic stimulus to this end, and as a deliberate contrast to earlier Mithraic conferences, whose orientation has been exclusively towards the history of religions. It also however marked the desire to pull the Mithraic finds of the NW provinces out from the shadow of the more dramatic and splendid sites in Italy, or, now, Syria, and highlight the distinctive contribution that the new archaeology can make to the re-construction of the cult in this region. The conference however also offered the opportunity of drawing attention to some very recently-discovered Mithraic temples – apart from Tienen itself, those at Bornheim-Sechtem near Bonn (C. Ulbert), in the grounds of the well-known villa at Orbe-Boscéaz, SW of Lac de Neuchâtel, Canton Vaud (T. Luginbühl et al.), and the temple in the Crypta Balbi in the southern Campus Martius in Rome (M. Ricci, L. Saguì)– it was unfortunately not possible to obtain reports about the two temples at Güglingen (SW of Heilbronn), or Künzing, or M.-A. Gaidon-Bunuel’s further work on the temple at Septeuil. We may add to this group the presentations of accounts of old excavations of mithraea (A. Hensen on ‘Lopodunum II’; M. Clauss & A. Hensen on the ‘Eiskeller’ at Bliesdalheim).
The opening paper by A. Schatzmann, building on his admirable report on the ‘small finds’ from older excavations which can be used to reconstruct ritual action (to be published in the BAR International Series), calls attention to the fundamental issue of norm versus local peculiarity, and sketches the variety of different ways in which ‘small finds’ can add to our understanding of Mithraic ritual. This approach is picked up by L. Allason-Jones in her paper on the mithraea of Hadrian’s Wall. There follows a group of papers mainly devoted to the taphonomy and/or the ceramics of particular temples, and the inferences concerning ritual practice that can be drawn from them: Tienen (M. Martens, A. Lentacker et al.), Bornheim-Sechtem (J.-C. Wulfmeier), Orbe-Boscéaz (J. Monnier, Y. Mühlemann), Martigny (F. Wiblé, C. Olive), Crypta Balbi (J. de Grossi Mazzorin). A second group concentrates on different aspects of specialised Mithraic ceramics: incense-burners (J. Bird), the waste from the Rheinzabern potteries (M. Thomas), the reconstruction of the now well-known Wetterau-ware Schlangengefäß from the Ballplatz-Mainz (I. Huld-Zetsche), and the issue of the specific character of these snake-decorated vessels as represented by older finds from Carnuntum (V. Gassner). A final paper in this group tackles the finds from an analogous, non-Mithraic, complex in Apulum (C. Höpken). A third group can only be described as ‘miscellaneous’, since the papers approach the issue of small finds in unrelated, though defensible, ways (R. Gordon, G. Dorin Sicoe, M. Marquart, M. Weiß, E. Sauer, K. Sas). Finally, it was felt that it would be useful to add a fairly complete bibliography of publications on Mithraism since Roger Beck’s ‘Mithraism since Franz Cumont’ (1984), a list which itself indicates something of the shifts of interest which have occurred within the field over the past vicennium. (from Introduction of R. Gordon)