Mithras

“ THE CULT OF MITHRAS The Phrygian and Egyptian mysteries eventually gave way before the greatest of all the mystery cults, the worship of Mithras. The Mithraic cult made its appeal to a wide range of human nature and gradually supplanted both of its predecessors. Mithraism spread over the Roman Empire through the propagandizing of Roman legions recruited in the Levant, where this religion was the vogue, for they carried this belief wherever they went. ”

“ At her side stands the sun-god Mithras, who is represented as a young and victorious hero. Both deities occupy the very first rank in the popular creed; while to the theologian they are the most potent of the good powers—Mithras being the herald and propagator of the service of Light and the mediator betwixt man and Ahuramazda, who now fades more into the background. Thus, in the subsequent period, the Persian religion appears purely as the religion of Mithras. ”

“ The final scene of all comes when we see Mithras arresting the glorious chariot of the Sun-God drawn by four white horses, and, mounting therein, being driven off by the ray-crowned Helios himself to the abode of light above the firmament [878] . In this 248also, it is easy to see a likeness between representations of the Ascension of Mithras and that of Elijah or even of Christ [879] .
However this may be, the Legend of Mithras, as thus portrayed, shows with fair closeness the belief of his worshippers as to his place in the scheme of the universe. ”

“ But this being, like the Platonic Zeus and the Gnostic Bythos, was considered too great and too remote to concern himself with the doings of the visible universe, in which Mithras acts as his vicegerent. Whether Mithras was or was not considered as in some sort the double or antitype of the Supreme Being cannot be said; but it is worth noticing that in the Vedas, as among the Hittites, Varuna and Mitra form an inseparable couple who are always invoked together, and that the same seems to have been the case with Ahura Mazda and Mithra in the oldest religious literature of the Persians [881] . ”

“ Candidates who successfully passed the Mithraic initiations were called Lions and were marked upon their foreheads with the Egyptian cross. Mithras himself is often pictured with the head of a lion and two pairs of wings. Throughout the entire ritual were repeated references to the birth of Mithras as the Sun God, his sacrifice for man, his death that men might have eternal life, and lastly, his resurrection and the saving of all humanity by his intercession before the throne of Ormuzd. ”

“ For the bull whose death at the hands of the God takes the central position in all the representations of Mithras was originally none other than the God himself—the sun in the constellation of the Bull, at the spring equinox—the sacrifice of the bull accordingly being also a symbol of the God who gives his own life, in order by his death to bring a new, richer and better life. Mithras, too, performs this self-sacrifice, although his heart struggles against it, at the command of the God of Heaven, which is brought to him by a raven, the messenger of the God of Gods. ”

“ He was described as "sitting on the throne of the good and the perfect, in regions of pure light," crowned with rays, and with a ring on his finger—a circle being an emblem of infinity; sometimes as a venerable, majestic man, seated on a Bull, their emblem of creation.
"Mithras the Mediator" was the god-Sun. Their most splendid ceremonials were in honor of Mithras. They kept his birth-day, with many rejoicings, on the twenty-fifth of December, when the Sun perceptibly begins to return northward, after his long winter journey; and they had another festival in his honor, at the vernal equinox. ”

“ In the struggle of the two opposing worlds, according to Persian ideas, Mithras stood in the foreground, the spirit of light, truth, and justice, the divine “friend” of men, the “mediator,” “deliverer,” and “saviour” of the world. He shared his office with Honover, Ahuramazda’s Word of creation and revelation ”

“ 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 ”

“ In the religion of the people, these divinities always survived; and the popularity of Mithras is evinced by the numerous Aryan proper names thence derived (Mithradates, &c.) . The educated community who had embraced the pure doctrine in its completeness scarcely recognized them, and the inscriptions of Darius ignore them. Only once he speaks of “the gods of the clans,” and once of “the other gods which there are.” Not till the time of Artaxerxes II. were Mithra and Anaitis received into the official religion of the Persian kings. ”

“ Mithras is spiritual light contending with spiritual darkness, and through his labours the kingdom of darkness shall be lit with heaven's own light; the Eternal will receive all things back into his favour, the world will be redeemed to God. The impure are to be purified, and the evil made good, through the mediation of Mithras, the reconciler of Ormuzd and Ahriman. Mithras is the Good, his name is Love. In [pg 363] relation to the Eternal he is the source of grace, in relation to man he is the life-giver and mediator. ”

“ Such is the nature of the temple named Istachar; and of the caverns in the mountains of Chusistan. They were sacred to Mithras, and were made use of for his rites. Some make a distinction between Mithras, Mithres, and Mithra: but they were all the same Deity, the [709] Sun, esteemed the chief God of the Persians. In these gloomy recesses people who were to be initiated, were confined for a long season in the dark, and totally secluded from all company. ”

“ Nor was the very real, if somewhat vague, monotheism which Mithraism taught, very likely to attract, at first sight, the enthusiasm of a large and mixed population engaged in civil pursuits. If the conjecture made above be correct, the Mithraist in the ordinary way acknowledged no other god than Mithras, although he would probably have admitted that he was but the representative and antitype of the supreme Jupiter whom he recognized as the official head of the State pantheon. ”

“ Later philosophy too lent its aid in that it took the sun as the supreme symbol of divinity. On Roman dedications Mithras is often called simply “The Invincible Sun,” Sol Invictus.
For all its exotic character Mithraism could offer nothing essentially new in point of theology which would attract devotees, nor could it win them simply by its elaborate and distinctive ritual. ”

