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 modern
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 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.
Mithras is a Greek
form of the name of an Indo-European god, Mithra
or Mitra. 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. Cumont remains the classic work on the
subject but latterly has been challenged by
Christian sceptics. 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.
Few writers mention
the cult. The evidence for it 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 and 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.
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. That the
rites were "secret" means the cult was
a "mystery" religion. 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.
Nevertheless it was
in the first century of this era that it begin
to take off in popularity, and physical remains
of the worship of Mithras only appear 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.
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. Zoroaster, whose aim was to
promote monotheism, omitted him from the Gathas
in favour of Ahuramazda. Later, he became more
important than Ahuramazda, because he acted as
mediator between men and those on the divine
level. 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, 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
primaeval bull fertilising the earth. He was the
Logos (the Word).
His 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. The Magi saw a trinity of Mithras,
Ahuramazda and Ahriman. Ahuramazda and Ahriman
seemed to be mirror images of some complex power
and Mithras was the link. Mithras only took the
side of Ahuramazda at the earthly level,
otherwise he was neutral between the two
principles.
The Mithraism that
entered the Roman Empire was a combination of
Persian Mithraic belief, Babylonian astrology,
Greek mysteries and perhaps Greek philosophy.
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. 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.
There is admittedly
little evidence for a Persian cult of Mithra.
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 found in the Roman cult of
Mithras. Also, there are few traces of the Roman
cult in Asia Minor whence it supposedly emerged.
Most 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—soldiers, slaves and
merchants—as elsewhere and existed in the area
of Rome as early as the late first century AD.
Only from the middle of the second century AD
did it blossom.
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, probably detracting from
the growth of Mithraism.
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 three main groups
of people; 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. Its failing might have been that women
were excluded—adherents were all male and were
sworn to secrecy. It had strong elements of
Freemasonry in its organisation.
Females worshipped
Cybele, Isis and later, Jesus. Mithraism had no
extensive priestly caste. Each small group of
worshippers had a father, simply a mamber
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.
Myth and the
Tauroctony
The story of Mithras
begins with the Demiurge 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. So he kills
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.
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. 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 about two 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 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.
He who will not eat
of my body, nor drink of my blood so that he
may be one with me and I with him, shall not
be saved. Mithraic Communion M J Vermaseren,
Mithras, The Secret God)
However, there is no
way of inferring that a bull was actually
sacrificed and eaten. Most mithraea seated only
about 40 worshippers and the rooms were too
small for bull sacrifices.
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
primeval 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, 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.
A lion headed figure
in the coils of a snake represents Ahriman, the Prince
of Darkness and therefore evil. The
Christian expression for the devil, Prince of
Darkness, used for example by Milton,
matches Mithraic as well as Essene use—Mithras
was Light and Darkness was Evil. The force of
Good necessarily was opposed by a force of Evil
in the old religions. Ahuramazda was opposed by
Ahriman in the Persian religion; Osiris was
opposed by Set in the Egyptian religion. Other
names for Satan trace him to earlier pastoral
gods Pan and Zeus Myiagros, respectively
Mephistopheles and Beelzebub, the Protector of
Flocks, the Lord of the Flies as the Jews
mockingly called him, Baal of the Philistines.
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.
Astronomical and
Cosmological Interpretation
The imagery of the
tauroctony is ancient. Only in the period from
around 4000 BC to 2000 BC did the sun
rise at the equinox in the constellation Taurus.
As the sun rose, the bull disappeared in the
dawn glow—the bull had been slain. Most of the
other symbols found in the tauroctony were
constellations along the celestial equator at
this time. The bull is Taurus, the dog is Canis
Minor, the snake is Hydra, the raven is Corvus
and the scorpion is Scorpio. As the rising sun
illuminated the night sky, these constellations
along the horizon faded away. First to go was
the bull of Taurus because the sun was rising in
that constellation. Sometimes a lion and a cup
were added to the tauroctony, apparently symbols
of the constellations Leo and Aquarius, which
were the constellations in conjunction with the
sun at the solstices in the age of Taurus.
This epoch was when
the astronomer priests of Akkadia were making
the first accurate astronomical observations and
describing the celestial patterns which later
spread everywhere as the zodiac. They divided
the year according to the celestial sign of the
rising sun but the sun does not forever rise in
the same place each month. The plane of the
equinoxes slowly rotates backwards at a rate of
one constellation every 2160 years and the
entire zodiac every 25,900 years.
