The Mysteries of Mithras

The name Mithras is very old. A god Mitra is invoked in a treaty of the Mitanni kingdom of northern Mesopotamia around 1380 BCE, Mitra appears in the Indian Rig Veda, and Mithra, a god of contracts, light and truth, is a major divine being in the Avesta, the scripture of Zoroastrianism, where he is still honoured today. When Romans of the first century CE began to worship Mithras in secret groups, they called their rites Persian, and their god wore Persian clothes.

How Mithra became the Roman Mithras is one of the great puzzles of ancient religion. In the 1890s the Belgian scholar Franz Cumont argued that the cult was essentially Persian religion carried west by soldiers and traders. Since the 1970s most scholars have doubted this. The Roman cult appears suddenly in the late first century CE, in Rome and on the frontiers, with a fully formed set of images that have no clear model in Iran. Many now think it was largely a Roman invention, perhaps by a single founder or circle, that borrowed Persian names to give it an air of ancient wisdom.

The earliest references are telling. Late in the first century CE the poet Statius described Mithras twisting the horns of a bull beneath the rocks of a Persian cave, and dedications from about 100 CE onwards show communities already in place. Plutarch, writing in the early second century, claimed that Cilician pirates had practised Mithraic rites in the first century BCE, but historians are uncertain how this relates to the later cult.

Almost everything known about Mithraic belief has to be read from images, and scholars disagree about almost every one of them. The central scene, repeated in hundreds of reliefs, paintings and statues, shows Mithras kneeling on a bull, pulling back its head and plunging a dagger into its neck while looking away. A dog and a snake reach towards the wound, a scorpion attacks the bull’s genitals, and ears of wheat sometimes sprout from its tail. A raven perches nearby, Sol and Luna watch from above, and the torchbearers Cautes and Cautopates stand at either side.

Cumont read the scene as a Persian creation myth in which the bull’s death brings life to the world. Later scholars, among them David Ulansey and Roger Beck, pointed out that the animals correspond to constellations lying along a band of the sky, and argued that the image is a star map. In Ulansey’s view Mithras was a god powerful enough to shift the whole cosmos; Beck saw the mithraeum as a model of the universe through which the soul descends and ascends. Others stress the theme of sacrifice and salvation. None of these readings can be proved, because the cult’s own explanations are lost.

Other images fill in the story. Mithras is born from a rock, shoots an arrow at a rock to bring forth water, carries the bull on his shoulders, shakes hands with Sol and then feasts with him on the bull’s hide before both ride away in the sun chariot. The third-century philosopher Porphyry, quoting older writers, says that the cave of Mithras was an image of the cosmos and that the cult taught the passage of souls through the heavens.

Mithraists met in a mithraeum, a small rectangular room made to look like a cave. Some were built underground, as beneath the church of San Clemente in Rome; others were vaulted and painted with stars. Raised benches ran down both sides, where twenty to forty initiates reclined for the cult meal, facing the image of the bull-slaying at the far end. Ostia, the port of Rome, alone has produced more than a dozen mithraea.

Members passed through seven grades: Raven, Bridegroom, Soldier, Lion, Persian, Sun-Runner and Father. Each was linked with a planet, and a floor mosaic in the mithraeum of Felicissimus at Ostia shows their symbols. Initiation involved tests whose exact nature is uncertain; paintings from Capua Vetere seem to show blindfolded, kneeling initiates, and Christian writers describe ordeals that may be exaggerated. The cult meal of bread and wine reminded Christian authors such as Justin Martyr of the Eucharist, which they explained as an imitation inspired by demons.

Inscriptions show that members included soldiers and officers, imperial slaves and freedmen, customs officials and merchants, and no women. The cult offered a close community, a ladder of honour and, it seems, a hope for the soul, all within a framework that fitted easily alongside the worship of other gods and loyalty to the emperor.

The Mysteries of Mithras reached their height in the second and third centuries. As late as 308 the emperors Diocletian, Galerius and Licinius restored a sanctuary at Carnuntum on the Danube to Mithras as protector of their rule. During the fourth century, as the empire became Christian, support declined. The laws of Theodosius I in 391–392 banned pagan sacrifice and temple worship, and the last traces of Mithraic activity disappear around 400. Some mithraea show deliberate damage to the cult image, while others were simply left empty or later built over by churches.

The cult left no successor community. A popular theory holds that it was a close rival to Christianity, a view encouraged by Ernest Renan’s remark that, had Christianity been halted, the world would have become Mithraic. Most historians now see the comparison as overstated: Mithraism was a small, men-only cult of local groups, without scriptures, clergy beyond each group or a mission to convert the world.

The reasons for the cult’s disappearance are debated as much as its origins. Christian emperors withdrew support from pagan cults and eventually banned them, and Christian writers attacked Mithraic rites by name. Yet some historians argue that many groups had already dwindled before the bans, as frontier armies were reorganised and the urban communities that sustained the cult changed in the crises of the third century. Mithraism depended on small, self-financing groups of men meeting in their own rooms. When those groups stopped meeting, nothing larger remained to carry the god forward, and the mysteries ended quietly rather than in one dramatic moment.

Its rediscovery has been dramatic. The London mithraeum, found in 1954 during rebuilding in the City, drew tens of thousands of visitors and has been restored near its original site. Mithraea at Ostia, Rome and Carrawburgh on Hadrian’s Wall can be visited today, and the strange image of the god and the bull still invites interpretation. New mithraea continue to be found, adding inscriptions and images that test each theory in turn.