Chapter 27. After Rome: Mani’s Mithra, Mehregan and Yalda, Armenian Mher, and Modern Claims of a Mithraic Root of All Religions

When the last mithraea of the West were destroyed, Mithra did not disappear. In the Iranian world his name passed into a new universal religion, Manichaeism, which carried it from Mesopotamia to Central Asia. His festivals survived the Arab conquest and are still kept. In Armenia he became Mher, a hero enclosed in a rock until the end of the world. In modern times a series of authors has argued that Mithra is the hidden root of later religions: medieval dualist heresies, Protestantism, the secret societies, a European entheogen cult, or, in Mehran Keshe’s teaching, all religions without exception. This chapter follows these afterlives, records the sources’ disagreements, and ends with a comparative table of the forms of Mithra presented in this Part.

Mani: the prophet between Babylon and Iran

The Encyclopedia of World History gives the standard summary: “Mani was born in 216 in Mesopotamia. His parents were Elkesaites, Jewish-Christian Gnostics. Mani also seemingly was influenced by another Gnostic sect called Mandaeism. Inspired by a vision of his ‘twin,’ the Holy Spirit, Mani left the Elkesaites. Mani’s teaching briefly enjoyed the favor of Persian kings; however, Bahram I favored Zoroastrianism, resulting in Mani’s imprisonment” [Encyclopedia of World History, #5204, “Manichaeanism”]. Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln give a different date and place. They describe Manichaeism as “in essence, a fusion of Gnostic Christianity with elements of early Zoroastrianism and Mithraism”, founded by Mani, “born in the year 214 after Christ, in Baghdad, related to the royal family of Persia”. They say that in 276, “by order of the king, Mani was imprisoned, beaten to death, flayed and beheaded”, and that his martyrdom only increased the credibility of his teaching [Baigent, Leigh, Lincoln, Sângele Sfânt și Sfântul Graal, #17849, part on the heresies; translated from the Romanian]. The two sources therefore differ by two years (216 against 214) and in place (Mesopotamia in general against Baghdad specifically).

The political setting was the Sasanian court. Sundermann discusses the third-century Zoroastrian high priest Kerdir (Kartir). Kerdir’s inscription records his vision of the afterlife: “the woman meets Kerdir’s likeness, greets him and proceeds with him hand in hand”. This, Sundermann argues, “proves that the legend of the Virgin of Good Deeds must have been a well known story in the Zoroastrian tradition of the third century”. The Manichaean “Virgin of Good Deeds” among the redeeming gods “is an adaptation of the Zoroastrian Virgin of Good Deeds” [Sundermann, Zoroastrian Motifs in Non-Zoroastrian Traditions, #55067, “The Virgin of Good Deeds”]. Mani’s church was thus competing with, and borrowing from, the state priesthood that defeated it.

Jackson places Mani’s doctrine inside the Iranian dualist tradition. Mani took over “the two principles of light and darkness, good and evil, which Zoroaster taught”. “This doctrine Mani amplified, modified, developed, and above all spiritualized. Like Zoroaster, he postulated the existence of Two Principles from the beginning to eternity. To Mani, Light was synonymous with spirit and good, Darkness with matter and evil. He recognized three Ages in the history of beginningless and endless time”. Man’s body belongs to the kingdom of darkness, but “he has spiritually in him some of the lost particles of light”, to be released by pure living [Jackson, Zoroastrian Studies, #55164, monograph on Mani]. The encyclopedia describes the church that put this into practice: “the ‘chosen,’ who abstained from meat, wine, sex, and many other things, and ‘hearers,’ who did not”. Its central rite was “the ‘table’ of the chosen, the daily meal of plants containing much light, such as melons, wheat bread” [Encyclopedia of World History, #5204]. The Christian side of the polemic appears in Hegemonius’ Acta Archelai, which Geden quotes because it calls the Manichaean “foreign priest and partner of Mithra” who will “worship Mithra alone as the sun” [Geden, Select Passages Illustrating Mithraism, #38272, “Hegemonius”]. Geden also recalls that Augustine “was himself in early life a Manichaean and therefore acquainted from within with forms of heresy nearly related to Mithraism” [Geden, #38272, “Augustine”]. The library’s Grand Bible compilation lists the Manichaean texts in English, including Henning’s translations of the Manichaean scriptures (1932-1936) and “The Manichaean Book of the Giants or The Kawan” (Henning, 1943) [The Grand Bible, #38287, table of contents].

