Mithraism was the Freemasonry of the Roman world. Whatever its ancestry in the ancient religion of Persia, it became something very different as soon as it left its native soil and took root in late Republican Rome. Like the other cults of Oriental origin, it moved with the vast commerce in human beings that is such a notable, and tragic, feature of the ancient world. Hundreds of thousands of slaves and soldiers, forcibly transported for life away from their homelands, could carry but one thing with them as they travelled: their faith. The cult of Mithras is one that travelled well, from Syria to Scotland, and it did not matter much that off1cial recognition of it in Rome was comparatively tardy, in the later second century A.D.
It is futile to try to correlate the widely scattered monuments and inscriptions with the ancient Persian religion, in the hope of coming up with a single Mithraic creed. But the social aspects arc easily enough described. The adherents were bound to no exclusive allegiance, being permitted like present-day Masons to belong to any church, or none; but they were bound by secrecy, which they observed (as people always did in ancient times) with a holy dread. Hence our relations with Mithraism will always be determined more by curiosity than by certainty. The Mithraic community was all male: women gravitated to the parallel cult of Cybele or the exclusively female one o Bona Dea. The congregations were small: no surviving Mithracum could house more than a hundred, but of course bigger lodges may have formed, and dissolved, at army camps. There were no social barriers, so that slaves and privates could become high initiates. The ceremonies were solemnly enacted and the initiations quite awe-inspiring.
Whether Mithraism resembled Masonry further, in being based on the esoteric truths common to all branches of the Perennial Philosophy, is another matter. The divergence o f symbolism from one Mithraeum to another is quire startling, and scholars have admitted that the local artisans did not always understand what they were depicting. One can go further and say that in that case they must have lacked proper direction, and that perhaps the masters themselves were none too sure of their symbolism and exactly what it meant.
The very impossibility of fitting the basic Mithraic symbols satisfactorily with those of the esoteric inheri tance of mankind suggests that the whole affair may have been an invented religion rather than a revealed one, perhaps on a level with Mormonism which similarly cakes as its starting point an ancient and authentic revelation.
When one studies Mithraic symbolism, one is struck by the constant shifting oflevels: from the astronomical to the metaphysical, from the psychological to the ontological. Who is the Mithras of the Mysteries? He is one of the gods, lower than Ahura Mazda (the Supreme Deity of Light of the Persians) but higher than the visible Sun. He is creator and orderer of the universe, hence a manifestation of the creative Logos or Word. Seeing mankind afflicted by Ahriman, the cosmic power of darkness, he incarnated on earth. His birth on 25 December was witnessed by shepherds. After many deeds (some of them described with the plates) he held a last supper with his disciples and returned to heaven. At the end of the world he will come again to judge resurrected mankind and after the last battle, victorious over evil, he will lead the chosen ones through a river of fire to blessed immortality. It is possible to prepare oneself for this event during life by devotion to him, and to attain a degree of communion with him through the sacramental means of initiation.
No wonder the early Christians were disturbed by a deity who bore so close a resemblance to their own, and no wonder they considered him a mockery of Christ invented by Satan, their own Dark Lord. In a certain way they may have been right. It is my suspicion - which, unfortunately, cannot be bolstered by scholarly evidence- that Roman Mithraism was born from some clairvoyant sense of the coming of Christ, seen through the perspective of Zoroastrian dualism. It is precisely the connections with Christianity that make Mithraism so interesting, and so confusing. Persian dualism is a faith of the Age of Aries (second-first millennia B c), which is the sign of the Sun's exaltation and Mars' rulership ; so Mithras, the solar warrior, is still re-enacting the close of the previous Age of Taurus (fourth-third millennia B C) by slaying the cosmic Bull. All the Arien leaders arc fighters: the ram-horned Moses, Ammon and Mars/Ares himself. Jesus Christ, on che other hand, immolates the age of war in the only way possible: by sacrificing himself as the Ram or Lamb of God. In doing so he ushers in the Age of Pisces (second-first millennia A D), the era which ch erishes in its hea rt an ideal of devotion and love.
Egg-Birth of Mithras
In one of his many syncretistic guises, Mithras springs fully-armed from the broken halves of the cosmic egg, like Phanes Protogonus, the first-born god of light in the Orphic theogony (cf. Pl. 142). The world-egg represents the entirety, in potentia, of one cosmic cycle, and its sundering symbolizes the polarity of positive and negative forces without which no world could unfold in time and space.
Mithras is both the personified creator who breaks the egg, and the mediator between the opposites who eventually heals the rift and reconciles the warring factions. He is born in the sign of Capricorn, i.e. at the winter solstice: the light of the world enters on the darkest day of the year.
Mithras as Sun God
Beyond the mention of his name in the inscription, 'Deo invicto Mitrae', there is nothing to distinguish this figure from Sol. He holds in his right hand a whip to drive his quadriga, and his rays pierce the stone to allow the light of a lamp to shine through from behind. Mithras is sometimes identifted with the Sun, yet sometimes put in actual opposition to it. According to one legend he stole the Sun God's cattle, slaughtered the cosmic Bull, and thus made possible the generation of mankind. The myths of cattle-stealing or cattle-herding gods, such as Hermes and Krishna, allude to the appropriation by spiritual monads of human bodies prepared through physical generation, or in Platonic language to the vivification of 'soma by nous'. his the task of religions to lead these monads up again to their proper home.