The fixed
association of the months with zodiacal signs is
that of the age of Taurus because 21 March is
still deemed the beginning of the month of
Taurus. In fact, today the spring equinox is in
the constellation of Pisces. Formerly it was in
Aries and in a hundred years time we shall have
entered the age of Aquarius, but Taurus remains
the sign associated with the spring equinox not
Aquarius. In other words once the association of
signs and months was made, it remained fixed,
even though the heavens seemed to be rotating as
the equinoxes precessed. This is the origin and
nature of Mithras the cosmic bull-slayer—an
aspect of the sun god—the equinoctial sun
rising in Taurus.
Now the sun is
normally shown separately from Mithras in the
pictures of the Mithraic legend that we have.
How can that be if Mithras was the sun god
himself—inscriptions confirm he is sol
invictus, the unconquered sun? The
Mithraists apparently considered Mithras, the
unconquered sun, as a sun beyond the sun—a
supermundane or spiritual sun beyond the sphere
of the fixed stars. From the time when the sun
was identified with the equinoctial bull to the
time of the rise of Mithras in the Roman Empire,
at least 3000 years passed, long enough for an
astronomic religion to evolve into a spiritual
one, but the seeds of the idea go back to the
Aryan origins of Mithraism.
The Aryans who went
on into India took twin sun gods with them,
Varuna and Mitra. Neither was the sun itself,
Surya, which manifested itself in twelve
different forms, plainly corresponding to the
zodiac. The Persian holy book, the Zend Avesta,
had an equivalent pair, Mitra (or Mithras) and
Ahura. The word ahura is related to the
name of the Assyrian sun god Assur and the
Indian word asura which is cognate with
Surya, the sun. Mitra is from the Persian word, mihr,
meaning sun. Thus the Iranians had a pair of sun
gods, Ahura and Mithras, just like their
brothers in India.
Different Persian
sects chose one or other of the sun gods as the
main one. Zoroaster, who sought to promote
monotheism, and the Persian Achaemenian kings
favoured Ahura, calling him Mazda, the wise sun.
He was always a spiritual sun, pictured as a
benign old man in sculpture merely as an
artistic convention just as the transcendental
Hebrew god is. He was served by "bounteous
immortals," one of whom was Mithras. As a
sun god, Mithras saw all things. The Avestan
Yasht dedicated to him describes him as having a
thousand ears, ten thousand eyes, and as never
sleeping.
Mithras was thus
retained in the Persian religion, appaerently
contrary to Zoroaster's intentions, as the face
of God—the visible manifestation of an
invisible and distant god. He it was who stood
for the Good Spirit against the bad one, Angra
Mainyu or Ahriman, the Persian Satan. Later
Mithras, who many must have found hard to
distinguish from Ahuramazda, took the
characteristics of the supreme god. In a hymn to
Mithras in the Avesta, Ahura Mazda tells the
prophet Zarathustra that when he created Mithras:
"I made him as worthy of worship as
myself." This accolade is given to no other
Amesha Spenta. Something happened akin to the
deification of Jesus in Christianity. Jesus was
identified with the archangel Michael, who was
the face and power of God. Soon Jesus became
God! Mithras became God, too.
Furthermore, in
Persian cosmology the sun and moon were located
beyond the stars. Zoroaster, whose name can be
read as sun-star, taught that the sun was
situated above the fixed stars. So, the origin
of the key ideas of Mitraism, a sun god and a
spiritual sun god who dwelt beyond the stars,
was Iranian.
Platonists had the
same beliefs more clearly expressed and it seems
most likely that when Mithras was adopted by the
Romans a Platonic philosophy was welded on to
the ancient god. In Plato's Republic the
sun is the source of all illumination and
understanding in the visible world while the
Good is the supreme source of being and
understanding in the world of the forms, the
intelligible world. Zoroaster lived seven years
on a mountain in a cave decorated as the cosmos.
Plato also symbolizes the world as a cave. The
cave dwellers have to ascend to the world beyond
the cave to receive the rays of the sun. The
ascent from the cave is an allegory of the
ascent of the immortal soul.
Hellenistic people
believed that after death the human soul
ascended through the seven heavenly spheres to
an afterlife in the pure and eternal world of
the stars. It was a dangerous journey, requiring
passwords to be given at each level of the
journey, and people were buried with small gold
medallions inscribed with the words. Plato, in Phaedrus,
describes explicitly the ascent of the soul to
the realm outside of the cosmos (upon the
back of the world), effectively heaven or
paradise. Here dwells True Being which
reason alone can perceive, and Good is
the power. The supermundane sun, the Good or the
True Being which reigned over this
transcendental region was seen by the Mithraists
as Mithras. Thus his appeal was as the god who
helped and protected the soul in reaching the
highest heaven, beyond the dome of the stars.