Mithra in the Manichaean pantheon (Boyce)

Mary Boyce’s article explains how the old god entered the new religion. Mani held that earlier prophets had taught the truth under different names, so his missionaries “translated” Manichaean gods into local ones. “Mithra came to be identified with two Manichaean gods. Among the Sasanian Persians his name was used to render that of the Living Spirit”, probably “as a warrior-god and conqueror of the powers of evil”. The Avestan Mithra is the “head-smasher of evil gods”, and the Living Spirit “fettered the tyrants of the earth”. Boyce judges this identification “largely a paper one”. The Living Spirit was stationed in the west, the quarter of the setting sun, and his work was finished before the world began [Boyce, On Mithra in the Manichaean Pantheon, #38266, pp. 45-47].

The missionaries to Parthia, probably Mar Ammo and his companions, instead identified Mithra with the first of the redeeming gods, the Third Messenger. He was a warrior, lived in the sun, was assigned to the east and was “invoked in many hymns”. A Middle Persian fragment hails him as dawn: “The morning-light and dawn is come, the radiant Light from the east”. Among the Sasanians he had first been equated with Nairyosangha, the Zoroastrian messenger-god. That equation covered traits Mithra lacked: envoy, and prototype of humanity, since “the Third Messenger was further believed to have shown himself naked to the demons in the skies, so that it was in his image that mankind was made” (the seduction of the Archons). In the surviving Parthian hymns, however, this myth “is given little emphasis”. Instead “the dominance of Mithra was such that his identification with the Third Messenger led to cultic emphasis on the Mithraic traits”. Most strikingly, “the Third Messenger became a sun-god among the Parthians”, though Mani “did not teach worship for it [the sun] as a personal god” [Boyce, #38266, pp. 47-52].

Boyce traces specific traits back to the Mihr Yasht, where Mithra “is not presented as a sun-god, but only as a deity closely associated with the sun” and bears “the epithet ‘making plants grow'”. The god of the Contract, “the swiftest of the gods”, with “ten thousand eyes”, produced a Parthian Third Messenger who is “faster than thought”, “the thousand-eyed”, and repeatedly “the Judge” and “judge and witness”. Boyce notes this last function “is not readily comprehensible in terms of Manichaean dogma”. She concludes that “even he, the most literate of the prophets, could not wholly prevent distortion of his carefully-enshrined doctrine”, and that the episode “shows the power of the Iranian Mithra, who thus set his bright and ancient stamp on the intruding Manichaean god”. In her notes she records that the attempts since Cumont to identify Mithra with Gayomard, or Nairyosangha with Mithra, “have failed to win general assent” [Boyce, #38266, pp. 48 nn. 2, 5; 52-54]. Chulev reads the same history as concealment: “the Mysteries of Mitra concealed itself in cognate Manichaeism, which long survived as a harbor of refuge for the shipwrecked gnostics and mystics” [Chulev, The Continuity Paradigm within the Mysteries of Mitra, #38297, “The fading of Mitra’s cult”].

Living festivals: Mehregan and the night of Yalda

The Byzantine traveller Cosmas Indicopleustes (c. 550) reported that “to the present time the Persians keep the festival of Mithra, that is of the sun” [Geden, #38272, “Cosmas Indicopleustes”]. Dhalla describes the autumn festival of Mihragan: “The festival was observed for several days, which were given over to thanksgiving, feasting, and rejoicing by all classes of people. It soon became the chief national festival of Iran … It is still observed not only by the Zoroastrians of India and Persia, but even by the Moslems of Persia” [Dhalla, Zoroastrian Civilization, #60424, “Feasts and Festivals: The festival of Mithra”]. Campos Méndez places it among the old Indo-Aryan seasonal feasts (jashan or gahambars) inherited by the Avestan calendar. He explains its “relación con el equinoccio otoñal” as “consecuencia del carácter solar del dios” and of the year’s beginning at the moment “en el que el sol comienza su retorno” [Campos Méndez, El Culto del Dios Mithra, #60243, nn. 67, 77]. Murdock and Barker date “the Zoroastrian/Persian festival of Mihragan or Mehregan” to “October 2nd”, describing it as representing the equinox and “harvest time” (their text says “vernal equinox”) [Murdock & Barker, The Astrotheology Calendar Guide, #71969, “October”].

