Mithras 1
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, July 23, 1999;
Wednesday, 13 July 2005
Abstract
Zoroastrianism
Mithras was a Persian saviour, whose cult was the leading rival of Christianity in Rome, and more successful than Christianity in the first four centuries of the Christian era. Mithraism, like Judaism and even more like Christianity is a Zoroastrian heresy. Zoroastrianism is a religious dualism, and so are the Jewish and Christian revisions of it. Both Zoroastrianism and Judaism propose two great contending gods, neither of whom can overcome the other, though an almost successful attempt has been made to paint out the Jewish evil god. The late derivative of Zoroastrianism of Artaxerxes II, Mithraism, and the late derivative of Judaism, Christianity, perfect the analogy, because the good gods of the two original religions now have the support of their sons—Mithras and Jesus.
Zoroaster invented a good god, Ahuramazda, whom he identified as the Creator and unique source of all morality. The antithesis of this good god was the god of pure evil, Angra Mainyu (Ahriman), the source of all sin and wickedness and of all the suffering of all human beings. This implacable enemy of the good god created his legions of devils to seduce and afflict mankind, and these malignant spirits are simply all the gods of all the peoples on earth who did not welcome the missionaries and armies of the worshippers of Ahuramazda. Those who did not were the earthly armies of the Evil Spirit. It is the duty of all who have been saved by Zoroaster’s revelation to convert or destroy any people of the earth who oppose the soldiers of the Good God. To be saved, humanity must provide his footsoldiers.
In the Christian New Testament, Satan is the “prince of this world.” He had the power to carry off the Son to a mountain top, and bribe him with wealth and dominion that Jesus cannot have expected to have himself. The gospels emphasise the power of Satan and that God had no direct sanction against it! Yehouah’s power is limited by the power of an equally strong Evil god. Christian propaganda is simply to deny that Satan is a god, although a god is, by definition, a superhuman, supernatural being, and Satan’s claim is verified on many pages of the Christians’ holy book. The early Christian, Lactantius (Institutiones, 2:9:13), was honest enough to call Satan an “antitheus”, an anti-god.
The material world is therefore a battleground. That is the Zoroastrian doctrine. Zoroaster laid the basis for the jihad, the Holy War, one of the greatest insanities that has afflicted mankind. The religions of love and submission, continuing the tradition, now treat the world as a battle ground in fact, and horrific examples of it have been seen since 2001 AD. The ideas Zoroaster produced, which he doubtless meant for nothing but good, were the best possible for fomenting world wide religious strife. Zoroaster was unwittingly the first prophet of Angra Mainyu, not Ahuramazda! He brought upon mankind the plague of religious zealotry that has characterized religion ever since in the “advanced” nations of the world!
Christians often claim that the Good God ultimately will prevail, so the Evil God is the lesser of the two, but that is also the Zoroastrian belief that Christians always assert is dualist. Dualist religions that have descended from Zoroastrianism like Judaism, Christianity and Islam all take the division of the world literally. Zoroaster might have made the same mistake, but he indicated that he saw the battle on earth for humanity as being a personal moral one and not one of killing people considered to be evil.
Zoroaster’s intention has been perverted. His mythology was directed really to the human psyche. The battle was within us because each of us had to chose between Good and Evil in life. If it is known that the Good God will win the war anyway, then all humans can be wicked. Good will prevail. The Zoroastrian scheme puts humanity at the center of the battle, and if enough people do not choose Good, then Evil will prevail. Admittedly, Zoroastrianism implies that Good will prevail, because the Good God has the advantage of Prometheus over Epimetheus, but the outcome remains our choice, and it has been for Evil so far in history!
Foundations of Mithraism
The Zoroastrian religion exerted a great attraction on the nations of the vast and multi-racial Persian Empire, and many converted to the the official religion to identify themselves with the dominant culture. The Persians, who formed the ruling aristocracy and enjoyed certain privileges like tax exemptions not extended to others, favored politically a religion that offered a bond of unity between the widely different peoples under their rule, and encouraged loyalty to their empire.
Although the Iranian plateau was highly populated, giving the Persians huge military manpower, few of them were members of the Persian or even the Median ruling elite. So, Persians, like the British in India, admitted natives into administration in the satrapies. Natives who had adopted the religion of their conquerors showing a desire to be assimilated into their culture, and a devotion to the universal god, would have been favoured, perhaps exclusively.
Besides this, though, the Persians had a policy of religious syncretism, almost completely overlooked by historians too ready to accept the kite flown for over a century by Christians and Jews that the Persians were tolerant of all religions. They tolerated the religions of co-operative people, and tried to remodel their religions on lines compatible with Mazdayasnaism. These people were called Juddin, and their is little doubt that when the empire collapsed to Alexander, these Juddin eventually became Yehudim—Jews.
Persian governors encouraged the practice of a system by which conquered people spontaneously obeyed the law. Zoroaster’s religion had a moral imperative. Ahuramazda commanded conduct of the highest morality, and, in its emphasis on manly courage and speaking the truth, corresponded to the code of honour for which the Persian aristocracy was famous. The ethics of the old Persian nobility, and particularly their insistence on always speaking the truth, greatly impressed the Greeks—so much so that Xenophon made Cyrus the hero of his “faction”, the Cyropaedia, although he himself had narrowly escaped death at the hand of Tissaphernes, a Persian of noble ancestry but perfidious. Xenophon concluded that no one could trust the Persian aristocracy in his time. Cyropaedia was probably propaganda, so all of it cannot be taken at face value, and the truth and loyalty of Persians will have been directed to others of the same faith, and perhaps the Juddin, but not necessarily to those considered agents of the Evil One.
