CHAPTER XII

THE WORSHIP OF MITHRAS

Few of us, perhaps, are inclined to recognize that, from its first establishment down to the Mahommedan Invasion of the VIIth century, the Roman Empire found itself constantly in the presence of a bitter, determined, and often victorious enemy. Alexander had conquered but had not destroyed the Persians; and, although the magic of the hero’s personality held them faithful to him during his too brief life, he was no sooner dead than they hastened to prove that they had no intention of tamely giving up their nationality. Peucestas, the Royal bodyguard who received the satrapy of Persia itself on his master’s death, and was confirmed in it at the first shuffling of the cards at Triparadisus, found it expedient to adopt the Persian language and dress, with the result that his subjects conceived for him an affection only equal to that which they afterwards showed for Seleucus[768]. Later, when the rise of the Parthian power under Arsaces brought about the defeat of Seleucus II Callinicus, the opposition to European forms of government found a centre further north[769], whence armies of lightly-equipped horsemen were able to raid up to the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean[770]. Thanks probably to the knowledge of this support in reserve, when Western Asia found the military power of the Greek kings becoming exhausted by internecine wars, she began to throw off the alien civilization that she had in part acquired, and to return more and more to Persian ways[771]. When the Romans in their turn set to work to eat up the enfeebled Greek kingdoms, they quickly found themselves in presence of a revived nationality as firmly held and nearly as aggressive as their own, and henceforth Roman and Parthian were seldom at peace. The long struggle with Mithridates, who gave himself out as a descendant of Darius[772], taught the Romans how strong was the reaction towards Persian nationality even in Asia Minor, and the overthrow of Crassus by the Parthians convinced his countrymen for a time of the folly of pushing their arms too far eastwards.

With the establishment of the Empire, the antagonism between Rome and Persia became still more strongly marked, and a struggle commenced which lasted with little intermission until the foundation of the Mahommedan Caliphate. In this struggle the advantage was not always, as we should like to think, on the side of the Europeans. While Augustus reigns, Horace boasts, there is no occasion to dread the “dreadful Parthians[773]”; but Corbulo is perpetually fighting them, and when Nero commits suicide, the legend immediately springs up that the tyrant is not dead, but has only betaken himself beyond the Euphrates to return with an army of Rome’s most dreaded enemies to lay waste his rebellious country[774]. Towards the close of the first Christian century, Trajan, fired, according to Gibbon, by the example of Alexander, led an army into the East and achieved successes which enabled him to add to his titles that of Parthicus[775]; but the whole of his Oriental conquests were given back by the prudent Hadrian on his succession to the throne. During the reign of Marcus Aurelius, Avidius Cassius obtained some solid victories on the frontier; but Macrinus is said to have bought off the Parthians with a bribe of nearly two millions of money. The rise of the Sassanian house and the retransfer of the leadership from the Parthians to their kinsmen in Persia proper brought about the reform of the Persian religion, and added another impulse to the increasing strength of Persian national feeling. Alexander Severus may have gained some successes in the field over Ardeshîr or Artaxerxes, the restorer of the Persian monarchy[776]; but in the reign of the last named king’s son and successor Sapor, the capture of the Emperor Valerian with his whole army, and the subsequent ravaging of the Roman provinces in Asia by the victors, showed the Republic how terrible was the might of the restored kingdom[777]. Aurelian, the conqueror of Palmyra, did much to restore the prestige of Roman arms in the East; and although he was assassinated when on the march against Persia, the Emperor Carus shortly after led a successful expedition into the heart of the Persian kingdom[778]. In the reign of Diocletian, indeed, the Persians lost five provinces to the Romans[779]; but under Constantine the Great the Romans were again vanquished in the field, and the Persians were only prevented by the heroic resistance of the fortified town of Nisibis and an incursion into their Eastern provinces of tribes from Central Asia from again overrunning the Asiatic possessions of Rome[780].

Henceforward, the history of the long contest between the two great empires—“the eyes,” as the Persian ambassador told Galerius, “of the civilized world[781],” is the record of almost uninterrupted advance on the part of Persia and of continual retreat on the side of Rome. The patriotic enthusiasm of a Julian, and the military genius of a Belisarius, aided by the dynastic revolutions common among Oriental nations, might for a time arrest the progress of the conquering Persians; but, bit by bit, the Asiatic provinces slipped out of the grasp of the European masters of Constantinople. In 603 A.D., it looked as if Persia were at length in the position to deliver the final blow in a war which had lasted for more than five centuries. By the invasion of Chosroes and his successive captures of Antioch, Jerusalem, and Egypt, it seemed as if the Persians had restored the world-empire of Cambyses and Darius; but the Persians then discovered, as Xerxes had done a millennium earlier, how dangerous it is for Orientals, even when flushed by conquest, to press Europeans too far. The Roman Emperor Heraclius, who never before or afterwards gave much proof of military or political capacity, from his besieged capital of Constantinople collected an army with which he dashed into Persia in a manner worthy of Alexander himself. After six brilliant campaigns he dictated to the Persians a triumphant peace in the very heart of their empire[782]. A few years later, and its shattered and disorganized remains fell an easy prey to the Mahommedan invaders.

The effect of this long rivalry might have been expected to produce in the Romans during its continuance a hearty dislike of the customs and institutions of the nation opposed to them; but almost the exact contrary was the result. It may be argued that Rome’s proved skill in government was in no small measure due to her ready adoption of all that seemed to her admirable in the nations that she overcame. Or it may be that the influence which the memory of Alexander exercised over all those who succeeded to his empire led them to imitate him in his assumption of Persian manners. The fact remains that, long before the division of the Roman Empire into East and West, the Romans displayed a taste for Oriental luxury and magnificence which seems entirely at variance with the simplicity and austerity of the republican conquerors of Carthage. It is hardly too much to say that while Alexander’s conscious aim was to make Asia Greek, the Romans, on possessing themselves of his Asiatic conquests, allowed themselves to become to a great extent “Medized,” and showed an unexpected admiration for the habits and culture of Alexander’s Persian subjects.

It may of course be said that this was in external matters only, and that the “Persian furniture” which excited Horace’s wrath[783] might if it stood alone be looked upon as merely a passing fashion; but the Court ceremonial introduced by Diocletian argues a steady tendency towards Persian customs and forms of government that must have been in operation for centuries. The household of a Julian Caesar was no differently arranged from that of a Roman noble of the period, and his title of Prince of the Senate showed that he was only looked upon as the first of his equals. But Diocletian was in all respects but language a Persian emperor or Shah, and his style of “Lord and God,” his diadem, his silken state dress, the elaborate ritual of his court, and the long hierarchy of its officials, were all designed to compel his subjects to recognize the fact[784]. As usual, the official form of religion in the Roman Empire had for some time given indications of the coming change in the form of government. The sun had always been the principal natural object worshipped by the Persians, and a high-priest of the Sun-God had sat upon the Imperial throne of Rome in the form of the miserable Heliogabalus. Only 13 years before Diocletian, Aurelian, son of another Sun-God’s priestess and as virile and rugged as his predecessor was soft and effeminate, had also made the Sun-God the object of his special devotion and of an official worship. Hence Diocletian and his colleague Galerius were assured in advance of the approval of a large part of their subjects when they took the final plunge in 307 A.D., and proclaimed Mithras, “the Unconquered Sun-God,” the Protector of their Empire[785].

In spite of this, however, it is very difficult to say how Mithras originally became known to the Romans. Plutarch says indeed that his cult was first introduced by the Cilician pirates who were put down by Pompey[786]. This is not likely to be literally true; for the summary methods adopted by these sea-robbers towards their Roman prisoners hardly gave much time for proselytism, while most of the pirates whom Pompey spared at the close of his successful operations he deported to Achaea, which was one of the few places within the Empire where the Mithraic faith did not afterwards show itself. What Plutarch’s story probably means is that the worship of Mithras first came to Rome from Asia Minor, and there are many facts which go to confirm this. M. Cumont, the historian of Mithraism, has shown that, long before the Romans set foot in Asia, there were many colonies of emigrants from Persia who with their _magi_ or priests had settled in Asia Minor, including in that phrase Galatia, Phrygia, Lydia, and probably Cilicia[787]. When Rome began to absorb these provinces, slaves, prisoners, and merchants from them would naturally find their way to Rome, and in time would no doubt draw together for the worship of their national deities in the way that we have seen pursued by the worshippers of the Alexandrian Isis and the Jewish exiles. The _magi_ of Asia Minor were great supporters of Mithridates, and the Mithridatic wars were no doubt responsible for a large number of these immigrants.

Once introduced, however, the worship of Mithras spread like wild-fire. The legions from the first took kindly to it, and this is the less surprising when we find that many of them were recruited under the earliest emperors in Anatolian states like Commagene, where the cult was, if not indigenous, yet of very early growth[788]. Moreover the wars of the Romans against the Persians kept them constantly in the border provinces of the two empires, where the native populations not infrequently changed masters. The enemy’s town that the legions besieged one year might therefore give them a friendly reception the next; and there was thus abundant opportunity for the acquaintance of both sides with each others’ customs. When the Roman troops marched back to Europe, as was constantly the case during the civil wars which broke out on the downfall of the Julian house, they took back with them the worship of the new god whom they had adopted, and he thus became known through almost the whole of the Roman Empire[789]. “From the shores of the Euxine to the north of Brittany and to the fringe of the Sahara[790],” as M. Cumont says, its monuments abound, and, he might have added, they have been met with also in the Egyptian Delta, in Babylon, and on the northern frontiers of India. In our own barbarous country we have found them not only in London and York, but as far west as Gloucester and Chester and as far north as Carlisle and Newcastle[791]. The Balkan countries, like Italy, Germany, Southern France, and Spain, are full of them; but there was one part of the Roman Empire into which they did not penetrate freely. This was Greece, where the memories of the Persian Wars long survived the independence of the country, and where the descendants of those who fought at Salamis, Marathon, and Thermopylae would have nothing to do with a god coming from the invaders’ fatherland. It is only very lately that the remains of Mithras-worship have been discovered at the Piraeus and at Patras, in circumstances which show pretty clearly that it was there practised only by foreigners[792].

