Browse By

Ruin or archaeological site; the cult has ceased

This page groups sacred sites by whether their sacred status is still actively maintained. Wikipedia notes that Mircea Eliade "argues that while the concept of a sacred space is often associated with religious traditions, it is not exclusive to them," since secular societies can keep treating a place as significant too. Browsing this way lets a visitor tell a site with living religious observance apart from one preserved mainly for its history.

Facts

Overview

What Defines This Grouping

Mithraea - small, deliberately cave-like rooms for a graded initiatory cult of men, built wherever the Roman army and the imperial administration went. The cult left no scripture: what is known of its meaning is reconstructed from its architecture and its images, above all the bull-slaying scene set at the end of every one of these rooms. 2

Attestation

Era of Attestation

Mithraea are archaeologically attested from the late first century CE to about the end of the fourth. There is no material evidence for the cult before that, and the older claim of direct descent from Iranian Mithra worship is not supported by the finds, whatever the god's name owes to Iran. 2