Following the Sun (18 page)

Jesus and Mithra share the same birthday, for one thing, the 25th of December, which is also of course the time of the winter solstice, when the god of the sun, who has been in a slow decline since the end of summer, overcomes the god of darkness and the length of the days begins increasing. Another contemporary Roman cult, the
sol invictus deus
, the Unconquered Sun, established (reestablished, actually, from earlier gods) by the emperor Aurelian in
A.D.
274, shared the same holiday. Both Christians and members of the Mithraic cults would meet in small hidden, underground chapels, both practiced baptism and the use of holy water, and both celebrated with communion ceremonies of bread and wine, as well as communal meals. The followers were consecrated in both faiths, believed in the immortality of the soul, and even thought of themselves as soldiers of their faith. In Mithraism, many of the adherents were probably soldiers, although unlike Christianity, it appears that only men were admitted. There was an elaborate multitiered initiation process in Mithraism in which the initiates moved upward through a series of seven grades to full membership. One of these, the second highest, was called the Sun Runner.

The typical mithraeum or chapel was a small rectangular subterranean chamber, about 75 feet by 30 feet with a vaulted ceiling. An aisle usually ran lengthwise down the center of the temple, with stone benches on either side on which the cult's members would recline during their meetings. On average, a mithraeum could hold perhaps twenty to thirty people at a time. At the back end of the aisle there was a statue or bas-relief of the central icon of Mithraism: the so-called tauroctony or “bull-slaying scene” in which the god of the cult, Mithra, is shown in the act of killing a bull. There were many hundreds—perhaps thousands—of Mithraic temples in the Roman empire. The greatest concentrations have been found in the city of Rome itself, and in those places in the empire (often in the most distant frontiers) where Roman soldiers—who made up a major segment of the cult's membership—were stationed. Since they were all underground, as the development of modern Europe proceeded, more and more of these ancient temples turned up, as in Bordeaux during the construction of a modern-day parking garage.

One of the best preserved of these mithraea is an exposed underground chamber in Ostia Antigua just outside Rome in which an opening in the roof of the cellarlike chapel is arranged so that at certain times of day the sun will penetrate into the depths and illuminate the images of Mithra killing the bull. In most of the images of the bull-slaying scenes Mithra is accompanied by a dog, a snake, a raven, and a scorpion, and the scene is depicted as taking place inside a cave, not unlike the mithraeum itself. This image was always located in the most important place in every mithraeum, like an altar, and obviously held great significance.

The current thinking is that the bull-slaying scene is an astronomical star map, not unlike the Cretan bull-leaping frescoes at Knossos. This interpretation is based on the fact that every figure found in the standard bull-slaying scenes has a parallel among a group of constellations in the Zodiac. According to this theory, the bull represents the constellation Taurus. The dog is Canis Minor, the snake, Hydra, the raven is Corvus, and the scorpion, Scorpio. Mithraic art in general is often associated with astronomical imagery—the Zodiac, various planets, the moon, individual stars, and, of course, the sun.

Recent interpretations of this arcane and seemingly obscure, insignificant religion are now taking the imagery a step farther and arguing that the solar god Mithra conquering the bull is a celestial prediction of future ages and a symbol of the power of the conquering sun—he who shifts and controls the cosmic sphere. Given the pervasive influence of astrology in the Greco-Roman period, a god possessing such a power would clearly have been eminently worthy of worship. Since he had control over the cosmos, he would automatically have power over the astrological forces determining life on earth, and would also, like Jesus, possess the ability to guarantee the soul a safe journey through the celestial spheres after death.

Mithraism was not the only solar cult to arise in Rome in the centuries before and after the birth of Christ. Often these new religions arose as a result of visions experienced by a given emperor, the best known of which was the supposed conversion of the emperor Constantine at the Battle of the Mulvian Bridge in
A.D.
312. Legend holds that during the battle—or in some versions in a dream the night before the battle—Constantine saw a cross in the sky directing him to march under this sign if he would be victorious—which he was. Curiously, however, there had been a similar conversion some forty years earlier when, during a battle, the troops of the emperor Aurelian saw a vision of an ancient and all-powerful Syrian solar deity, El Gabel, and emerged victorious from the battle. Aurelian interpreted this as a sign and modified the cult to establish a new solar-based religion in Rome, the cult of
sol invictus
, the Unconquered Sun, which soon became the official religion of the state. A temple of the Campus Agrippa was dedicated to this god on December 25th in the year
A.D.
274, the feast day of Mithra.

