Nietzsche spent the winter of 1876-77 in Sorrento, in the company of Paul Ree and his old friend von Malwida Meysenbug, which was established in this city since 1862 and at which he found hospitality. During this period, Nietzsche visited all the surrounding territory, and of course also made an excursion to Capri.
Nietzsche was then thirty-two. In 1869 he became professor of classical philology at Basel University, and was famous for publication in 1872 of Birth of Tragedy and the violent controversy that had followed. However in 1876 her health had deteriorated to the point that in 1879 pushed him to leave teaching. The trip to Sorrento and a visit to Capri is situated at a critical moment in the life of Nietzsche, in which he essentially was taking an important decision: to cease its activities to become a philologist, philosopher, but a philosopher-type Specifically, when life, action and body language would form the center and the stimulus for each reflection.
The South and the East in general, have to always exerted a great attraction for the Germans, and in particular men of culture. Before Nietzsche, Goethe had already made a trip to Italy, and described the South with colors so vivid to exacerbate further the desire of sun and freedom - let us say of anarchy - of many German intellectuals and philosophers, who, impatient of the rigid education Protestant felt - as he said the young man talking about Hegel Kant - of 'having your own master within himself', in a word to be slaves themselves. In Nietzsche, this same desire for freedom are added and blended with the spirit of rebellion that permeated his philosophical musings, and invested the whole tradition German philosophical idealism, which he - the last heir to the Hegelian Left - try a birth of Protestant Christianity. Already in Feuerbach's repudiation of Christianity and the monotheistic religion had an inevitable effect of increasing sympathy for pagan worship and polytheism, in which the welding between man and nature emerges powerfully as the primary data. Nietzsche - The Birth of Tragedy that in had placed at the center of discussions of the importance of the 'Dionysian' and the irrational in human existence - seems attracted to Capri, especially from the cult that Christianity had always considered his worst enemy: Mithraism, the worship of the god Mithra.
This worship, according to a tradition of interpretation that Nietzsche obviously deemed reliable, took place in what the inhabitants of Capri still call the 'cave of marriage', or 'Cave Matromania or Matermania'. However, Nietzsche did not read the story of Mithra (which, however, still ignore the real meaning) through the eyes of an archaeologist or philologist. In the eyes of Nietzsche, it became a matter of flesh and blood, an event in which sacrificial exploding and uncontrollable ancient ancestral instincts. References to the 'Cave of marriage' fragments appear in the spring of 1878 (28 nos. 17, 22, 24, 25, 34, 39, vol. IV 4 Nietzsche Werke, hrsg. Von Colli-Montinari, vol. 3 IV ED. Italian).
- Mitromania. Wait until the glow of the first rays of the sun, and finally fix it, challenge him and see him off.- Mithra - Mithra HopeMadness!- Cave of marriage, painting idyllic unconscious- Tiberius: the madness of the action. Its negative: the folly of knowledge- Imagine life as a party that has its point of departure in Mitromania.- Mithra slaying the bull, which pounced on the snake and the scorpion
Cave reappeared a few years later in the aphorism 55 of Beyond Good and Evil . During a debate on human sacrifices Nietzsche remembers 'the sacrifice of the Emperor Tiberius in the cave of Mithra in the island of Capri, the most terrible of all Roman anachronisms'.
I would add, finally this brief and fascinating overview of Nietzsche's references to the cult of Mithra, which could be echoes of the cult itself, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra , first the name of Zarathustra-Zoroaster, that the neo-Platonic sources (Porfirio) closely related to Mithraism, and secondly, the two symbols of the serpent and the dog, ubiquitous in every tauroctony. I must point out however that it is virtually impossible to be very clear about what I have said so far. Groped to explain Mithra with Nietzsche, Nietzsche or inversely with Mithra, is like light in the dark. In the case of Mithra, we have no reliable literary documents can decipher the meaning of the paintings and reliefs, starting from the same event Central, the killing of the bull, which were given very different interpretations over time. The latest, in time, to Ulansey, even linking it to the precession of the equinoxes. In the case of Nietzsche, it is known that the character and deliberately obscure aphoristic fragments and many philosophical works by authorizing ever more varied interpretations. I shall therefore make some clarifications are of a more historical and philological, advancing when it is appropriate that those are only hypotheses at this stage of interpretation.
