Mithraic Practice and Christianity

Mithraic Practice and Christianity Dr M D Magee

The cave of the Tauroctony was the material world into which the soul had to descend to be purified before it could return to the solar realm of light and spirit. Initiates of the Mysteries of Mithras had to be ritually pure and were purified by baptism, as we are told by Tertullian, a third century Christian from North Africa, but they were obliged to undergo a series of eighty trials of increasing difficulty. The initiate, Dr O Seyffert, notes, had to remain unconquered—undaunted and unfazed by the tasks, which involved water, fire, hunger, thirst, scourging and solitude. There were seven levels of initiation, one for each of the seven planets and each with its symbol, the highest level being that of the Father, Pater. From the lowest these grades were Corax (symbol—a raven, planet—Mercury), Nymphus (a male bride, Venus), Miles the first grade of full membership (a soldier, Mars), Leo (a lion, Jupiter), Perses (a Persian, Luna, the moon), Heliodromus (a charioteer of the sun, Sol, the sun), meaning a servant of Mithras, and finally Pater (a father, Saturn), the head of the grotto, and reminiscent of the honour the Zoroastrians paid to the head of the family and Ahuramazda, perhaps. Quite unlike Christianity, members of the cult of Mithras were not stopped from being members of other cults.

At the level of initiation called Miles or soldier, the mystae of Mithras were symbolically branded, the priest making the sign upon their foreheads to redeem their sins and to mark them as soldiers of Mithras ready to “fight the Good Fight.” Tertullian complains that the Devil was imitating the Christians’ “divine mysteries” because initiates of the Mithraic religion were baptised in this way, and we can be sure the sign made was that of the cross. The mythological justification was Zoroastrian, that good creation was in warfare with evil creation, and these soldiers were soldiers of the good creation. Christians use the expressions “soldiers of Christ” and “put on the armour of light,” somewhat inappropriate metaphors for a religion of love, one might think, but entirely appropriate to their Mithraic origins.

Mithraists had their Lord’s Supper, apparently a celebration of the meal that Mithras had with the sun deity, which had eschatological significance.

Above the rank of Leo votaries were called “participants” because they participated in this sacred meal. Below the rank of Leo, Mithraists were called “servants” and served the higher levels—the similarity with Essenism is striking. Participants committed their everlasting loyalty to the saviour god, Mithras, in his fight against evil. Plutarch tells us that their reward was to be returned to life in the restored world at the eschaton. It therefore stands for a heavenly meal, and it is depicted in some Mithraea, so was considered important. It seems like the messianic meal of the Essenes, symbolic of the righteous entering heaven.

Justin Martyr, in his first Apology, says the arrangement of the grottos, with benches on either side of a table, was because the Mithraic central ritual was a sacred meal of bread and water, that he himself compared to the Christian Eucharist. He complained that Satan had copied the Christian Eucharist because the adherents of Mithras also partook of consecrated bread and water symbolic of the incarnate god’s body. The bread consisted of small round cakes—each marked with a cross!


Fourth century AD marble statue of the Good Shepherd, unJesus-like but quite Mithraic

Mithraic language and symbolism are widespread in the New Testament. “The Dayspring from on High,” “the Light,” and the “Sun of Righteousness” are all Mithraic (or Essene) expressions used of Jesus. Mithras was born out of a rock—Theos ek Petros—and Christian imagery shows the stable, in which Jesus was born, as a cave. (The newly born Mithras was adored by shepherds who brought him gifts.) It was not originally oppression that led the early Christians to use catacombs for worship but simply a desire to copy the practice of the worshippers of Mithras. They decorated their catacombs with paintings, one of the most popular ones being of Moses striking the rock. Mithras, struck a rock to produce water for his followers to drink! The most popular picture of all however was Christ as the Good Shepherd. Mithras too was the Good Shepherd.

