Episode 26

Merry Mithras!

Grab a cup of cocoa (or something stronger) and join Anna and Amber as they don their coziest jammies and tell the story of Mithras, the lesser-known Reason For The Season from the ancient world. Learn how religions shift through time and place, and why you might want to feast on bull meat in a cave with some Romans this holiday season.

To learn more, check out:

The Roman Cult of Mithras (The Tertullian Project)

Is Jesus Simply a Retelling of the Mithras Mythology? (Cold Case Christianity)

Jerome: The Principal Works of St. Jerome (PDF)

Clauss, Manfred (2001) The Roman Cult of Mithras: The God and his Mysteries

Were Pagan Temples All Smashed Or Just Converted Into Christian Ones? (Forbes)

Mithraism (Encyclopedia Iranica)

On Mithra's Part in Zoroastrianism (Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London)

Mithra iii. In Manicheism (Encyclopedia Iranica)

Religious syncretism (Encyclopedia Britannica)

Foltz, Richard (2010) Religions of the Silk Road: Premodern Patterns of Globalization

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The Dirt Podcast

Archaeology, Anthropology, and our shared human past.

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The Dirt Podcast

As science communicators in anthropology and archaeology, we hosts of The Dirt acknowledge that we hold a position of considerable privilege and opportunity, and commit ourselves to continuous learning, unlearning and reflection. We recognize that our disciplines, as well as our own lives, are rooted in and propped up by settler colonialism, white supremacy, and dispossession.

We now reside on the stolen ancestral territory of the Shawnee and Haudenosaunee and on the lands of the Muscogee and Cherokee Nations, but over its lifetime, The Dirt has also been produced on the unceded traditional territory of the Piscataway Conoy and Cedarville Band of Piscataway Indians, as well as that of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, Patwin and Miwok peoples and all those dispossessed by Cession 296. We offer our show as a platform for Indigenous scholarship, history, and cultural expression, through citation and conversation, and we welcome the opportunity to host and compensate Indigenous scholars of archaeology and anthropology as interview guests.

Likewise, we encourage all listeners who reside in settler-colonial states to learn about on whose land they reside, their place in the ongoing process of colonization, and how to contribute materially to reparations and Indigenous sovereignty.