The Dress and Colour of Mithraism: Roman Or Iranian Garments?
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Mannheimer Geschichtsblätter Sonderveröffentlichung 4 Titel o. Abschnitt Manel García Sánchez The dress and colour of Mithraism: Roman or Iranian garments? As a result of the rise of Eastern cults, dress and a comparative study of the Iranian (Avestan) texts colour became an identity trait in the sphere of – not much more eloquent than the classical sour- religion, with Mithras dressed in Asian style, in ces, by the way –, and through the iconography of Persian trousers, a star-spangled mantle and a dress among Iranian peoples in Antiquity, a source Phrygian cap, combined with all the symbolism of that is of considerable use in determining whether the colours which we can also interpret from the the dress of the god himself and his assistants, the iconography of Mithraism. The aim of our study of torchbearers Cautes and Cautopates, or the dress the dress and colours of Mithraism is to determine of his worshippers, was either typically Roman, or whether in the context of the Roman Empire, the borrowed from the Iranian 6 or Phrygian culture, or polychromatic ritual dress of Mithras was Roman, simply the refl ection of a stereotyped, generic way Iranian or Phrygian. In short, through the dress of of representing an Oriental in the Roman world. Mithraism we set out to study the construction An examination of the dress and colour of process of Roman identity on one hand and on the Mithraism forces us to take sides in the heated other hand the ways of representing otherness. controversy over the Oriental origin of the cult In refl ecting on the hermeneutic exercise as and its rites between, on the one hand, the tradi- applied to the study of Mithraic iconography, R. tional interpretation upheld by the Belgian scho- Turcan wrote: “Les images sont un langage dont les lar F. Cumont and the “école iranisante”, 7 with L. éléments sont faits pour être compris en fonction A. Campbell as its foremost representative, which d'un vocabulaire commun au sculpteur et au spec- defi nes Mithraism as “la forme romaine du maz- tateur de son oeuvre, en l'occurrence au responsa- déisme or a parsisme hellénisé“, 8 and, on the other ble et aux fi dèles de la communauté mithriaque”. 1 hand, the Occidentalist interpretation, put forward In view of the paucity of relevant information in the by S. Wikander, 9 R. L. Gordon 10 and M. Clauss, 11 among literary sources on the dress and colours of Mithra- others, which views Mithraism as a genuine creati- ism it is essential to interpret the iconographic on of the Roman world, especially in the Danubian sources and attempt to guess whether both dress territories, in Rome or in Ostia, although this polemic and colour hid a symbolic meaning important for could be resolved with R. Turcan’s sensible statement the worshippers of the Mithraic communities, for as that “si Mithra est iranien, le mithriacisme est gréco- R. Turcan pointed out, “l'art mithriaque est comme romain”, 12 or with M. Clauss that Mithraism was an un livre d'images dont le texte serait perdu” 2 and independent creation in Roman context. 13 the Mithraic iconography is like a “Bibles de Pierre”. 3 Nor, in the study of the dress and colour of J. Alvar has also drawn attention to the impor- Mithraism, can we disregard the interpretations tance of examining, in the mysteries in general, given by D. Ulansey, J. R. Hinnells, R. L. Gordon, R. Beck something that has hitherto been neglected – the and all those authors who, to a greater or lesser signifi cance of colours and textures, i.e. sensory extent, have taken their distance from Cumont’s perception. 4 At all events, in the absence of detailed hypothesis concerning the Iranian origin of Roman accounts of the “Mysteria Mithrae” or the dress of Mithraism and developed the “new astronomical the god or his worshippers in the literary sources, interpretation of the tauroctony”, an interpretation except for some occasional mentions, such as the fi rst put forward by K. B. Stark in 1869, which sees in one by Lucian about Mithras’s dress, 5 of a kaftan Mithraic iconography a “cosmological code”, 14 and and a tiara, we have to make do with an attempt which should also be considered in relation to the to decipher the latent meaning in the Mithraic latent symbolism in the colour and dress motifs. iconography, though without losing sight of the But in a study of the construction process of provisional and hypothetical nature of such an Roman identity through dress in general, and at a interpretation. We can fi nd some help, however, in colloquium on “Dress and Religious Identities in the 123 Titel o. Abschnitt Sonderveröffentlichung 4 Mannheimer Geschichtsblätter The dress and colour of Mithraism: Roman or Iranian garments? Roman Empire” in particular, it is imperative, when and Cautopates. 