start with the relationship between Mithra and Campania. The cult of Mithra in Campania was quite widespread: in addition to the findings of Posillipo (the Grotta di Pozzuoli: a tauroctony visible at the National Museum of Naples [inv.6764] Carminiello to Mannes and Pizzofalcone, we Mitreo of Santa Maria Capua Vetere, with the important and beautiful frescoes and the equally important scenes of initiation, and other claims of the presence of the cult are mitriaco Calvi (ancient Cales: tauroctony terracotta, Naples Museum inv. 6854; a second tauroctony clay, very special, lies in the Berlin Museum) and Ischia (see monograph Santa Maria Capua Vetere on Vermaseren and the volume of Tam Tran Tinh on the worship of deities in eastern Campania, both published nell'EPRO).
We must now Capri. The presence of Mithra in Capri is known to all, to the point where it is spoken in the film Toto Emperor of Capri (1949) (writers Vittorio Metz, Marcello Marchesi and Luigi Comencini, who was also the director), where between merits of Toto, together with that of carrying a snake around the hat, is quoted above to "have renewed the worship of the god Mithra in Capri." But, apart from cinema, it is from Capri that comes another relief of Mithra tauroctono the National Archaeological Museum of Naples (inv. 6723). In his speech at the Congress of November 3, 2001 on the presence in the ancient oriental Capri, organized by the Istituto Universitario Orientale of Naples, Carmen Simeone has carefully reconstructed the history of this survey. The news about his oldest find was made by Luigi Giraldi, who in his description of the island of Capri (1775) says that the survey, found in a nearby vineyard, was placed at the Church of San Costanzo. Resulted in the Bourbon Museum of Portsmouth, the survey also found their permanent home in the Naples Museum, where it is currently visible. That its original location was in the Cave of Marriage and the cave itself was a mitreo is an assumption that the Count della Torre Rezzonico in its Isle of Capri (1794) writes that you "do not say that the marble was first discovered in San Costanzo Matromania to, or in the Great cave of Mithras, and the entire cave temple was prepared. " It is therefore starting from the statements of Count della Torre Rezzonico Matermania that the cave is assigned the role, hitherto unpublished, of magnum Mithrae antrum and 'natural place' pad Capri. And since the laws have always been a greater penetration of the truth, the legend, through a series of mediations, first of all the reports of travelers, had taken hold even on the big Gregorovius, that before the Grotto of Capri writes:
Everything indicates that we are in front of the cell of a temple. Matromania The name of the cave, with unintended irony that the people has changed in Marriage, as if there Tiberius had celebrated his wedding, is derived from Magnae Matris antrum or antrum Magnum Mithrae [But] it is said that the temple was dedicated not only to Mithra because the Persian god was worshiped in this place, but because this cave was found in the survey, which represents the sacrifice of Mithra [...]. The relief shows Mithras in Persian costume, kneeling on the bull in the neck as he plunged the sacrificial knife and the snake, the scorpion and the dog attack the bull. ( Figuren, Geschichte, Leben und aus Italien scenerio, Leipzig 1856, 360 ff.)
As you can see, Gregorovius as fully trusted that it was just a legend about the origin of the cave and the original location of the relief. But the authorities Gregorovius, who was also a personal friend of oltretuttutto Malwida von Meysenbug, Nietzsche was such that, when he visited Capri and the cave, could have no doubts about its meaning. But going into detail.