About the time of
Jesus, Philo wrote of God as the intelligible
sun or hypercosmic star. Later the
Neoplatonist, Plotinus, told the same story,
that the sun in the divine realm is Intellect
which sustains soul—if Intellect dies, soul
dies. Later still the Neoplatonist Emperor
Julian wrote in Hymn to Helios that the
sun moved in the starless heaven beyond the
fixed stars. For almost a millennium the idea of
a second sun beyond the cosmos was a constant of
Classical thought. Platonists like Numenius,
Cronius, and Celsus were Mithraists, so it is
inconceivable that Platonist ideas did not
influence Mithraism where we also find two suns,
Helios, the god of the physical sun, and Mithras,
unconquerable sun beyond the stars.
If Mithras was seen
as a spiritual sun, a god of the whole cosmos,
then he must have been understood in a
transcendental sense as outside of the cosmos.
This explains the Mithraic motif of the birth of
Mithras from a rock. Mithras emerges from the
top of a round rock, which is usually shown
Orphic style with a snake around it. The Orphics
also had an idea of a spiritual sun. Indeed
Mithras is sometimes shown being born from a
cosmic egg, just as Phanes is born of the cosmic
egg in Orphic representations. The Mithraic cave
and the Orphic cosmic egg both were the cosmos.
In the rock-birth scenes Mithras is almost
always shown holding a torch, the symbol of a
sun. Franz Cumont, the scholar disparaged by
Christians for revealing our knowledge of
Mithraism, described much of this solar theology
in 1909.
So Mithras the Bull
Slayer evolved into a spiritual god of the whole
cosmos and was depicted, like Atlas, supporting
the cosmic sphere, depicted with the
constellations reversed, because they were seen
from the other side! The statue of Atlas
Farnese similarly depicts the cosmic globe,
bearing the constellations as they would appear
from outside the universe.
Mithraic Practice
and Christianity
Initiates of the
Mysteries of Mithras had to be ritually pure and
were purified by baptism, as we are told by
Tertullian, a third century Christian from North
Africa. There were seven levels of initiation,
one for each of the seven planets and each with
its symbol, the highest level being that of the
Father, Pater. From the lowest these grades were
Corax (symbol—a raven,
planet—Mercury), Nymphus (a male bride,
Venus), Miles the first grade of full
membership (a soldier, Mars), Leo (a
lion, Jupiter), Perses (a Persian, Luna,
the moon), Heliodromus (a charioteer of
the sun, Sol, the sun), and finally Pater
(a father, Saturn). Those who reached Pater
could lead an assembly. Quite unlike
Christianity, members of the cult of Mithras
were not stopped from being members of other
cults.
At the level of
initiation called Miles or soldier, the mystae
of Mithras were symbolically branded, the priest
making the sign upon their foreheads to redeem
their sins and to mark them as soldiers of
Mithras ready to fight the Good Fight.
Tertullian complains that the Devil was
imitating the Christians' divine mysteries
because initiates of the Mithraic religion were
baptised in this way, and we can be sure the
sign made was that of the cross. The
mythological justification was Zoroastrian, that
good creation was in warfare with evil creation,
and these soldiers were soldiers of the good
creation.
Christians use the
expressions soldiers of Christ and put
on the armour of light, somewhat
inappropriate metaphors for a religion of love,
one might think, but entirely appropriate to
their Mithraic origins. Above the rank of Leo
votaries were called participants because they
participated in a sacred meal. Below the rank of
Leo, Mithraists were called servants and served
the higher levels—the similarity with Essenism
is striking. Participanats committed their
everlasting loyalty to the saviour god, Mithras,
in his fight against evil. Plutarch tells us
that their reward was to be returned to life in
the restored world at the eschaton.
Justin Martyr, in
his first Apology, says the arrangement
of the grottos, with benches on either side of a
table, was because the Mithraic central ritual
was a sacred meal of bread and water, that he
himself compared to the Christian Eucharist. He
complained that Satan had copied the Christian
Eucharist because the adherents of Mithras also
partook of consecrated bread and water symbolic
of the incarnate god's body. The bread consisted
of small round cakes—each marked with a cross!