The winter-solstice festival is a different matter. The reference shelf describes Yalda or Chelle Night as “an ancient festival in Iran” and neighbouring lands, held on the night of 21 December with fruit, pomegranates and readings of Hafez. Shab-e Yalda was added to UNESCO’s Intangible Heritage lists in 2022. The article stresses that the name “Yalda” is a borrowing “from Syriac-speaking Christians”, in whose language it “literally means ‘birth'” and was “the Syriac Christian proper name for Christmas”. It adds that “in Zoroastrian tradition the longest and darkest night of the year was a particularly inauspicious day”, when Ahriman’s forces were at their peak. It also reports journalist Hashem Razi’s 1979 theory that Mehregan, “the day-name festival of Mithra”, had shifted to the winter solstice in early Islamic times; the article notes that the theory “has a significant following on the Internet, but while Razi’s documentation has been academically accepted, his adduction has not” [Wikipedia: Yalda Night]. Two Western accounts have to be weighed against this. Lawless repeats the claim that “the ancient Persian festival of Mithras, ‘the day of the birth of the unconquered sun,’ also fell in late December” [Lawless, Heaven Scent, #67495]. Keshe celebrates “the birth of Mitra during the night of Yalda” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 517, #378229, section 4].

Armenian Mihr and the hero in the rock

The Armenian sources quoted by Cumont, in Geden’s translation, show Mihr as a living god in late antiquity. Agathangelos reports that St Gregory went “to the temple of Mihr, the reputed son of Ormuzd … and rased it to the ground”. Elisaeus records Persian officials who say that “the god Mihr was born of a human mother” and swear the death sentence on Christian martyrs “by the god Mihr”. Moses of Khorene preserves the royal oath: “We swear by the great god Mihr that we will not do any harm to thy royal throne” [Geden, #38272, “Agathangas”, “Elisaeus Vartabad”, “Moses of Khorene”]. Mihr outlived the conversion as an epic figure. Petrosyan notes “two Mhers in the standard versions of the epic of Sasun: Mher the Elder (or: Lion Mher) and Mher the Younger”. He finds traits shared with the Western Mithras, “the figure of the horseman Mher inside the rock”, and also a link to the Urartian Haldi [Petrosyan, Haldi and Mithra/Mher, #38285]. Boyle’s text of the epic ends with the door closing on Mher and a voice from the rock: “thou with thy horse shall remain in the rock until the barleycorn grows to the size of the hip … When that day comes Mher and his horse will again come out of the rock”. A raven guides Mher to the rock, which leads Boyle to ask, in his title, whether the rock is “a Mithraic spelaeum in Armenian folklore?” [Boyle, Raven’s Rock, #60215].

Modern theses of a Mithraic root

Chulev’s title states his thesis: “Zoroastrian-macedonic-Phrygian Mithraism of the I-IV centuries – a Chauvinistic predecessor of the X-century Bogomilism/Catharism and later Protestantism”. He argues that Mithraism’s legacy was “its rejection of the theism and the doctrine polemics”, opposing “experience” to faith and “liberation and enlightenment” to the God of theism. He says the same ideals reappear in “the Macedonic Bogomilism movement”, “a modified form of Manichaeism, thus consequently a modified medieval form of Magianism and Mysteries of Mitra”. Bogomilism then “descended further in the west under the name of Catharism, which turned out to be the 11th-13th centuries predecessor of the later Protestantism” [Chulev, #38297, “The fading of Mitra’s cult and its legacy”]. Chulev also finds Mithraic symbols “still placed in the coves of these secret societies (as the ‘Freemasons’, ‘Priory of Sion’, ‘Opus Dei’, ‘Illuminati’, ‘Lions Club’…)” [Chulev, #38297].

