Mithramania
By JAMES POPE-HENNESSY .
T- HIS year the summer skyline of the bombed regions of the City of London has changed in aspect. Up into the rain, rivalling the spires of Wren, cranes and derricks, tilted at their elegant, predatory angles, tower. The noise of pneumatic drills vies with the roar of the traffic. All this busy activity is now as natural a City commonplace as were last year the wide empty spaces where willow-herb and sorrel waved, and as the massive silence which enveloped these bomb-ruins. But about one particular building site near the Mansion House there is an air of expectant oddity. People stand around in groups near the main opening in the corrugated sheeting which protects this big area. There are extra police, those specially tall City constables with their high, bulged helmets. It is all somewhat conspiratorial, at any rate, mysterious, and suggests either the presence of minor royalty or that an accident has just occurred. Has a navvy fallen off a derrick, or been swallowed by the now-famous Walbrook marsh ? Yet this haphazard daytime curiosity is nothing to what takes place towards sunset. Then the queues of sightseers stretch down the neighbouring streets-15,000 in one evening aloneowe are told by the newspapers. They are going to pay homage at the temple of Mithras, the Persian Sun-God whom Roman soldiers worshipped on this site from about the year 150 to 320 A.D. The news that a temple dedicated to the cult of Mithras had been unearthed during excavation work for the new Bucklers- bury House has aroused enormous interest. The fine heads of the stone statue of Mithras and, quite possibly, of one of his attendant deities, Cautes or Cautapates, unearthed there have in a week become as photographically familiar as the features of the Foreign Secretary himself. Anything concerning the earliest periods of London history must always have a romantic appeal of its own; while the fact that the rites of Mithras, whose cult in Rome at one time seriously rivalled that of Christ and shared similarities with it, remain as secret today as they did to non-initiates 1700 years ago, adds a sense of mystery and excitement to the new discovery. One .remembered drawings reconstructing the Mithraic shrine found at Carrawburgh on the Roman Wall four years ago, and accounts of what is thought to have been the ritual of the worshippers of Mithras. One remembered too the subterranean Mithraic shrines at Ostia, that superbly convincing relic of antiquity lying upon the sun- baked plain between Rome and the sea, chips of white marble mingling with the daisies in the grass. statues standing upright once more beneath stone-pine trees, amongst whole streets of shops, houses and granaries, as well as temples and theatres. In one of these dim Ostian shrines of Mithra there is a curious atmosphere of evil and of the unknown—the runnels for the sacrificial blood, the altar, the stone benches on which initiates would recline. Then, too, many Londoners know the Mithras figure in the British Museum, with his plunging sword killing the bull, his little Persian cap and fly-away cloak. These memories and this half-knowledge lent glamour to the reports one read of the Walbrook shrine. They made one long to go. When you get there, what do you see ?
Trudging across a waste-land of rubble, you descend to a small area on its eastern side which has a barricade round it, and planks on which to walk. Here, in a sea of squelching blackish mud, can be discerned the broken wall foundations of a building of basilican plan. You are first struck by its diminutive size—for though larger than the Northumbrian shrine, and measuring sixty feet by twenty, the Walbrook remains appear to be of doll's-house proportions isolated in the midst of its great open space. Then you gradually perceive the essential shape of the building—the central chamber, the altar platform with a square well of brackish ;water beside it, the triple apse, and .the bases of the columns. It has often seemed to me that of all sciences archaeology requires the greatest effort of the imagination. The Walbrook temple lends support to this belief. The earnest, eager faces of the archaeologists with their mud-covered hands, the cheerful interest of the young labourers carefully sifting the rubble, fill you with respect. But having visited the site I find it hard to understand why there should be such undue excite- ment about preserving it.
What is it that makes Londoners so careless of the real beauties of their own city ? The period between the wars, which saw the destruction and commercialisation of eighteenth.. century Mayfair, will not be forgiven by future generations. This year it took the determined efforts of the new and active Kensington Society to save the last wing of Holland House from demolition. A few years ago I witnessed in Brompton Cemetery—a peaceful and charming place where one could stroll between the fine Georgian tombstones—a scene of un- paralleled vandalism when navvies with crowbars were smash- ing memorial urns and overturning gravestones to make way for some species of infants' playground and a hard tennis court; the church authorities at Holy Trinity felt they had done their duty by listing the names of those whose tombstones were thus desecrated and destroyed. And now, because the rubble that was a Roman soldiers' temple (and which even if enclosed in a vault in the foundations of Bucklersbury House can never be a place of architectural beauty) is threatened with re-burial, there is a public outcry. Can one hope that this is the beginning of a belated sense of civic responsibility, or is it just a momentary reaction to an item of news ?
The almost hysterical interest aroused by the Walbrook dig provides food for reflection on publicity and on relative values. In a street overlooking the Mithraic shrine, a street where passers-by cease to-pass in order to squint through the joints of the corrugated sheeting which screens the site from view, stands the most original and possibly the most beautiful of all Wren's parish churches in the City—St. Stephen Walbrook. This church, with its sixteen Corinthian columns and its perfect and complex dome, was admired even by Wren's detractors. John Wesley relates that an Italian architect, who had been to London, later met Lord Burlington in Italy. My Lord, go back to see St. Stephen's in London,' he urged : ' We have not so fine a piece of architecture in Rome.' St. Stephen Walbrook was damaged in the war. It has now been scrupulously restored. Leaving the new Mithraic pilgrims to their cult I walked up the steps of this church and experienced once more the perennial revelation of the proportions of the flanking columns and the dome. St. Stephen's, of course, was completely empty.
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