Chapter 22. The Roman Mysteries of Mithras I: Myth, Mithraeum and the Bull-Slaying

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 must be deduced almost entirely from the monuments themselves. The great gap which exists between the records of the Persian and Roman Mithras makes interpretation all the more difficult” [Vermaseren, Mithras the Secret God, #38300, ch. 8 “The God’s Most Famous Feat”]. This chapter follows the cult as its monuments show it: the cave, the bull-slaying, its attendant figures, the side-panel “legend”, the borrowed pantheon and the lion-headed god. Disagreements over interpretation are noted here and argued in chapter 24.

The cave as cosmos: the mithraeum

According to Porphyry (De antro nympharum 5-6), quoting Euboulus, Mithras had to be worshipped in a natural cave near running water. Where no cave existed, the Mithraists built one (spelaeum, spelunca, crypta), often in rooms or cellars given by rich members, as at Santa Prisca and San Clemente in Rome. The vault, “a symbol of the celestial vault”, was often painted with stars. The standard plan had a central aisle between two benches on which the initiates reclined during the meal, and a cult niche at the far end, sometimes faced with pumice, with two fire-altars “in keeping with the Persian tradition” [Vermaseren, #38300, ch. 6 “The Mithraic Temple”]. Widengren reconstructs the same rooms (portico, pronaos, apparatorium, a stair down to the vaulted crypta) and adds that the shrines were probably lit only by candles, “which must have exercised a suggestive effect on the participants” [Widengren, The Mithraic Mysteries in the Greco-Roman World, #38302, §3]. Tertullian mocked the shrine as “truly a camp of darkness” (vere castra tenebrarum) [Vermaseren, #38300, ch. 6].

Porphyry’s cave was also a model of the cosmos. Widengren translates the key passage: Zoroaster dedicated to Mithras “a natural cave among the mountains near to Persis… suggesting to him an image of the cave of the world, that Mithras created”, and “the Persians initiate the mysta by conducting him in mysteries down the road by which souls descend and back again up the road out” [Widengren, #38302, n. 28, quoting De antro 6]. Manly P. Hall, quoting Lundy’s Monumental Christianity, gives the esoteric form of the same idea: the cave “was adorned with the signs of the zodiac, Cancer and Capricorn… the gates of souls descending into this life, or passing out of it in their ascent to the Gods; Cancer being the gate of descent, and Capricorn of ascent” [Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, #45649, chapter on the ancient mysteries]. Ruck, Hoffman and González Celdrán note that the orientation was symbolic and “did not always correspond to its real geographical orientation”: the tauroctony stood in the “western” niche and the entrance faced the rising sun in the “east” [Ruck et al., Ciupercile, mitul și Mithras, #38283, n. 19].

Six sanctuaries

Vermaseren’s survey of sites shows how much the cult varied from place to place [Vermaseren, #38300, ch. 7 “Important Mithraic Sanctuaries”]:

Vermaseren also counts sixteen Mithraea at Ostia, a town of perhaps 50,000-60,000 inhabitants, and uses the Sofia Mithraeum to illustrate a typical interior [#38300, ch. 7, fig. 4].

The tauroctony and its attendants

Vermaseren writes: “On the rear wall of every Mithraeum there was a representation of the bull-slaying”, following a set convention: “the god… forces down the heavy animal with his knee and, holding up its head by one horn or the nostrils, thrusts his dagger deep into the bull’s heart”. Ears of corn “charged with magic power” spring from the blood and the tail. A dog and a snake rise towards the wound to drink, and a scorpion grips the genitals. Vermaseren links the scorpion to the Bundahishn, where Ahriman attacks the primordial bull, and concludes that Ahriman’s evil act “became in Mithras’s hands man’s salvation”; the dog and snake, he argues, seek the blood’s life-giving power [#38300, ch. 8]. Mithras looks away with “an expression of anguish”; a raven brings Sol’s order to kill; Sol and Luna watch from the upper corners [#38300, ch. 9 “The Figures round the Bull-Slayer”].

Two figures in Persian dress flank the scene: Cautes with his torch raised and Cautopates with his torch lowered, the rising and the setting sun. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite speaks of a “triple Mithras” (triplasios Mithras), and Vermaseren reads the group as morning, noon and evening sun [#38300, ch. 9]. Gershevitch argues against reading the “three Mithrases” (Mithras, Cautes, Cautopates) back into Old Iran. The triplasios is attested only in the fourth century AD, and Cumont had already suggested that the torch-bearers copy “a conventional type of figurative religious art”. [Gershevitch, The Avestan Hymn to Mithra, #60160, Introduction VIII “The Western Mithras”].

Widengren adds an Iranian background: the scorpion and snake appear on cult reliefs at Hatra, and the white bull of the Capua and Barberini paintings recalls the white bull of the Parthian hero Farīdūn. The scene of Mithras carrying the bull, the bouklopos theos (“cattle-stealing god”), goes back in his view to an Indo-Iranian myth of a young god, a bull and cows. In a note he suggests: “Possibly he first pulled out the bull from his refuge, and then carried it to the cave” [Widengren, #38302, §4, nn. 96-97].

Other authors read the slaying differently. Ries reports that Turcan connected the tauroctony “with the spring rebirth of the world and with its renewal at the end of time”. In this reading the god’s role is to bring souls into the cycle of life and “to save creation thanks to the blood of the bull” [Ries, Il Culto di Mithra, #38276, ch. 9]. Hall gives a solar-esoteric reading: the sword stands for the sun’s rays, which “release at the vernal equinox the vital essences of the earth—the blood of the bull” [Hall, #45649]. The astral school, which treats the whole scene as a star map, is presented in chapter 24.