A second modern line is the entheogen thesis. Vaknin bases his essay on Cumont and on Ruck, Hoffman and González Celdrán’s Mushrooms, Myth and Mithras. He writes that Mithraism initiated its members through seven stages culminating in an ecstatic vision, and that “Western civilization was profoundly influenced by a secret spiritual practice centred on the use of entheogenic plants and mushrooms” [Vaknin, Zeul Mitra si virusul, #60323, section 1; translated from the Romanian]. He adds his own theory that religions are the work of retroviruses in the human genome [Vaknin, #60323]. Ferrara cites the same book, subtitled “The Drug Cult that Civilized Europe”. He qualifies it: “spiritual restoration required more than the ingestion of plant entheogens; additional components of the Mithraic liturgy included breathing techniques, medicinal recipes, magical rites, charming amulets, and reciting magical words” [Ferrara, Sacred Bliss, #66945, ch. 2].

Keshe: Mitra as mother, soul and source of all religions

Mehran Tavakoli Keshe’s teaching makes Mitra the origin of every faith. In April 2021 he said: “in time we’ll come to understand that all the religions come from Mithraism, the essence of Ahura Mazda, it has changed name as it changed time in place”. In the same session he derived the wedding ring and the royal circlet from Mithraism [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 374, #378086]. In KSW 360 he dates Mitra’s birthday “some 8,000 years ago” and calls Mithraism “the fundamental culture of the Universe” that predates all named religions [Keshe, KSW 360, #378072, sections 0, 8]. Where the scholarly sources present Mithra as a male Indo-Iranian god, Keshe teaches that Mitra was a woman. As early as 2014 the session notes read: “RNA is line of connection to gods, goes back 26,000 years … Mother in Iranian house is the head, Mithra was female” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 33, #377676]. KSW 517 celebrates “her arrival” as humanity’s passage from darkness to light [Keshe, KSW 517, #378229, section 2]. KSW 612 defines her metaphysically: “Mitra is the Soul of the Man (STM)” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 612, #378324, section 2]. In December 2025 the workshops announced the birthday of “Mitra’s Daughter” on 6 December, and the speakers presented the Faravahar on screen as “the sign of Zoroaster” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 619, #378331]. Keshe described his own position this way: “I live deeply by Zoroastrianism, by Mitraism, in the school of thoughts. Maybe because it was the way I was brought up” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 620, #378332].

Key points

• The Encyclopedia of World History gives Mani’s birth as 216 in Mesopotamia, to Elkesaite parents, influenced by Mandaeism, with Bahram I’s preference for Zoroastrianism leading to his imprisonment. Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln say 214 in Baghdad and call Manichaeism a fusion of Gnostic Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Mithraism.
• Jackson describes Mani as having “amplified, modified, developed, and above all spiritualized” Zoroaster’s dualism into Two Principles and Three Ages. His church was divided into the elect, who kept a daily “table” of light-rich foods, and the hearers.
• Boyce shows that Mithra’s name went to the Living Spirit among the Sasanian Persians and to the Third Messenger among the Parthians. Under Mithra’s influence the Messenger became a sun-god, “thousand-eyed” and “Judge”.
• Sundermann traces the Manichaean Virgin of Good Deeds to the Zoroastrian motif found in Kerdir’s vision.
• Mihragan survived as a several-day feast and became, in Dhalla’s words, “the chief national festival of Iran”, kept even by Muslims. The solstice night of Yalda carries, according to the reference shelf, a Syriac Christian name meaning “birth”; the same article reports Razi’s contested theory linking it to Mehregan, while Lawless and Keshe present the solstice as Mithra’s birth.
• In Armenia Mihr was sworn by kings, and as Mher he survives in the Sasun epic, sealed in a rock until the world is renewed (Petrosyan, Boyle).
• Chulev links Mithraism, Manichaeism, Bogomilism, Catharism and Protestantism, and finds its symbols in modern secret societies. Vaknin (after Ruck et al.) and Ferrara put forward or qualify the entheogen thesis.
• Keshe teaches that “all the religions come from Mithraism”, that Mitra was female and is the Soul of the Man, and that her day is a universal celebration. The academic sources of this Part, by contrast, describe a male Indo-Iranian god.