Zoroastrianism had the same appeal as Christianity later. The promise of equality among human beings by religion has obvious bonding benefits. This aspect of the religion must have appealed strongly to the weak and downtrodden. The Mazdakites [†]
Ahuramazda is a strictly just, honest, and impartial deity. He has ordained certain rules of righteousness for all mankind. Yehouah is a god who was partial first to a particular tribe then to particularly credulous people. No unprejudiced observer could fail to conclude that Zoroastrianism was not changed for the better when it was remodelled by Jews and then Christians.
Zoroastrianism was a universal religion and sent out missionaries to preach its gospel to all the world, but it became the official religion of the Persian Empire and its fate depended on the fate of Persia. When Alexander the Great overran the Persian Empire and the Greeks colonized Asia from the Mediterranean to the borders of China and from the Caspian Sea to the Indus, the centre of the religion disappeared, and all that remained were the seeds left in various places by the Persian chancellery.
From its status as the official religion of a mighty empire, Zoroastrianism suddenly fell to the abject position of being only the faith of conquered peoples. The crushing defeat of its pious monarchs discredited their religion. Many former adherents abandoned it because they had lost faith in an impotent god, or recognized the cultural superiority of the Greeks, or they saw the advantages of joining the victors, or even because they had been Zoroastrian only out of expediency.
After Alexander’s conquest, the Greeks built Greek cities throughout the lands Alexander had conquered, and Greek became the language of all persons who had any pretensions to culture. Aramaic, the Semitic langaage which had been the lingua franca of the Persian Empire, became largely the language spoken by the ignorant peasantry of the countryside. Ahuramazda became Horomasdes. The Magi were reduced to the status of swindlers, conjurers, magicians, evangelists, prophets and mediums. They earned a living out of the ignorant and gullible with their tricks. Astrology, which even sensible people accepted as possible, was a staple for which there was always a fair demand.
To the Magi, it must have seemed as though the end of the world had come. Most of the population recognized the superiority of Greek civilization and adopted it, including its language, and its culture. On the fringes of the empire, the caste of priests had to devise new ways of earning a crust. But, many Persians stuck to the core religion in the defeated country long enough to see other sympathetic governments in the Parthians and the Sassanids—Zoroastrianism was eclipsed but was not persecuted. It recovered some prestige.
Elsewhere, Zoroastrianism survived in heresies. Christianity is a Zoroastrian heresy. Many details of Christian doctrine were devised by the Magi in the various Zoroastrian sects—confession of sins, penance and absolution, ceremonial “last suppers” of bread and wine, observance of the twenty-fifth of December as a divine birthday, and many others, including even terminology, such as use of the title “Father” to designate a leader of a church, or priest.
Zoroastrianism begins with Ahuramazda, represented only in aniconic form by the sacred fire, as the only god to be worshipped. It evolved to the Mithraic cult in which the Son has, for all practical purposes ousted the Father, and the sacred fire has been replaced by murals, sculpture and such rites as a Last Supper.
Persian and Roman Mithraism
Romans usually called Mithras “Sol Dominus Invictus.” Roman writers believed that Mithraism came from Persia and that Mithraic iconography represented Persian mythology. From this beginning scholars have traced Mithras in Persian, Mittanian and Indian mythology. The Mitanni gave us the first written reference to Mithras in a treaty with the Hittites. Mithras is celebrated in the Zoroastrian Yashts or hymns of the Sassanian (224-640 AD) Avesta, a book which preserved old oral traditions.
Mithras is a Greek form of the name of an Indo-European god, Mithra or Mitra (Old Persian, Mica). At the end of the nineteenth century Franz Cumont, a Belgian historian of religion, published a two volume work on the Mithraic mysteries taking the origins of the cult as Persian. Mithraism was once called the mysteries of Mithras or, significantly, the mysteries of the Persians. Cumont remains the classic work on the subject but latterly has been challenged by Christian skeptics. One apologist tells us that Cumont was wrong about ancient Iranian Mithraism being continuous with Roman Mithraism. Only the name of the god, some terminology, and astrological lore were common. The challenge is based on the lack of hard evidence, much of which Christians themselves destroyed, so there is good reason to stick with the authoritative foundation of Cumont’s earlier work. There is nothing in most of these challenges.
The evidence for Mithraism is mostly archaeological—the remains of mithraic temples, monumental inscriptions, the iconography of the god and sculptures, sculpted reliefs, wall paintings and mosaics. From every known such reference and such documents as existed, Cumont claimed that Mithras was Persian Mithra. If Mithras had Iranian roots then the Roman cult of Mithraism must have begun in the east of the Roman empire. Roman soldiers met worshippers of the god, Mithras, in the provinces to the east of the empire, adjacent to Persia, and Plutarch confirms that Mithraism entered the Empire from Persia when Pompey’s Roman soldiers encountered pirates from Cilicia—the home in Asia Minor of Paul the apostle—practising the “secret rites of Mithras” and were impressed by the god’s high precepts. It was spread by soldiers, eastern merchants—called “Syrians” and slaves, in the middle of the first century BC. Slaves, soldiers and merchants were highly mobile and so offered a means of rapid transmission of the cult.
Christians, desperate to make Mithraism dependent on Christianity, insist that it only started in the second half of the first century AD, despite Plutarch’s plain statement. Since he lived at this very time, he can hardly have thought a new Roman fad was over a century old. He knew it as old and, by his own time, well established.
That the rites were “secret” meant the cult was interpreted as a “mystery” religion, but that is an error, in origin at least. The Persians would not admit any strangers into their sacred services because they were unclean. Being an offshoot of Zoroastrianism, Mithraism will have had the same custom, a custom also held by the Jews, another offshoot of Zoroastrianism. In the Jewish temple, the Court of the Gentiles was as far as gentiles were allowed to go.