Notwithstanding this popularity, it is not easy to say exactly what god Mithras’ European worshippers considered him to be. If length of ancestry went for anything in such matters, he might indeed claim a greater antiquity than any deity of the later Roman Pantheon, with the single exception of the Alexandrian gods. Mithras was certainly worshipped in Vedic India, where his name of Mitra constantly occurs in the sacred texts as the “shining one,” meaning apparently the material sun[793]. He is there invoked in company with Varuna, generally considered the god of the sky, and therefore according to some, the prototype of the Greek Zeus and the Latin Jupiter[794]. His appearance in a similar connection in the sacred books of the Persians led the founders of the comparative study of religion to think that he must have been one of the primitive gods of their hypothetical Aryan race, and that his worship must go back to the imaginary time when Persians and Hindus dwelt side by side in the plains of Cashmere. But this theory is giving way before proof that the original home of the Indo-European race was Europe, and has been badly shaken by the discovery at Boghaz Keui of tablets showing that the gods Mithra and Varuna were gods of the Mitannians or Hittites[795] at some date earlier than 1500 B.C., and therefore long before the appearance of the Persians in history. If the worship of Mithras were not indigenous in Western Asia, it may therefore well have come there independently of the Persians[796].

There is no doubt, however, that the roots of Mithras-worship went very far down into the Persian religion. In the Yashts or hymns which are the earliest evidence of primitive Iranian beliefs, Mithra—to use the Avestic spelling of his name—frequently appears, not indeed as the material sun, but as the “genius of the heavenly light” which lightens the whole universe[797] and is the most beneficent among the powers of Nature. Mithras is not here, however, the Supreme Being, nor even the highest among the gods benevolent to man. This last place is occupied in the Zend Avesta by Ahura Mazda, “the omniscient lord,” who appears to be the Persian form of Varuna, the god of the sky whom we have seen associated with Mitra in the Vedas[798]. Nor is Mithras in the Zend Avesta one of the six Amshaspands, the deified abstractions or personified attributes of Ahura Mazda, who, in the later developments of the Persian religion, occupy towards him much the same position that the “Roots” of Simon Magus and the Aeons of the Pleroma among the Gnostics do towards the Boundless Power or the Ineffable Bythos[799]. In the later Avestic literature, he appears as the chief of the Izeds or Yazatas, a race of genii created by Ahura Mazda, who are the protectors of his universe and the helpers of mankind in their warfare against the powers of darkness[800]. In the latest as in the earliest Persian view of the personality of Mithras, therefore, it is plain that he occupies an intermediate position between the Creator and man.

It is not, however, in the religion associated with the name of Zoroaster that we must look for the origin of Mithraism. The date of the sacred books of Mazdeism and the historical existence of Zoroaster himself have recently been brought down to as late as the VIIth century B.C.[801] and the appearance in Asia of the Persian tribes as conquerors, whereas Mithras was, as we have seen, worshipped in Asia Minor nearly a millennium earlier. Moreover, the strict dualism which set Ahriman, the god of darkness and evil, in eternal and perhaps equal opposition to Ormuzd, the god of light and goodness, seems to have been unknown before the Sassanid reform in 226 A.D., by which time the worship of Mithras in Europe was at its apogee[802]. M. Cumont is, therefore, doubtless right when he thinks that Mithraism was derived not from Mazdeism, but from Magism or the religion of the Magi, the tribe of Medes whose domination was put an end to by Darius the son of Hystaspes, and whose name was afterwards given to a priestly caste and has passed into our own language as the root of the word “magic.”

That these Magi practised a religion different from that taught in the Avestic literature is plain enough. The romantic story told by Herodotus of the Magian who seized the throne of Persia during Cambyses’ absence in Egypt on the pretence that he was the king’s brother whom Cambyses had privily put to death[803], is fully confirmed by Darius’ trilingual inscription on the Rock of Behistun, first copied and deciphered by Sir Henry Rawlinson and lately published in elaborate form by the British Museum[804]. Darius here narrates how “a certain man, a Magian, Gaumata by name ... lied unto the people (saying) ‘I am Smerdis, the son of Cyrus, the brother of Cambyses.’ Then all the people revolted from Cambyses and went over to him, even Persia and Media and the other provinces.” Darius goes on to record that “thereupon Cambyses died by his own hand[805],” that the seven Persian nobles overthrew the pretender much in the way described by Herodotus, and that “I rebuilt the temples of the gods, which that Gaumata, the Magian, had destroyed. I restored that which had been taken away as it was in the days of old[806].” This he tells us he did “by the grace of Ahura Mazda,” and that by this grace he always acted. The memory of these events was kept up by the festival of the Magophonia or Massacre of the Magi which was yearly celebrated in Persia and during which no Magus dared show himself in the streets[807]. Darius’ words show that there was a religious as well as a dynastic side to the Magian revolt, though whether the false Smerdis restored the old worship of the land, which he found in danger of being supplanted by Zoroastrianism or the worship of Ahura Mazda, may still be doubtful. In any event, the reformation or counter-reformation made by Darius did not succeed in entirely uprooting the old Magian faith, for Herodotus speaks of the Magi as still being in his time the priestly caste among the Persians, and as acting as diviners and sacrificers to the Achaemenian kings who ruled Persia up to Alexander’s Conquest[808].

The Magian religion as it appears in Herodotus and other Greek authors, however, seems to have shown none of the hostility to the powers of darkness so apparent in the religious literature collected by the Sassanian kings. “The whole circuit of the firmament” was, according to Herodotus, their greatest god or Zeus; and he says that they also “sacrifice to the sun and moon, to the earth, to fire and water, and to the winds”; but that “they do not, like the Greeks, believe the gods to have the same nature as men[809].” He also tells us that later they borrowed from the Arabians and the Assyrians the worship of a goddess whom he calls Mitra, and although he is probably wrong as to the origin and sex of this deity, his evidence shows that Semitic admixture counted for something in the Magian worship. In other respects, the Magian seems to have been a primitive faith given up to the worship of the powers of nature or elements, which it did not personify in the anthropomorphic manner of either the Semites or the Greeks, and to have paid little attention to public ceremonies or ritual. It follows therefore that, like the religions of many uncivilized people of the present day, it would draw no very sharp distinction between good and evil gods, and would be as ready to propitiate or make use of the evil, that is those hostile to man, as the good or benevolent. Plutarch, who describes the religion of the Magi more than three centuries after Herodotus, when the name of Zoroaster the Persian prophet and the dualistic belief favoured by his teaching had long been popularly known in the West, says that the Magi of his time held Mithras to be the “Mediator” or intermediary between “Oromazes” or Light on the one hand, and “Areimanios” or Darkness and Ignorance on the other, and that they used to make bloody sacrifices to the last-named in a place where the sun never comes[810]. It is easy to see how such a cult, without the control of public ceremonies and with its unabashed traffic with the powers of evil, would be likely to degenerate into compulsion or magic.

There was, however, another popular superstition or belief which, about the time when Mithraism made its appearance in Europe, had spread itself over Western Asia. This was the idea that the positions and changes of the heavenly bodies exercise an influence over the affairs of the world and the lot both of kingdoms and individual men. It probably began in Babylonia, where the inhabitants had from Sumerian times shown themselves great observers of the stars, and had been accustomed to record the omens that they drew from their motions for the guidance of the kings[811]. This kind of divination—or astrology to call it by a familiar name—received a great impulse after Alexander’s Conquest, in the first place from the break up of the Euphratean priestly colleges before referred to, and the driving out of the lesser priests therein to get their own living, and then from the fact that the scientific enquiry and mathematical genius of the Greeks had made the calculation of the positions of the heavenly bodies at any given date and hour a fairly simple matter to be determined without direct observation[812]. It was probably no mere coincidence that the Chaldaei and the Mathematici, as the astrologers called themselves, should have swarmed at Rome under just those emperors in whose reigns Mithraism began to push itself to the front[813].

While we may be sure that these factors, the religion of the Magi, the practice of magic, and the astrological art, all counted in the composition of the worship of Mithras, we yet know but very little of its tenets. No work has come down to us from any devotee of Mithras which will give us the same light on the way his worshippers regarded him that the romance of Apuleius and the encomium of Aelius Aristides have cast on the mental attitude of the devotees of the Alexandrian cult. The extensive books of Eubulus and Pallas on Mithras and the history of his worship, which Porphyry tells us were extant from the reign of Hadrian down to his own time[814], are entirely lost, and our only source of information, except a very few scattered notices in the Fathers and in profane writers like the Emperor Julian and Porphyry himself, are the sculptures and inscriptions which have been found in his ruined chapels. These texts and monuments the scholarly care of M. Cumont has gathered into two large volumes, which will always remain the chief source from which later enquirers must draw their materials[815]. From their study he comes to the conclusion that, in the religion of Mithras, there figured above him the Mazdean gods of good and evil respectively called in the Zend Avesta Ahura Mazda and Angro Mainyus, or in more familiar language, Ormuzd and Ahriman. Behind and above these again, he would place a Supreme Being called Zervan Akerene or Boundless Time, who seems to be without attributes or qualities, and to have acted only as the progenitor of the opposing couple. This is at first sight very probable, because the Orphic doctrine, which, as we have seen, made Chronos or Time the progenitor of all the gods, was widely spread in Asia Minor before Alexander’s Conquest, and the Persian colonies formed there under his successors must therefore have come in frequent contact with this most accommodating of schools[816]. Traditions of a sect of Zervanists in Western Asia, who taught that all things came from Infinite Time, are also to be found[817]. But most of these are recorded after Mithraism had become extinct; and M. Cumont’s proofs of the existence of this dogma in the European religion of Mithras can be reduced on final analysis to a quotation from a treatise by Theodore, the Christian bishop of Mopsuestia who died in 428 A.D., directed, as it would seem, against the “Magi” of his time, in which he admits that their dogmas had never been written, and that the sectaries in question, whom he calls Magusaeans, said “sometimes one thing and deceived themselves, and sometimes another and deceived the ignorant[818].” M. Cumont’s identification of the lion-headed statue often found in Mithraic chapels with the Supreme God of the system has been shown elsewhere to be open to serious question, and the figure itself to be susceptible of another interpretation than that which he would put upon it[819]. On the whole, therefore, while M. Cumont’s mastery of his subject makes it very dangerous to differ from him, it seems that his theory of a Boundless Time as the pinnacle of the Mithraist pantheon cannot be considered as proved.