From what Nietzsche says it is clear that he identified Mithra with the Sun today Although this part of the communis opinio , it is not peaceful, because on the one hand, this identification seems to be reflected in the epigraphic material, in that the dedications Soli Deo Invicta Mithrae are recurring (one, written in greek, comes precisely from Ischia CIMRM I 178), on the other Mithra and the Sun are two distinct iconographic characters, as seen from the side panels of the tauroctony, and two distinct levels of initiation , Eliodromus and Pater, identified respectively with the sun and Mithra.
The feast of Mithra and Mitromania. The Zoroastrian feast of Mithra was the festival of Mihragan, and took place in a period roughly equal to our autumn. Mithraism in the Roman festival of Mithra coincided with that of the unconquered sun, and was set on December 25th, our Christmas. If the marriage was a cave mitreo as Nietzsche thinks, the feast of Mithra - that Nietzsche was of course the more general meaning of 'celebration of life' and the joy of living - could also take place there. In fact, as we have seen there is no evidence that it was, but Nietzsche threw his marriage on the Cave of the desire for freedom. Not by chance in 28, 33, Nietzsche speaks of the period lived in Sorrento as a liberation: "In Sorrento I threw it behind his back nine years of stickiness."
The connection between Mithra and Hope finds no immediate feedback. Hope Farm was a deity of the Roman Republic, and was in the area later occupied by the Circus Vary, near the Church S. Croce in Gerusalemme. A combination - only implicitly - between Mithra and the hope is perhaps found in the prayer of Cascelia elegans, found carved on a small stand inside the Mitreo S. Stefano Rotondo in Rome. The combination makes more sense, however, the prospect of hope for a 'return' of deities and ancestral forces advocated by Nietzsche, in which concepts such as "Dionysian" and "will to power" tend to identify themselves. In this return to the forces of the unconscious - the same one that Freud would have put at the center of his reflections - were a representation of 'idyllic', in view of Nietzsche, its in the cave of Capri.
the same lines, the reference to Nietzsche's "madness" of Mithra, who in the literary and epigraphic material does not find any feedback. On the contrary, Mithra was known as the "mediator" (this is the meaning of his name), and the Neo-Platonic philosophy (Porfirio) made it a quasi-divine image of the intellect, which is the opposite of insanity.
The folly of Mithra, the reading of Nietzsche, is immediate correspondence in the madness of Tiberius, which then, in Beyond Good and Evil , are assigned a human sacrifice made - as initiated into the mysteries Mithra - precisely in the Cave of marriage. Of course, even here the folly of Tiberius - opposed, as it appears, the 'madness of knowledge' - first of all the meaning that can be deduced from the general guidelines of the philosophy of Nietzsche. As for the historical foundation of the news, Tacitus and Suetonius - the most likely source of Nietzsche - attributed only to Tiberius 'madness' of a sexual nature (the usual excesses attributed by historians of the Senate and the Republican party to almost all the emperors) but do not mention anything like that, and certainly if the news had not been true if the escape would be made. Tiberius - how many emperors - can have had sympathy for Mithraism is still possible, especially as this cult was widespread in the army.
Turning now to alleged human sacrifice. Although there are reports of 'foundation sacrifices' in relation to some mitrei (Vermaseren, Mithra, ce dieu mystérieux 137-8), the fact is that Mithraism - as is also evident from the paintings of S. Mitreo Maria Capua Vetere - foresaw violent initiations, and - like every mystery cult - an 'death ritual', which obviously was not a real death. As for the attribution of human sacrifice to Tiberius, it is likely that here Nietzsche was betrayed by memory, and has attributed to Tiberius an episode instead History Augusta (Vita Commodi 9) attaches to Commodus, namely the deliberate or accidental killing of an adept at a kind of 'mystery play 'in which Commodus was to recall, in the guise of Zeus, the myth of the killing of the giant anguipedi (a very common scene in the side panels of the tauroctony).
