Month: October 2026

In the third and fourth centuries the worship of the sun moved from the private cave-sanctuaries of Mithras to the centre of the Roman state. Emperors gave the sun a temple, a priesthood, coins and a birthday. The Tetrarchs dedicated…

No question in Mithraic studies has been argued over more than this one: was the Roman cult of Mithras a western survival of an Iranian religion, or a new creation of the Roman world that used a Persian name and…

This chapter turns from images to people: initiation, the seven ranks, the meal, the exclusion of women, the charges of bloodshed, and who joined. The library’s sources agree that Mithraism was a small, secret, male, hierarchical brotherhood that was especially…

The Roman Mithras has to be studied mainly from stones, paintings and graffiti rather than from books. Vermaseren states the problem directly: “Ancient literature gives hardly any information about the meaning of this symbolic act, and what little we know…

In the god Mithra the library’s sources most clearly show religion merging with state power. From the fourth century BC to the first century AD he appears in royal inscriptions and in the throne-names of Pontus, Parthia, Armenia and Commagene,…

Zarathustra’s Gathas never name Mithra, yet in the Younger Avesta Ahura Mazda declares that he made Mithra as worthy of worship as himself. The library’s scholars disagree sharply about how this happened. Some see a prophet hostile to the cult…

The god whom Roman soldiers would later worship in caves first appears in history as a name on a diplomatic document. Before he slew a bull or was hailed as the invincible Sun, Mitra was the power that held two…

The Arab conquest ended Zoroastrianism’s long run as the religion of Iranian empires, but the faith survived it. It survived as two communities. The Iranis held out in the oases of Yazd and Kerman while their numbers kept falling. The…

Zoroastrian eschatology has two levels. The first is individual: the soul is judged at the Chinvat Bridge on the fourth dawn after death. The second is universal: at the end of a fixed world history, a saviour born of the…

Zurvanism taught that Ohrmazd and Ahriman were twin sons of Infinite Time, Zurvan akarana. Few questions in Zoroastrian studies have divided scholars as sharply. There are two reasons. The evidence is contradictory: as Boyce puts it, “foreign sources for the…