The Child Mithras Turning the Zodiac
The divine Child holds in his hand the globe of the earth, just as the Christ Child in medieval icons holds the royal orb surmounted by his symbol, the cross. Both are imagined as lords of a limited, geocentric cosmos: a manifested physical universe which extends as far as the eye can see, i.e. to the stars of the Zodiac, placed 'foursquare' between the winds or archangels. The beasts below, often shown in the tauroctones (bull-slaying monuments), probably represent the elements and four signs of the Zodiac connected with generation: Serpent-Fire-Leo (cf. the shape of the 'Leo' symbol); Dog-Earth-Virgo (dogs are sacred to Mercury, ruler of the sign); Raven-Air-Libra; Scorpion-Water-Scorpio. But Mithraic iconography is so inconsistent the Scorpion is absent here, for example that one cannot offer any blanket fexplanations of its meaning.
Tauroctone
The central image of Mithraic iconography is his slaying of the cosmic Bull which Ormuzd, god of light, had created, in order to save it from the clutches of Ahriman, god of darkness. The myth can be interpreted on several levels. Terrestrially it represents the sun's gift of fertility to crops and creatures: the pouring of vitality into the ground or into the womb from which new life can arise. This is the level explored in Frazer's The Golden Bough Psychologically it is the sacrifice or sublimation of the sexual powers, of which the bull is an obvious symbol, in the interests of higher development, as practised by monks and yogis, Astronomically it marks the end of the Taurean Age of mankind (fourth-third millennia B.C) which preceded the Arien Age (second-first millennia B.C) to which the Persian myths belong.
Theologically it is the action of one of the lower gods, like Jehovah or Jupiter, who 'slay' the archetypal Ideas to create the physical matter without which our world could not exist. (Ahriman, mistakenly called a principle of evil, is only 'dark' because he represents an unknowable, higher level of gods, who have no possible commerce with matter or with the limited time and space signified by the circumscribing Zodiac.) Physically it is the transmutation of matter into energy, taking place between the positive and negative potencies. Metapltysically it is the encounter between the infinite cosmic substance (Taurus) and the binding cosmic idea (Gemini).
Just like the Crucifixion, the Mithraic sacrifice takes place between Sun and Moon and under the eye of the Father God Jupiter. The good and bad thieves also have their correspondences in the two torch-bearers Cautes and Cautopates, who have as many meanings as the sacrifice itself. They are at every level reflections of the primal duality of light and darkness, life and dea th, spirit and matter, etc. Cautopates, with lowered torch, rules the autumn equinox and winter solstice, the barren half of the year ; Cautes, with raised torch, is the return of fertility in spring and summer. But in southern Iranian reliefs their symbolism is reversed, because there the scorching summer sun withers the vegetation which flourishes in the cooler, wetter months. Much of Mithraic iconography seems to belong in the venerable tradition of vegetation symbolism. But to those versed in the Hermetic-Platonic tradition, Cautopates also signiftcs the extinction of the soul's light on its entry into the body, and Cautes its rebirth after ' death'.
Mithraic Magus
The nudity of Greek gods and of the Greeks themselves was repugnant to the people of the Middle East, whose fear of their own sexuality led even before the Muslims to excesses such as the veiling of women. This overdressed Magus, and indeed Mithras himself in his cloak and trousers, must have seemed as exotic to the Graeco-Roman world as the Japanese in kimonos did to nineteenth-century Europe. One garment, the ' Phrygian' cap, became a universal symbol of the Oriental cults, being worn by Mithras, Attis, the Kabeiroi. the Dioscuri, and their servitors. Later it became the headgear of medieval Masons. the sans-culotttes, and La Liberté herself. Its symbolism is one of supreme spiritual attainment, represented also in Osiris.
Like Shiva, another supreme god of cyclic creation and destruction, Aion here has four arms, though what the front ones held we do not know : probably sceptre and keys. The back pair dutch arrows carved onto the wings. The accompanying symbols here are definitely chthonic: three-headed Cerberus,the guard-dog of the underworld, and a mass of snakes. To an ordinary Mithraist the conception of Aion as a god of Hades like Pluto or Serapis was probably more familiar than the lofty explanations of Orphism. The lions' hea ds would denote courage, and the eye on the breast intelligence- though it is of course the 'eye of the heart' through which the soul knows truth. The apron, an Egyptian garment later adopted by Freemasonry, may serve to emphasize the purity to which devotees of Mithras aspired.
Aion
Unlike the cosmic gods who are shown inside the Zodiac, Aion stands above a Zodiac-encircled glo be or wears the signs on his body. Here the signs are indicated by the twelve divisions of his sceptre. The two bands crossing the globe recall the World Soul's method of creation in Plato's Timaeus, by crossing the two circles of world-stuffin the form of an X . Aion is a creator, but not of worlds: he emanates metaphysical principles or gods. In the Persian thcogony he is Zervan, whose two sons are the opposites Ormuzd and Ahriman between which Mithras mediates. So he is in a way the highest aspect of Mithras, being beyond rather than between the opposites.
By Joscelyn Godwin in "Mistery Religions in the Ancient World", Harper & Row Publishers, USA, 1981, excerpts pp. 98-109. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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