CHAPTER VI
THE RELIGION OF MITHRA
Of all the oriental religions which attracted the devotion of the West in the last three centuries of the Empire, that of Mithra was the most powerful. It is also the system which for various reasons has the greatest interest for the modern student. It is perhaps the highest and most striking example of the last efforts of paganism to reconcile itself to the great moral and spiritual movement which was setting steadily, and with growing momentum, towards purer conceptions of God, of man’s relations to Him, and of the life to come. It is also the greatest effort of syncretism to absorb, without extinguishing, the gods of the classic pantheon in a cult which was almost monotheistic, to transform old forms of nature worship and cosmic symbolism into a system which should provide at once some form of moral discipline and real satisfaction for spiritual wants. In this effort, Mithraism was not so much impeded by a heritage of coarse legend as the worships of Pessinus and Alexandria. It was indeed sprung from the same order of religious thought as they. It could never detach itself from its source as a cult of the powers of nature.[3003] But the worship of the Sun, with which Mithra was inseparably connected, was the purest and most natural form of devotion, if elemental powers were to be worshipped at all. And heathendom tended more and more under the Empire to fix its devotion on the source of all light and life. The Sun was to Plato the highest material symbol of the Infinite Good. Neo-Pythagoreanism and Neo-Platonism regarded him as the sacred [pg 586]image of the power beyond human ken.[3004] “Before religion,” it has been said, “had reached the point of proclaiming that God must be sought in the realm of the ideal and the absolute outside the world of sense, the one rational and scientific cult was that of the Sun.”[3005] Heliolatry also harmonised with absolutism in the State, as the old Persian kings and their imitators, the emperors of the third century, clearly perceived. The great temple of the Sun, which Aurelian, the son of a priestess of the deity, founded in the Campus Martius, with its high pontiffs and stately ritual, did honour not only to the great lord of the heavenly spheres, but to the monarch who was the august image of his power upon earth and who was endued with his special grace.[3006] The power of Mithra in the fourth century lay in the fact that, while it was tender and tolerant to the old national worships, and never broke with the inner spirit of heathenism, it created an all-embracing system which rose above all national barriers, which satisfied the philosophic thought of the age in its mysticism, and gave comfort and a hope of immortality through its sacraments.
Mithra was one of the most ancient and venerable objects of pagan devotion, as he was one of the last to be dethroned. In faint outline he can be traced to the cradle of the Aryan race.[3007] In the Vedas he is a god of light, and, as the god of truth, who hates all falsehood, he has the germ of that moral character which grew into a great force in the last age of his worship in the West. In the Avestas, the sacred books of the religion of Iran, which, however late their redaction, still enshrine a very ancient creed, Mithra has the same well-defined personality. He is the radiant god who seems to emerge from the rocky summits of eastern mountains at dawn, who careers through heaven with a team of four white horses; yet he is not sun or moon or any star, but a spirit of light, ever wakeful, watching with a thousand eyes, whom nothing can escape and nothing deceive.[3008] And so, while he gives warmth and increase to the earth, and health and wealth to men, he is also from the beginning a moral power. He confers wisdom [pg 587]and honour and a clear conscience and concord. He wages a truceless war with the evil powers of darkness, and guards his faithful soldiers against the craft of the enemy. He is the friend and consoler of the poor; he is the mediator between earth and heaven; he is the lord of the world to come.[3009] But his place in the Zoroastrian hierarchy was not always equally high. At one time he was only one of the yazatas, who were created by the supreme Ormuzd.[3010] But Mithra has still the attributes of guardian and saviour; he is approached with sacrifice, libation, ablution, and litany, as in the latest days of his power in the West. And again a higher place is given to him; he is the vicegerent of the remote, ineffable Ormuzd, the mediator through whom the supreme power crushes evil demons, and wages war with Ahriman; he is invoked in the same prayers side by side with the Supreme. The Great Kings, especially the later, regard Mithra as their special guardian, swear by him in their most solemn oaths,[3011] and call upon him in the hour of battle. If he was the god of the humble and afflicted, he was also the god of the prince and warrior noble, and so we shall find him at the end.