Whether Ormuzd and Ahriman played any important part in the Roman worship of Mithras is also doubtful. With regard to the first-named, both Greeks and Romans knew him well and identified him unhesitatingly with Zeus and Jupiter[820]. Hence we should expect to find him, if represented at all on the Mithraic sculptures, with the well-known features, the thunderbolt, and the eagle, which long before this time had become the conventional attributes of the Roman as well as of the Homeric father of gods and men. We are not entirely disappointed, for we find in a bas-relief formerly in a chapel of Mithras at Sissek (the ancient Sissia in Pannonia) and now in the Museum at Agram, the bull-slaying scene in which Mithras figures and which will be presently described, surmounted by an arch on which is ranged Jupiter seated on his throne, grasping the thunderbolt, wielding the sceptre, and occupying the place of honour in a group of gods among whom we may distinguish Mars and Mercury[821]. In another bas-relief of the same scene, now at the Rudolfinum in Klagenfurt, he is depicted in a similar position in an assembly of the gods, which although much mutilated seems to show Zeus or Jupiter in the centre with Hera or Juno by his side[822]. But the most conclusive of these monuments is the great bas-relief found at Osterburken in the Odenwald, wherein the arch surmounting the usual bull-slaying scene contains an assembly of twelve gods with Zeus in the centre armed with thunderbolt and sceptre, while around him are grouped Apollo, Ares, Heracles, Hera, Athena, Aphrodite, Nike, Poseidon, Artemis, Hades, and perhaps Persephone[823]. When by the side of these we put the many inscriptions left by the legionaries to “the holy gods of the fatherland, to Jupiter best and greatest, and to the Unconquered One”; to “Jupiter best and greatest, and to the divine Sun, the Unconquered Sun,” and other well-known names of Mithras, there can be no doubt that his worshippers used to adore him together with the head of the Roman Pantheon, and that they considered Mithras in some way the subordinate of or inferior to Jupiter[824]. Yet there is nothing to show that the Mithraists as such identified in any way this Jupiter Optimus Maximus with the Persian Ahura Mazda, Oromasdes, or Ormuzd, or that they ever knew him by any of these outlandish names.

The case is different with Ormuzd’s enemy Ahriman, who evidently was known by his Persian name to the Roman worshippers of Mithras. In the Vatican can be seen a triangular marble altar dedicated by a _clarissimus_ named Agrestius who was a high-priest of Mithras, to “the god Arimanius[825],” and altars with similar inscriptions have been found at Buda-Pesth[826]. At a Mithraic chapel in York also, there was found a statue, now in the Museum of the Philosophical Society in that city, which bears an inscription to the same god Arimanius[827]. There is therefore fairly clear evidence that the Mithraists recognized Ahriman under his Persian name, and that they sacrificed to him, as Plutarch said the “magi” of his time did to the god whom he calls Hades[828], and this agrees with Herodotus’ statement that the Persians used to do the same to “the god who is said to be beneath the earth[829].” Although this gave occasion to the Christian Fathers to accuse the Mithraists of worshipping the devil, we are not thereby bound to conclude that they looked upon Arimanius as an essentially evil being. It seems more probable that they considered him, as the Greeks did their Hades or Pluto, as a chthonian or subterranean power ruling over a place of darkness and discomfort, where there were punishments indeed, but not as a deity insusceptible of propitiation by sacrifice[830], or compulsion by other means such as magic arts[831]. It has been shown elsewhere that his image in a form which fairly represents his attributes in this capacity appears with some frequency in the Mithraic chapels, where a certain amount of mystery attached to its exhibition[832]. It seems to follow from these considerations that the worshippers of Mithras attributed to their special god no inferiority to Ahriman as M. Cumont’s argument supposes, and that the only power whom they acknowledged as higher than Mithras himself was the Roman equivalent of Ormuzd, the Jupiter Optimus Maximus adored throughout the Roman Empire of their time as the head of the Pantheon[833].

The connection of Mithras with the sun is also by no means easy to unravel. The Vedic Mitra was, as we have seen, originally the material sun itself, and the many hundreds of votive inscriptions left by the worshippers of Mithras to “the unconquered Sun Mithras[834],” to the unconquered solar divinity (_numen_) Mithras[835], to the unconquered Sun-God (_deus_) Mithra[836], and allusions in them to the priests (_sacerdotes_), worshippers (_cultores_), and temples (_templum_) of the same deity leave no doubt open that he was in Roman times a sun-god[837]. Yet this does not necessarily mean that he was actually the day-star visible to mankind, and the Greeks knew well enough how to distinguish between Apollo the god of light who was once at any rate a sun-god, and Helios the Sun itself[838]. On the Mithraic sculptures, we frequently see the unmistakable figure of Mithras riding in the chariot of the Sun-God driven by the divinity with long hair and a rayed nimbus, whom we know to be this Helios or his Roman equivalent, going through some ceremony of consecration with him, receiving messages from him, and seated side by side with him at a banquet which is evidently a ritual feast. M. Cumont explains this by the theory that Mithras, while in Persia and in the earliest Aryan traditions the genius of the celestial light only[839], no sooner passed into Semitic countries and became affected by the astrological theories of the Chaldaeans, than he was identified with their sun-god Shamash[840], and this seems as reasonable a theory as can be devised. Another way of accounting for what he calls the “at first sight contradictory proposition” that Mithras at once was and was not the sun[841], is to suppose that while the Mithraists wished those who did not belong to their faith to believe that they themselves worshipped the visible luminary, they yet instructed their votaries in private that he was a deity superior to it and in fact the power behind it. As we shall see, the two theories are by no means irreconcilable, although absolute proof of neither can yet be offered.

One can speak with more certainty about the Legend or mythical history of Mithras which M. Cumont has contrived with rare acumen to reconstruct from the monuments found in his chapels. It is comprised in eleven or twelve scenes or tableaux which we will take in their order[842]. We first see the birth of the god, not from the head of his father Zeus like Athena, or from his thigh like Dionysos, but from a rock, which explains his epithet of “Petrogenes” or rock-born. The god is represented in this scene as struggling from the rock in which he is embedded below the waist, and always uplifts in one hand a broad knife of which we shall afterwards see him make use, and in the other a lighted torch[843]. He is here represented as a boy, and wears the Phrygian cap or so-called cap of liberty which is his distinctive attribute, while the torch is doubtless, as M. Cumont surmises, symbolical of the light which he is bringing into the world[844]. The rock is sometimes encircled by the folds of a large serpent, probably here as elsewhere a symbol of the earth, and is in the Mithraic chapel discovered at Housesteads in Northumberland represented in the form of an egg, the upper part remaining on the head of the nascent god like an egg-shell on that of a newly-hatched chicken[845]. This is probably due to some confusion or identification with the Orphic legend of the First-born or Phanes who sprang from the cosmic egg; but the central idea of the rock-birth seems to be that of the spark, hidden as it were in the stone and leaping forth when struck. In one or two examples of the scene, the miraculous birth is watched by a shepherd or shepherds, which leads M. Cumont to draw a parallel between this and the Adoration of the Shepherds at the Birth of Christ.

The next two scenes are more difficult to interpret with anything approaching certainty. In one of them[846], Mithras is represented as standing upright before a tree from which he cuts or tears a large branch bearing leaves and fruit. He is here naked, save for the distinctive cap; but immediately after, he is seen emerging from the leafage fully clothed in Oriental dress. In the next scene—the relative order of the scenes seems settled by the places they most often occupy on different examples of the same sculptures[847]—Mithras in the Phrygian cap, Persian trousers, and flowing mantle generally worn by him, kneels on one knee drawing a bow, the arrows from which strike a rock in the distance and draw from it a stream of water which a kneeling man receives in his hands and lifts to his mouth[848]. Several variants of this scene exist, in one of which a suppliant is kneeling before the archer-god and raising his hands towards him as if in prayer; while in another, the rock may well be a cloud. M. Cumont can only suggest with regard to these scenes, that the first may be an allusion to the Fall of Man and his subsequently clothing himself with leaves as described in the Book of Genesis, and that the second scene may depict a prolonged drought upon earth, in which man prays to Mithras and is delivered by the god’s miraculous production of rain. He admits, however, that this is pure conjecture, and that he knows no Indian, Persian, or Chaldaean legend or myth to which the scenes in question can be certainly attached. It seems therefore useless to discuss them further here.

Passing on, we come to a series of scenes, the meaning of which is more easily intelligible. In all of these a bull plays a principal part. It is abundantly clear that this bull is no terrestrial creature, but is the Goshurun or Heavenly Bull of the Zend Avesta, from whose death come forth not only man, but beasts, trees, and all the fruits of the earth[849]. In the Mithraic sculptures, we see the Bull first sailing over the waters in a cup-shaped boat[850] like the coracles still used on the Euphrates, or escaping from a burning stable to which Mithras and a companion have set fire[851]. Then he is depicted grazing peaceably or raising his head now and then as if alarmed by some sudden noise[852]. Next he is chased by Mithras, who seizes him by the horns, mounts him[853], and after a furious gallop casts him over his shoulders, generally holding him by the hind legs so that the horned head dangles to the ground[854]. In this position, he is taken into the cave which forms the chapel of Mithras.