22 Unlike the Parthians and the Sas- looking at the dress and colour of Roman Mithra- sanians, these last-mentioned were never depicted ism, to try to answer the question formulated by R. in a humiliating, inferior or submissive position. But Beck concerning Mithraism in general: how much this discovery is not new, as F. Cumont anticipated is there that is “genuinely Iranian” and how much it by a century when, writing about the creation is there that is “reinvented Perserie” 15 behind the of an archetypal image, of an Orientalising cliché epithet “Persian”? This set of mental tools – “Per- that found in dress its most eloquent feature for serie” – had already arisen before in the forms of representing otherness, he remarked: that the dress representation of Persian Achaemenid otherness in of Mithra couldn’t be too accurate to the Persian the Greek “imaginaire”. 16 It consisted in a psycho- original model. 23 And it might be advisable to try logical mechanism of appropriation prior to the to put an end to the lack of precision in the use of domination of the eternal border enemy – a defen- the terms Persian, Phrygian and Oriental dress in ce mechanism that A. Mastrocinque has defi ned Mithraic historiography. for the Roman world in a revealing way: “Le culte The hypothesis proposed by D. Ulansey 24 is an- du dieu persan et la parenté entre Romains et Per- other of those in which Mithras is represented as ses posaient les prémisses de l'extension du droit the archetypal fi gure of an Oriental. Basing him- romain sur l'Iran”– 17 and a process the reverse side self on F. Saxl, 25 Ulansey believes he has discovered of which were the forms of representation of Par- the model for the iconographic representation of thian and Sassanian otherness, 18 in which the Asian Mithras in the Perseus of the Greek world, repre- always appeared subjugated, defeated, dressed in sented in his constellation as the fi gure of a young barbarian and feminine fashion (“laxae vestes”, hero armed with a dagger and also wearing a Phry- “fl uxa velamenta”), combined, moreover, with the gian cap. According to what we read in Herodotus, barbarian garment 'par excellence' in the classical Perseus was a hero linked in the Greek imagination imagination: long trousers. 19 with Persia and the Persians as the result of a simi- In the process of the construction of Roman lar exercise to the one the Romans are supposed identity through religion, dress must have been a to have performed with Mithras, whom they regar- decisive factor, for, as R. M. Schneider has pointed ded as of Iranian origin. 26 As argued by R. Turcan out: “From antiquity to the present day dress codes this would also seem to follow from the expres- have played a key role in visualizing the difference sion “Persei sub rupibus antri” in Statius’s poem between West and East, friend and foe”. 20 In Roman “Thebais”, which it is "la plus ancienne attestation representations of an Oriental, the posture, the littéraire d'une iconographie mithraique as tauroc- dress, the physiognomy and the hairstyle might tones".27 Although the passage in question makes refl ect an ethnic archetype such as the Parthians no mention of the god’s dress, it does reveal, as R. and Sassanians, or simply a generic “Oriental”, the Turcan has pointed out, that the image of Mithras last-mentioned usually represented as a good-loo- was already present at that time in the imagination king youth with long hair and Eastern dress, almost of the Roman epic poet’s audience or readership. always with a Phrygian cap ( πῑλο̋ ) and barbarian Moreover, Statius’s scholiast, Lactantius Placidus, long trousers ( ἀναξυρίδε̋). In Roman art, the repre- noted that the Persians were the fi rst to worship sentation of all Eastern peoples was adapted to fi t the Sun in caves, a Sun which according to the scho- this archetype of the Oriental. This applies to the liast appears “in Persian dress with a tiara” (“Persi- Parthians and later the Sassanians, although they co habitu cum tiara”), 28 in other words, like Mithras were both always represented as vanquished, 21 the with his Oriental “pileus”.29 Trojans Ganymedes and Paris, the Persians, the However, F. Cumont was the fi rst one to deter- castrated “Galli”, many of the representations being mine, thanks precisely to the aid of the god’s Phry- of handsome servants and cupbearers, sometimes gian dress, where and when Mithras’ image was with the function of table legs, and divine perso- conceived, Orientalising or Iranianising the popular nages such as Attis, Orpheus and, of course, the iconography of the Νικὴ βουθυτοῦσα. According to “deus pileatus” Mithras and his companions Cautes Plutarch, we should look to Tarsus, the city in which 124 Mannheimer Geschichtsblätter Sonderveröffentlichung 4 Titel o.