The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire: Mysteries of the Unconquered Sun by Roger Beck

Author:Roger Beck
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, pdf
Tags: Europe, Body, Ancient, Social Science, science, General, Anthropology, Religion, Rome, Cultural & Social, Mind & Spirit, Astrology, Archaeology, History
ISBN: 9780198140894
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2006-01-12T03:13:42.832000+00:00

15. THE COGNIZED UNIVERSE AND CELESTIAL NAVIGATION: THE CASE OF THE INDIGO BUNTING

Humans of course are not the only species of animal to construct a cognized environment, though we are perhaps the only one to bring it to full consciousness. We not only construct a cognized environment-any animal endowed with locomotion must do this or die-but also think about it and talk to our conspecifics about it. In other words, our cognized environment is more than just the necessary mental proxy for our operational environment.

Together with our human ability to think about and talk to each other about our cognized environment comes the ability to construct alternative environments, one of which, the `mithraeum = universe', we have been analysing in the present chapter. Other animals presumably do not have this luxury (though who finally knows?). Their cognized environment is their sole template of reality, and for each species natural selection has optimized that template for survival in its operating environment.

In many instances it is possible to infer some particular feature of the cognized environment of a species from the behaviour of the phenotype. As an analogy to the cognized environment constructed by our Mithraic cosmonauts let us take a look at the cognized environment of an animal which must travel vast terrestrial distances from one location to another and back again at regular intervals, a migratory bird-specifically the Indigo Bunting.

The Indigo Bunting (Passerina cyanea) was the subject of an elegant experiment to determine empirically how it navigates, what features of its environment it selects and constructs mentally as indicators of `proper direction'. For long-distance travellers there are no better or more reliable indicators than the celestial bodies, for they are the same at your destination as at your point of departure and they are equally accessible there as here. So it is with buntings. They navigate by the stars. Specifically, the experiment, which was conducted in a planetarium, proved that they navigate by reference to the north celestial pole recognized as the point around which the circumpolar stars revolve (Emlen 1967; Berthold 2001: 153_4).61

Now the revolution of the circumpolar stars is nothing but a manifestation of universal daily motion, and universal daily motion is nothing other than the Revolution (or circle or period) of the Same which Plato in the Timaeus construes both as the highest visible manifestation of Unity and Reason and as existing, in a more or less deformed copy, in the heads of humans and animals.62 So by a nice coincidence, which he would surely have savoured, the Indigo Bunting appears to have done in a literal and scientifically verifiable way precisely what Plato urges us humans to do. It has cultivated internally the Revolution of the Same. By this it navigates, by this it finds its way.

The venue of the bunting experiment was a planetarium, because in a planetarium the motions of the celestial bodies can be replicated. In this respect a planetarium is a model or image of the universe. The bunting of course cannot

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