Mithraic language
and symbolism are widespread in the New
Testament. The Dayspring from on High,
the Light, and the Sun of
Righteousness are all Mithraic (or Essene)
expressions used of Jesus. Mithras was born out
of a rock—Theos ek Petros—and Christian
imagery shows the stable, in which Jesus was
born, as a cave. (The infant Mithras was adored
by shepherds who brought him gifts.) It was not
originally oppression that led the early
Christians to use catacombs for worship but
simply a desire to copy the practice of the
worshippers of Mithras. They decorated their
catacombs with paintings, one of the most
popular ones being of Moses striking the rock.
Mithras, struck a rock to produce water for his
followers to drink! The most popular picture of
all however was Christ as the Good Shepherd.
Mithras too was the Good Shepherd.
The Cilicians
introduced Mithraism to Rome. The chief city of
the Cilicians and one of the main centres of
Mithraism was Tarsus, home of St Paul. When Paul
writes (1 Cor 10:4):
They drank of that
spiritual rock... and the rock was Christ,
he leans
significantly toward the Mithraic idea of the
God from the Rock, as does Jesus when he says
(Mt 16:18):
Upon this rock I will
build my church,
referring to Peter.
Both Mithraism and
Christianity introduced symbolic sacrifice:
Mithraists by depicting the sacrifice of the
bull prominently in their churches and
Christians by images of the crucifixion of Jesus
and the symbolic drinking of his blood in the
communion. The shedding of animal blood was
originally a substitute for the shedding of
human blood. The bull is interchangeable with a
ram—the Ram in the Persian Zodiac is a lamb.
So Mithras can also be sacrificed as a lamb just
as Jesus is the Paschal Lamb. Remember Mithras
is also the seven spirits of goodness just as
the Book of Revelation has a slain lamb
with seven horns and seven eyes representing the
seven spirits of God. Easter when the
Paschal Lamb was eaten was a Mithraic festival.
In the seventh century the church tried to
suppress pictures of Jesus as a lamb precisely
because of its Pagan associations.
The Church took most
of its features from Pagan mystery religions:
vestments, pomp, ritual, mitre, wafer. When
Western fundamentalist Christians try to argue
that the Church took nothing from the mystery
religions, they are not only arguing against
sceptics and atheists, they are arguing also
against the millions of protestant Christians
whose protest was precisely that the Roman
Church had adopted Pagan, largely Mithraic,
practices.
The Vatican Hill in
Rome considered sacred to Peter was previously
sacred to Mithras. The cave of the Vatican was a
Mithraeum until December 25, 376 AD, the
birthday of the sun god, when a city prefect
suppressed Mithraism and seized the grotto in
the name of Christ. Mithraic artefacts found in
the Vatican Grotto were taken over by the
Church.
The head of the
Mithraic faith was the Pater Patrum, the 'Father
of Fathers,' who sat in the Vatican cave. The
Mithraic Holy father wore a red cap and garment
and a ring, and carried a shepherd's staff. The
head of the Christian faith, the bishop of Rome,
adopted the same title and dressed himself in
the same manner, becoming the 'Papa' or
'Father'—the Pope—who subsequently sat
literally in the same seat in Rome as the Pater
Patrum! The throne of St Peter at Rome is older
than the Church. From the carved motifs
decorating it, it was Mithraic.
All Christian
priests, like Mithraic priests, became 'Father',
despite an editor of Matthew's specific
repudiation of this and several other rival
religious habits on Jesus's behalf:
But you are not to be
called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and
you are all brethren. And call no man your
father on earth, for you have one Father, who
is in heaven. Neither be called masters, for
you have one master, the Christ. (Matthew
23:8-10)
The Magi, priests of
Zoroaster, wore robes displaying the sword of
Mithras. Identical robes are worn by Christian
priests to this day. Why is the Pope's crown
called a tiara, a Persian headdress? Why do
Christian bishops wear a divided tiara called a
mitre? Did they adopt the habit from Mithras's
priests who wore a mitra (Greek) to
signify their office and the duality of the
world. Mithraists commemorated the ascension of
Mithras by eating a mizd, a sun-shaped
bun embossed with the sword (cross) of the god.
This "hot cross bun" as the mass
was adapted to Christianity and eventually
degenerated to the communion wafer, though it is
still the same design, in Catholic churches at
least.
In the fourth
century, Constantine effectively merged
Mithraism with Christianity and the other solar
cults of the Empire under the control of the
Christian bishops. Roman Emperors from Julius
Caesar to Gratian had been pontifex maximus,
high priest of the Roman gods. When Theodosius
refused the title as incompatible with his
status as a Christian, the Christian bishop of
Rome had no such qualms about taking the title.