In the first century of this era, it begin to take off in popularity, and physical remains of the worship of Mithras only appear commonly after 150 AD. About twenty-five inscriptions to him have been found in Spain, and several statues of him were found at Merida, perhaps a cult centre in the west. It was not officially recognised in the Empire until the end of the second century AD and reached the height of its popularity in the third century. There were perhaps thousands of Mithraic temples in the Roman empire, mainly in Rome itself but, as Mithraism appealed to soldiers, also in garrisons on the frontiers of the Empire. It was one of the last of the Eastern Mystery cults to reach the West and one of the most vigorous.
Few writers mention the cult, but, according to Porphyry (On the Cave of the Nymphs) it was founded by Zoroaster. Porphyry said Zoroaster founded Mithraism in a cave, and so Mithras is shown being born from a rock—Petra Genetrix—as a young man stepping from the rock holding a torch and a sword. Consequently, the places where Mithras was worshipped were in caves, or mock caves. Since it was an eastern cult, it seems paradoxical that it was stronger in the west than in Anatolia and Syria. The reason is, at least partly, because the other religious legacy of Persia, Judaism was stronger in the east. Mithraism came more directly from the religion of the ruling Persians, and survived less easily the demise of the Persian nobility outside of the Persian core lands, but Judaism was founded as the “good” religion of submissive people. It was not directly related with the religion of the Persian aristocracy, and so survived more easily, especially at the fringes where Mithraism survived as the religion of nobility reduced to banditry, a religion of small cells of believers resisting the demise of Persian rule. But it was not carried into Rome by Anatolian bandits, but by Roman soldiers and merchants who took up the religion. In the west, it retained the custom of the outlaws of meeting only in small, independent, intimate cells, where the sacred repast was taken by just a few, but they obeyed the Roman law that meetings of colleges should not be clandestine, and so they were never persecuted for acting illegally.
In the original Persian pantheon, Mithras was a yazata (angel) lower than Ahuramazda (later Ormuzd), the Supreme Being, with whom he was associated, but higher than the Sun. Mithras could not have been the sun itself because when the sun went at night behind the world mountain, Hara, Mithras did not go with it, but continued his fight against evil through the hours of darkness. In the original tradition, it will have been Varuna who went with the sun at night into the underworld. Zoroaster, whose aim was to promote monotheism, apparently omitted these gods from the Gathas in favour of Ahuramazda. Later, Mithras became more important than Ahuramazda, perhaps because he acted as mediator between men and those on the divine level, and so was the human face of God. Eventually Strabo could write:
[The Persians] honour the Sun, whom they call Mithras, and the Moon and Aphrodite, and Fire and Earth, and Winds and Water.
Mithras became omniscient, the god of light, the Heavenly Light, a spiritual Sun, the enemy of darkness and therefore of evil and hence the god of battles and of military victory. Mithras was the god of contracts and oaths, he embodied the seven divine spirits of goodness (showing that he had become or always was Ahuramazda), he protected the righteous in this world and helped them into the next. He sent rain from Heaven and light from the sun and helped mankind by slaying the Primæval Bull, the first sacrifice, fertilising the earth. He was the Logos (the Word), meaning the order of the universe, the Persian, Arta.
The Mithraism that entered the Roman Empire certainly differed from the Persian religion as practised in Persia during the Achaemenid empire. Christian polemicists deny that the Roman Mithras was the same god as the Persian Mithras. They say:
- the Roman Mithras cannot be assumed to have originated in Iran, and was only a distant relative of the Persian god, perhaps associated by name only
- the Roman Mithras was best known for his act of slaying a bull, but not the Iranian Mithras
- the Roman Mithras was not concerned with contracts
- Iranians, unlike the Roman Mithraists, did not worship in cave-like rooms, have levels of initiation, or pursue secrecy.
Because so many records of the Persian religion have been destroyed by the Greeks and then by the Moslems, it is possible to make some of these assertions. The question is whether the Roman Mithras was a new god invented with the name of the Persian yazata, just to give it some eastern mystery, or was the Roman god essentially the Persian god merely changed somewhat by his long journey from Rhages to Rome. In short, was it the same Mithras in that he was dressed up as Iranian just enough to suggest eastern, Persian origins? It was a phony Persian religion. Or had proper Mithras worshippers taken the cult with them westwards? Cumont thought so. Christian apologists do not.
Roman Mithraism combined Persian Zoroastrianism, Babylonian astrology, Greek mysteries and perhaps Greek philosophy, but the Persians had themselves been influenced by the Babylonian civilisation in its 200 years of empire, and then a further 300 years almost had passed from the defeat of the Persians and the institution of Alexandrine Hellenization. Thus the opportunity was there for the main differences to be introduced into the original Zoroastrianism of Cyrus to metamorphose it into the Roman variety. An invented religion need have no common features with anything in the east. In fact, many common traits in the characteristics of the god and the religion, West and East militate against the Roman version being invented. The most obvious is that, in Rome, Mithras was a sun god, and, in Persia, he was a god associated with the morning sun.
There is little evidence for a Persian cult of Mithras, suggesting it was never important in itself to the Persian nobility, but by the end of empire it had grown in importance especially at the periphery, notably in Anatolia. The special devotion to Mithras of the later Parthian aristocracy is attested by their use of such theophoric names as Mithridates, but Parthians remained Zoroastrians, and Magi at their courts kept the sacred fires alight. Beck translates Dio Cassius as writing that, at his coronation by Nero, Tiridates of Armenia declared he had come “to revere you [Nero] as Mithras”, and Pliny adds that Tiridates initiated Nero into “magicis cenis”—magical feasts, but more probably Magian feasts, there being Magoi among the retinue of Tiridates. Possibly this occasion was when Mithraism was effectively granted Imperial approval, in effect if not formally.
