Tocephaline in Roman Mithraism Howard M

THE MEANING AND FUNCTION OF THE LEON- TOCEPHALINE IN ROMAN MITHRAISM

HOWARD M. JACKSON

Although much scholarly attention has been devoted to attempts at its decipherment, the strange and often nightmarish lion-headed god of the Mithraic mysteries is still something of a mystery itself. Near consensus has been arrived at with regard to some of the problems involved, yet in the case of others widely divergent and conflic- ting solutions have been offered that still claim rival proponents. To be sure, no one can hope to resolve them all in the brief scope of an article. But sufficient evidence exists to allow at least some reasonably certain conclusions about what the leontocephaline meant to the Roman Mithraists and what function it served in their cult. It is to sorting out and presenting this evidence that what follows is addressed. In interpreting the leontocephaline the classic view to which all studies respond, whether pro or con, is that of Franz Cumont. * In accordance with his theory that Mithraism in the Roman world was in large part directly of Iranian extraction, the great Belgian historian of religions considered the leontocephaline to represent Aiwv or Xp6voq as Kp6voq, though in fact, he held, these Greek names were but the Western equivalents for the creature's true identity as Zurva-n akarana, or boundless Time. He further held that, as in the Zurvanite system from which the deity as a cosmogonical abstraction, though not its peculiar Roman iconography directly derived, the leontocephaline was the supreme god of the Mithraic 1 pantheon.? Cumont's view of the leontocephaline's Zurvanite origin and its supreme status in Roman Mithraism has lately been subjected to a good deal of criticism as arbitrary and unfounded on hard evidence.2 2 There are four interlocking problems involved here: 1) what the leontocephaline was named, 2) what it represented, 3) whence derive its complex of iconographic features, which are by no means uniformly the same in all examples,3 and 4) how it functioned in the 18

Mithraic cult. The first problem is the logical starting point. What may have been a leontocephaline (its head is missing and its body is not wrapped round by the usual serpent), found at York (CIMRM # 833), is the only example (if it is one) out of several dozens to bear a dedicatory inscription (CIMRM #834) that may identify its sub- ject. Whether indeed it does so depends, in turn, upon whether the key word ARIMANIV is restored as a nominative or as an ac- cusative.4 On the provisos, however, that the statue represents a leontocephaline (it does have the usual wings and keys), that the crucial word is correctly restored, and that the word identifies the statue itself, the being's name was Arimanius, nominally the equivalent of Ahriman, the great Evil One of the Zoroastrian pantheon. In support of this admittedly shaky identification of the leontocephaline there are the facts that Arimanius is known from in- scriptions to have figured as a deus in the Mithraic cult (CIMRM #369, an altar from Rome; #1773 with fig 461 and #1775, both from Pannonia) and to have been depicted by some kind of plastic image (signum Arimanium: CIMRM # 222, from Ostia). Some of those who stress this identification discover that the Mithraists were Iranian heretics who worshiped the Devil after all; others find themselves forced to deny the leontocephaline the supreme status in the Mithraic order that Cumont accorded him, since Ahriman could by no stretch of a Zurvanite imagination be 5 Zurviin akarana itself.5 Many struggle to explain how Ahriman might, in Roman Mithraism, have acquired a somewhat sweeter disposition and become affiliated with cosmic periodicity, both of which are alien to the Iranian deity but which are clearly implied by the iconography of the leontocephaline. This Ahriman-hypothesis follows Cumont at least to the extent that it assumes a direct Ira- nian derivation for the meaning of the leontocephaline and therefore tends to labor under the illusion that just because the deity of Roman Mithraism was named Arimanius it must consequently have been a quintessentially evil anti-god. This conclusion is vitiated by the observation that Ahriman's Western equation with Hades6 means that Ahriman is likely to have acquired associations which were originally quite foreign to him and that Arimanius might therefore have meant something quite different to Roman Mithraists from the purely Evil One of Zoroastrian and Zurvanite