Patriarchal Pagan purists as well as worshippers
of Isis defied official syncretism for a few
hundred more years but after the beginning of
the fifth century, the bishops were confident
enough to purge Pagan religions. Paganism
survived precariously for a while but illegally.
Holy Days
The Christian Bible
has no calendar of holy days and at first
Christianity had no festivals, holy days or
Sabbaths. When the Saviour might arrive on a
cloud at any moment, one has little interest in
constructing calendars. To gentile Christians
all days were the Lord's day so there was no
basis for separating out just some of them. As
hopes of an early return faded, the traditional
festivals of Passover and Pentecost, the latter
from the Essenes' Festival of the Renewal of the
Covenant, were remembered as commemorating the
crucifixion and the events of Acts. But, once
Christianity became a state institution,
principles gave way totally to pragmatism and
holy days were introduced to front Pagan
festivals which people had become accustomed to
celebrating and which could not easily be
suppressed.
The great festivals
at Easter in honour of Attis and other gods were
popular and had to be given a Christian raison
d'etre. The church was quite open about this as
a letter of Pope Gregory in 601 AD shows,
but it might come as a shock to many Christians
to know that Christmas, Easter, the Assumption,
the feast of John the Baptist, the feast of St
George and the fast of Lent are all Pagan.
The Christian
Sabbath is also Pagan. The Babylonians adopted a
seven day week based on the cycles of the moon
and directed that certain types of work should
not occur on certain days called Sabbaths. The
seven days of the week were early identified
with the seven known planets beginning with the
sun. The first day was therefore dedicated to
the sun and the last day to Saturn. But the god
Saturn was considered unlucky so no work was
risked on his day. The people commissioned by
Cyrus to leave Babylonia and set up a temple to
Yehouah adopted the Babylonian habit of not
working on a Saturday. The story of the Jewish
Sabbath, the day when God in the creation myth
rested from his labours, was devised to offer an
explanation for the custom they had adopted.
Subsequently, the
Jews imposed such a strict interpretation on the
day of rest that a man could be executed for
lighting a fire on the Sabbath and the
scriptures record that, in the time of Moses, a
man was indeed executed merely for gathering
fire wood on the Sabbath (Num 15:32-36). It was,
of course, an exemplary tale written after the
Babylonian exile and not by Moses himself as
legend has it.
Early Christians
believed that Jesus had repealed laws on the
Sabbath and did not include observance of it in
his ordinances. Even Paul attacked the Galatians
for observing a special day as holy and he
repeated his view in his letter to the
Colossians. In the second century Irenaeus
confirmed that Jesus had cancelled observance of
a Sabbath. Tertullian added in the third century
that Sabbaths were unknown to Christians. The
church fathers, Victorinus, Justin, Clement,
Origen, Eusebius, Epiphanius, Cyril, Jerome and
others were all emphatic that Christians knew no
Sabbath!
There was a whole
tradition in the Roman world of having Sunday as
a sacred holiday and the early gentile
Christians found it convenient to match it.
Obviously Sunday was a special holy day for sun
worshippers which included the worshippers of
Mithras. Mithras was called Dominus, the
Lord, and his sacred day was Sunday. So Sunday
was The Lord's day long before the
Christians took it as their sacred day. Because
of the remnants of Nazarene tradition
associating Jesus with the sun, justified by
Malachi, and backed up by the tradition that
Jesus had risen from the dead on a Sunday, it
became customary even in the first century for
Christians to meet on a Sunday. For Christians
Sunday also became the Lord's Day. Irenaeus and
Tertullian both thought the Lord's Day should be
a day of rest but plainly there was no adoption
of any strict observance of it, though it was
regarded as a special day.
In 321 AD
Constantine, still not officially a Christian,
ordered that the "venerable day of the
Sun" should be a compulsory day of rest.
And so it became, gradually taking on a stricter
religious purity so that, despite the
protestations of Luther that people should dance
and feast on that day, the puritans took it over
and turned it into a day to rival that of the
Mosaic Law of the post-exilic Jewish priesthood!
Mithraism eventually
died out after its suppression by the Christians
in 376-377 AD. By then its doctrines and
ceremonies had been absorbed into Christianity
so it had little basis for an independent
existence. The two religions had almost
everything in common: a divine Lord who offered
men salvation; a sacramental meal; baptism; the
idea of the believers being crusaders against
evil; an ultimate judgement of the soul; ideas
of Heaven and Hell; a high moral code.