of this or a similar episode, which attributes to Tiberius, Nietzsche speaks of as 'the most terrible of all Roman anachronisms'. It is difficult to clarify the meaning of that term. An anachronism is literally something relevant to the past or lived as if it were revived today. Mithra was actually an ancient Indo-Iranian deity, spoken of in the Vedas . When the cult of Mithra was introduced into Rome (according to Plutarch by Cilician pirates captured, then later built by Pompey in the Roman social and economic fabric of [60 BC]), it had already undergone profound changes which will make it comparable to other popular Oriental cults Empire. Compared to its original Indo-Iranian, Roman Mithraism can be considered a phenomenon of 'modern' and in this sense also 'anachronistic', as might have seemed anachronistic compared to the Roman Empire Empires years that had preceded him. As in Nietzsche, as we know, the 'modernity' begins with Socrates - difficult to completely rid a German professor Hegelian legacy - it is possible that he meant that to recover the true meaning of the cult of Mithra was necessary to return to his true sources, the fiery world of Indo-Aryan heroes, the model of the superman, and then to go back several millennia. This may explain why the rising sun of Mithra seems to be disappointing: it is a pale reflection of 'real' sun, can only raise the 'hope' of a return of ancient gods in all its glory.
Finally, a brief description of the relief that Nietzsche, following Gregorovius view from the cave. Strangely, he only speaks of the serpent and the scorpion, forgetting the dog. The tauroctony of Capri does not have anything relevant than the standard model spread throughout the Roman Empire, except for one peculiarity, which is also noticeable in the painting by Marino: a ray of sun longer than the others, which goes directly harming Mithra, as always facing toward the Sun while killing the bull. Between the two there is the crow, under the tutelage of Mercury. Franz Cumont, the first great student of the mysteries of Mithra, he thought the raven was the messenger of the Sun, and that the sacrifice of the bull happen behind his order. The fact that Mithra is always facing the Sun could confirm this hypothesis, but this does not increase our understanding of the scene, which, as I said, have been given conflicting interpretations.
We now return to the involuntary protagonist of this story: Cave of the marriage. 'Cave of marriage' is the term / popular explanation of 'Cave Matermania or Matromania' (the variant 'Mitromania' seems to appear only in Nietzsche), but the explanation that 'learned' connects to the cult of Mithra, as we have seen, or that of the Great Mother Cybele (or later for both). The report of Carmen Simeon, which I mentioned, has made it very clear to rebut the reading of the same cave as a place of worship of Mithra. During the same meeting another relationship, that of Eduardo Federico, had explained just as well be unfounded link the cave to the worship of Cybele (which also mentions Gregorovius then rejected in favor of Mithra), the difference being that while the cult of Mithra in Capri there are claims, the same can not be said for that of Cybele (see Tran Tam Tinh on this issue pp. 94-97). Again we must go back to the eighteenth century and the historical relationship According to Giuseppe Maria (1750). The cave, he wrote:
name is corrupt Matromania by its Latin name of the tomb or probable ara Matris Manium or temple Matris Magnae or both of Cybele, still seeing the niches, and the signs of the altar.
This interpretation was accepted mainly by English and German travelers, who described the cave in those terms, alternating with the name of Cybele that of Mithra. It is likely that the name - according to a hypothesis of Domenico Silvestri picked up by Eduardo Federico - resulting from a more original name Matrumo / marriage, which would be derived from an adjective Matrumaneus / Matrimaneus, where local forms Matrummanie / Matremmanie. The folk tradition Act as Matremmanie Matremmònie, that is, as marriage, and hence the popular name of the Grotto, which is opposed to the name 'product'. If that is so popular the phrase would have greater historical basis of that fear, and confirms the well-known adage, vox populi, vox of .
[published in 4 parts: News ... Backlight, nn. XVIII/11, November 2009, p. 16; XVIII/12, December 2009, pp . 15-16; XIX / 2, February 2010, p. 16; and XIX / 3, March 2010, p. 15 . ]
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