David Hewson
The Seventh Sacrament
Mithras, God of the Midnight, here where the great bull dies,
Look on thy children in darkness. O take our sacrifice!
Many roads thou hast fashioned: all of them lead to the Light,
Mithras, also a soldier, teach us to die aright!
Principal Characters
Pino Gabrielli, warden of the Piccolo Museo del Purgatorio
Nic Costa, an agente in the Rome Questura
Gianni Peroni, a fellow agente
Leo Falcone, Costa and Peroni’s inspector
Teresa Lupo, chief pathologist
Emily Deacon, Costa’s partner
Raffaella Arcangelo, Falcone’s partner
Ornella Di Benedetto, warden of the church of Santa Maria dell’Assunta
Rosa Prabakaran, a junior police agente
Bruno Messina, police commissario over Leo Falcone
Arturo Messina, Bruno’s father, now retired from the police in disgrace
Enzo Uccello, a criminal on release
Beatrice Bramante, former wife of Giorgio, mother of Alessio
Dino Abati, a homeless man
Prinzivalli, a police sovrintendente
Silvio Di Capua, Teresa Lupo’s deputy
Cristiano, a biologist specialising in worms
Judith Turnhouse, an archaeologist
Lorenzo Lotto, a left-wing aristocrat and magazine owner
Alessio Bramante, a schoolboy
Giorgio Bramante, his father, an archaeologist
Ludo Torchia, Toni LaMarca, Dino Abati, Sandro Vignola, Andrea Guerino, Elisabetta Giordano, Bernardo Giordano, and Raul Bellucci, students under Giorgio Bramante
Leo Falcone, a police sovrintendente
Arturo Messina, police commissario over Leo Falcone
Author’s Note
Mithraism originated in Persia before the sixth century BC. From around AD 136 onwards, it was adopted as one of the most important cults among Roman and government officials. Subterranean Mithraic temples built by Imperial troops are common in all of the empire’s military frontiers, from the Middle East to England. Three have been identified along Hadrian’s Wall, in northern England; more than a dozen, out of a suspected hundred or more, have been discovered in Rome itself.
At the heart of Mithraism lay several features which seem to have appealed to the military and bureaucratic mind. The cult was highly organised, secretive, and confined to men. It demanded insistence on absolute hierarchical obedience, first to local, higher-ranking members of the cult, and ultimately to the emperor. It also used a series of different “sacraments” to mark the passage of followers from one of its seven ranks to the next. Indeed the very word “sacrament,” while religious in nature today, stems from the original Latin term used for the oath of allegiance sworn by soldiers on joining the army. What those sacraments were, we can only guess, but they appear to have involved a separate initiation ceremony, with a swearing of oaths and on occasion a sacrifice, for each of the specific ranks, from the most junior, Corax, to the leader, Pater.
Mithraism shared some similar ideas and features with early Christianity, though the idea that the Catholic Church copied deliberately from the cult is probably far-fetched. None of the Mithraic scriptures remain, however, since this was a religion fated to be wiped from the history books. On October 28, AD 312, at the conclusion of a civil war, Constantine won control of the empire at the battle of the Milvian Bridge, a strategic point at which the Flaminian Way crossed the Tiber River into Rome. Though a follower of pagan ways himself at the time, Constantine, probably for political reasons, decided to make Christianity the sole religion of the empire. As his troops sacked Rome, the repression of Mithraism began.
The most visible relic of Mithras in Rome today is the archaeological find uncovered by Irish Dominican monks excavating the basilica of San Clemente close to the Colosseum. Here, an entire underground temple has been revealed, with chambers for ceremonies, and the focal point of worship, the mithraeum itself, where the ceremonial altar, with its image of Mithras slaying the bull, would have stood. San Clemente is open to the public; many more underground sites, including other mithraeums, are open by appointment. The visits offered by the voluntary organisation Roma Sotterranea (www.underrome.com) offer the best way to explore the extensive hidden city that lies beneath modern Rome. Many sites are difficult, dangerous, and illegal to visit without expert assistance.
Since history is invariably written by the victors, we have no independent contemporary accounts of what happened on the day the victorious Constantine entered Rome. However, we do know that he “disbanded” the imperial elite troop of the Praetorian Guard, which had sided with his opponent, Maxentius, and destroyed entirely their headquarters, the Castra Praetoria, which possessed a mithraeum in the vicinity for their private worship. A glimpse into the events of that day can be found in a less well-known Roman mithraeum, on the Aventine hill, not far from the area where much of this book is set. Excavations beneath the small church of Santa Prisca in the 1950s revealed that the original Christian building had been built on the remains of a Mithraic temple. When the archaeologists made their way into the heart of the mithraeum, they discovered it had been desecrated, probably sometime shortly after Constantine’s victory, and statues and wall paintings had been destroyed with axes. What happened to the temple followers during this turbulent period is unknown.
Book 1
A Child in Darkness
The boy stood where he usually did at that time of the morning: in the Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta, on the summit of the Aventino hill, not far from home. Alessio Bramante was wearing the novelty glasses that came in the gift parcel from his birthday party the day before, peering through them into the secret keyhole, trying to make sense of what he saw.
The square was only two minutes’ walk from Alessio’s front door, and the same from the entrance to the Scuola Elementare di Santa Cecilia, so this was a journey he made every day, always with his father, a precise and serious man who would retrace his steps from the school gates back to the square, where his office, an outpost of the university, was located. This routine was now so familiar Alessio knew he could cover the route with his eyes closed, no longer needing that firm, guiding adult hand every inch of the way.
He adored the piazza, which had always seemed to him as if it belonged in a fairy-tale palace, not on the Aventino, which was a hill for ordinary, everyday men and women. Ones with money, like bankers and politicians. But not special people, kings and queens, banished from their homelands to live in the grand villas and apartment blocks dotted through its leafy avenues.
Palms and great conifers, like Christmas trees, fringed the white walls that ran around three sides of the piazza, adorned at precise intervals with needle-like Egyptian obelisks and the crests of great families. The walls were the work, his father said, of a famous artist called Piranesi, who, like all his kind in the Rome of the past, was as skilled an architect as he was a draftsman.
Alessio wished he could have met Piranesi. He had a precise mental image of him: a thin man, always thinking, with dark skin, piercing eyes, and a slender, waxy moustache that sat above his upper lip looking as if it had been painted there. Piranesi was an entertainer, a clown who made you laugh by playing with the way things looked. When he grew up, Alessio would organise events in the piazza, directing them himself, dressed in a severe dark suit, like his father. There would be elephants, he decided, and dancers and men in commedia dell’arte costumes juggling balls and pins to the bright music of a small brass band.