Here, if the order in the most complete monuments be followed, we break off to enter upon another set of scenes which illustrate the relations between Mithras and the sun[855]. In what again seems to be the first in order, we see Mithras upright with a person kneeling before him who, from the rayed nimbus round his head, is evidently the god Helios or Sol[856]. In one representation of this scene, Mithras extends his left hand towards this nimbus as if to replace it on the head of its wearer[857] from which it has been displaced in yet another monument[858], while in the other, he displays an object not unlike a Phrygian cap which may, however, be, as M. Cumont suggests, something like a water-skin[859]. Generally, Mithras is represented as holding this object over the bared head of the kneeling Sun-God, as if to crown him with it[860]. Then we find Mithras with the ray-crowned Sun-God upright beside him, while he grasps his hand in token, as it would seem, of alliance or friendship[861]. If we accept the hint afforded by the theory that the rock yielding water on being split by the arrows of Mithras is really a cloud producing the fertilizing rain, we may imagine that we have here the unconquered god removing clouds which obscure the face of the great life-giving luminary and restoring to him the crown of rays which enables him to shed his kindly light upon the earth. The earth would thus be made fit for the creation of man and other animals which, as we shall see, follows; but in any event, the meaning of the scene which shows the alliance is, as M. Cumont has pointed out, not doubtful[862]. In one monument, where Mithras grasps the hand of the person we have identified with the Sun-God before an altar, he at the same time draws his sword, as if to perform the exchange of blood or blood-covenant usual in the East on swearing alliance[863]. Possibly the crowning scene, as M. Cumont also suggests[864], is to be connected with Tertullian’s statement that in the initiation of the Mithraist to the degree of _miles_ or soldier, he was offered at the sword’s point a crown, which he cast away from him saying that Mithras was his crown. If so, it would afford some proof that the initiate here, as in the mysteries of Isis, was made to impersonate the sun, which is on other grounds likely enough.

We return to the scenes with the Bull, which here reach their climax. This is the sacrifice of the Bull by Mithras, which forms the central point of the whole legend. Its representation, generally in bas-relief, was displayed in the most conspicuous position in the apse of the Mithraic chapel, where it occupied the place of the modern altar-piece, and such art as the Roman sculptors succeeded in displaying was employed to make it as impressive and as striking as possible[865]. It shows the god grasping with his left hand the nostrils of the beast, and kneeling with his left knee in the middle of the Bull’s back, while with his right hand he plunges the broad-bladed dagger with which he was armed at his birth into the Bull’s shoulder[866]. A dog leaps forward to lap the blood flowing from the wound, while at the same time a scorpion seizes the Bull by the genitals. A serpent also forms part of the group, but his position varies in the different monuments, while that of the other animals does not. Sometimes, he lifts his head towards the blood, as if to share it with the dog, sometimes he is extended along the ground beneath the Bull’s belly in apparent indifference to the tragedy enacted above him[867]. Before the Bull stands generally a youth clothed like Mithras himself in Phrygian cap, tunic, and mantle, as well as the anaxyrides or tight trousers in which the Greeks depicted most Easterns, while another youth similarly attired stands behind the dying victim. These two human figures are alike in every particular save that one of them bears a torch upright with the flame pointing upwards, while the other holds a similar torch reversed so that the flame juts towards the earth. We know from a Latin inscription that the torch-bearer with uplifted torch was called Cautes, he with the reversed one Cautopates, but of neither name has any satisfactory derivation or etymology yet been discovered[868].

The meaning of the group as a whole can, however, be explained by the documents of the later Persian religion. The _Bundahish_ tells us that Ahura Mazda created before all things the Bull Goshurun, who was killed by Ahriman, the god of evil, and that from his side came forth Gayômort, first of men, while from his tail there issued useful seed-plants and trees, from his blood the vine, and from his seed the different kinds of beasts[869]. Save that the bull-slayer is here not the god of evil but the lord of light himself, the myth is evidently the same in the Mithraic bas-reliefs, for in some of the earliest monuments the Bull’s tail is actually shown sprouting into ears of wheat, while in others the production of animals as a consequence of the Bull’s death may be indicated, as well as the birth of the vine[870]. That the dog plays the part of the guardian of the Bull’s soul is probable from what we know of later Persian beliefs[871], while the scorpion as the creature of Ahriman may be here represented as poisoning the seed of future life at its source[872]. That Mithras is not supposed to kill the Bull from enmity or other personal reasons, but in obedience to orders from some higher power, is shown by the listening pose of his head during the sacrifice. This is M. Cumont’s opinion[873], as also that the serpent here takes no active part in the affair, but is merely a symbolic representation of the earth[874]. The whole drama is clearly shown as taking place in a cave or grotto, as appears from the arch of rocks which surmounts, and, as it were, acts as a frame to, the Tauroctony or bull-slaying scene in most Mithraic chapels. This cave, according to Porphyry, represents the universe.

The Legend, however, does not end with the death of the Bull. In the chapel at Heddernheim, the great slab on which the Tauroctony is sculptured in bas-relief is pivoted so as to swing round and display on its other face another scene which we find repeated in a slightly different form on many monuments[875]. Mithras and the Sun-God are here shown as partaking of a ritual feast or banquet in which grapes seem to figure. At Heddernheim, the grapes are tendered to the two gods over the body of the dead bull by the two torch-bearing figures Cautes and Cautopates, while on an arch above them various quadrupeds, dogs, a boar, a sheep, and a cow, are seen springing into life. In other monuments, the same scene generally appears as a banquet at which Mithras and Helios are seated side by side at a table sometimes alone, but at others in company with different persons who can hardly be any other than initiates or worshippers[876]. That this represents some sort of sacrament where a drink giving immortality was administered seems probable, and its likeness to representations of the Last Supper is sufficient to explain the complaint of Justin Martyr and other Fathers that the devil had set on the Mithraists to imitate in this and other respects the Church of Christ[877]. The final scene of all comes when we see Mithras arresting the glorious chariot of the Sun-God drawn by four white horses, and, mounting therein, being driven off by the ray-crowned Helios himself to the abode of light above the firmament[878]. In this also, it is easy to see a likeness between representations of the Ascension of Mithras and that of Elijah or even of Christ[879].

However this may be, the Legend of Mithras, as thus portrayed, shows with fair closeness the belief of his worshippers as to his place in the scheme of the universe. Mithras was certainly not the Supreme God, a rank in the system filled by Ahura Mazda, or his Latin counterpart, Jupiter Best and Greatest[880]. But this being, like the Platonic Zeus and the Gnostic Bythos, was considered too great and too remote to concern himself with the doings of the visible universe, in which Mithras acts as his vicegerent. Whether Mithras was or was not considered as in some sort the double or antitype of the Supreme Being cannot be said; but it is worth noticing that in the Vedas, as among the Hittites, Varuna and Mitra form an inseparable couple who are always invoked together, and that the same seems to have been the case with Ahura Mazda and Mithra in the oldest religious literature of the Persians[881]. It may therefore well be that the learned doctors of the Mithraic theology regarded their Supreme Being and Mithras as two aspects of the same god, an idea that, as we have seen, was current at about the same period among the Gnostics. It is, however, impossible to speak with certainty on such a point in the absence of any writings by persons professing the Mithraic faith, and it is highly improbable that the rugged soldiers who formed the majority of the god’s worshippers ever troubled themselves much about such questions. For them, no doubt, and for all, perhaps, but a few carefully-chosen persons, Mithras was the Demiurge or Divine Artizan of the universe[882], which he governs in accordance with the laws of right and justice, protecting and defending alike man and those animals and plants useful to him which Mithras has himself created from his own spontaneous goodness. Hence he was the only god to whom they admitted allegiance, and although the existence of other heavenly beings was not denied, it is probable that most of them were looked upon as occupying at the best a position less important to us than that of Mithras himself.

It is probable, moreover, that all the scenes in the Mithraic sculptures in which we have seen the god taking part were considered as being enacted before the creation of man and in some heaven or world midway between the abode of Infinite Light and this earth. That the grotto into which Mithras drags the primordial Bull is no earthly cavern is plain from Porphyry’s remark that the Mithraic cave was an image of the universe[883], as well as from the band of zodiacal figures or the arch of rocks which sometimes encloses the bas-reliefs, the sky being looked upon by the Babylonians as a rocky vault. The sun and moon in their respective chariots also appear above the principal scene; and a further hint as to its whereabouts may be found in the fact that the flowing mantle of Mithras is sometimes depicted as spangled with stars, thereby indicating that the scenes in which he appears are supposed to take place in the starry firmament. Hence is explained the epithet of μεσίτης or Mediator, which Plutarch gives him[884], and which should be interpreted not as intercessor but as he who occupies a position midway between two places[885]. That the higher of these in this case was the Garôtman or abode of Infinite Light of the Avestic literature, there can, it would seem, be no question; but what was the lower?

Although the statement must be guarded with all the reserves imposed upon us in all matters relating to the religion of Mithras by the absence of written documents, it is probable that this lower division of the universe was our earth. The monuments give us with fair certainty the Mithraic ideas as to how life was brought thither; but they tell us little or nothing as to the condition in which the earth was at the time, nor how it was supposed to have come into existence. Porphyry tells us that the “elements” (στοιχεῖα) were represented in the Mithraic chapel[886], and we find in some examples of the bull-slaying scenes, the figures of a small lion and a crater or mixing-bowl beneath the belly of the bull, which M. Cumont considers to be the symbols of fire and water respectively; while the earth may be typified, as has been said above, by the serpent, and the fourth element or air may be indicated by the wind which is blowing Mithras’ mantle away from his body and to the left of the group[887]. If this be so, it is probable that the Mithraist who thought about such matters looked upon the four elements, of which the ancients believed the world to be composed, as already in existence before the sacrifice of the primordial bull brought life upon the earth; and that the work of Mithras as Demiurge or Artizan was confined to arranging and moulding them into the form of the cosmos or ordered world. As to what was the ultimate origin of these elements, and whether the Mithraists, like the Gnostics, held that Matter had an existence independent of, and a nature opposed to, the Supreme Being, we have no indication whatever.