The cult was dispersed following the death of Aurelian, and the next emperor, Diocletian, reinstated the old gods of the empire and began a campaign against other religions and cults, the first instance of religious persecution—pagans generally were more tolerant of other religions, and even willing to take new gods into their pantheons. In 303 Diocletian began “The Great Persecution,” which sent many Christians to the lions. All this ended with Constantine, whose mother was a Christian and whose father was a devotee of the Unconquered Sun. Things could have gone the other way. Not two years before his conversion to Christianity, Constantine was leaning toward the solar worship of his father.

The emperor Julian, who lived during this same period of religious turmoil in Rome, had a theory that the sun was a shield from a more powerful force that lay behind the visible entity we see in the sky. Julian was related to Constantine but he reinstated paganism upon his ascension to the throne and began criticizing Christianity. Although he preached tolerance, he and his associates recognized Helios as the sole god. He claims in his famous “Hymn to the Sun” that even as an untutored child he knew that the sun, Helios, was the only god. There were two aspects to Helios, the visible entity that rose every day in the east, but that was only a manifestation of the Invisible, the great source that lay behind the sun.

One day having a drink with Geneviève, we got into a discussion of poor Derek and his slow-moving progress on his novel. He had been working on said novel, or at least writing something, so he claimed (no one had ever seen a single line), for eight years, and Geneviève, who had become a sort of solicitous sister to him, was worried that if he ever finished, he would die. Or perhaps he would die if he did not finish. One afternoon we hatched a plan to take him out to Saint-Emilion to have lunch and drink some good wine and try to shake him out of his routine.

That weekend Bertrand drove the three of us out in his tiny Fiat, Derek and I squashed thigh to thigh in the back, our knees jamming the back seat. We stopped at a vineyard in Libourne and had a taste of wine, and then again at the famous Cheval Blanc vineyard, and then continued on and parked the car at the base of the town.

Saint-Emilion is another stop on the old Santiago route. Pilgrims walking down from Breton would halt there at the hostels, and I was interested to visit this place, not only for the wine. The town is located on a rise at the head of a cleft in the Dordogne River plateau, and the road rises up from the valley floor between two steep vine-covered slopes. It is considered one of the most beautiful of the wine district villages.

While the three of them ascended to look for a good place to have lunch, I got them to drop me off below the village and took a little walk along the country lanes that surround the town. Although the vines were still dormant, or just budding up, the good green earth was fresh and flowers were blooming or just coming into bloom on the verges and lanes around the base of the town. Here were the beloved flowers of the European spring—the primrose and the buttercup, harebells and gillyvor, Marybuds, and mints, spurge, and celandine, and little sweet violets breathing out from the banks and scenting the air as I passed. After three days in rain and city life, I felt the need to stretch my legs, and having found a little rutted track below the walls, I circumambulated the whole town and came up to the center on the east side, past vineyards and the arching ruined walls of an old church.

From the heights I could see many of the famous vineyards of Saint-Emilion. Lining the banks of the Dordogne River on the west were the vineyards of the Libourne; just to the north, out of sight, lay the district of Pomerol; and beyond that the great vineyards of Bordeaux; and farther still, the jutting peninsula that held the famous vineyards of the Médoc, Rothschilds, Margaux, and St. Estephe; and then to the south, the district of Armagnac; and the Bergerac district to the northeast.