After his conquest, Alexander minted coins bearing the image of Zeus enthroned modelled on the coins of Mazaeus at Tarsus. Some Greco-Bactrian coins show a similar enthroned god, but with solar rays around his head or wearing a ray-like tiara. A D H Bivar thought it could only be Mithras. In Hellenistic times, Mithras was sometimes shown like Zeus like the god of the Graeco-Persian royal cult of Antiochus I, king of the small prosperous state of Commagene in the mid first century AD. At Commagene, Apollo/Mithras wielded thunderbolts like Zeus/Oromasdes, but, though exalted at Commagene, Mithras remained below Zeus/Oromasdes in the pantheon. Boyce thinks Greeks could not imagine an active and popular god like Mithras as being nothing but an angel, a servant of the high god. Perhaps Hellenized Iranians too! Several atypical monuments from Anatolia and Crimea suggest intermediate forms of Mithraism existed. In Anatolia and among the Iranian diaspora in Anatolia, the unemployed Hellenized Magi played an important part in transmitting Mithraism westward. Bivar concluded other manifestations of Mithras-worship in antiquity in Asia and Europe helped conduct Mithraism west.
A Persian link with Roman Mithraism cannot be denied in that the fifth level of the seven levels of fraternity was called Persian. That initiates were aspiring to a rank of “Persian” implies that Mithraism was a non-Persian or post-Persian religion. Though Persia was Rome’s most fearsome enemy in the east, there was no suggestion that Romans considered Mithraists as traitors, even though, Roger Beck (Encyclopaedia Iranica) tells us, Roman worshippers of Mithras aspired to be Persians for cult purposes. For Romans, “Persian” was a cultic not an ethnic designation but showed the religion did not come directly from the Persians, but from a peripheral people, aspiring to the honour of being a Persian. It suggests an origin in the fringes of the Persian empire, where colonised people aspired to be ranked with the rulers, rather as Anglo-Indians did in the days of the British Raj. The Persian nobility were identified exactly with their religion. Those who followed the Persian religion were Persians, just as people who followed the Jewish religion were Jews.
Professor Moghdam thinks much of the eastern evidence has not been recognized because it was specifically buried under churches and mosques or left as ruins feared by Arabs as places of jinns. He says the word “khirbah”, which has understandably been associated with “ruins” by the Arabs, as in “khirbit” Qumran, the most famous one of them known in the west, is really from the Persian “khorabe”, a “sun-dome”, “abe” being a dome. Dozy translated Arabic “khirba” as a “court”. A sun-dome is a place of worship and a court of Mithras. The “khirbahs” scattered all over Arabia and Syria are, Moghdam believes, mithraeums. Certainly Mithraic figures and statuettes have been found in some of them. In the kitab al-Aghani is narrated:
In Sistan there was a man called Burzen, an ascetic, whose father had been impaled in his Khiraba.
Moghdam comments, he could not have been impaled in his “ruins” but could have been in his “khorabe” or mithraeum. Evidently, there were “khorabes” as far as Sistan. The writings of the sectarians of Khirbit Qumran are markedly dualistic in tone, suggesting a long association with Persian teaching. The common noun in Armenia for temple, Mehean, means mithraeum. The ruins of the Mehean in Garni are impressive, having been built by the kings of Armenia, who were at that time Mithraists not Christians. A temple at Kangavar was dedicated to Anahita, and Mithraic cathedrals are known that were made into fire temples by the Sassanians.
Mithras’s enemy was the Demiurge, Angra Mainyu or Ahriman, the god with power to spoil the good creation of Ahuramazda in mankind’s level of the cosmos, and so able to mislead men. Plutarch in On Isis and Osiris digresses to describe dualism in Zoroastrianism, noting that Mithras was “in the middle” (meson) between the good Horomazes and the evil Areimanius, “and this is why the Persians call the Mediator Mithras”. The Magi saw a trinity of Mithras, Ahuramazda and Ahriman. Ahuramazda and Ahriman seemed to be mirror images of some complex power—perhaps Zurvan, Time—and Mithras was the link. Mithras only took the side of Ahuramazda at the earthly level, otherwise he was neutral between the two principles.
Roman Mithras, as his mightiest and most beneficent deed, sacrifices a bull, but the truth is no one knows of a certain bull slaying by the Iranian Mithras because any direct evidence of it has gone. Assertions do not dispose of arguments, though Christians, used to settling all disputes by reference to the holy book, have got into the habit of believing they do. In Zoroastrian legend, there is no denying that a bull was slain—the Primæeval Bull, effectively the source of living things! The bull is slain, although Mithras is not the killer.
Ahriman killed the Primæval Bull of creation, but the outcome was paradoxically good—rather as the plot of Satan to kill the son of God on the cross, in some versions of the Christian myth, was foiled in it being precisely God's purpose. It was unintentionally the first sacrifice. The dying bull’s sperm was carried to the moon, purified and generated all domestic animals. That the Evil Spirit should have done good, even involuntarily, must have seemed odd, and the myth therefore seems to have evolved with Mithraic theology. Christians ought to know about changing theology, but what they treasure in their own fantasies, they will not permit in other people’s. So, a variant of this was that the first man was tricked by Angra Mainyu into killing the Primæval Bull.
Persians were reluctant to make pictures of their gods, just like the Moslems today, and there is no Persian iconography of the god slaying the bull like that found in the Roman cult of Mithras. Then, the prophesied Saoshyant, the Persian saviour, would repeat the deed of sacrificing a bull and make from its fat and the sacred drink haoma, a potent to give immortality. Possibly, in one form of Zoroastrianism, Mithras was pictured as the Saoshyant, whence the Roman adaptation. Later, this form in the east died or was persecuted as heretical.
