Mithraism

• 1. Introduction

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  Mithraism was a Roman mystery religion centered on a god who killed a bull in a cave, and for three centuries it spread quietly through the armies, merchant quarters, and bureaucracies of the Roman Empire. Its initiates called themselves syndexioi, those "united by the handshake", and they met in underground chambers so numerous that modern estimates put the total for the city of Rome alone at roughly 680 such temples. No written theology survives. No founding myth was ever set down in a text that endured. What remains is stone: about 420 sites have yielded related materials, including around 1,000 inscriptions and 700 carved images of the same scene repeated again and again across the empire, from Roman Britain in the northwest to Roman Dacia in the east. Who were these men, where did their god come from, and why did the Roman world forget Mithras so completely that he was already a stranger by late antiquity? Those questions have occupied scholars for more than a century, and they remain, in large part, unanswered.

• 2. The God and His Names

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  An early Greek form of the name Mithras appears in the Cyropaedia, a 4th century BCE biography of the Persian king Cyrus the Great, written by Xenophon. The name reaches back further still: a peace treaty between the Hittites and the kingdom of Mitanni, dated to around 1400 BCE, contains the form mi-it-ra-, making it the earliest recorded evidence of the deity in Asia Minor. Iranian Mithra and Sanskrit Mitra are believed to share a common ancestor in the Indo-Iranian word mitrás, meaning contract, agreement, or covenant.

  Scholars debate whether all these names point to the same god. John R. Hinnells treated Mitra, Mithra, and Mithras as a single deity worshipped across several different religions. David Ulansey took the opposite position, arguing that the bull-slaying Mithras was an entirely new god who began to be worshipped in the 1st century BCE, and to whom an old and respected name was applied. Mary Boyce, a researcher on ancient Iranian religions, concluded that whatever the extent of Iranian content in the Roman cult, the name Mithras alone shows it carried some importance.

  The term Mithraism itself is a modern convention. Writers of the Roman period called the religion the Mithraic mysteries, the mysteries of Mithras, or the mysteries of the Persians. Modern historians sometimes use Roman Mithraism or Western Mithraism to separate it from the Persian worship of Mithra, a distinction that itself reflects the ongoing argument over how closely the two traditions are actually related.

• 3. The Bull-Slaying at the Center

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  In every mithraeum, the central image was identical: Mithras kneeling on a bull, his left hand gripping its nostrils, his right driving a dagger into its flank, his gaze turned back over his shoulder toward Sol. A dog and a snake reach upward toward the wound. A scorpion seizes the bull's genitals. A raven watches from nearby. Ears of wheat grow from the bull's tail, sometimes from the wound itself. Two torch-bearers, Cautes and Cautopates, stand on either side dressed like Mithras, one torch pointing up, one pointing down.

  This image, called the tauroctony, appears in about 700 surviving examples. Some were fixed reliefs; others were constructed on pivots so they could be rotated during ritual. On the reverse side of these rotating monuments was a more elaborate feasting scene, suggesting the tauroctony was displayed during the first part of a ceremony and then turned to reveal the banquet for the second part. Some mithraea also contained small portable versions of the scene, probably for private devotion.

  What the killing meant is a question scholars have not resolved. David Ulansey pointed out that there is no evidence the Iranian god Mithra ever killed a bull, calling this "perhaps the most important example" of evident difference between Iranian and Roman traditions. Roger Beck mapped each element of the scene onto a constellation: the bull is Taurus, the dog is Canis Minor or Canis Major, the scorpion is Scorpius, the raven is Corvus, the wheat ear on the bull's tail corresponds to Spica. Beck himself concluded that Mithras is not a constellation but the Unconquered Sun moving through them. Ulansey argued instead that Mithras represents Perseus, pointing to the position of Perseus directly above Taurus in the night sky, and to shared iconographic details between the two figures, including youth, a dagger, and a Phrygian cap. Michael Speidel linked Mithras to Orion, based on proximity to Taurus and the consistent shape of the figure's costume. A more recent proposal by Jelbert suggests the deity represented the Milky Way itself, whose path in the sky bridges Taurus and Scorpius.

• 4. Temples, Rituals, and Membership

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  Mithraic temples were sunk below ground, windowless, and typically small. In cities, a basement might be converted; in other locations, a space was excavated and vaulted over, or a natural cave was used. Stone benches lined the longer walls, providing room for 15 to 30 diners, very rarely more than 40. The cult generally preferred to open a new center rather than expand an existing one, which is why so many small mithraea are scattered across the empire while none grew into a dominant sanctuary.

  Mithraists called their sacred spaces speleum or antrum (cave), crypta, fanum, or templum; the word mithraeum is a modern coinage. Many were built near springs or streams, and a basin was frequently incorporated into the structure, suggesting fresh water was required for certain rites. The walls of mithraea were commonly whitewashed, and where that whitewash survives it often carries extensive graffiti, which, alongside dedicatory inscriptions on altars, forms the main body of Mithraic text.

  Archaeology of numerous mithraea confirms that feasting was central to worship. Animal bones and very large quantities of fruit residues have been found at many sites. Cherry-stones in particular appear in large numbers, pointing to mid-summer, late June or early July, as a season especially associated with Mithraic festivities. The Virunum album, an inscribed bronze plaque, records a festival of commemoration dated to the 26th of June 184 CE. Beck connects celebrations at this time of year to the significance of the summer solstice.

  Membership was almost entirely male. Only male names appear in surviving inscribed membership lists, and historians including Richard Gordon have concluded the cult was for men only. Soldiers were strongly represented, along with merchants, customs officials, and minor bureaucrats. Few initiates came from leading aristocratic or senatorial families until the pagan revival of the mid-4th century; but freedmen and slaves were always present in considerable numbers. Membership lists from Dura-Europos and Virunum record initiates by grade and allowed scholars to track individuals transferring between mithraea in different locations.

