Dora Gao (University of Michigan)
The “Mithras Liturgy” (PGM IV.475–820) is perhaps the most famous text from the PGM IV, one of the longest extant papyri in an archive of Greco-Egyptian religious formularies likely found in the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes. Dating to the fourth century CE, this long and extensive ritual for temporary immortalization details the experiences of a practitioner as they pass through seven planes of existence to achieve a divine consultation with the god Helios Mithras. Due to its highly philosophical nature, scholars have commonly placed this text in dialogue with late antique schools of thought and read it in the context of Middle Stoic or Neoplatonist theurgical belief (Johnston 1997; Lewy 1956; Edmonds 2004; Edmonds 2014). Though these engagements have generated productive conclusions regarding the myriad cosmopolitan influences upon the Mithras Liturgy text, they have often decontextualized this ritual by placing it within an abstracted milieu of Hellenistic late antique religion and philosophy.
This paper situates the text and ritual of the Mithras Liturgy more specifically within the Greco-Egyptian cultural context of late antique Roman Egypt. An examination of the last seventy lines of this text, which outlines a list of instructions and materials required for the enactment of the rite, makes clear that this ritual was fundamentally Egyptian in practice despite the presence of Hellenistic ideologies. Utilizing the framework of performative indigeneity, I argue that the enactment of Egyptian religious practice under Roman imperium can be viewed as a set of “performative politics when the conspicuous fact of their occurrence alone constitutes a claim or declaration of existence against forms of governance that seek to obscure or eradicate the life of certain groups” (Kahambing 2019, 11). The practice of Egyptian ritual, then, served to resist the erasure of Egyptian religion in two distinct ways. First, the fact that many of the Greco-Egyptian ritual formularies were written in Greek, rather than the priestly language of Demotic, suggests that these rites became at least linguistically available to a wider group of ritualists than the traditional temple priests. As such, the relocation of these rituals from the centralized institution of the Egyptian temple to individuals and of groups of practitioners allowed the traditions of Egyptian religion to persist despite the limitations that the Roman administration placed on the Egyptian priesthood (Smith 1978, 186; Monson 2012, 220–21). Second, the physical embodiment of these Egyptian rituals undermined the power of the Greco-Roman literary imagination to distort and redefine the value and image of Egyptian religious practices through exoticized portrayals of Egyptian priests (Frankfurter 2000, 175–83) and the appropriation of Egyptian epistemic authority (Moyer 2011, 268–69). In this sense, the enactment of rituals such as the Mithras Liturgy allowed for the continuation of Egyptian religious practice to be performed in service to communities for whom indigenous religious traditions would have held particular meaning and provided a familiar form of religious recourse