Guided Pathway

Cautes and Cautopates are stock figures in Mithraic imagery. They appear as a pair, torch up and torch down, alluding directly to the rising and setting sun. Warburg chose to represent only Cautopates, as seen in a relief from the San Clemente mithraeum, the first he visited during his time in Rome. The standing figure in Persian dress faces right, gently lowering his torch. It is a melancholy image, an image of sunset, of autumn, quite hauntingly placed at the lower right, the end of panel read as a page. It may almost betoken the eclipse of Mithraism, of the ancient mysteries, as Christianity gained the ascendancy. On March 29, 1929, Warburg wrote to his wife Mary in Hamburg, saying that he was glad that he and Saxl, each from his own point of view, had come to the Mithraic mysteries—“without which the struggle between paganism and Christianity in the West cannot be grasped.”