Guided Pathway

In mid-March Warburg asked that a published talk (1922) by his friend Franz Boll be forwarded down to Rome: “Die Sonne im Glauben und in der Weltanschauung der alten Völker” (The Sun in the Belief and Worldview of Ancient Peoples). Mithraism needed to be contextualized. When he came to assemble Panel 8, Warburg provided the Phaeton face of the Dieburg altar with a penumbra of photographs attesting to the Greek and Roman cult of the sun god. Top and center (#5), satyrs on a red-figure vase cavort before the rising sun, shown as a bust in a radiant disk. Nearby the myth of the deity’s daily journey—the journey catastrophically undertaken by Phaeton—took on concrete form in a bold frontal image of the rayed Helios rising from the ocean on his chariot pulled by four horses: the object is an ancient Greek phalera (#2) a disk of the type worn on a soldier’s breast or a horse’s trappings—adding a military nuance, appropriate in a panel devoted to the soldiers’ god Mithras. Next to the phalera is a first-century Roman altar to the sun god, an item discovered in Rome (Trastevere), housed at the Capitoline Museum; Warburg saw fit to reproduce all four faces (#1.1–4). On the front face the rayed bust of the deity is seen above the dedicatory inscription to “the most holy sun,” indicating that the altar had been offered by three figures belonging to the Claudian gens, who are revealed to have come from distant Palmyra. On the left face of the altar, which shows an image of the sun god climbing into a griffin-drawn chariot crowned by a Victory, there is an inscription in Palmyrene characters: “to Malachbel and the Palmyrene deities.” The processes of religious syncretism, and the force of the sun cult, are suggested. The altar provides a precedent for or an analogy to the embrace of the Indo-Iranian solar deity in the heart of the Roman empire.