Of Mithraic eschatology or the view that the worshippers of Mithras held as to the end of the world, we know rather less than we do of their ideas as to its beginning. The Persian religion, after its reform under the Sassanid kings, taught that it would be consumed by fire[888]; and, as this doctrine of the Ecpyrosis, as the ancients called it, was also held by the Stoics, whose physical doctrines were then fashionable at Rome, it is probable enough that it entered into Mithraism also. But of this there is no proof, and M. Cumont’s attempt to show that a similar conflagration was thought by the Mithraic priests to have taken place before the Tauroctony, and as a kind of paradigm or forecast of what was to come, is not very convincing[889]. Yet some glimpse of what was supposed to happen between the creation of the world and its destruction seems to be typified by a monstrous figure often found in the ruined chapels once used for the Mithraic worship, where it seems to have been carefully guarded from the eyes of the general body of worshippers. This monster had the body of a man[890] with the head of a lion, while round his body is twined a huge serpent, whose head either appears on the top of the lion’s or rests on the human breast. On the monster’s back appear sometimes two, but generally four wings, and in his hands he bears upright two large keys, for one of which a sceptre is sometimes substituted; while his feet are sometimes human, sometimes those of a crocodile or other reptile. On his body, between the folds of the serpent, there sometimes appear the signs of the four quarters of the year, _i.e._ Aries and Libra, Cancer and Capricorn[891], and in other examples a thunderbolt on the breast or on the right knee[892]. The figure is often mounted on a globe which bears in one instance the two crossed bands which show that it is intended for our earth, and in one curious instance he appears to bear a flaming torch in each hand, while his breath is kindling a flame which is seen rising from an altar beside him[893]. It is possible that in this last we have a symbolical representation of the Ecpyrosis. Lastly, in the Mithraic chapel at Heddernheim, which is the only one where the figure of the lion-headed monster was found _in situ_, it was concealed within a deep niche or cell so fashioned, says M. Cumont, that the statue could only be perceived through a little conical aperture or peep-hole made in the slab of basalt closing the niche[894].

M. Cumont’s theory, as given in his magnificent work on the _Mystères de Mithra_ and elsewhere, is that the figure represents that Zervan Akerene or Boundless Time whom he would put at the head of the Mithraic pantheon, and would make the father of both Ormuzd and Ahriman[895]. M. Cumont’s opinion, on a subject of which he has made himself the master, must always command every respect, and it may be admitted that the notion of such a supreme Being, corresponding in many ways to the Ineffable Bythos of the Gnostics, did appear in the later developments of the Persian religion, and may even have been known during the time that the worship of Mithras flourished in the West[896]. It has been shown elsewhere, however, that this idea only came to the front long after the cult of Mithras had become extinct, that M. Cumont’s view that the lion-headed monster was represented as without sex or passions has been shown to be baseless by later discoveries, and that the figure is connected in at least one example with an inscription to Arimanes or Ahriman[897]. M. Cumont has himself noted the confusion which a Christian, writing before the abolition of the Mithras worship, makes between the statues of Hecate, goddess of hell and patroness of sorcerers, and those of the lion-headed monster[898], and Hecate’s epithet of Περσείη can only be explained by some similar association[899]. At the same time, M. Cumont makes it plain that the Mithraists did not regard these infernal powers Ahriman and Hecate with the horror and loathing which the reformed Zoroastrian religion afterwards heaped upon the antagonist of Ormuzd[900]. On the contrary the dedications of several altars and statues show that they paid them worship and offered them sacrifices, as the Greeks did to Hades and Persephone, the lord and lady of hell, of whom the Mithraists probably considered them the Persian equivalents. From all these facts, the conclusion seems inevitable that the lion-headed monster represents Ahriman, the consort of Hecate[901].

If we now look at the religious literature of the time when the worship of Mithras was coming into favour, we find a pretty general consensus of opinion that the chthonian or infernal god represented in the earlier Persian religion by this Ahriman, was a power who might be the rival of, but was not necessarily the mortal enemy of Zeus. Whether Neander be right or not in asserting that the prevailing tendency of the age was towards Dualism[902], it is certain that most civilized nations had then come to the conclusion that on this earth the bad is always mixed up with the good. Plutarch puts this clearly enough when he says that nature here below comes not from one, but from two opposed principles and contending powers, and this opinion, he tells us, is a most ancient one which has come down from expounders of myths (θεολόγοι) and legislators to poets and philosophers, and is expressed “not in words and phrases, but in mysteries and sacrifices, and has been found in many places among both Barbarians and Greeks[903].” The same idea of antagonistic powers is, of course, put in a much stronger form in the reformed Persian religion, where the incursion of Ahriman into the kingdom of Ormuzd brings upon the earth all evil in the shape of winter, prolonged drought, storms, disease, and beasts and plants hurtful to man[904]. But this does not seem to have been the view of Ahriman’s functions taken by the older Magism, whence the worship of Mithras was probably derived[905]. In Mithraism, it is not Ahriman, as in the _Bundahish_, but Mithras, the vicegerent of Ormuzd, who slays the mystic Bull, and by so doing he brings good and not evil to the earth. Nowhere do we find in the Mithraic sculptures any allusion to Ahriman as a god of evil pure and simple, or as one who is for ever opposed to the heavenly powers. We do, indeed, find in several Mithraea representations of a Titanomachia where the Titans, represented as men with serpent legs, are depicted as fleeing before a god like the Greek Zeus who strikes them with his thunderbolts[906]. But this is not more necessarily suggestive of two irreconcilable principles than the Greek story of the Titans, those sons of Earth who were persuaded by their mother to make war upon their father Uranos, who put their brother Kronos upon his throne, and who were in their turn hurled from heaven by Kronos’ son Zeus. Even if we do not accept the later myth which reconciles Zeus to his adversaries[907], the story does not go further than to say that the Titans attempted to gain heaven and were thrust back to their own proper dwelling-place, the earth.

It is in this way, as it would seem, that the lion-headed monster of the Mithraic chapels must be explained. Ahriman, the god girt with the serpent which represents the earth, has rebelled against Ormuzd or Jupiter, and has been marked with the thunderbolt which has cast him down from heaven. But he remains none the less lord of his own domain, the earth, his sway over which is shown by the sceptre which he wields while standing upon it[908]. As for the keys which he bears, they are doubtless those of the gates behind which he keeps the souls and bodies of men, as the Orphics said, imprisoned, until he is compelled to release them by a higher power[909]. In all this, his functions do not go beyond those of the Greek Hades, with whom Plutarch equates him.

It is however, possible that he was conceived by the Mithraists as occupying a slightly different place in the material universe from that of his Greek prototype. The true realm of Hades was generally placed by the Greeks below the earth, but that of the Mithraic Ahriman may possibly be just outside it. M. Cumont shows many reasons for supposing the lion-headed god to be connected with the idea of destiny[910], and in one of the very few contemporary writings which make distinct allusion to the Mithraic tenets, there is something which confirms this view. This occurs in a fragment embedded, as it were, in a Magic Papyrus or sorcerer’s handbook now in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris[911]. The document itself is probably not, as Prof. Albert Dieterich has too boldly asserted, a “Mithraic Liturgy”; but it is evidently connected in some way with the Mithraic worship and begins with a statement that the writer is a priest who has received inspiration from “the great Sun-God Mithras.” M. Georges Lafaye is of opinion that it narrates in apocalyptic fashion the adventures of the soul of a perfect Mithraist on its way to heaven, and this is probably correct, although it is here told for no purpose of edification but as a spell or charm[912]. The soul, if it be indeed she who is speaking, repeatedly complains to the gods whom she meets—including one in white tunic, crimson mantle and anaxyrides or Persian trousers who may be Mithras himself—of “the harsh and inexorable necessity” which has been compelling her so long as she remained in the “lower nature[913].” But the Sphere of Destiny or necessity, as we have seen in the _Pistis Sophia_, was thought to be the one immediately surrounding the earth, and although the document in which we have before met with this idea belongs to a different set of religious beliefs than those here treated of, it is probable that both Gnostic and Mithraist drew it from the astrological theories current at the time which came into the Hellenistic world from Babylon. It is therefore extremely probable that the Mithraists figured Ahriman as ruling the earth from the sphere immediately outside it, and this would agree well with his position _upon_ the globe in the monuments where he appears. It is some confirmation of this that, in another part of the Papyrus just quoted, the “World-ruler” (Cosmocrator) is invoked as “the Great Serpent, leader of these gods, who holds the source of Egypt [Qy, The Nile?] and the end of the whole inhabited world [in his hands], who begets in Ocean Pshoi (_i.e._ Fate) the god of gods[914]”; while the Great Dragon or Outer Darkness in the _Pistis Sophia_ is said to surround the earth. That both orthodox Christians and Gnostics like the Valentinians looked upon the Devil, who, as lord of hell, was sometimes identified with Hades, as the Cosmocrator or World-Ruler requires no further demonstration[915], and in this particular as in others the Mithraists may have drawn from the same source as the Gnostic teachers[916].

That they did so in a related matter can be shown by direct evidence. Like the Ophites of the Diagram before described, the Mithraists thought that the soul descended to the body through seven spheres which were those of the “planets” Saturn, Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, the Moon, and the Sun in that order, which Origen, who mentions the fact, says that the Persian theology declared to be symbolized “by the names of the rest of matter,” and also gave for it “musical reasons[917].” He further describes the different qualities which the soul in her passage receives from each sphere, and which it seems fair to conclude she gives back to them on her reascension. M. Cumont is no doubt right when he attributes the origin of this tenet to the _mathematici_ or astrologers and says that it too came originally from Chaldaea[918]. The seven heavens are also found in many Oriental documents of the time, including the _Book of the Secrets of Enoch_[919] and the _Apocalypse of Baruch_[920]. According to Origen, they were symbolized in the Mithraic chapels by a ladder of eight steps, the first seven being of the metals peculiar to the different planets, _i.e._ lead, tin, copper, iron, an alloy of several metals, silver, and gold, with the eighth step representing the heaven of the fixed stars[921]. The Stoics who held similar views, following therein perhaps the Platonic cosmogony, had already fixed the gate of the sky through which the souls left the heaven of the fixed stars on their descent to the earth in Cancer, and that by which they reascended in Capricorn[922], which probably accounts for the two keys borne by the lion-headed god on the Mithraic monuments, and for those two Zodiacal signs being displayed on his body. The other two signs, _viz._ Aries and Libra, may possibly refer to the places in a horoscope or genethliacal figure which the astrologers of the time called the _Porta laboris_ and _Janua Ditis_ respectively, as denoting the gate by which man “born to labour” enters life, and the “gate of Hades” by which he leaves it[923]. If, as Porphyry says, the doctrine of metempsychosis formed part of the Mithraic teaching, the keys would thus have a meaning analogous to the Orphic release from “the wheel[924].”

