The London Mithraeum
The London Mithraeum is a name to conjure with. Is it a setting out of Harry Potter? Is it a trendy bar? Or perhaps a stylish spa? In fact, it is the site of an ancient Roman temple, built in the 3rd century BCE and now the focus of a museum under the new, shiny Bloomberg building near Cannon Street.
It is very impressive. Free to visit, although booking is advised, the museum spreads down into the basements of the building: what was street level in Roman Londinium. The story of the discovery of the site is itself rather magical, as the foundations of the temple only became evident on a WWII bomb site in 1954. The head of Mithras, which revealed the purpose of the building, was only found on the final day of excavations.
The marvellous, pain-staking piecing together of evidence, that is the process of most such discoveries, is made evident on the ground floor of the museum. A large floor-to-ceiling wall case is filled with objects found at the site during recent excavations for the Bloomberg building. Items range from shoes to nails, glassware to the wooden remains of wax tablets that bear tantalising ghostly inscriptions. A smart tablet given out at the entrance allows you to investigate the display.
Descending the staircase, the inscribed walls reveal how you are moving back in time as you descend to older street levels. On the next floor the voice of Joanna Lumley introduces you to the still-mysterious cult of Mithras. She interviews a number of experts while an impressive audio-visual evocation plays behind replicas of the site’s major artefacts. Here the head of Mithras is joined by the Tauroctony: the central image of the cult in which Mithras killed the sacred bull, interpreted by scholars as a creation myth of fertility and rebirth.
Another floor down and you enter the temple itself. I am always amazed at what magic can be woven with a simple combination of sound, smoke and light. A soundtrack conjures the presence of the cult’s male adherents, while smoke and light beams create the impression of the temple’s walls and windows rising out of the ruins. A simple representation of the tauroctony glows at the end. The short ‘show’ takes 20 minutes and allows you to appreciate fully the significance of what could be fairly dry Roman ruins.
But the temple is not the only significant historical moment in this site’s history. The Bloomberg building stands on Walbrook, one of London’s rivers that now run underground. This was the heart of Roman London, with the main east-west road running immediately north of the site and bridging the Walbrook right by the building. The airy ground-floor entrance to the museum is showcasing a contemporary commission that responds to this rich history. Isabel Nolan has produced a 19.45m tapestry, The Barely Perceptible Vibration of Everything, which draws on geographic and archeological images of the area. It is a playful but powerful colourful imagination of the site and it’s history. You see it through a large steel painted sculpture, Blind to the Rays of the Returning Sun, as if Mithras’s bull has taken contemporary form, brooding over the site where once he was worshipped.