Francis Legge

“ THE WORSHIP OF MITHRAS Few of us, perhaps, are inclined to recognize that, from its first establishment down to the Mahommedan Invasion of the VIIth century, the Roman Empire found itself constantly in the presence of a bitter, determined, and often victorious enemy. Alexander had conquered but had not destroyed the Persians; and, although the magic of the hero’s personality held them faithful to him during his too brief life, he was no sooner dead than they hastened to prove that they had no intention of tamely giving up their nationality. ”

“ Sect. XV. “How many evil thoughts do we not think every day! How many deceitful and unseemly words do we not speak! How many unseemly deeds do we not do! Thus do we prepare torments for ourselves by crimes and frauds. Since we have walked body and soul in the love of the greedy and shameless Demon of Envy, and the Light of the Five Gods which we absorb in our food every day thereby goes to the Land of Evil. Wherefore, O my God, to cleanse ourselves from sin, so pray we now: Manâstâr hîrzâ! ”

“ What they, and even more urgently, their womenfolk needed was a God, not towering above them like the Eternal Sun, the eye of Mithras and his earthly representative, shedding his radiance impartially upon the just and the unjust; but a God who had walked upon the earth in human form, who had known like themselves pain and affliction, and to whom they could therefore look for sympathy and help. Such a god was not to be found in the Mithraic Cave.
For these reasons, probably, Mithraism fell after a reign of little more than two centuries. Yet for good or ill, few religions have lived in vain ”

“ This perpetual self-identity under varying forms, this annihilation of death through the power of self-reproduction, was the object of an enthusiastic worship, characterized by remarkable self-abandonment and immersion in the divine, by a mixture of obscene symbolism and sublime truths, by negation of the moral distinctions and family ties that exist in a more developed society, but do not exist in the free life of Nature. ”

“ O my God, if in our sin we have unwittingly sinned against the God of the Sun and Moon, the Gods enthroned in the two resplendent Palaces. If, although calling him the True, Mighty, and Powerful God, we have not believed in him. ”

“ I prostrate myself and praise with a pure heart and a sincere tongue, the Great God, the Father of the Lights and of their elements, the most highly praised, the glorified, thee and all thy Majesty and thy blessed worlds that thou hast called forth! ”

“ As the “armour” of the First Man, from which the souls of men are formed, was made with the aid of these five worlds, it is reasonable to suppose that one or other predominates in the soul of everyone. Hence probably the degree in the Manichaean hierarchy to which any hearer might attain was thought to be decided for him before his birth, and governed his destination after death. Thus it is said in the Pistis Sophia: “Those who have received exalted mysteries shall be in exalted places, and those who have received humble mysteries in humble places in the light of my kingdom.” ”

“ He aimed, in short, at establishing a universal religion which should include within its scope the three faiths that between them commanded the allegiance of the whole civilized world, and should acknowledge him as its founder and chief. Had his plans come to fruition in his lifetime, he would have attained an empire over the minds of men far greater and wider than any ever claimed or dreamed of by the most ambitious of the Roman pontiffs. ”

“ A reign of terror might often exist among the great families in the capital under a jealous or suspicious Emperor, and the majority of the proletariat might there as in other large towns be entirely given up to the brutal or obscene amusements of the arena or the theatre. But in the provinces these things had little effect on the working of the system set up under the Empire; and the civilized world was for the first time, perhaps, in its history, beginning to feel the full benefits of good government and freedom from foreign invasion. ”

“ The gods are there also with the vesture, so that the sinful one thinks they have come to deliver him. But they have only appeared to him to reproach him, to remind him of his actions, and to convince him of his guilt in having neglected the support of the Just. He wanders unceasingly throughout the world, and is tortured until the coming of the End of the World, when he will be thrown into hell. Thus, Manes teaches,” continues the tradition, “that there are three paths for the soul of man. One leads to Paradise, which is the path of the Just. ”

“ MARCION We have seen that Valentinus left Alexandria to settle in Rome before promulgating his new doctrine [685] , and the Eternal City seems at that time to have drawn to itself as with a magnet all those Oriental teachers of Christianity who wished to make innovation in religion. Rome in the IInd century had become a veritable sink into which poured men of all nations and creeds whether old or new. ”

“ Gazing with our eyes, hearing with our ears, seizing with our hands, and trampling with our feet, we ever torture and impede the Light of the Five Gods, the dry and wet earth, the five kinds of animals, and the five kinds of plants and trees. ”

“ With this view they went back to what is probably the earliest philosophical theory of the origin of the universe, and declared that before anything was, there existed God, but God conceived as an infinite ocean of divinity, too great and too remote to be apprehended by man’s intelligence, of whom and of whose attributes nothing could be known or said, and who could only be likened to a boundless sea. ”

“ A sovereign without religion is a tyrant, and a people which have no religion may be deemed the most monstrous of all societies. Religion may exist without a State, but a State cannot exist without religion; and it is by holy laws that a political association can alone be bound [1011] .”
Yet in spite of these sentiments, more pithily expressed perhaps in the “No bishop, no king” of our own James I, the task of founding a common religion for the whole of the new Persian empire must have presented some uncommon difficulties. ”

“ In other respects, the Magian seems to have been a primitive faith given up to the worship of the powers of nature or elements, which it did not personify in the anthropomorphic manner of either the Semites or the Greeks, and to have paid little attention to public ceremonies or ritual. It follows therefore that, like the religions of many uncivilized people of the present day, it would draw no very sharp distinction between good and evil gods, and would be as ready to propitiate or make use of the evil, that is those hostile to man, as the good or benevolent. ”