The Cilicians introduced Mithraism to Rome. The chief city of the Cilicians and one of the main centres of Mithraism was Tarsus, home of S Paul. What Paul writes:

And were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and did all eat the same spiritual meat, and did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ,
(1 Cor 10:4)

mutatis mutandis is entirely appropriate to a Mithraic initiation, and indeed, “Moses” is the biblical rendering of the Persian High God, Ahuramazda, the Lord Mazda. Paul is leaning noticeably toward the Mithraic idea of the God from the Rock, and so does Jesus when, referring to Peter, he says:

Upon this rock I will build my church,
(Mt 16:18)

Both Mithraism and Christianity introduced symbolic sacrifice: Mithraists by depicting the sacrifice of the bull prominently in their churches and Christians by images of the crucifixion of Jesus and the symbolic drinking of his blood in the communion. The shedding of animal blood was originally a substitute for the shedding of human blood. The bull is interchangeable with a ram—the Ram in the Persian Zodiac is a lamb. So Mithras can also be sacrificed as a lamb just as Jesus is the Paschal Lamb. Remember Mithras is also the seven spirits of goodness just as the Book of Revelation has a slain lamb with seven horns and seven eyes representing the “seven spirits of God”—pure Zoroastrianism! Easter when the Paschal Lamb was eaten was a Mithraic festival. In the seventh century the church tried to suppress pictures of Jesus as a lamb precisely because of its Pagan associations.

The Church took most of its features from Pagan mystery religions: vestments, pomp, ritual, mitre, wafer. When Western fundamentalist Christians try to argue that the Church took nothing from the mystery religions, they are not only arguing against sceptics and atheists, they are arguing also against the millions of protestant Christians whose protest was precisely that the Roman Church had adopted Pagan, largely Mithraic, practices.

The Vatican Hill in Rome considered sacred to Peter was previously sacred to Mithras. The cave of the Vatican was a Mithraeum until December 25, 376 AD, the birthday of the sun god, when a city prefect suppressed Mithraism and seized the grotto in the name of Christ. Mithraic artefacts found in the Vatican Grotto were taken over by the Church.

The head of the Mithraic faith was the Pater Patrum, the “Father of Fathers,” who sat in the Vatican cave. The Mithraic Holy father wore a red cap and garment, and a ring, and carried a shepherd’s staff. The head of the Christian faith, the bishop of Rome, adopted the same title and dressed himself in the same manner, becoming the “Papa” or “Father”—the Pope—who subsequently sat literally in the same seat in Rome as the Pater Patrum! The throne of St Peter at Rome is older than the Church. From the carved motifs decorating it, it was Mithraic.

All Christian priests, like Mithraic priests, became “Father,” despite an editor of Matthew specifically repudiating this and several other rival religious habits on Jesus’s behalf:

But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brethren. And call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven. Neither be called masters, for you have one master, the Christ.
(Mt 23:8-10)

The Magi, priests of Zoroaster, wore robes displaying the sword of Mithras. Identical robes are worn by Christian priests to this day. Why is the Pope’s crown called a tiara, a Persian headdress? Why do Christian bishops wear a divided tiara called a mitre? Did they adopt the habit from Mithras’s priests who wore a “mitra” (Greek) to signify their office and the duality of the world. Mithraists commemorated the ascension of Mithras by eating a “mizd,” a sun-shaped bun embossed with the sword (cross) of the god. This “hot cross bun” as the “mass ”was adapted to Christianity and eventually degenerated to the communion wafer, though it is still the same design, in Catholic churches at least.

In the fourth century, Constantine effectively merged Mithraism with Christianity and the other solar cults of the Empire under the control of the Christian bishops. Roman Emperors from Julius Caesar to Gratian had been “pontifex maximus,” high priest of the Roman gods. When Theodosius refused the title as incompatible with his status as a Christian, the Christian bishop of Rome had no such qualms about taking the title. Patriarchal Pagan purists as well as worshippers of Isis defied official syncretism for a few hundred more years but after the beginning of the fifth century, the bishops were confident enough to purge Pagan religions. Paganism survived precariously for a while but illegally.

