Mithras

The teaching

Taught from the carvings of his temples, with Porphyry, Celsus and the Christian writers who answered the cult.

A story told in stone

The cult kept its story in pictures rather than books, and the pictures tell it in a set order, carved in panels around the great scene of the bull or painted on the temple walls. Its outline is the same from the Thames to the Euphrates; the words that went with it are lost, and it is read from the stone. The temple as a cave, the bull-slaying image, the members' meal and the seven grades are taught under Orders and mystery schools, in The ancient mysteries; here is the story the panels tell, and what the few writers outside the cult recorded of it.

Born from the rock

Mithras is born from a rock, a youth already, naked but for his Persian cap, rising from the stone with a knife in one hand and a torch in the other; in some carvings shepherds watch, and the inscriptions call him the god born from the rock. In a carving from Housesteads on Hadrian's Wall he comes out instead from an egg within the ring of the zodiac. His first deed is a miracle of water: he draws his bow and shoots an arrow into a rock, a spring gushes out, and a figure kneels to drink.

The bull

Then comes the bull. Mithras finds it at pasture, seizes it by the horns and rides it as it bolts, holding on until it tires; then he hoists it by the hind legs onto his shoulders and drags it into the cave, a labour the carvings show again and again. In the cave he kills it, kneeling on its back, pulling its head up by the muzzle and driving his knife into its neck, often with his face turned back towards the Sun above. From the dying bull life springs: ears of wheat grow from its tail, and in some carvings grapes from its blood, while a dog and a snake reach for the wound and a scorpion grips its parts. A line painted in the temple beneath the church of Santa Prisca in Rome, as it is usually read, says to him: and you saved us too, by shedding the blood.

The Sun and the meal

After the slaying the Sun himself kneels before Mithras, who sets a crown on his head, or raises the bull's haunch over him; then the two clasp right hands over an altar and are bound in friendship. They feast together on the hide of the bull, served by attendants wearing the masks of a raven and a lion, as on a carving from Konjic in Bosnia, and the members' own meal on the benches of the temple was the image of that feast. Last of all Mithras climbs into the Sun's chariot and rises with him into the sky.

What the outsiders wrote

The first writer to name him, the poet Statius, about AD 90, speaks of Mithras twisting the horns of the bull under the rocks of a Persian cave. Plutarch says that the pirates of Cilicia whom Pompey crushed kept secret rites, among them those of Mithras, which still lasted in his own day. Porphyry tells that Zoroaster first dedicated a natural cave in the mountains of Persia to Mithras, the maker and father of all, as an image of the world Mithras made, and gives him his seat on the line of the equinoxes, bearing the sword of the Ram and riding the Bull, as lord of all that comes to be.

The pagan Celsus, as Origen quotes him, describes an emblem of the Mithraic mysteries for the soul's road through the heavens: a ladder with seven gates and an eighth above them, the first gate of lead for Saturn, the second of tin for Venus, then bronze for Jupiter, iron for Mercury, a mixed metal for Mars, silver for the Moon and gold for the Sun. And a Christian of the fourth century, Firmicus Maternus, preserves a line spoken to the initiate: initiate of the stealing of the bull, joined by the right hand to the illustrious father.

The rival rite

The Christian writers saw his rites as a rival's. Justin Martyr wrote that in the mysteries of Mithras bread and a cup of water are set out with certain words, and held that evil spirits had copied the Lord's Supper. Tertullian wrote that Mithras signs his soldiers on the forehead, offers bread and brings in an image of resurrection. These are the charges of opponents, and they record what outsiders saw: a meal of bread and water, a mark on the forehead and an image of rising.

The god of the contract

His name is that of Mithra in the old Persian hymns, the god of the covenant, whose very name means contract: he has a thousand ears and ten thousand eyes, keeps watch over every oath, and strikes down the one who breaks his word. The Roman worshippers dressed their god as a Persian and held that their mysteries came from Persia, as Porphyry's story of Zoroaster shows, and their own god too was a god of the bond: his members were joined to him and to one another by the clasp of the right hand.

The sky in the carving

Many have read the bull scene as a picture of the sky, for the zodiac often frames it and the grades are joined to the planets. Each creature in it has its constellation on the band of the sky between the Bull and the Scorpion: the Dog, the Snake, the Raven, the Scorpion, the ear of wheat in the Virgin's hand, and in some carvings the Lion and the Cup. The two torchbearers, one torch raised and one lowered, have been taken for the rising and the setting sun, or for spring and autumn. The members climbed through seven grades as Celsus' ladder climbs through seven planets, and their god sat, as Porphyry said, on the line where day and night are equal.