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structured system. The Roman conception of religious chaos was symbolized by Faunus.

The Ara Maxima existed in historical times,87 providing a tangible link between the religious past and present. In this sense it might well be regarded as the earliest Roman shrine. Significantly it was also, in terms of its aetiology, the first expression of the concept of exclusively male ritual space. Note that according to the logic of Rome’s myths, female ritual space was not a Roman creation. Bona Dea with her female rites was already part of the enchanted landscape into which Hercules intruded, and which he ended up by dominating. None the less that female space needed to be incorporated into the new system, for it was that which defined and complemented the newly created male space. Together they constituted the germ of the new Roman system. Cicero, in his harangues against Clodius, was certainly not exaggerating the importance of the cult of Bona Dea to the civic religion. It is arguable that he did not go far enough when he described the cult as one which ‘we received from our kings and is coeval with our city’.88 The perceived antiquity of Bona Dea’s cult, with the particular meanings that antiquity was invested with, clearly constituted a large part of its significance.

BONA DEA AND THE MYSTERIES OF MITHRAS

We come now to the problem of status. Were the male and female cultic spaces perceived to have an equal status, or in the patriarchal society of the time was the female cultic space marginal to a central masculine space? This is the current orthodoxy on Roman religion.89 In this section I shall argue that in Rome, male and female cultic space were equally important to the civic system. It is time to rethink the notion that Roman religion placed a negative value on the female and a positive value on the male.

The mysteries of Mithras, like the cult of Hercules, were, to the best of our knowledge, forbidden to women.90 But in contrast to the cult at the Ara Maxima the cult of Mithras occupied a space marginal to the public cults of Rome. This was an ancient mystery religion of uncertain oriental origin91 which did not reach its classic western form until the 1st century BC to the 1st century AD.92 It was especially popular among the Roman legions, which were also undoubtedly responsible for the wide dissemination of the cult throughout the Roman empire. According to Plutarch, Mithras was

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introduced to Rome by the Cilician pirates conquered by Pompey.93 But it is unlikely that the initiates were at this stage anything more than a tiny sect operating on the fringes of society, and with no effect on the dominant ideology of the day. Cumont in 1913 writes of the mysteries in the time of the Republic, ‘L’action de ses sectateurs sur la masse de la population était à peu près aussi nulle que celle de sociétés bouddhiques dans l’Europe moderne.’94 The mysteries were therefore not part of the religious system which included the cult of Bona Dea and Hercules Invictus. But they provide a useful analytical tool with which to evaluate the relative importance of male and female cultic space.

The mysteries of Mithras, like the cult of Hercules, did not admit women to its rites. But the dynamics of this exclusion were quite different from those operating in the cult of Hercules Invictus. The nature of this difference is instructive. I am not suggesting an opposition here in the structuralist sense; merely the contrast between two very different views of the world. What I hope will emerge from this analysis is not so much a positive as a negative hypothesis; not so much what Bona Dea was as what she was not. This in turn will, I hope, be helpful in understanding the status of her cult in the civic religion.

The cult of Mithras was based on a deliberate rejection of the realities of the world as they were perceived to exist.95 Instead, the initiate entered into a deliberately constructed cosmic entity, governed by a carefully constructed cosmology. Central to that cosmology was the rejection of the female. It is important to note that unlike the male cultic space created by Hercules, which had to exist within a wider cultic universe, the Mithraic cosmos was complete: it was the universe. Beyond its boundaries existed nothing. The rejection of women was therefore total. In the mysteries of Mithras women had no status because they simply did not exist. Even their exclusive function of child-bearing was denied in both the myth and the ritual by an appeal to the fantasy of sexless generation. Mithras was born from a rock.

