MITHRA
Channel: slobomotion
Date: 2013-10-10

This statue is in the museum of antiquities in Arles, France.  This museum has the second largest collection of "pagan" sarcophagi in the world (in fact, many show Christian images).  Arles is in the Bouches-du-Rhône département of France, in "Provence."  It is quite close to the Mediterranean sea.  Its residents were given Roman citizenship by Julius Caesar in thanks for help to beat Pompey, his rival stationed in Marseilles.

Many of the objects in this museum were found right in Arles and very recently, too.

I studied early Christian art formally and have been to many places in the world to see it.  While visiting an old Roman fort village in Northern England from the time of Hadrian, I saw my first Mithraic images.  People sometimes joke that had Christianity not spread, many of us would be Mithaists now.  That could be.

I tried to make this a clip in good definition as the room here was very bright and there isn't much of the statue left, but it has just about the most Mithraic detail I have ever seen.

There are still many major Roman things in Arles to see, such as an ampitheatre and an arena.  Also, some parts of a viaduct and necropole.  Right near this museum was a huge circus, where chariot races and things took place.

One of the things I noticed among the objects in this museum is how many of them were so finely made.  They could have been done with machines and showed great beauty.  I also enjoyed a scale model there which showed a Roman factory which used water to have mills at various levels.  Many of the sarcophagi were actually started in Macedonia and other places far away and were only finished and personalized once they were delivered, by skilled workers who may have traveled with them.  Some were rather hilariously redone, such as one woman wished the memory of her spouse, who is there in effigy with her lying atop their sarcophagus, to be completely removed.  She now appears to recline alone on a nice big cushion.

I recommend this museum, and Arles itself.  Arles still has a kind of rowdy atmosphere, with people dressing as Romans just to go out at night and others riding Camargue horses in the streets.  They like parades, markets and bullfights.  The artist Vincent Van Gogh lived here and did many paintings showing the mistral wind shaking things up.  A lot of fine quality rice is grown around here and salt raking takes place, too.  

I think there are clues in the images of Mithra which are very telling and have to do with numbers and astronomy, but I actually didn't study Mithraism deeply.  We are only now finding out more about it.

copyright 2013 Lisa B. Falour, B.S., M.B.A.
The Museum authorized me to make this video clip and to comment.
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