“ The early Christian missionaries abhorred the Mithras myth with a hatred infinitely more bitter than that reserved for the common, every day mysteries. In their heart of hearts they knew that the Indian God was their most serious rival. ”

“ Although the statement must be guarded with all the reserves imposed upon us in all matters relating to the religion of Mithras by the absence of written documents, it is probable that this lower division of the universe was our earth. The monuments give us with fair certainty the Mithraic ideas as to how life was brought thither; but they tell us little or nothing as to the condition in which the earth was at the time, nor how it was supposed to have come into existence. ”

“ Hercūles, who appears in Persian mythology as Mithras, the unconquered sun, is traced back to his Phœnician origin in the line of Baal. Therefore, the Persian Mithras represents Chemosh and Tammuz, both of whom are sun-gods as well as the “god of forces,” for the sun is the most powerful influence in the planetary world. The mysteries of Mithras were celebrated with much pomp and splendor on the revival of the Persian religion under the Sassanidæ. ”

“ Mithras is not here, however, the Supreme Being, nor even the highest among the gods benevolent to man. This last place is occupied in the Zend Avesta by Ahura Mazda, 232“the omniscient lord,” who appears to be the Persian form of Varuna, the god of the sky whom we have seen associated with Mitra in the Vedas [798] . ”

“ Mithraism was in no way universal. It was mainly a soldiers’ superstition, its relics are not numerous as are those of the main popular deities.
There is not a shred of evidence, nor of anything that can be twisted into an implication of evidence, that St. Paul had ever heard of Mithras. To suggest that St. Paul got the dogma of the Atonement from the mysteries of Mithras is as though I were to suggest that Mr. Wells got his doctrine of Natural Selection from the Contrat Social; for (1) I have no proof that he has ever heard of the Contrat Social; he probably never has. ”

“ Mithras, the Persian Saviour, and mediator between God and man, was believed by the inhabitants of Persia, Asia Minor and Armenia, to have been put to death, and to have risen again from the dead. In their mysteries, the body of a young man, apparently dead, was exhibited, which was feigned to be restored to life. By his sufferings he was believed to have worked their salvation, and on this account he was called their "Saviour." His priests watched his tomb to the midnight of the veil of the 25th of March, with loud cries, and in darkness ”

“ The mysteries of Mithras do not turn on a human victim: contrariwise, the victim is a bull. The man gets much the best of it—with a knife.
The idea that Mithraism was ever a serious rival to the Catholic Church is an old-fashioned piece of guesswork, which every succeeding year of research has done more and more to discredit. ”

“ Zoroaster held that there were two divine beings, the better being a god, Horomazes (Ormuzd) , the other a dæmon Areimanios (Ahriman) , the one most like to light of all sensible things, the other to darkness and ignorance, "and between them is Mithras, for which reason the Persians call Mithras the Mediator." But the hour of Mithras was not yet come, and in all his writings Plutarch hardly alludes to him more than half a dozen times. ”

“ Finally, philosophy as well as politics contributed to the success of Mithraism, for the outcome of the attempt to recognize in the Graeco-Roman gods only forces of nature was to make the Sun the most important of deities; and it was the Sun with whom Mithras was identified.
The beginning of the downfall of Mithraism dates from A.D. 275, when Dacia was lost to the empire, and the invasions of the northern peoples resulted in the destruction of temples along a great stretch of frontier, the natural stronghold of the cult. The aggression of Christianity also was now more effective. ”

“ This Zoroastres therefore called the one of these Oromazes, and the other Arimanius; and affirmed, moreover, that the one of them did, of anything sensible, the most resemble light, and the other darkness and ignorance; but that Mithras was in the middle betwixt them. For which cause, the Persians called Mithras the mediator. And they tell us that he first taught mankind to make vows and offerings of thanksgiving to the one, and to offer averting and feral sacrifice to the other. For they beat a certain plant called homomy113 in a mortar, and call upon Pluto and the dark ”

“ Even here it points back to a past time when the people concerned still had their dwelling-place along with the kindred Aryan tribes in a much more northerly locality.27 Thus Mithras, the “Sol invictus” of the Romans, struggling victoriously through night and darkness, is a Sun hero, who must have found his way into Persia from the north. ”

“ Now, whatever be the case with regard to these,—whether the Persians and those who conduct the mysteries of Mithras give false or true accounts regarding them,—why did he select these for quotation, rather than some of the other mysteries, with the explanation of them? For the mysteries of Mithras do not appear to be more famous among the Greeks than those of Eleusis, or than those in Ægina, where individuals are initiated in the rites of Hecate. ”

“ We have sure evidence that the mysteries of Mithras were, in particular, strongly affected by the influence of the Pythagorean sect, which was itself organised like a kind of mystery. In a more general way, philosophy introduced into the mysteries ethical ideas and, instead of the purely ritualistic or rather magical means of salvation, some moral requirements became necessary to earn immortality. ”

“ It should be noticed that the mystic ladder of Mithras had eight steps, and we have seen that when the soul had climbed through the seven planetary spheres there was still before her the heaven of the fixed stars. The Sun seems in Origen’s account of the Mithraic faith to have formed the last world to be traversed before this highest heaven could be reached; and it was through the disk of the Sun that the ancients thought the gods descended to and reascended from the earth. ”

“ Here the fragment abruptly breaks off, and plunges into directions for the manufacture of oracles and the other stuff common in Magic Papyri. One is not much inclined to believe with M. Cumont that the author of the galimatias knew nothing about Mithraism [964] , and merely introduced Mithras’ name into his opening to impress his readers with a sense of the value of his recipes. ”