Holy Days
The Christian Bible has no calendar of holy days and at first Christianity had no festivals, holy days or Sabbaths. When the Saviour might arrive on a cloud at any moment, one has little interest in constructing calendars. To gentile Christians all days were the Lord’s day so there was no basis for separating out just some of them. As hopes of an early return faded, the traditional festivals of Passover and Pentecost, the latter from the Essenes’ Festival of the Renewal of the Covenant, were remembered as commemorating the crucifixion and the events of Acts. But, once Christianity became a state institution, principles gave way totally to pragmatism and holy days were introduced to front Pagan festivals which people had become accustomed to celebrating and which could not easily be suppressed.

The great festivals at Easter in honour of Attis and other gods were popular and had to be given a Christian raison d’etre. The church was quite open about this as a letter of Pope Gregory in 601 AD shows, but it might come as a shock to many Christians to know that Christmas, Easter, the Assumption, the feast of John the Baptist, the feast of S George and the fast of Lent are all Pagan.

Mithras was associated with festivals at the equinoxes, whence the figures of the torchbearers, Cautes and Cautopatres. The main festival however changed during the Persian empire, when the Persians chose to adopt the Babylonian New Year. So, although it began as an autumn festival, it later became a spring one.

In his Errors of the Profane Religions, Firmicus Maternus, the Christian Father, ridicules Mithraists for doing what Christians do, saying that, in March…

…on a certain night an image is laid upon a bier, and it is mourned with solemn chants. When they are sated with this fictitious lamentation, a light is brought in. Then the mouths of all the mourners are anointed by a priest, who murmurs slowly: “Rejoice, followers of the saved god, because there is for you, a relief from your grief.”

More clearly he writes:

Thou dost bury an image, thou dost mourn an image, thou dost bring forth an image from the grave, and, wretched man, when thou hast done this, thou dost rejoice… Thou dost arrange the members of the recumbent stone… So the devil also has his Christs.

The Christian Sabbath is also Pagan. The Babylonians adopted a seven day week based on the cycles of the moon and directed that certain types of work should not occur on certain days called Sabbaths. The seven days of the week were early identified with the seven known planets beginning with the sun. The first day was therefore dedicated to the sun and the last day to Saturn. But the god Saturn was considered unlucky so no work was risked on his day. The people commissioned by Cyrus to leave Babylonia and set up a temple to Yehouah adopted the Babylonian habit of not working on a Saturday. The story of the Jewish Sabbath, the day when God in the creation myth rested from his labours, was devised to offer an explanation for the custom they had adopted.

Subsequently, the Jews imposed such a strict interpretation on the day of rest that a man could be executed for lighting a fire on the Sabbath and the scriptures record that, in the myth of Moses, a man was indeed executed merely for gathering fire wood on the Sabbath (Num 15:32-36). It was, of course, an exemplary tale written after the Persian colonization.

Early Christians believed that Jesus had repealed laws on the Sabbath and did not include observance of it in his ordinances. Even Paul attacked the Galatians for observing a special day as holy and he repeated his view in his letter to the Colossians. In the second century Irenaeus confirmed that Jesus had cancelled observance of a Sabbath. Tertullian added in the third century that Sabbaths were unknown to Christians. The church fathers, Victorinus, Justin, Clement, Origen, Eusebius, Epiphanius, Cyril, Jerome and others were all emphatic that Christians knew no Sabbath!

The Lord’s day was Sunday, for obvious reasons but not Christian ones. There was a whole tradition in the Roman world of having Sunday as a sacred holiday and the early gentile Christians found it convenient to match it. Obviously Sunday was a special holy day for sun worshippers which included the worshippers of Mithras. Mithras was called “Dominus,” the Lord, and his sacred day was Sunday. So Sunday was the “Lord’s day” long before the Christians took it as their sacred day. Because of the remnants of Nazarene tradition associating Jesus with the sun, justified by Malachi, and backed up by the tradition that Jesus had risen from the dead on a Sunday, it became customary even in the first century for Christians to meet on a Sunday. For Christians Sunday also became the Lord’s Day. Irenaeus and Tertullian both thought the Lord’s Day should be a day of rest but plainly there was no adoption of any strict observance of it, though it was regarded as a special day.