Nevertheless, consider the following. M J Vermaseren relates an Indian myth of Soma (Avestan haoma), a polymorphic god, one of whose forms is that of a bull whose semen is the rain which fertilizes the earth. He is therefore the life giver. Soma was murdered by the gods including Mithras. Indians were the Aryan brothers of the Persians. The Roman evidence tells us that the Saviour Mithras killed the Primæval Bull. The Roman Mithras wore a Phrygian cap. Phrygia had been part of the Persian empire for 200 years and was in the region from which the Mithraic religion was reported by contemporaries to have emerged—Cilicia in Anatolia. He also wore a short cape of the Greek style and Persian trousers. The Ionian Greeks were also ruled by the Persians for a long time, served in the Persian military and merchant service, and were neighbours of the Phrygians. These related strands of history and mythology are sufficient to suggest a continuity of belief from India to Rome expressed in a myth of the god killing a bull.
Apologists will protest that such an interpolation is contrary to the evidence, but that is merely to suit themselves. When evidence has been destroyed whether deliberately or by accident, we are entitled to make inferences from what remains. It is impossible to be sure they are absolutely right, but it is pure stupidity not to use the evidence we have. Christians do not want to use it to make inferences because it does not suit them, so they suddenly become purists in regard to evidence. They want no evidence that is not foolproof to be admitted. Yet their own beliefs are based on ancient hearsay evidence with no sound foundation. They are hypocrites.
In Europe, excavations have revealed a mithraeum under many of the earliest church buildings. There are few obvious instances of the Roman cult in Asia Minor whence it supposedly emerged, But the Persian empire was not lacking in Mithraic monuments. The trouble is that, in the east, churches or mosques were similarly built on the site of temples to Mithras, or Persian divinities at any rate, as at Etchmiadzin, under the Juma Mosque in Esfahan, and under other Juma Mosques in Iran. Eastern mithraea seem to have been first converted to Sassanian fire-temples, still called “dare-e Mehr”, and then into mosques, even so continuing to be called a “House of Communion”. The “fire temple” in Bishapur was a mithraeum. It seemed unlikely that a fire-temple would have been built underground, but the discovery of a fragment with a figure of Mithras, reproduced by Professor Ghirshman, confirms its Mithraic origin.
One remarkable instance in Anatolia is a spectacular monument, which has partly survived the depredations of two millennia, on the high mountain which the Turks call Nemrud Dag, close to the upper course of the Euphrates and about 365 miles east-southeast of Ankara. As close to heaven as the terrain allowed, Antiochus I (64-38 BC) of the small buffer kingdom of Commagene, who claimed both Alexander and Darius as ancestors, erected, on both sides of an artificial hill added to the summit, colossal statues of his gods, which could pass as Greek but wear Oriental robes and Persian headdresses. One of the two principal gods majestically looking out over a valley is a fusion of Zeus and Oromasdes. The second is a fusion of Apollo, Helios, and Mithras. The Greeks were willing to believe that Zeus was also Oromasdes in inner Asia, just as he was Amun in Egypt, and it was only reasonable that he would seem different to a different people.
The shrine, despite the Greek appearance given it by Antiochus, is late Zoroastrian and even included a massive altar on which the sacred flame could be kept burning. Antiochus, a minor king, ruled his kingdom as a Roman puppet. He was of generally Greek culture, but he chose to associate himself with the Zoroastrian religion, doubtless because his subjects still mostly held to it. Commagene was a buffer between the Roman Empire and the aggressive Parthian Empire. The great Parthian king, Mithridates VI Eupator had waged a series of bloody wars with the Romans from 88 to 66, when he was defeated decisively by Pompey. He fled to his overseas colonies in the Crimea, where he committed suicide. Parthian power remained formidable, as Crassus was to learn at Carrhae. Mithradates’s theophoric name denotes him as a votary of Mithras.
To the southeast of Nemrud Dag may still be seen a large cave in the side of a mountain. A wide terrace was built up in front of it, and the entrance made an arch in walls covered with once lavish ornaments, sculptured reliefs and inscriptions, which have long since disappeared. From the floor of the cave, engineers sank a tunnel, at an angle of 45° downward, into the mountain for 520 feet and enlarged it to a large room at the bottom. It is a shrine built and excavated probably by Antiochus for an annual commemoration of the miraculous birth and epiphany of the Son of God, Mithras, born in a cave, saluted by choirs of rejoicing angels, and first adored by shepherds on the twenty-fifth of December, after the Winter Solstice. Mithras, however, was born an adult.
In the room at the bottom, Antiochus will have performed religious rites to renew his own participation in divinity. He will have put on garments to impersonate Mithras emerged at the dramatic moment of sunrise, on the terrace as the “theos epiphanes”, suggesting to the awaiting worshippers that he was an incarnation of Mithras, or at least his divinely-appointed viceregent on earth.
Antiochus was also portrayed in the characteristic pose of Zoroastrian kings, face to face with his god. He and Mithras both in Persian trousers and tunic, stand facing each other and joining their hands, as if sealing a covenant with a handshake. Antiochus is distinguished by his crown, Mithras by the rays of the sun which appear behind his Phrygian cap. Antiochus showed himself shaking hands with Ahuramazda, who remains seated on his throne, since the supreme god was still entitled to that dignity.
Much more evidence of the worship of Mithras comes from the western empire, particularly Rome itself and its port, Ostia, and the military forts on the Danube. Mithraism was also popular among the legionaries in North Africa and those in the forts of Hadrian’s wall. Rome had some 700 mithraea and Ostia had some more, but not many have survived. Besides grottos, 400 other traces of Mithras have been found in Rome and Ostia. Mithraism in Rome and Ostia appealed to the same people as elsewhere and existed in the area of Rome as early as the late first century AD.
