The article examines two recently discovered Mithraic representations of Cautes from Alba Iulia, focusing on a rare iconographic type showing the torchbearer with a bucranium.
Standing stone statuette of Cautopates, the downward-torch bearer, found at Bordeaux and kept in the city’s museum of antiquities (musée d’Aquitaine ?).
Hmmm… Vermaseren says the figure "points the torch downwards with both hands", so that would mean Cautopates. But this one actually looks like it’s doing the opposite? Maybe the missing head (which Vermaseren doesn’t mention) makes the gesture harder to read?
Anyway, I’ll check my photo collection and see if I can find a better pic for the frame!
Memoir by Félix Lajard analysing a Mithraic bas-relief discovered in Vienne in 1830. Based on direct examination of the fragments and their context, the study corrects an earlier misidentification and documents a rare lion-headed figure within a probable mithraeum.
Marble statue of Cautes, found at Ostia. The head, one arm and the legs are missing. The figure wears a short tunic and raises the torch in the canonical upward gesture.
Small limestone stele, discovered at Apt in 1903. It depicts a standing torchbearer in the conventional Mithraic posture and dress, accompanied by a cock placed at his feet.
In polemical passages from the late second and early third centuries, Tertullian portrays the cult of Mithras as a demonic imitation of Christian rites and provides rare early references to Mithraic initiation and ritual symbolism.
An anonymous late-antique Christian poem, traditionally attributed to Pseudo-Paulinus of Nola (Poema 32, vv. 109–111), that ridicules pagan cults and presents Mithras, Isis, and Serapis as gods of concealment, contradiction, and unstable forms rather than light.
Late antique legendary biography of Alexander the Great (c. AD 300), where history, myth, and imperial ideology merge around figures of divine kingship and solar power.
Dion Chrysostom, c. 100 A.D., a philosophical writer under the emperors Nerva and Trajan, composed a series of discourses or essays (λόγοι) on various subjects, in one of which he reports concerning the doctrines and practices of the magi.
In the eighteenth year of Diocletian’s reign, Galerius Maximianus, persuaded by the sorcerer Theoteknos, consulted demonic oracles in a cave and was urged to initiate the persecution of the Christians.
Radcliffe G. Edmonds III analyses the absence of the moon in the Mithras Liturgy. He argues that this absence reflects a deliberate cosmological framework in which lunar powers linked to genesis are excluded from the ritual of ascent.
This collective volume explores the ways ancient peoples interacted with divine powers through prayer, magic, and the interpretation of the stars. Drawing on evidence from Mesopotamia to Late Antiquity, it situates these practices within broader religious and cosmological systems.