In 321 AD, Constantine, still not officially a Christian, ordered that the “venerable day of the Sun” should be a compulsory day of rest. And so it became, gradually taking on a stricter religious purity so that, despite the protestations of Luther that people should dance and feast on that day, the puritans took it over and turned it into a day to rival that of the Mosaic Law of the post-exilic Jewish priesthood!

Mithraism eventually died out after its suppression by the Christians in 376-377 AD. By then its doctrines and ceremonies had been absorbed into Christianity so it had little basis for an independent existence. The two religions had almost everything in common: a divine Lord who offered men salvation; a sacramental meal; baptism; the idea of the believers being crusaders against evil; an ultimate judgement of the soul; ideas of Heaven and Hell; a high moral code.

Ernest Renan, a Catholic scholar who wrote a famous Life of Jesus, believed that if it were not for Christianity we should all today be worshippers of Mithras. The reasons for the success of Christianity were its overwhelmingly syncretic nature, the admission of women, the expropriation of the Jewish Scriptures, and the claim that the Christian incarnate god was a historic figure.

Tertullian, whose father was probably a Mithraist, says the initiation of the soldier, the third rank, but the first of full membership, was by his being offered a crown on the point of a sword. The initiate was not to accept the crown and instead declare that Mithras was his crown! Not only does this ritual evoke the temptation of Jesus, but the crown spoken of was plainly the solar halo, and the sword a cross! Augustine of Hippo, S Augustine, admits the two religions had effectively merged when he claimed that the priests of Mithras worshipped the same God he did. Mithras was Jesus.

Christian Arguments
Most Christians dismiss the worship of Attis and of Mithras as of no general importance in the empire until later than the New Testament time, not until the second and third centuries in the case of Mithras worship. Edwin Yamauchi, a Christian archaeologist and polemicist, says:

Those who seek to adduce Mithra as a prototype of the risen Christ ignore the late date for the expansion of Mithraism to the west… [Most] dated Mithraic inscriptions and monuments belong to the second century (after 140 AD ), the third, and the fourth century AD.

Never trust a Christian. The earliest remains of a church building, at Dura-Europos, date from 230 AD, and nothing else is found until the end of the third century, yet there are many earlier Mithraea. Plainly, the worship of Mithras was well ahead of the worship of Jesus. In any case there is the dated pre-Christian Mithraic inscription of Antiochus I of Commagene (see above) in eastern Asia Minor. Mithras shakes hands with the King, he wears the Phrygian cap, the Persian trousers, and a cape. His hat is star speckled and rays of light emerge from his head like a halo. His torq is a serpent. This is the image of the Roman Mithras in a scene taking place 100 years before the crucifixion.

There were worshippers of Mithras in Rome in Pompey’s time (67 BC). There is a first century inscription contemporary with the earliest Christians from Cappadocia and one from Phrygia dated to 77-78 AD. Sanctuaries to Mithras existed in Rome and Ostia in the first century. Another inscription in Rome dates to Trajan’s reign (98-117 AD), and the Christian Father, Justin Martyr, mentions Mithraism in about 140 AD. Despite this Christians say the real diffusion of Mithraism only begins at the end of the first century.

Christians are more defensive about Mithras than perhaps any other pre-Christian Roman god. The two religions had so much in common, it can hardly be denied although Christians will try to deny it as a first shot. Their second shot is that the followers of Mithras copied the Christians! Christians feel obliged to take silly positions on these issues because they seek to defend Christianity as a revealed religion, not one which evolved in a certain milieu and therefore has common features with contemporary religions. So, no religious practices that seem in any way to be like any Christian ones could have been original—they must have been taken from Christianity!

