Branding in the Mysteries of Mithras?

PER BESKOW BRANDING IN THE MYSTERIES OF MITHRAS? In the humanities, as in all scholarly work, there is a cumu lative effect, which constitutes a problem in itself. In our research we all depend on our predecessors and their interpretation of material with which we are also working. Sometimes this is helpful, but often it is rather an obstacle and a danger, for we always run the risk of being misled by scholars before us. The past 80 years of Mithraic studies are no exception. As Richard Gordon has shown in an excellent essay (1975), the great authority of Franz Cumont has for a ,long time fettered the following gener ations of scholars in a priori assumptions, which have been seriously questioned only in the past decade. I would here like to take up a special problem, which illust rates this danger in a very striking way. The history of branding in the mysteries of Mithras is, as I understand it, the story of a scholarly myth, which has been handed over from one scholar to another, and which has achieved some kind of silent acceptance, even where it has been put aside and forgotten. It is worth while to follow this tradition back to its beginnings, and a suitable starting-point is offered by the portraits of the emperor Hostilian. In the Ludovisi collection (belonging to the Museo Nazionale Romano) there is a sarcophagus from Roman imperial time with a battle scene on its front. In the centre of the turmoil stands a young Roman commander, characterized by a distinct mark on his forehead, just below the hairline, and in the shape of an X. For a long time the identity of the person represented on this portrait was uncertain, but ,it was agreed that a bust in the Capitoline Museum seemed to represent the same person. A por trait bust in the museum of Aschaffenburg also shows the same features and the same stigma on the forehead. It was the German art historian Helga von Heintze who solved the problem of the commander's identity (1957, reprint 488 BRANDING IN THE MYSTERIES OF MITHRAS? 1974). I With the help of numismatic evidence she was able to show that all the three portraits represent the emperor Hostilian, younger son of Trajan Decius. Widely known as a persecutor of Christianity, Decius was an I1lyrian soldier, who managed to take imperial power in 249, and who fell in a battle against the Goths only two years later. His elder son, Herennius Etruscus, was killed in the same battle, and so the younger son Hostilian came to imperial dignity for a few months, first as Caesar, then as Augustus, but always in the shadow of the mightier Trebonianus Gallus. In 251, the same year as he had become emperor, he died in the plague. There was a rumour that Trebonianus Gallus and his son Volusian had caused his death, and it is possible that the magnificent sarcophagus has been ordered by these two em perors with the precise purpose of putting these suspicions to silence. The X-shaped scar on Hostilian's forehead must have been a characteristic feature of this emperor. It is indicated on all the three portraits known, and according to von Heintze it is also visible on some of his coins (1974: 378). Also his brother Heren nius Etruscus carries, oddly enough, the same mark on certain coins (von Heintze, 1974: 393). According to von Heintze it has a definite meaning: it is a proof that Hostilian has been initiated into the mysteries of Mithras. Horeover she thinks that she is now able to identify a number of persons on other Roman imperial portraits as Mithraic priests. But these conclusions are by no means as decisive as von Heintze supposes. On the contrary they are merely hypothetical. Being an art historian, she has been willing to accept too easily ideas presented by well-known scholars in the field of the mysteries, and so she has taken for granted that branding on the forehead was en established practice in the mysteries of Mithras. There is no single passage in the literature of antiquity, epigraphical evidence included, where such branding is mentioned. Nearest to such a statement comes Tertullian, when he tells us that the initiates of Mithras received a sign on their forehead. In his work De praescriptione haereticorum 40/ written about 1 In the following I refer to the pages of the reprint. 2 Corpus Christianorum, Ser. Lat. 1 (ed. Refoule), Turnhout 1954: .

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