The earliest remains of the cult of Mithras are from the garrison at Carnuntum in Upper Pannonia on the Danube River (modern Hungary). The Roman legion, XV Apollinaris, garrisoned at Carnuntum was ordered East in 63 AD to fight against the Parthians and then the Jews, who revolted from 66-70 AD. In about 71 or 72 AD, on their return to base back in Carnuntum, the legionaries made Mithraic dedications.
It is impossible not to identify the Roman and the Persian gods called Mithras. Christians want us to believe that Pagans worshipped two quite different gods with the same name and an identifiable point of contact. It is too absurd and a sign of desperation that such views are submitted for consideration. The Mithras of the Roman religion had certainly changed in his slow journey from Susa, as noted above, but it is quite ignorant and stupid to pretend that the Roman Mithras did not begin in Persia and retained many of the qualities of the Persian god. And the lack of remains in the east is easily explained, as Christians ought to realise. It is that Christianity first established itself and grew in these very regions, detracting from the growth of Mithraism, absorbing it and erasing it. Mithraism was founded on and retained albeit with Hellenistic trappings to disguise it, Persian Zoroastrianism.
An attraction for the Romans of Oriental religions was that they had a long history and their gods a reputation for wisdom. This was true of Mithraism. Mithras was a redeemer but also offered a role model as an epitome of morality. Mithraism began to spread because it appealed to to the merchant classes who valued its demand for high moral standards and therefore honesty, to the lowly and humble such as slaves poor freedmen, and particularly to the military. Merchants adopted it because of the high ethics the god demanded over contracts, a concern the Christians claim Roman Mithras did not have! Its failing might have been that women were excluded—adherents were all male and were sworn to secrecy. Modern Freemasonry has strong elements of Mithraism in its organisation.
Myth and the Tauroctony
The story of Mithras begins with the Ahriman oppressing mankind. Mithras is incarnated from a rock on 25 December, the old date of the midwinter solstice. He enters the world, observed by lowly shepherds, on the darkest day of the year—he is the Light of the World. During his incarnation he helps mankind like Orpheus and carries out miracles like Jesus. In an abstract way, he dies for the good of mankind. He kills the sacred bull, the equinoctial sun which revivifies the earth, but the bull is an aspect of himself, for he is the sun, or rather the heavens represented by the path of the sun through the summer constellations—the summer zodiac. Mithras is the god of the summer sun. So he kills an aspect of himself, just as God, the Father, kills himself by offering himself as a victim in his aspect as God the Son. As an annual sun god he is resurrected. His mission done he holds a last supper with his disciples and returns to Heaven, the level beyond the cosmos, in the solar chariot. He will be victorious over evil at the last battle and will sit in judgement on mankind, when he will lead the Chosen Ones over a river of fire to immortality.
Christians are quite desperate to prove that Mithras was not a dying and rising god. They say, even granting that the suffering god myth is essential to mystery religions, Mithras can hardly be included because he is the only god who did not suffer. It is true that the god in his human form did not die as the others did, but he died in the form of the bull which represented himself. Christians claim this is all a misapprehension based on Cumont’s original interpretation which is—they say—plagued with problems. So today’s Mithraic scholars are very sceptical of attempts to understand the Roman Mithras in the light of the Iranian one. It would be nice to know how many of these Mithraic sceptics are Christians. We can guess most, and we can thank earlier Christians for the lack of evidence, but sun gods often slay bulls which represent themselves as the sun rising in the constellation of Taurus. The idea has a firm and ancient basis.
Apologists will say that solar myths in which other gods of no relation to Mithras are depicted as bulls, and sacrifices of bulls in various places, are of no relevance to the issue. But that is utterly absurd. The killing of the bull is so closely linked with solar worship that it can be taken as a signal of it. Mithras was a solar god. Why are Christian apologists so determined that solar gods do not kill bulls?
The scholars are agreed, from a message scratched in a second century Mithraeum, that Mithras promised his worshippers immortality:
And us, too, you saved by spilling the eternal blood.
The source of this precedes Christianity because the parent of Mithraism was Zoroastrianism in which the good creation would be restored at the end of time in an eternal existence. So, those who sought to be on the side of good, were promised eternal life after death. Again, the precious sensibilities of Christians who think they are unique have to be preserved. Here they even will admit that religions have points in common, to try to minimize the importance of another religion offering what the Christians want to keep for themselves. By doing so, they automatically admit that Christianity is neither unique nor even compellingly different from other religions in the milieu from which it sprang—the Roman empire.
The Mithraeaum
Mithras worship took place in churches called grottos, imitations of caves or sometimes actual caves or catacombs, a small oblong space with a domed ceiling about 7-10 metres wide, decorated with carved reliefs, statues and paintings. Since Mithras was born in a cave, the mithraea, the churches of the cult, had to be located underground, and if no natural cave was conveniently available, an area of ground was excavated and roofed over with a dome, accounting for the preservation of so many of them. The Christians could not knock down holes in the ground, so they filled them in and built churches on top ensuring that the mithraea were preserved in their foundations. A normal Mithraeum would accommodate only thirty or thirty-five worshippers at one time, and the size of a congregation must have been deliberately limited to ensure that its members were truly close companions.