Their third shot is even more tenuous. Critical scholars were Christians and tended to interpret one cult by another, including Christianity. They aimed to construct a general “mystery theology” or common “mystery religion.” Starting with the Christian ideas they already had in their heads, they interpreted the mystery religions and found Christian ideas in the mysteries having unconsciously put them there when they were not really! As we saw, S Augustine admitted that the priests of Mithras and he both worshipped the same abstraction. Even Christian saints therefore were subject to this methodological carelessness. They too were projecting Christian ideas! Oh, and their claim that the similarities came from demonic imitation of Christian rites was made only so that the Church Fathers could make apologetic capital out of the analogy. It is all Christian obfuscation necessitated by their absurd beliefs. They have muddied the waters of history for far too long.

The latest hypothesis, if it merits such an honourable title, of Christian apologists is that Roman Mithraism was “a new creation using old Iranian names” to give an exotic coloring to a new mystery cult. Such things happened, but not quite in this unashamedly commercial way. Religions evolved, notably when they crossed cultural boundaries, just as Christianity rapidly changed when it entered the Roman sphere from being a Jewish sect to being a new eastern mystery cult. The changes were not emtirely uncommercial in Christianity and doubtless the same was true of Mithraism, but the continuity is undeniable.

When it comes to specifics, Christians are as deceitful and two faced as ever. They are utterly unable to deny that 25 December was the birthday of the Unconquerable Sun, the Roman name of Mithras. What they say is that it does not matter! Suddenly all Christians become fundamentalists because the New Testament does not say when Jesus was born. The church decided Jesus was born on 25 December precisely because it was already the highly popular birthday of Mithras, and a national holiday. What it was was the midwinter solstice, a solar festival and therefore associated with a solar god. The reason the Christian bishops were happy to accept this as a Christian festival was because Christianity was seen by everyone as a solar religion—even the Christian bishops.

Jesus had his twelve companions and sometimes Mithras is said also to have had twelve companions. There is nothing in the extant myths we have of Mithras to confirm this, but twelve in the context of a solar god can only represent the constellations of the Zodiac. What we do know is that Mithras was an aspect or yazata of the God of Heaven, Ahuramazda, and Mazda seems originally to have been the Indo-European god, Varuna. Mithras and Varuna are both sun gods, Mithras being the bright sun and Varuna the dark sun, the winter or night-time sun. In Indian mythology they were included among twelve sun gods, the Adityas. Four or sometimes six constellations are illustrated in the Mithraic Tauroctony, though they are not all in the Zodiac.


The four evangelists are the four quarterly signs of the zodiac: man, bull, lion and eagle, being Aquarius, Taurus, Leo, and Scorpio

In Christian iconography, the four evangelists are depicted by Zodiacal signs, but not all twelve apostles. Twelve small figures found on some representations of the Tauroctony, seem to be celestial symbols possibly signifying the Zodiac and the god’s companions, but it is conjecture. Neverthless, allowing for the transmutation of myths and the gaps left by Alexander and the Mullahs, there are obvious connexions here that make sense in the context we have.

Mithras was considered a mediator between good and evil as represented by Ahuramazda and Angra Mainyu. Apologists like to find a distinction even in this simple role from the Christians’ Redeemer, but like many futile Christian objections, they simply refuse to accept religious symbolism. On that basis, we are right to see nothing other than a biscuit in the Holy Communion, not flesh, and nothing but wine in the chalice, not blood. These apologists are utter dolts. Mithras, as is accepted, had a role of acting as some sort of mediator between the Good and the Evil Spirits. He was neutral in this role except when he defended the worldly level, when he defended mankind. His initiates were introduced to him via the idea of a “Logos,” undeniably showing that Christianity and Mithraism had some common roots.

MORE HERE Tweet