• 5. Seven Grades of Initiation

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  St. Jerome lists the seven grades of Mithraic initiation, and Manfred Clauss argues their number must be connected to the seven planets. A mosaic in the Mithraeum of Felicissimus at Ostia Antica depicts all seven, each grade paired with symbolic emblems and placed under the protection of a planetary god. In ascending order: Corax the Raven, under Mercury; Nymphus the Bridegroom, under Venus; Miles the Soldier, under Mars; Leo the Lion, under Jupiter; Perses the Persian, under Luna; Heliodromus the Sun-Runner, under Sol; and Pater the Father, under Saturn.

  Each grade had its own emblems. The Leo carried a batillum, a sistrum, a laurel wreath, and a thunderbolt. The Pater wore elaborate jewel-encrusted robes with metallic threads and carried a shepherd's staff and a patera. Admission to the community was completed by a handshake with the pater, mirroring the handshake between Mithras and Sol in the mythology; this is the origin of the term syndexioi.

  A fragmentary Egyptian papyrus, Papyrus Berolinensis 21196, preserves part of what appears to be a catechism for the Leo grade, a question-and-answer exchange in which the examiner asks and the initiate responds with prescribed answers. The text is damaged, but phrases survive: the initiate received something "in a pit", was associated with "the hot and cold", and declares "the savior's" something in response to a question about wrapping. Clauss noted in 1990 that only about 14% of inscribed Mithraic names recorded before 250 CE identify the initiate's grade, leading him to suggest the seven grades represented a priestly class rather than the full membership. Gordon and others maintain that all initiates belonged to one of the grades.

• 6. Origins: The Scholarly Argument

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  Franz Cumont published his two-volume collection of source texts and monument images between 1894 and 1900, and his argument dominated the field for most of the following century. Cumont held that Roman Mithraism was essentially the Persian state religion transplanted westward, that the god Mithra had arrived in Rome accompanied by much of the Mazdaean pantheon, and that whatever changes occurred in the West were largely superficial.

  At the First International Congress of Mithraic Studies in 1971, John R. Hinnells and R.L. Gordon subjected Cumont's framework to sustained criticism. Hinnells concluded that Cumont's reconstruction of the bull-slaying scene was not merely unsupported by Iranian texts but was actually in serious conflict with known Iranian theology. Gordon argued that Cumont had severely distorted the available evidence by forcing material to conform to a predetermined model of Zoroastrian origins, and that the Mithraic mysteries in the West were an entirely new creation.

  Beck, reviewing the field from a later vantage point, suggested that the most likely scenario was the one proposed by Merkelbach: that the mysteries were created in the city of Rome by a single identifiable type of founder, someone from an eastern province who knew Iranian myths in detail but was Greek-speaking and incorporated elements of Greek Platonism. Clauss tended to agree. Archaeologist Lewis M. Hopfe pointed to the distribution of evidence, noting that there are only three mithraea in Roman Syria compared to the concentration in Rome, Italy, and the western provinces, and concluded that the religion seems to have begun in Rome and been carried eastward by soldiers and merchants.

  Ulansey offered a different theory entirely: that the Mithraic mysteries originated as a religious response to the Greek astronomer Hipparchus's discovery of the precession of the equinoxes, a phenomenon that revealed the entire cosmos to be moving in an unknown way. This discovery, Ulansey argued, was interpreted by the religion's founders as evidence of a powerful new god capable of shifting the cosmic spheres. The debate between these positions has not been resolved, and Beck concluded that the old Cumontian model of formation in Anatolia and diffusion westward is, as he put it, "by no means dead, nor should it be."

• 7. Rivalry, Suppression, and Forgetting

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  Ernest Renan wrote in 1882 that if Christianity had been arrested by some mortal malady, "the world would have been Mithraic." That claim has been contested by later scholars. Leonard Boyle pointed out in 1987 that only fifty known mithraea exist in the entire city of Rome. J. A. Ezquerra argued that the two religions never shared similar enough aims for Mithraism to pose a genuine threat of takeover.

  The 4th century changed everything. Christian emperors issued anti-pagan decrees, and according to L. H. Martin, Roman Mithraism came to an end with the decrees of the emperor Theodosius during the last decade of that century. Mithraic sanctuaries were destroyed. Clauss notes that inscriptions show Mithras appearing on dedications made by Roman senators who had not converted to Christianity, as part of the pagan revival among the elite in the second half of the century; but Beck states that "quite early in the fourth century the religion was as good as dead throughout the empire."

  At the Mithraeum at Pons Sarravi in Gallia Belgica, large numbers of votive coins deposited by worshippers were recovered scattered across the floor. The coins ran in a continuous series from the reign of Gallienus, who ruled from 253 to 268 CE, through to Theodosius I, who ruled from 379 to 395 CE. Christians apparently regarded the coins as polluted and left them where they fell, inadvertently preserving a precise record of the mithraeum's active life.

  Below several churches, including Santa Prisca and San Clemente, earlier mithraea were found. The ground plans of the churches above were laid out in ways that visually expressed Christianity's displacement of the older religion. Franz Cumont suggested that Mithraism may have survived in remote areas of the Alps and Vosges into the 5th century, and Mark Humphries noted that the deliberate concealment of Mithraic cult objects in some regions suggests worshippers were taking precautions against attack. In the end, the cult vanished so completely that Isis was still remembered in the Middle Ages as a pagan deity; Mithras had already been forgotten in late antiquity.