To enhance the resemblence to a natural cave the ceiling of the mithraeum was vaulted and sometimes was rendered with crushed pottery to give an illusion of rock. The ceilings sometimes had vents to admit shafts of light. A narrow aisle about 12-20 metres long usually ran down the centre of the room with a stone bench on either side for two or three dozen members to sit or recline on during the service. If an ordinary room was being prepared as a grotto then dining couches were arranged in two rows down the length of the room. At the end of the aisle, opposite the entrance, was a symbolic mural, carved relief or tapestry of Mithras slaying a bull inside a cave like the mithraeum itself, which would be brightly illuminated in the dimness of the grotto. This tauroctony was the main icon of Mithraism. This mural was often one of a diptych, the other showing Mithras sitting at a table with Helios, the sun.
From the arrangement of benches or dining couches, and from wall paintings in some mithraea, it seems worshippers were initiated into the celebration of a common meal. Devotees sought communion with Mithras to prepare for the final judgement. Mithras slayed the Cosmic Bull, and from this bull he obtained the “eternal blood” that was shed for the salvation of mankind.
He who will not eat of my body, nor drink of my blood so that he may be one with me and am I commingled with him, shall not be saved.Mithraic Communion (M J Vermaseren, Mithras, The Secret God)
The literary and archaeological remains of the religion of Mithras suggest that the salvation of man, symbolized by the slaying of the Primaeval Bull, is ritualized in a communal holy meal with the brethren. Evidence that this divine supper came from Persian religion is the terminology. Professor Moghdam tells us the Persian for a “good meal” meaning a “sacred meal” is “hu-khoresht” where the meat is Persian “nushkhare”, the edible thing of immortality, and “nushabe” is the water of immortality. The Greek form of the “hu-khoresht” is “eucharist”. Moreover, two ancient Iranian words for the holy repast in the Gathas are “myazda” and “myastra”. Moghdam believes the first form transposed into the Persian “miz” and Latin “mass”, and the second form gives Greek “mysterion”, mystery. That is why Mithraism and Christianity were mystery religions. These religions were private and required ritual purity, but not secret. Anyone could apply to join and attend the rituals. Secrecy is not essential to the “myastra”.
This is evidence that the votaries of Mithras came to think of their holy suppers as theophagous, with the cannibalistic implications of the Christian eucharist. Their Last Suppers commemorated, and hence doubtless imitated, the sacred meal at which Mithras and his assistants, celebrating their victory over the powers of evil, partook of bread and wine, the bread being made from the wheat that sprang from the spine of the slain bull, and the wine from the grapes that sprang from the bull’s blood. The Mithraic concept of redemption by blood appears in the taurobolia celebrated by the religious in the waning Roman Empire—in a lustrum, they were cleansed of their sins by the blood of a bull that was slain in imitation of Mithras’s slaying of the Primæval Bull. However, there is no way of inferring that a bull was actually sacrificed and eaten. Most mithraea seated less than 40 worshippers and the rooms were too small for bull sacrifices.
Were all mithraeums simple grottos, merely churches as opposed to cathedrals? Did the Roman emperors neglect their Mithraic religion in never building any impressive mithraeums, even though the official religion for a long time was Mithraism under the name of the Unconquered Sun? Several emperors were proud to be followers of Mithras. Trajan was pictured with the Mithraic Phrygian cap of liberty. In fact, Professor Moghdam tells us the basilica of Trajan and the magnificent halls attached to the baths of Caracalla were set apart for worship of Mithras.
Since Mithraic worship was exclusively for men, their wives mainly went to the temple of the Magna Mater (Cybele) which was usually located just across the street for their convenience and, being entirely above ground, was usually effaced completely by the fury of the Christians when they took over. The cults of Mithras and the Magna Mater seem to have been closely related, both emerging from neighbouring parts of Anatolia, and the two theologies interpenetrated to some degree, as in the significance of a bull. Women could indulge in a “taurobolium” and have their sins washed away by the magical blood of the bull slain as if in memory of the Primæval Bull. They also used water for ritual purification, and some scholars suppose that the Magna Mater was a form of Anahita of the Persian trinity for whom a bull was undoubtedly sacrificed.
Mithraism had no extensive priestly caste. Each small group of worshippers had a “father”, simply a member of the highest rank of the cult. Why are Christian priests called father? Major centres of worship had a “father of fathers”, equivalent to a Christian bishop. It always remained a private religion, never receiving huge state patronage, so the shrines and churches of Mithras remained humble and the worshippers pious and egalitarian. In Mithraic churches, noble, freedman and slave met as equals. Mithraism had its male celibates and expected its initiates to repudiate worldly offerings expecting instead heavenly wealth.
Symbols and Imagery
As far off as China, on the Mithraic monument of Hsian-fu, various Mithraic symbols are explained—the cross, the pearl, the lotus and the dolphin:
- The cross was a Mithraic symbol of the brotherhood of man, the aim of Mithraism being the the the Kingdom of God on earth, the unity of the people of the four corners of the world—a truly universal religion.
- The pearl is a beautiful, pure thing that grows from a seed in its shell in water, one of the sacred elements of Mithraism. It signifies the miraculous seed of Zoroaster from which the Saoshyant will develop when the pure virgin bathes in the sacred water. The pearl, in Mithraic monuments, appears in the hands of angels in Taq-e-Bostan, in the beak of birds notably in eastern Iran, and in literature, even appearing as as the Pearl of Great Price in the gospels and in the Syriac Hymn of the Pearl. The pearl or its shell sometimes appears at the birth of Mithra looking like an egg where it has been misinterpreted as Orphic.
- The dolphin has similar aqueous connotations as a sympathetic creature to mankind, which raises its young in water. This symbol is found on some Mithraic monuments in Europe and appears abundantly in the khirbahs or mithraeums in Syria and Arabia.