The other gods who appear on the Mithraic monuments are those known to us in classical mythology and are represented under the usual human forms made familiar by Greek and Roman art. By the side of, but in a subordinate position to Jupiter, we find, if M. Cumont be justified in his identifications, nearly all the “great gods” of the Greco-Roman pantheon. Five of these, that is to say, Jupiter himself, Saturn, Mars, Venus, and Mercury may be intended as symbols of the planets which, then as now, bore these names. But there are others such as Juno, Neptune and Amphitrite, Pluto and Proserpine, Apollo, Vulcan, and Hercules who cannot by any possibility be considered as planetary signs[925]. M. Cumont’s theory about these divinities is, if one understands him rightly, that these are really Persian or Avestic gods, such as Verethragna, represented under the classic forms of their Greek counterparts to make them attractive to their Roman worshippers[926]. This does not seem very probable, because the Persians did not figure their gods in human form[927]. Nor is there any reason to think that the Mithraists confined themselves to the _theocrasia_ or the practice of discovering their own gods in the divinities of the peoples around them which we have seen so rife in Greece, Italy, and Egypt. But in the age when the worship of Mithras became popular in the Roman Empire, all paganism was groping its way towards a religion which should include and conciliate all others, and there is much evidence that the votaries of Mithras were especially determined that this religion should be their own. Isis, as we have seen, might proclaim herself as the one divinity whom under many names and in many forms the whole earth adored; but the Mithraists apparently went further and tried to show that their religion contained within itself all the rest. They appear to have first gained access to Rome under an alliance with the priests of Cybele, whose image, with its emasculated attendants the Galli, was transported from Pergamum to the Eternal City during the critical moments of the Second Punic War[928]. Externally there were many analogies between the two cults, and Cybele’s consort Attis, like Mithras, was always represented in a Phrygian cap and anaxyrides. One of the most impressive, if most disgusting practices in the religion of Cybele—the Taurobolium or blood-bath in which a bull was slaughtered over a pit covered with planks pierced with holes through which the blood of the victim dripped upon the naked votary below—was borrowed by the Mithraists, and many of them boast on their funereal inscriptions that they have undergone this ceremony and thereby, as they express it, have been “born again.” The _clarissimi_ and high officials of the Empire who have left records of the kind are careful to note that they are worshippers of “the Great Mother” (Cybele) and Attis, as well as of Mithras[929], and a similar statement occurs so frequently on the funereal and other inscriptions of their wives as to lead to the hypothesis that the ceremonies of the Phrygian Goddess were the natural refuge of Mithras’ female votaries[930]. So, too, the worship of the Alexandrian divinities, which that of Mithras in some sort supplanted, and which, as being as popular in the Greek world as the last-named was in the Latin, might have been expected to be hostile to it, yet had relations with it not very easy to be understood. In the assembly of the gods which in some of the monuments crowns the arch set over the Tauroctony, the central place is in one instance taken by Sarapis with the distinctive _modius_ on his head instead of Zeus or Jupiter[931], the same priest often describes himself as serving the altars of both gods, and “Zeus, Helios, Mithras, Sarapis, unconquered one!” is invoked in one of those spells in the Magic Papyri which contain fragments of ritual prayers or hymns[932]. Possibly it is for this reason, that the initiating priest in Apuleius’ story whom the grateful Lucius says he regards as his father, is named Mithras, as if the initiate had been led to the Mysteries of Isis through the worship of that god[933].

The same syncretistic tendency is particularly marked in the leaning of the Mithraists to the worship of the gods of Eleusis. “Consecrated to Liber [the Latin name of Dionysos] and the Eleusinian [goddesses],” “Mystes of Ceres,” “priest” or “Chief Herdsman (_archibucolus_) of the god Liber,” “hierophant of Father Liber and the Hecates,” “Consecrated at Eleusis to the god Bacchus, Ceres, and Cora” are some of the distinctions which the devotees of Mithras vaunt on their tombstones[934]; while we learn that when the last survivors of the two sacred families who had for centuries furnished priests to the Eleusinian Mysteries died out, the Athenians sent for a priest of Mithras from one of the neighbouring islands, and handed over to him the care of the sacred rites[935]. It is even possible that the complaisance of the Mithraists for other religions went further than has hitherto been suspected. Not only does Justin Martyr after describing the celebration of the Christian Eucharist say,

“Wherefore also the evil demons in mimicry have handed down that the same thing should be done in the Mysteries of Mithras. For that bread and a cup of water are in these mysteries set before the initiate with certain speeches you either know or can learn[936]”;

but we know from Porphyry that the initiate into the rites of Mithras underwent a baptism by total immersion which was said to expiate his sins[937]. Among the worshippers of Mithras, on the same authority, were also virgins and others vowed to continence[938], and we hear that the Mithraists used, like the Christians, to call each other “Brother” and address their priests as “Father[939].” St Augustine tells us that in his time the priests of Mithras were in the habit of saying, “That One in the Cap [_i.e._ Mithras] is a Christian too!” and it is not unlikely that the claim was seriously made[940]. During the reigns of the Second Flavian Emperors and before Constantine’s pact with the Church, we hear of hymns sung by the legionaries which could be chanted in common by Christians, Mithraists, and the worshippers of that Sun-God the adoration of whom was hereditary or traditional in the Flavian House[941]. The Mithraists also observed Sunday and kept sacred the 25th of December as the birthday of the sun[942].

Of the other rites and ceremonies used in the worship of Mithras we know next to nothing. As appears from the authors last quoted, the whole of the worship was conducted in “mysteries” or secret ceremonies like the Eleusinian and the rites of the Alexandrian divinities, although on a more extended scale. The Mithraic mysteries always took place in a subterranean vault or “cave,” lighted only by artificial light. The ruins of many of these have been found, and are generally so small as to be able to accommodate only a few worshippers[943], whence perhaps it followed that there were often several Mithraea in the same town or city[944]. The chief feature seems to have been always the scene of the Tauroctony or Bull-slaying which was displayed on the apse or further end of the chapel, and was generally carved in bas-relief although occasionally rendered in the round. The effect of this was sought to be heightened by brilliant colouring, perhaps made necessary by the dim light, and there were certainly altars of the square or triangular pedestal type, and a well or other source from which water could be obtained. The benches for the worshippers were of stone and ran at right angles to and on either side of the Tauroctony, so as to resemble the choir stalls in the chancel of a modern church[945]. We have seen that the lion-headed figure was concealed from the eyes of the worshippers, and we know that they used to kneel during at least part of the service, which was not in accord with the practice of either the Greeks or Romans, who were accustomed to stand with upturned palms when praying to the gods[946]. Sacrifices of animals which, if we may judge from the débris left in some of the chapels, were generally birds[947], seem to have been made; but there is no reason to believe the accusation sometimes brought against the Mithraists that they also slaughtered human victims in honour of their god. Lampridius tells us, on the other hand, that the Emperor Commodus on his initiation sullied the temple by converting a feigned into a real murder[948], and we hear from another and later source that in consequence of this only a bloody sword was shown to the candidate[949]. It seems therefore that somebody was supposed to suffer death during the ceremony, perhaps under the same circumstances as already suggested in the kindred case of the Alexandrian Mysteries[950].

We are a little better informed as to the degrees of initiation, which numbered seven. The initiate ascended from the degree of Crow (_corax_), which was the first or lowest, to that of Father (_Pater_), which was the seventh or highest, by passing successively through the intermediate degrees of Man of the Secret (_Cryphius_), Soldier (_Miles_), Lion (_Leo_), Persian (_Perses_), and Courier of the Sun (_Heliodromus_)[951]. It would seem that either he, or the initiating priests, or perhaps the other assistants, had to assume disguises consisting of masks corresponding to the animals named in the first and fourth of these degrees, and to make noises like the croaking of birds and the roaring of lions[952]. These rightly recall to M. Cumont the names of animals borne by initiates or priests in other religions in Greece and Asia Minor and may be referred to totemistic times. We also know from a chance allusion of Tertullian that on being admitted to the degree of soldier, the initiate was offered a crown or garland at the point of a sword, which he put away from him with the speech, “Mithras is my crown!”, and that never thereafter might he wear a garland even at a feast[953]. Porphyry, too, tells us that in the degree of Lion, the initiate’s hands and lips were purified with honey. It has also been said by the Fathers that before or during initiation, the candidate had to undergo certain trials or tortures, to swim rivers, plunge through fire, and to jump from apparently vast heights[954]; but it is evident from the small size of the Mithraea or chapels which have come down to us that these experiences would have demanded much more elaborate preparation than there was space for, and, if they were ever enacted, were probably as purely “make-believe” as the supposed murder just mentioned and some of the initiatory ceremonies in certain societies of the present day[955]. Lastly, there is no doubt that women were strictly excluded from all the ceremonies of the cult, thereby justifying in some sort the remark of Renan that Mithraism was a “Pagan Freemasonry[956].”