“ For the second mystery of the First Mystery, if it is duly accomplished in all its forms, and the man who accomplishes it shall speak the mystery over the head of a man on the point of going forth from the body, so that he throws it into his two ears:—even when the man who is going forth from the body shall have received it aforetime, and is a partaker of the word of Truth [567] ,—verily, I say unto you that when that man shall go forth from the body of matter, his soul will make a great flash of light, and will pass through every Place until it come into the kingdom of that mystery. ”

“ The Demon of Envy [the name generally used in the treatise for the Devil] planted these five poisonous trees of death in the five kinds of ruined places. He made them on every occasion deceive and trouble the original luminous nature, to draw in from without the nature which is stranger to it, and to produce poisonous fruit. Thus the tree of the dark thought grows within the city of the bones; its fruit is hatred: the tree of the dark feeling grows within the city of the nerves; its fruit is irritation: the tree of the dark reflection grows within the city of the veins ”

“ The god whose name is Let Complete Death Come, when he has summoned anybody to him, they come to him, their hearts disturbed by the fear of him; for there is nobody dares look up to him from amongst gods and men, the great are to him as the small and he spares not [those] who love him, but he tears the nursling from the mother as he does the old man, and everyone who meets him is filled with affright [664] . ”

“ Much of this may be due to the desire apparently inborn in natives of Egypt to define with excessive minuteness the topography of the invisible world; but the disposition of these different Rulers was by no means a matter of indifference to mankind. The Demiurge, as in the Ophite system, was not, indeed, bad, but foolish and blind, not knowing what he did, nor why he created man. Yet it is he who sends forth the souls of men which reach them at their birth and leave them at their death. Hence, says Hippolytus, he is called Psyche or Soul as Sophia is called Pneuma or Spirit. ”

“ The follower of Manes, on the contrary, concealed his religion as carefully as Basilides wished his followers to conceal theirs, and even went to the length of outwardly adopting a creed different from his own. It is not therefore to be wondered at that the rulers of the Roman Empire, whose acquaintance with the worship of Mithras was a thousand times more profound than our own, should have favoured Mithraism and have made every effort to suppress Manichaeism. ”

“ Ὅταν γὰρ τὸν μὲν κόσμον λύητε, ὑμεῖς δὲ καταλύησθε, κυριεύετε τῆς κτίσεως καὶ τῆς φθορᾶς ἁπάσης. “You were deathless from the beginning and the children of life everlasting, and you wish to share out death among you, in order that you may dissipate and destroy it and that death may die in and by you; for when you put an end to the world and are yourselves put an end to, you have rule over creation and all corruption.” So one of the documents of the Pistis Sophia speaks of this world being finally consumed by the fire “which the perfect wield.” ”

“ Thus the truth of Renan’s comparison of the Mithraic faith with modern Freemasonry becomes more apparent, and we may picture to ourselves the Mithraists as a vast society spread over the whole of the Empire, consisting mainly of soldiers, and entirely confined to the male sex. The example of the Emperor Julian, himself a devotee of Mithras, but actively concerned in the propagation of the worship of other divinities, such as Apollo, Serapis, Mars, and Cybele [973] , shows that its real aim was not so much the conversion of individuals as the inclusion of all other cults within itself. ”

“ Below the starry world comes the Sphere of Heimarmene or Destiny, so called apparently because both the earthly and heavenly lot of each soul is determined on its downward passage through it, and below that again the Sphere simply so called, which is the visible firmament apparently stretched above us. ”

“ The theory of the macrocosm and the microcosm, which teaches that the body of man is in itself a copy of the great world or universe, is here carried to excess [1202] , and we hear much of the “trees” which certain demons, previously sticking to the elements, says the treatise, “like a fly to honey, a bird to bird-lime, or a fish to the hook [1203] ,” plant in the soul to the corruption and ultimate death of the better desires there implanted by the Light. ”

“ The Christian tradition of Manes’ teaching concerning the protoplasts says merely that “he who said ‘Let us make man in our own image’” was the same Prince of Darkness who thereby counselled the other Archons to give up their light in order to make man in the likeness
“of the form that we have seen, that is to say, of the First Man. And in that manner,” it continues, “he created the man. They created Eve also after the like fashion, imparting to her of their own lust, with a view to the deceiving of Adam. ”

“ But whatever its cause, there can be no doubt about the hatred felt by Manes for the Jewish religion, which is prominent in every tradition of his teaching. The earlier Gnostics, like Marcion, had made the God of the Old Testament a harsh but just and well-meaning tyrant; but Manes would have none of this, and declared that he was a fiend.
“It is the Prince of Darkness,” the Christian tradition makes him say, “who spoke with Moses, the Jews, and their priests. Thus the Christians, the Jews, and the Pagans are involved in the same error when they worship this God. ”

“ The theory that the emperor, king, or chief of the State is of a different nature to other men, and is in a peculiar manner the care of the gods, was first formulated in the West during the time that Mithraism was in power and is a great deal more the creation of the Persian religion than of the Egyptian, in which he was said to be the incarnation of the Sun-God. ”

“ Even the avoidance of crime has no other sanction, and complete withdrawal from the world is advocated on merely prudential grounds; while rejection of the mysteries is the unpardonable sin:
“When I have gone unto the light” (says the Jesus of the Texts of the Saviour to His disciples) “preach unto the whole world, saying: Renounce the whole world and the matter that is therein, all its cares, its sins, and in a word all its conversation, that ye may be worthy of the mysteries of the light, that ye may be saved from all the torments which are in the judgments. ”