- The lotus is a water-flower. Mithra is often shown standing in a lotus as he is at Taq-e-Bostan, nominally a Parthian monument. It has, though, been re-dedicated, as its cave-like construction, its Mithraic appurtenances of flowing spring and small lake, the figure of Mithras standing on a lotus flower, and its religious scenes inside, betray. Moreover, it is in Baghestan, a name which honourrs Mithras as the “Baga”.
Mithraic imagery is largely astronomical. The setting is a cave encircled by the chariot of the sun and the signs of the zodiac. The Neoplatonic philosopher, Porphyry, says the cave of the tauroctony, which the domed Mithraic grottos were meant to imitate, was “the cosmos.” The zodiac, planets, sun, moon, and stars are commonly portrayed in Mithraic art. Mithras himself was usually shown clad in a tunic, Persian trousers, cloak and a pointed floppy cap called a Phrygian cap, as slaying the cosmic bull created by Ahuramazda, the God of Light, to prevent Ahriman from slaying it, and thereby offering the first sacrifice, but occasionally he was depicted as Sol. The grotto mural showed Mithras pulling back the bull’s head by its nostrils and stabbing its exposed neck with a dagger in his right hand, the bull’s blood re-entering the earth yielding ears of corn. Thus, the mural represents the sacrifice of the Primæval Bull, the first animal, from the soul of which came all other life as a result of this sacrifice. Thus it stood for life, vitality, vigour, peace and plenty—the whole of Ahuramazda’s good creation. But the evil creation of Ahriman was shown biting and stinging the good world.
The Sun and the Moon observe the sacrifice. Two torch bearers are in attendance, miniature versions of Mithras, one with an up turned torch and one with a down turned torch. A torch bearer in ancient symbolism denoted the sun. In Apuleius’s Golden Ass, we read:
I carried a lighted torch thus I was adorned as the sun.
In the mysteries of Eleusis, the torch bearer was dressed as the sun. In ancient symbolism a cross represents the equinoxes, when the equinoctial plane intersects the celestial equator, making a notional cross in the heavens. The two torch bearers in the tauroctony are often shown with crossed legs because they stand for the sun at the spring and autumn equinoxes. The spring equinox is denoted by a raised torch representing light, summer, life, spirit and the liberated soul. The autumn equinox is shown by a lowered torch representing darkness, winter, death, matter and the soul trapped in the body. A serpent or a dog drinks the bull’s blood. Other symbolic objects present include a raven on the bull’s back, a scorpion nipping at its testicles and a tree.
In well preserved Mithraea, other scenes show Mithras being born from a rock, Mithras dragging the bull to a cave, plants springing from the blood and semen of the sacrificed bull, Mithras and the sun god, Sol, banqueting on the flesh of the bull while sitting on its skin, Sol investing Mithras with the power of the sun, and Mithras and Sol shaking hands over a burning altar. In these other pictures Mithras is the Saoshyant or redeemer of the cosmos, ending up in heaven having destroyed evil and restored the world at the End of Time. Interpretation of these scenes tell us what we know about Mithraism.
Zurvan—Father Time
Theodicy has always been a problem in Patriarchal religions beginning with the first. What is the source of evil? In Zoroastrianism, why were there two gods, one of Good and one of Evil? If the Good God is ultimately supreme, then why was there a Wicked God at all? How could a Good God be so stupid as to create, whether voluntarily or inadvertently, an implacable adversary as powerful as himself? There is no answer to a non-question, but they are the questions that theologions think they can answer.
Zoroaster had called the rival gods twins, so they had to be brothers, and Time (Zurvan) was their father. In the tauroctony, a lion headed figure in the coils of a snake represents Ahriman, the “Prince of Darkness” and therefore evil. Zurvan is depicted in just this way too, showing that Ahriman is an aspect of Time—past time, the cause of change and corruption. Arimanius is attested in Mithraic epigraphy. Logically then Ahuramazda and Mithras, as the face of God, stand for future time, birth and the hope of static perfection when good triumphs over evil.
Zurvan or Zervan is the Greek and Latin, Aeon or Cronos (Saturn), evidently the same as Chronos despite the changed spelling. Imagined as a hermaphrodite able to engender children by himself, he was depicted as a nude male figure having upturned and downturned wings and the head of a lion, with a serpent coiled many times about his body. The serpent, as Ouroboros consuming its own tail, stood for time as the perennial motion of the sun through the heavens. But the Persians had in their theology the concept of the End of Time, because the battle of Good and Evil is fought only for the period of limited time, called the “Time of Long Dominion.” The spiralling serpent stands for this. Time did not need a parent because it is eternal. Time is hermaphroditic because it has dual aspects, able to be viewed in two directions, like the images of Janus. The twins were therefore themselves both aspects of time—just as Prometheus looked forwards and had foresight, but Epimetheus looked backwards and only knew what had already happened.
Zoroastrian teaching was that after the resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgement, the triumphant Ahuramazda would put an end to time! The universe is restored to its state of timeless perfection in which nothing will happen ever again. Eternity is static! Christians said, “time shall be no more.” In Zoroastrian eschatology, time caused change in Ahuramazda’a perfect creation. Time is thus equal to the Evil Spirit and, after the Last Judgement, Ahuramazda abolishes it restoring perfection. The Zurvanists did not think they were spoiling Zoroaster’s idea—they were distinguishing between eternity and historical time.
After the gradual revival of Zoroastrianism under the Parthians, the Zurvanists flourished in the old Persian territories as one of the Zoroastrian sects until c 531 AD, when the orthodox Magi persuaded Khusrau (Chosroes) I, the greatest of the Sassanian kings of Persia, to declare the Zurvanists as heretics. To save his subjects from future mistakes, Khusrau authorized his orthodox Magi to compile an authoritative text of the Avesta and gave it his approval, which carried great weight. This is the version that was the basis of the text that we now have.
Moses and Exodus