It has also been said that the true inwardness and faith of the religion of Mithras was in these mysteries only gradually and with great caution revealed to the initiates, whose fitness for them was tested at every step[957]. It may be so, but it is plain that the Mithraist was informed at the outset of at least a good many of the tenets of the faith. The whole Legend of Mithras, so far as we know it, must have been known to the initiate soon after entering the Mithraic chapel, since we have ourselves gathered it mainly from the different scenes depicted on the borders of the great central group of the Tauroctony. So, too, the mystic banquet or Mithraic Sacrament which, if the Heddernheim monuments stood alone, we might consider was concealed from the eyes of the lower initiates until the proper moment came, also forms one of the subsidiary scenes of the great altar piece in the chapels at Sarmizegetusa, Bononia and many other places[958]. In a bas-relief at Sarrebourg, moreover, the two principal persons at the banquet, _i.e._ Mithras and the Sun, are shown surrounded by other figures wearing the masks of crows and perhaps lions[959], which looks as if initiates of all grades were admitted to the sacramental banquet. One can therefore make no profitable conjecture as to what particular doctrines were taught in the particular degrees, though there seems much likelihood in M. Cumont’s statement that the initiates were thought to take rank in the next world according to the degree that they had received in this[960]. The belief that “those who have received humble mysteries shall have humble places and those that have received exalted mysteries exalted places” in the next world was, we may be sure, too profitable a one for the priests of Mithras to be neglected by them. It certainly explains the extraordinary order for the planetary spheres adopted by Origen[961], according to which the souls which had taken the lowest degree would go to the heaven of Saturn, slowest and most unlucky of the planets, while those perfected in the faith would enter the glorious house of the Sun.

Whether they were thought to go further still, we can only guess. It should be noticed that the mystic ladder of Mithras had _eight_ steps, and we have seen that when the soul had climbed through the seven planetary spheres there was still before her the heaven of the fixed stars. The Sun seems in Origen’s account of the Mithraic faith to have formed the last world to be traversed before this highest heaven could be reached; and it was through the disk of the Sun that the ancients thought the gods descended to and reascended from the earth. This idea appears plainly in the Papyrus quoted above, where the Mithraist is represented as an eagle who flies upwards “and alone” to heaven and there beholds all things[962]. He prays that he may, in spite of his mortal and corruptible nature, behold with immortal eyes after having been hallowed with holy hallowings, “the deathless aeon, lord of the fiery crowns,” and that “the corruptible nature of mortals” which has been imposed upon him by “inexorable Necessity” may depart from him. “Then,” says the author of the fragment—which, it will be remembered, claims to be a revelation given by the archangel of the great Sun-God Mithras—the initiate “will see the gods who rule each day and hour ascending to heaven and others descending, and the path of the visible gods through the disk of the god my father will appear.” He describes the machinery of nature by which the winds are produced, which seems to be figured on some of the Mithraic monuments, and which reminds one of the physics supposed to be revealed in the Enochian literature. Then, after certain spells have been recited, the initiate sees the disk of the Sun, which opens, disclosing “doors of fire and the world of the gods within them.” Then follow more invocations to the gods of the seven planetary worlds who appear in due course, and presumably give him admission to their realms. After another invocation, in what may possibly be some Asianic or Anatolian language very much corrupted, the initiate beholds “a young god, beautiful, with fiery hair, in white tunic and purple mantle, and having on his head a crown of fire,” who seems to be Helios or Sol, the driver of the sun’s chariot on the Mithraic monuments. He is saluted as “Mighty in strength, mighty ruler, greatest king of gods! O Sun, lord of heaven and earth, God of Gods!” Next appear “seven virgins in linen robes having the heads of serpents,” who are called “the seven Fortunes of heaven” and are, as M. Georges Lafaye surmises, the seven stars of the constellation of the Great Bear[963]. They are followed by seven male gods also dressed in linen robes and with golden crowns, but equipped with the heads of black bulls, who are called “the rulers of the Pole.” These are they, we are told, who send upon the impious thunders and lightnings and earthquakes. And so we are led at last to the apparition of “a god of extraordinary stature, having a glance of fire, young and golden-haired, in white tunic and golden crown, clothed in anaxyrides, holding in his right hand the golden shoulder of a young bull.” This, _i.e._ the shoulder, we are told, is called “Arctos, who moves the sky, making it to turn forwards and backwards according to the hour.” But the god appears to be intended for Mithras, and the shoulder of the bull is probably an allusion to the bull-slaying scene which may serve to show that there were more interpretations than one placed upon the Tauroctony. The initiate hails this god as “Lord of water, consecrator of the earth, ruler of the air, shining-rayed One, of primeval rays!” and the like, and continues:

“O Lord, having been born again, I die! Having increased and again increasing, I come to an end by life-begotten birth, and coming into existence, and having been released unto death, I pursue my way, as thou hast ordered from the beginning, as thou hast ordained: And having accomplished the mystery, I am _Pheroura miouri_.”

Here the fragment abruptly breaks off, and plunges into directions for the manufacture of oracles and the other stuff common in Magic Papyri. One is not much inclined to believe with M. Cumont that the author of the galimatias knew nothing about Mithraism[964], and merely introduced Mithras’ name into his opening to impress his readers with a sense of the value of his recipes. It seems more likely that the writer of the fragment had really got hold of some part of a Mithraic ritual, which he had read without understanding it, and that he was trying to work more or less meaningless extracts from it into his spells on the same principle that the sorcerers of the European Renaissance used when they took similar liberties with the words of the Mass. If this view be adopted, it follows that the concluding words given above confirm the view that the Mithraists, like the Orphics before them, taught the metempsychosis or reincarnation of souls[965]. Did the Mithraist think that his soul, when released from this “dread necessity,” finally escaped from even the planetary spheres and, raising itself into the heaven of the fixed stars, became united with the Deity Himself? We can only ask the question without being able to suggest an answer supported by any evidence.

With regard to the priests who acted as celebrants in these strange mysteries, there are instances to be found in the inscriptions which make it plain that the priestly office was not confined or attached to any particular degree of initiation. _Pater Patrum_ (Father of Fathers) is a designation which occurs too frequently on the monuments for it to mean anything but eldest or president of those who had taken the seventh or highest degree in one congregation[966]. But _Sacerdos_ or _Antistes_ indifferently is the name by which the priest of Mithras is described by himself and others, and the holding of the office seems not to have been inconsistent with the tenure at once of other priesthoods and of high office in the State. Thus the _clarissimus_ Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, who was Urban Praetor, Proconsul of Achaea, Prefect of the City, Prefect of the Praetorians of Italy and Illyricum, and Consul Designate at the time of his death, was Father of Fathers in the religion of Mithras besides being Pontiff of the Sun and Pontiff of Vesta[967]. This was at a very late date, when probably only a man of high civil rank dared avow on his tombstone, as did Vettius, his fidelity to the god; but earlier, we find Lucius Septimius, a freedman of Severus, Caracalla, and Geta, acting as “Father and Priest of the Unconquered Mithras in the Augustan house”—evidently a Court chaplain—, and a certain _clarissimus_ Alfenius Julianus Kamenius who is of consular rank, a quaestor and a praetor, as a “father of the sacred things of the Highest Unconquered One Mithras[968].” So, too, we find a veteran of the IVth Flavian Legion acting as _pater sacrorum_, a decurion as _antistes_ and another as _sacerdos_ of Mithras[969]. Evidently, the cares of the priesthood did not occupy the priest’s whole time, and he never seems to have lived in the temple as did the clergy of the Alexandrian divinities. There was, on the faith of Porphyry, a _summus pontifex_ or Supreme Pontiff of Mithras, who like the Christian bishop in the Epistle to Timothy was forbidden to marry more than once[970]; but this was probably a high officer of State appointed directly by the Emperor. No proof is forthcoming that a fire was kept perpetually burning on the altar in the European chapels of Mithras, as perhaps was the case with the temples of the faith in Asia Minor, or that daily or any other regularly repeated services were held there, and such services moreover could seldom have been attended by the soldiers with the colours, who seem to have made up the majority of the god’s worshippers. Prayers to the Sun-God and other deities were no doubt offered by Mithraists, possibly at sunrise and sunset, and perhaps special ones on the first day of the week, which they very likely held sacred to their god. But the small size of the Mithraea, and the scanty number of the members of the associations supporting each[971], make it extremely unlikely that there was anything like regular congregational worship, or that the faithful assembled there except for initiations or meetings for conferring the different degrees. The extremely poor execution of the bas-reliefs and other sculptures found in the majority of these chapels all points the same way. Most of these, together with the furniture and what are nowadays called “articles de culte,” were presented to the chapel by private members of the association[972]. The fact that the congregations of many chapels must have frequently changed by the shifting of garrisons from one end of the Empire to the other caused by the operations of war both external and civil, also helps to account for their temporary and poverty-stricken appearance when compared with the great and stately temples reared to rival gods like Serapis.