The legend on the side-panels

Danubian and Rhenish reliefs frame the tauroctony with episodes, “an open picture-book” in Vermaseren’s phrase [#38300, ch. 10 “The Legend of Mithras”]:

• Rock-birth. Mithras emerges naked except for the Phrygian cap, holding a dagger and a torch: deus genitor rupe natus, born from the petra genetrix. December 25 was his feast. In a 1951 article on this scene, Vermaseren argues that the rock stands both for the vault of heaven and for the earth. “The amphora and the serpents are found on other Mithraic reliefs as symbols of the elements of water and of earth”. [Vermaseren, The Miraculous Birth of Mithras, #60178, Mnemosyne 1951].
• Adventures with the bull. Mithras catches, rides and finally carries the bull to the cave, qui portavit umeris iuvencum (Santa Prisca), the transitus dei of the inscriptions. Commodianus mocked him as a cattle-thief like Cacus [#38300, ch. 10].
• Water miracle. Mithras shoots an arrow at a rock and water gushes out for kneeling figures: “A spring, within the rocks, which feeds both brothers with nectar” (Santa Prisca).
• Hunt. On horseback, with lion and snake, Mithras shoots at boar and deer; at Dura he wears the dress of a Palmyrene officer of archers.
• Sol and Mithras. Sol kneels before Mithras in what Vermaseren calls the “accolade”; the two then clasp right hands across an altar in a blood pact.
• Banquet and ascent. The gods feast on the bull’s flesh on its hide and ride the sun’s chariot towards Oceanus or heaven, a scheme later reused for Elijah on Christian sarcophagi.

Pantheon and the god of infinite time

According to Vermaseren, Mithraic reliefs absorbed the Olympian pantheon “as a whole”. Kronos-Saturn hands thunderbolts and sceptre to Jupiter over an altar; at Dura, Jupiter hurls the Titans into Tartarus; Oceanus lies as a witness under the bull-slayer at Santa Prisca and Walbrook. Atlas under the heavens wears a Phrygian cap, and Vermaseren takes him to be “none other than Mithras himself supporting the vault of heaven”. Sarapis appears at Santa Prisca, Walbrook and the Baths of Caracalla (“Zeus Helios, the great Sarapis… the invincible Mithras”), and the Walbrook Dionysus group shows Bacchic ties [#38300, chs. 7, 11 “The Mithraic Pantheon”].

The lion-headed figure is the most disputed image: a human body, often four wings, a snake coiled round it with the zodiac between the coils, sometimes keys or a fire-shovel. Examples come from Modena (a Phanes-Mithras rising from an egg), Merida (a youthful version with a lion’s head on the chest) and Castel Gandolfo (four arms, an eye on the chest). Vermaseren notes that Zaehner and, “with reservations”, Duchesne-Guillemin identified the figure with Ahriman. He himself agrees with Cumont: “The lion-headed figure is the Time-god called Aion by the Greeks and Zervan in Persian literature” [#38300, ch. 12 “The God of Infinite Time”]. Gershevitch calls the Ahriman identification “the seemingly correct step” [#60160, VIII]. Widengren rebuts the arguments for Ahriman and concludes that “the old explanation that the lion-headed deity is the Aion-Saeculum can certainly be upheld”. He asks how the higher initiates could be called leones “if ‘lion’ could signify this evil power” [Widengren, #38302, §4].

Blood, drugs and salvation: further readings

The Santa Prisca wall-texts give the soteriological line Et nos servasti eternali sanguine fuso, which Vermaseren translates “Us too you have saved by shedding blood which grants eternity” [#38300, ch. 19 “New Texts from Santa Prisca”]. Ries quotes the same verse [Ries, #38276, ch. 9]. Ruck, Hoffman and González Celdrán go further; their subtitle calls Mithraism “the drug cult that civilized Europe”. They argue that the rock-birth and water miracle encode an entheogenic sacrament: the moist, water-born rock is “another clear metaphor for the Amanita mushroom” [Ruck et al., #38283, title page and ch. 3 “The Miracle of Water”]. Ferrara, following them, writes that “during the Eucharist of Mithraism, those present participated in a sacramental feast that contained entheogens”. He adds that the liturgy also used “breathing techniques, medicinal recipes, magical rites, charming amulets, and reciting magical words” [Ferrara, Sacred Bliss, #66945, ch. 2]. Vermaseren’s account of the meal, by contrast, lists bread, wine, meat and water.

Key points

• The Roman cult is known mainly from monuments. Vermaseren says the meaning of the bull-slaying “must be deduced almost entirely from the monuments themselves” (#38300).
• The mithraeum was a natural or built cave modelled on the cosmos. Porphyry calls it the road of souls’ descent and ascent, and Hall/Lundy name Cancer and Capricorn as its gates.
• Every Mithraeum had a tauroctony with a standard cast: dog, snake, scorpion, raven, corn-ears, Sol and Luna, and the torch-bearers Cautes and Cautopates. Gershevitch argues that the “triple Mithras” is late and not Iranian.
• The side-panel “legend” runs from rock-birth to the bull adventures, the water miracle, the hunt, the pact with Sol, the banquet on the bull’s hide and the ascent in the chariot.
• The lion-headed god is identified as Aion/Zervan by Cumont, Vermaseren and Widengren, and as Ahriman by Zaehner, Duchesne-Guillemin and Gershevitch.
• The Santa Prisca verse et nos servasti… sanguine fuso and Turcan’s reading (renewal of the world through the bull’s blood) express the cult’s promise of salvation. Ruck et al. and Ferrara argue for an entheogenic sacrament.