Why France, particularly this section of France, should end up producing some of the best wines in the world is a matter of much discussion, but a great deal is owed to a combination of soils and sun. Wine grapes need a warm spring sun to form flowers and a fine balance between rain and sun during the summer to set and ripen the grapes to yield the proper combination of sugars and acids needed for wine. A cold rainy sunless summer will give poor, acidic wines, a hot summer will sweeten them. An early frost can disturb the formation of sugar and cause the acids to increase and create a condition called acid rot. Good years, which according to vinters are few and far between, are the result of just the right amount of rainfall and sunlight, and a proper range of temperature during critical periods of the growing season. A good vintage is a much advertised statistic when it occurs, but in fact a so-called “good year” may not mean for all vintages. Because of the wide variation in microclimates and the little dips and valleys, or the presence of a strip of sheltering woods or a local hailstorm or damaging thunderstorm, one vineyard may have a good year while another, less than a mile away, will not have the same conditions and produce a bad or poor wine. All this is serious business in towns such as Saint-Emilion.

Soil is the other variable; it plays an important role in the acidity, sweetness, or bite of a given wine and around Bordeaux the soil consists, generally, of a rough gravelly mix above sands and clays, hardly the good rich soils one generally associates with other agricultural products. But the soils too are related to the sun. One of the reasons that the gravelly soils in this district produce a good wine has to do with light. Generally wherever possible growers like to plant on south-facing slopes, and the combination of direct solar energy and the rocky soils acts to collect and hold the warmth from the sun. Furthermore, the vines are generally pruned in such a way as to take advantage of solar power. The grapes are grown close to the soil if possible, which means constant cutting back of the naturally sprawling, climbing vines; the closer to the ground the better the maturation, since the sun's reflection from the warm earth adds to the direct sunlight during the day and during the night the absorbed warmth radiates back to the grape. This has generated the evolution of many different structures to grow the grapes on, varying from district to district to take advantage of the local environment and angle of the sun. In Saint-Emilion the vines grow along long fencelike wires, for example. Some
vignerons
, or wine makers, leave two distinct branches, one to bear, and one to make the wood for the following year.

Although there are many species of wild grapes around the world, the grapes used in winemaking were developed from a single species,
Vitis vinifera
, which was originally believed to grow wild in Turkmenistan, between Samarkand and the Caspian Sea, roughly the same area that gave the world the tulip. Grapes used for wine are smaller than the eating varieties of grape, and generally have large seeds, or pips, and thick skins. From this single species, breeders have created countless varieties; over one hundred are used for wine-making in France alone.

In March in Bordeaux, the foot of the vines are either exposed or covered, depending on the spring rains, and later, the way I understand it (I have this from Bertrand, who gave us a long lecture at the first vineyard we stopped in at Libourne), the roots are uncovered for fruiting. By June, little yellowish clusters of flowers appear on the vines. And after pollination by insects, these begin to set grapes and fill in. Then the mystery begins.

As in all green plants, oxygen is absorbed from the atmosphere through the leaves, combined with water taken up from the soils, and then changed into starch. Driving this engine of food production, the singular element upon which the whole process depends, is the sun.

The word for this mystic process, photosynthesis, tells the story:
photo
, Greek for light, and
synthesis
, the Greek verb to make or produce. It is arguably the single most important chemical reaction in the sustenance of life on earth.

The whole process begins inside the leaf. Generally speaking, in most green plants the flat leaf presents a broad surface to the sun so as to catch as much radiant energy as possible. And the leaves arrange themselves on the plant stem or trunk in such as way as not to obscure one another from the precious, life-giving light. On a single large plant, a maple tree, for example, there may be as many as several hundred thousand leaves, a surface of as much as half an acre, all told, and all the day long each leaf absorbs sunlight madly, eight to twelve or more hours a day, throughout all the days of the growing season.

Just below the surface of the leaf is a clear layer of cells arranged in such a way so as to gather the full power of sunlight. They are swollen with countless microscopic specks called chloroplasts, which are filled with green chlorophyll and are so concentrated that the whole leaf takes on the color green. These receive the first radiant energy of the sun. The chlorophyll traps that energy, transforms it, stores it, and then passes it along into the plant through an elaborate chemical process of electron transfers involving water and oxygen. The end result is that these substances are combined and transformed into carbohydrates, which is to say the sugars or starches that form the base of virtually all the food chains on earth.