Thus the truth of Renan’s comparison of the Mithraic faith with modern Freemasonry becomes more apparent, and we may picture to ourselves the Mithraists as a vast society spread over the whole of the Empire, consisting mainly of soldiers, and entirely confined to the male sex. The example of the Emperor Julian, himself a devotee of Mithras, but

## actively concerned in the propagation of the worship of other

divinities, such as Apollo, Serapis, Mars, and Cybele[973], shows that its real aim was not so much the conversion of individuals as the inclusion of all other cults within itself. It was doubtless with this view that Julian recalled from exile those heresiarchs who had been banished by the Christian emperors and insisted on equal toleration for all sects of Jews and Christians[974]. Themistius is no doubt merely echoing the sentiments of the Mithraist emperor when he writes to his Christian successor Jovian that no lover of wisdom should bind himself to any exclusively national worship, but should acquaint himself with all religions[975]. God, he says, requires no agreement on this subject among men, and their rivalries in matters of faith are really beneficial in leading their minds to the contemplation of other than worldly things. But this highly philosophic temper was not reached all at once; and it is probable that the worship of Mithras was, on its first importation into the West, but one foreign superstition the more, as little enlightened and as exclusively national as the Jewish, the Egyptian, or any of the others. It was probably its rise to imperial favour under the Antonines, when Commodus and many of the freedmen of Caesar’s House were initiated, that first suggested to its votaries the possibility of using it as an instrument of government; and henceforth its fortunes were bound up with those of the still Pagan State. Its strictly monarchical doctrine, using the adjective in its ancient rather than in its modern connotation, must have always endeared it to the emperors, who were beginning to see clearly that in a _quasi_-Oriental despotism lay the only chance of salvation for the Roman Empire. Its relations with Mazdeism in the strict form which this last assumed after the religious reforms of the Sassanian Shahs have never been elucidated, and M. Cumont seems to rely too much upon the later Avestic literature to explain everything that is obscure in the religion of Mithras. If we imagine, as there is reason to do, that Western Mithraism was looked upon by the Sassanian reformers as a dangerous heresy[976], the Roman Emperors would have an additional reason for supporting it; and it is significant that it was exactly those rulers whose wars against the Persians were most successful who seem to have most favoured the worship of the Persian god. When Trajan conquered Dacia, the great province between the Carpathians and the Danube now represented by Hungary and Roumania, he colonized it by a great mass of settlers from every part of the Roman Empire, including therein many Orientals who brought with them into their new home the worship of their Syrian and Asianic gods[977]. It was hence an excellent field for the culture of a universal and syncretic religion such as that of Mithras, and the great number of Mithraea whose remains have been found in that province, show that this religion must have received hearty encouragement from the Imperial Court. From its geographical position, Dacia formed an effective counterpoise to the growing influence upon Roman policy of the Eastern provinces, and it might have proved a valuable outpost for a religion which was always looked upon with hostility by the Greek-speaking subjects of Rome. Unfortunately, however, a religion which allies itself with the State must suffer from its ally’s reverses as well as profit by its good fortunes, and so the Mithraists found. When the Gothic invasion desolated Dacia, and especially when Valerian’s disaster enabled the Goths to gain a footing there which not even the military genius of Claudius could loosen, Mithraism received a blow which was ultimately to prove fatal. The abandonment of Dacia to the Goths and Vandals by Aurelian in 255 A.D., led to its replanting by a race whose faces were turned more to Constantinople than to Rome, and who were before long to be converted to Christianity _en masse_[978]. Diocletian and his colleagues did what they could to restore the balance by proclaiming, as has been said above, the “unconquered” Mithras the protector of their empire at the great city which is now the capital of the Austrian Empire; but the accession of Constantine and his alliance with the Christian Church some twenty years later, definitely turned the scale against the last god of Paganism. Although the Mithraic worship may have revived for a moment under the philosophic Julian, who was, as has been said, peculiarly addicted to it, it possessed no real power of recuperation, and was perhaps one of the first Pagan religions to be extinguished by the triumphant Christians[979]. In 377 A.D., Gracchus, the Urban Prefect of Rome, being desirous of baptism, carried into effect a promise made, as St Jerome boasts, some time before, and breaking into a chapel of Mithras, “overturned, broke in pieces and cast out” the sculptures which had seen the admission of so many initiates[980]. His example was followed in other parts of the Empire, and it is probable that some decree was obtained from the Emperor Gratian legalizing these acts of vandalism[981]. It is in this reign, M. Cumont finds, that most of the Mithraea were wrecked, and the very few which have come down to us in more complete state owe their preservation to the caution of their congregations, who blocked or built up the entrances to them in the vain hope that a fresh turn of the wheel might again bring their own cult to the top[982]. A conservative reaction towards the older faiths did indeed come for a moment under Eugenius; but it was then too late. The masses had turned from Mithraism to Christianity, and the only adherents of the “Capped One” were to be found among the senators and high officials who had long connived at the evasion of the edicts prohibiting all forms of Pagan worship. The invasions of Alaric and Attila probably completed what the Christian mob had begun.

M. Cumont and Sir Samuel Dill are doubtless right when they attribute the downfall of Mithraism in great measure to its attitude towards women[983]. Mithraism was from the first essentially a virile faith, and had little need of the softer emotions. Hence we find in it none of the gorgeous public ritual, the long hours spent in mystic contemplation before the altar, or the filial devotion of the flock to the priest, that we see in the worship of the Alexandrian Gods. In spite of the great authority of M. Cumont, whose statements on the subject seem to have been accepted without much enquiry by later writers, it will probably appear to the impartial student that the priests of Mithras were more like the churchwardens or elders of Protestant communities at the present day than the active and highly organized hierarchy of the Alexandrian divinities and of the Catholic Church. It is, as we have seen, most probable that they never visited their chapels except in company with the other devotees when an initiation into one or other of the seven degrees of the cult was to be performed, and, judging from the scanty numbers of the congregation, this can only have been at fairly long intervals. Hence the daily prayers and sacrifices of themselves and their congregations were probably rendered elsewhere, either in the privacy of their homes, or in the temples of other gods. In neither case would they have much need for the assistance of women in their propaganda, who would, moreover, have probably felt little interest in a worship from the most solemn and distinctive parts of which they were excluded. The Mithraists therefore had to dispense with the support of a very large and important fraction of the community which was easily won over to the side of their rivals. Exceptional causes such as the perpetual shifting of the legions from one end of the Empire to the other at a time when communications between them were many times more difficult than now, may have prevented such considerations for some time from having their full weight. When once they did so, the issue could not long be in doubt.

Nor was the very real, if somewhat vague, monotheism which Mithraism taught, very likely to attract, at first sight, the enthusiasm of a large and mixed population engaged in civil pursuits. If the conjecture made above be correct, the Mithraist in the ordinary way acknowledged no other god than Mithras, although he would probably have admitted that he was but the representative and antitype of the supreme Jupiter whom he recognized as the official head of the State pantheon. As for the other gods, he probably considered them as mere abstract personifications of the powers of Nature, who were at the most the creatures and subjects of Mithras “the friend,” and whom it might please him to propitiate by acts of worship which the god would know how to appreciate. This is not very far from the theories of the Stoics, always dear to the nobler spirits in the Roman Empire, and coupled with the high Stoic ideal of duty, forms one of the best working philosophies for the soldier ever devised. But the soldier, removed as he is from care for his daily necessities, and with instant and ready obedience to another will than his own constantly required of him, has always held different views on such subjects to the civilian; and such ideas were rather above the heads of the crowd, sunk for the most part in abject poverty, utterly absorbed in the struggle for daily bread, and only anxious to snatch some passing enjoyment from a life of toil. What they, and even more urgently, their womenfolk needed was a God, not towering above them like the Eternal Sun, the eye of Mithras and his earthly representative, shedding his radiance impartially upon the just and the unjust; but a God who had walked upon the earth in human form, who had known like themselves pain and affliction, and to whom they could therefore look for sympathy and help. Such a god was not to be found in the Mithraic Cave.

For these reasons, probably, Mithraism fell after a reign of little more than two centuries. Yet for good or ill, few religions have lived in vain; and some of the ideas which it made popular in Europe have hardly yet died out. The theory that the emperor, king, or chief of the State is of a different nature to other men, and is in a peculiar manner the care of the gods, was first formulated in the West during the time that Mithraism was in power and is a great deal more the creation of the Persian religion than of the Egyptian, in which he was said to be the incarnation of the Sun-God. This is fairly plain from the custom to which M. Cumont has lately drawn attention of releasing at the funeral or apotheosis of a Roman emperor a captive eagle, representing the soul of the dead ruler, the upward flight of the bird being held typical of the soul’s ascension into heaven[984]. The connection of this practice with Mithraism is evident, since “eagle” was one of the names given to the perfect Mithraist, or he who had taken all the seven degrees of initiation, and had therefore earned the right to be called _pater sacrorum_[985]. The Christian emperors of Rome continued probably the practice and certainly the nomenclature associated with it, and Constantine and his successors were hailed by the Mithraic epithets of “aeternus,” “invictus,” and “felix” as freely as his Pagan predecessors. From this period the notion of the “divinity that doth hedge a king” descended to comparatively modern times, and “Sacred Majesty” was an epithet of our own kings down to the reign of the last Stuart. Probably, too, it was the custom of releasing an eagle at a royal funeral which so impressed the popular imagination that the metaphor became transferred, as such things generally are sooner or later, to the lower ranks of the community, and the figure of the soul being borne aloft on wings took the place that it still occupies in popular Christian literature.

The share that Mithraism had in diffusing the practices of magic and astrology is by no means so clear. That the Mithraists, like other pagans of the early centuries, were addicted to magic is one of the most frequent accusations brought against them by Christian writers, and the word magic itself, as has been said above, is derived from those Magi from whom the Mithraists were said to have derived their doctrine. In support of this, it can certainly be said that the worshippers of Mithras by rendering a modified cult to Ahriman, whom the Christians identified with Satan, laid themselves open to the suspicion of trafficking with devils, and it is quite possible that they, like the followers of many other religions at the time, looked with favour upon the compulsion rather than the propitiation of the lower powers. Yet the strict monotheism of the faith which practically looked to Mithras for the ultimate control and regulation of all sublunary things, is certainly against this conclusion; and it should be noticed that the laws against the practices of magic and astrology, then so intertwined that it is difficult to separate them[986], were quite as severe under emperors like Commodus and Diocletian who worshipped Mithras, as under those of their successors who professed the faith of Christ. The rites of Hecate, however, were, as we have seen, closely connected with those of Mithras and were generally in the hands of Mithraists. These Hecatean rites seem to have been almost entirely magical in their character, and it is the name of Hecate that was handed down as that of the patroness of sorcerers through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance[987]. One of the priests of Mithras also goes out of his way to declare on his epitaph that he is _studiosus astrologiae_, and on the whole the Christian accusation was probably not without foundation.

Footnote 768:

Droysen, _Hist. de l’Hellénisme_, t. II. pp. 33, 289.

Footnote 769:

_Op. cit._ III. pp. 351, 352; 439, 450. As Droysen points out, in this respect there was no practical difference between Parthian and Persian.

Footnote 770:

As in B.C. 41, when the Parthians under Pacorus “rushed” Palestine. See Morrison, _The Jews under the Romans_, p. 58, for authorities. Cf.

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