Ernest Renan, a
Catholic scholar who wrote a famous Life of
Jesus, believed that if it were not for
Christianity we should all today be worshippers
of Mithras. The reasons for the success of
Christianity were its overwhelmingly syncretic
nature, the admission of women, the
expropriation of the Jewish Scriptures,
and the claim that the Christian incarnate god
was a historic figure.
Tertullian, whose
father was probably a Mithraist, says the
initiation of the soldier, the third rank, but
the first of full membership, was by his being
offered a crown on the point of a sword. He was
not to accept the crown and instead declare that
Mithras was his crown! Not only does this ritual
evoke the temptation of Jesus, but the crown
spoken of was plainly the solar halo, and the
sword a cross! Augustine of Hippo, S Augustine,
admits the two religions had effectively merged
when he claimed that the priests of Mithras
worshipped the same God he did. Mithras was
Jesus.
Christian Arguments
Most Christians
dismiss the worship of Attis and of Mithras as
of no general importance in the Empire until
later than the New Testament time, not until the
second and third centuries in the case of
Mithras worship. Edwin Yamauchi, a Christian
archaeologist and polemicist, says:
Those who seek to
adduce Mithra as a prototype of the risen
Christ ignore the late date for the expansion
of Mithraism to the west... [Most] dated
Mithraic inscriptions and monuments belong to
the second century (after 140 AD ), the
third, and the fourth century AD.
Never trust a
Christian. The earliest remains of a church
building, at Dura-Europos, date from 230 AD,
and nothing else is found until the end of the
third century, yet there are many earlier
Mithraea. Plainly, the worship of Mithras was
well ahead of the worship of Jesus. In any case
there is a dated pre-Christian Mithraic
inscription of Antiochus I of Commagene (69-34 BC)
in eastern Asia Minor. Mithras shakes hands with
the King, he wears the Phrygian cap, the Persian
trousers, and a cape. His hat is star speckled
and rays of light emerge from his head like a
halo. His torq is a serpent. This is the image
of the Roman Mithras in a scene taking place 100
years before the crucifixion.
There were
worshippers of Mithras in Rome in Pompey's time
(67 BC). There is a first century
inscription contemporary with the earliest
Christians from Cappadocia and one from Phrygia
dated to 77-78 AD. Sanctuaries to
Mithras existed in Rome and Ostia in the first
century. Another inscription in Rome dates to
Trajan's reign (98-117 AD), and the
Christian Father, Justin Martyr, mentions
Mithraism in about 140 AD. Despite this
Christians say the real diffusion of Mithraism
only begins at the end of the first century.
Christians are more
defensive about Mithras than perhaps any other
pre-Christian Roman god. The two religions had
so much in common, it can hardly be denied
although Christians will try to deny it as a
first shot. Their second shot is that the
followers of Mithras copied the Christians!
Christians feel obliged to take silly positions
on these issues because they seek to defend
Christianity as a revealed religion, not one
which evolved in a certain milieu and therefore
has common features with contemporary religions.
So, no religious practices that seem in any way
to be like any Christian ones could have been
original—they must have been taken from
Christianity!
Their third shot is
even more tenuous. Critical scholars were
Christians and tended to interpret one cult by
another including Christianity. They aimed to
construct a general mystery theology or
common mystery religion. Starting with
the Christian ideas they already had in their
heads, they interpreted the mystery religions
and found Christian ideas in the mysteries
having unconsciously put them there when they
were not really! As we saw, St Augustine
admitted that the priests of Mithras and he both
worshipped the same abstraction. Even Christian
saints therefore were subject to this
methodological carelessness. They too were
projecting Christian ideas! Oh, and their claim
that the similarities came from demonic
imitation of Christian rites was made only so
that the Church Fathers could make apologetic
capital out of the analogy. It is all Christian
obfuscation necessitated by their absurd
beliefs. They have muddied the waters of history
for far too long.
The Greeks
themselves never favoured Mithras worship
because it came from the religion of their
traditional enemies, the Persians. But Persian
influence went into Greece by other routes.
Greeks philosophers, if not Greek peasants, were
never so bigoted that they thought there might
not be anything to learn from their enemies.
Plato was probably influenced by Persian
religion and thought just after the time when
the Persians had been the greatest threat. Later
the Mithraists took back into their religion
Platonic ideas through the neo-Platonists. The
Christians did the same while decrying Pagan
practice.
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