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.
CHAPTER XIII
MANES AND THE MANICHAEANS
It is generally said that the religion of Mithras ended and was absorbed in Manichaeism, which may thus be supposed to have inherited some, at least, of its doctrines[[988]]. This is one of those statements which are copied by one author from another until they acquire by mere repetition the force of an axiom; but its truth is not obvious, nor does it appear to rest upon any sound foundation. Except in the fact that both Mithraism and Manichaeism came in the first instance from Persia, there is little likeness between the two faiths, which are in all essential respects diametrically opposed to each other. A strict dualism, or the eternal antagonism of two equal principles, is the distinguishing feature of the religion of Manes, while the worship of Mithras rested, as has been said in the last chapter, on an equally uncompromising monotheism, which made the Supreme Being, whether known as Jupiter or Ormuzd, at once the creator and the governor of the universe. In this respect, it drew near to Judaism, which it may have aimed at incorporating with itself, and was not ashamed to place on its monuments scenes which can be referred to the Old Testament[[989]]. Manichaeism, on the other hand, looked on Judaism with horror, rejected the Old Testament entirely, and was not improbably born in an outbreak of anti-Semitic fury[[990]]. But the discrepancy of doctrine is as nothing compared to the wide difference in those external matters which in a new religion most strike the imagination of the crowd, and have therefore much to do with its success or failure. The Mithraist was accustomed, as we have seen, to an allegorical and symbolical ritual in which the material image of his god was for ever before him; but the Manichaean, as we shall see later, forbade the use of images and his worship consisted merely of prayers and hymns. The Mithraists made frequent use in their ceremonies of the sacrifice of animals; but the Manichaeans looked with displeasure on the taking of the life even of plants. The worshipper of Mithras not only gloried in the outward profession of his religion, but by his avoidance of the wearing of garlands forced the notice of it on those of his fellows who were not of the faith. The follower of Manes, on the contrary, concealed his religion as carefully as Basilides wished his followers to conceal theirs, and even went to the length of outwardly adopting a creed different from his own. It is not therefore to be wondered at that the rulers of the Roman Empire, whose acquaintance with the worship of Mithras was a thousand times more profound than our own, should have favoured Mithraism and have made every effort to suppress Manichaeism. The very emperors who placed their reformed State under the protection of Mithras imposed the penalty of death upon those of their subjects who should venture to teach the religion of Manes[[991]].
Not less different were the sanctions with which Mithraism and Manichaeism appeared in the West. The worship of Mithras came into the Roman world unobtrusively and without any claim to an exclusive revelation or special means of propaganda. But Manichaeism had at its back the personality of one of those wonderful men who appear at rare intervals in the world’s history, to leave behind them a memorial of their empire over the minds of their fellows in the shape of a new creed. Manes was indeed, as the discoveries of the last decade have taught us, an innovator in religion entirely worthy to rank with Zoroaster, Buddha, and Muhammad, and when the difficulties in the way of his missionary activity are considered, his influence upon the religious ideas of those who came after him was at least as marked as that of any of them. Manes or Mânî—the first being the Greek form of the name—was born, according to his own deliberate statement, about the year 216 A.D., in a village of Babylonia called Mardînû situate on the Kutha canal to the south of Ctesiphon[[992]]. According to Christian tradition, his real name was Corbicius or Kubrik and he was a slave of unknown birth[[993]]; according to the Mahommedan writers his father was one Patecius or Fatak, while his mother is sometimes described as the “Lady Mary,” sometimes as a Parthian princess, and is sometimes named Karossa[[994]]. Such legends grow up naturally round the birth of all founders of religions, and we should believe them the less in this case that they have been handed down to us by the professors of religions bitterly opposed to that of Manes. Yet the story about the Parthian princess seems confirmed by the free access that he seems to have always possessed to the court of the Persian monarchs of his time. Manes himself says, according to Al-Bîrûnî, that illumination came to him in his thirteenth year[[995]]; but this is contradicted by the Fihrist, which puts the age at which he received revelation as twenty-four[[996]]. The Acta Archelai, a Christian source obviously suspect in the state it has come down to us, would make him a priest of Mithras[[997]], a tradition which may have originated at a date when the Catholic Church recognized the danger to itself involved in the spread of the Mithraic religion. Another story would make him a Magus or one of the priestly caste entrusted by Ardeshîr with the propagation of the reformed religion of Zoroaster[[998]], which is discredited by the fact that it was the Magi who were from the outset his bitterest enemies[[999]]. A late Oriental writer says that he was a Christian priest having a cure of souls at Ahvâz[[1000]], the capital city of the province of Huzitis, which again is negatived by the fact that he seems from his writings to have had little more than a hearsay knowledge of Catholic Christianity, although they show some acquaintance with the heresies of Bardesanes and Marcion[[1001]]. He is said to have acquired great skill in painting which he used to illustrate his teaching[[1002]], and to have been a learned mathematician and astronomer. This is likely enough; but the only events of his life which seem well attested, are that he began at an early age to propagate his doctrine and that he succeeded in converting to it Peroz or Fîrûz the son of Ardeshîr, through whose means he obtained a formal hearing from Sapor or Shâpûr, the conqueror of Valerian and Ardeshîr’s successor, shortly after this king’s accession to the throne[[1003]]. Sapor seems to have listened to Manes with respect and, according to an Oriental writer, to have even favoured his propaganda, until the Magi, to whom the revival of the Zoroastrian religion had been committed, convinced him of his error[[1004]]. On this, Manes was exiled from Persia and retired, says Al-Bîrûnî, to India, China, and Thibet preaching his gospel[[1005]]. On Sapor’s death, he returned to Persia under Hormisdas or Ormuz, and again, it is said, succeeded in converting to his tenets the reigning monarch[[1006]]. On Varanes’ or Bahram’s accession to the throne the following year, however, he was seized and put to death as a heretic after a disputation with the Chief of the Magi, in which he failed to support the test of an ordeal by molten metal proposed to him[[1007]]. The most likely account of his death narrates that he was decapitated, and that his skin stuffed with straw was suspended at the gate of the town where the execution took place[[1008]]. This was followed by a great persecution of the Manichaeans throughout Persia, and it is fairly evident that this, like his own fate, was due to the hostility he had aroused in the Magi[[1009]]. The date of his death is fixed with some accuracy at 275 A.D., so that he would then have reached the age of sixty years[[1010]].
The causes underlying this sudden appearance of a new religion are doubtless to be looked for in the political and religious history of Persia at the time. Ardeshîr, as has been said above, gave new life to the feeling of Persian nationality which the Parthian Kings had kept alive during Greek supremacy in Asia, and succeeded in again founding a Persian Empire. Like Alexander, Antiochus Epiphanes, and again, Diocletian, he seems to have been thoroughly alive to the great effect that a faith common to the whole empire would have in uniting the peoples under his sway.