In his discussion of the significance of grade names in the mysteries, Gordon argues that the only way to make them meaningful to the initiates was to make an appeal to the commonly held associations of ideas which each of the names evoked. Thus although rejecting the outside world, the mysteries needed to use it as a point of reference to make the nature of the rejection intelligible to its initiates. In other words, the terms of the denial of elements in the out-

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side world admitted the existence of those elements, albeit outside the cult. Thus the systematic rejection of women at each level in the progress of the initiate may be interpreted as a recognition of women’s status in the ‘non-existent’ world beyond the cult. The rejection of women occurred on every level, mundane, mythic and cultic. It occurred on an empirical level: women had no part in the ritual. The myth of Mithras’ birth also excluded women on a mythic level. But most significant was their exclusion at a cultic level. It was not simply women that were excluded but the female principle itself. The central myth of the cult, that Mithras was born not of woman but of a rock, can very instructively be compared to the myth of Hercules and the Bona Dea. In the cult of Hercules too, women were excluded, so that female members of the population had no place therein, just as in the cult of Mithras. But the aetiological myth recognized the necessity for the female principle and the necessary cultic space was provided, albeit at a safe distance. Exclusion of women from a cult was in itself nothing very much out of the ordinary. But exclusion of the female principle from a cultic system—which is what the Mithraic mysteries did—was a different proposition altogether and needed to be legitimated repeatedly. This, I suggest, is why the theme of female rejection occurs at every level in the initiatory process in the cult of Mithras as well as in the myth.

I suggest that if the mysteries of Mithras were inordinately preoccupied with legitimating the denial of any status to the female principle it could only be because of the important status conferred on the female in the cultic system that the mysteries had rejected, which was the traditional civic ideology. The cult of the Bona Dea, as I argued, occupied its own well defined space within the civic system where the cult of Hercules also existed. Whatever may have been the actual process of the formation or invention of these cults in an antiquity so remote that it has not been recoverable by historical investigation, analysis, or indeed imagination, the common perception of that formation, in the myth of Hercules and Bona Dea at any rate, was that sexual exclusiveness was a feature imposed initially by women. Far from being pushed by the male into a marginal position, the female occupied centre stage to begin with, and it is the male that was refused entry. Indeed if we were to carry the logic of this aetiological position to its extreme, we would arrive at a scenario where the male cultic space is the marginal one.

But carrying logic to its extreme in this instance will seriously undermine the plausibility of this analysis. Nowhere in the ancient

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sources do we find the slightest hint that the cult of Hercules at the Ara Maxima, much less male cultic space, occupied a marginal position in the cultic universe. And yet, the evidence of the aetiological myths, especially with respect to chronology, appears to support a case for the hypothesis. Both in the case of Bona Dea and of Hercules, a fact that is stressed repeatedly is the antiquity of the cult. The Ara Maxima, as we saw, derived a large part of its cultic importance from its perceived antiquity.96 But the cult of Bona Dea was even older. It was believed to have been in existence when Hercules arrived on the scene. Both our sources for the Hercules-Bona Dea myth imply that the cult was well established before Hercules’ arrival.97 According to the mythological account Hercules was refused entry to the women’s rites first, and his exclusion of them from his was done in retaliation. So according to the logic of the myth, at any rate, not only did women exist within the cultic universe, but they were there first, and what is more they made the rules. This is almost an inversion of the Mithraic scenario. However, cultic practice does not appear to have reflected the mythic logic, and nowhere is the cult of the Bona Dea accorded a status superior to that of Hercules. Myth and cult appear to have been in conflict on this issue although the conflict would, I suspect, be more of an issue to the modern analyst than to the ancient. No such conflict is apparent in the sources, nor are the logical consequences of the myth as I have delineated them ever discussed.

If there is no evidence that male cultic space occupied a marginal position, the same can be said for female cultic space. The cult of the Bona Dea was unquestionably perceived to have been of great importance to the welfare of the Roman state. Cicero repeatedly refers to the ceremony as being performed pro populo or pro salute populi Romani.98 Moreover, the furious row that Clodius caused can only partly be put down to political exploitation of the event. The rites had certainly been polluted. We are told that the pontifices pronounced them polluted in response to a question by the senate.99 We cannot ignore the possibility that this could have been a politically expedient decision, and that they would just as easily have decided otherwise if that had been politically more desirable. However, it appears that the pontiffs’ decision was in this instance merely an endorsement of one taken much earlier. The Vestal Virgins had almost immediately repeated the ceremony,100 which would imply that it was they who had taken the decision that the rite was polluted and had acted on it. Thus the college of pontiffs was merely endors-