The Persian conquest of Babylon had lasting effects on the religion of Mithra. There he encountered a sacerdotal system which had its roots in an immemorial civilisation. The conquerors, as so often happens, were to some extent subdued by the vanquished.[3012] Syncretism set in; the deities of the two races were reconciled and identified. The magical arts and the astrolatry of the valley of the Euphrates imposed themselves on the purer Mazdean faith, and never relaxed their hold, although they failed to check its development as a moral system. Ormuzd was confounded with Bel, Mithra with Shamash or the Sun-god. The astral and solar lore, the faith in mystic numbers, which had been cultivated in Babylonia through many generations, took its place in the theology of Mithra, and they have left their mark in many a chapel on the Danube and the Rhine. Yet Mithra, identified with the Sun at Babylon, was never absorbed in the cult of the solar deity in the West.[3013] On many of the later [pg 588]inscriptions Mithra and the Sun are mentioned side by side as equals and allies. Yet the connection of Mithra with Babylon is never forgotten either by Greeks or Romans. Claudian connects him with the mysteries of Bel.[3014] The priest who, with many weird rites, in a waste sunless spot beside the Tigris, conducts Menippus to the underworld, wears the dress of Media, and bears the name Mithrobarzanes.[3015]
With the destruction of the Persian empire and the diffusion of Magian influence in Asia Minor, the worship arrived at its last stage before entering on the conquest of the West. The monarchs of Pontus, Armenia, Cappadocia, and Commagene, who claimed descent from the Achaemenids, were politic or enthusiastic votaries of the religious traditions of Iran.[3016] While they reverenced Ormuzd and Anaitis, Mithra was their special patron, as he was to Artaxerxes.[3017] Mithra’s name appears constantly in the names of royal houses, such as Mithradates and Mithrobarzanes. The inscription on the tomb of Antiochus of Commagene, who boasted of his descent from Darius the son of Hystaspes, records the endowment of solemn Persian rites, and combines the names of Ormuzd and Zeus, of Apollo and Mithra.[3018] In the submergence of national barriers which followed the fall of the Persian monarchy, and under the influence of Greek philosophy, that process of syncretism began in Asia Minor which was destined to produce such momentous results in the third and fourth centuries. But the Mazdean faith, strong in its associations with the ancient sources of spiritual enlightenment in the East, never succumbed to the western paganism. The classical gods might be admitted to the Mazdean heaven; Zeus might be confounded with Ormuzd; Anaitis might find an analogue in Artemis Tauropolus. But the ancient name of Mithra was never profaned in the liturgy by any translation.[3019] It was chiefly perhaps in Phrygia and Lydia that alien worships produced a lasting effect in modifying the Persian theology. The pure morality of the Mithraist creed might seem to have little in common with the orgies of the devotees of Attis and the Great Mother. But religious sentiment has a miraculous power both to [pg 589]reject and to transmute. The costume and Phrygian cap of Attis appear on all the monuments of Mithra to the end. And, although it is a subject of debate, the taurobolium, that baptism of blood which was the most impressive rite of the later paganism, was, in all probability, early borrowed by Mithra from the ritual of Phrygia.[3020] The pine, the emblem of immortality, which is so prominent in the scenes of mourning for Attis,[3021] also has a place in the sculptured remains of the Persian chapels. And the title Menotyrannus, a title of Attis, which is given to the Persian god on many slabs, recalls his passage through the same region.[3022] But Greek art had a more powerful and enduring effect on the future of Mithra than any of these accretions. Probably the ancient Persian faith recoiled from any material image of its divine powers,[3023] although here also Assyria may have corrupted its purity. But when Hellenic imagination began to play around the Mazdean gods, the result was certain. The victorious Mithra was clothed with human form, and his legend was fixed for ever by some nameless Pergamene artist, who drew his inspiration from the “steer-slaying Victory” of Athens.[3024] The group in which the youthful hero, his mantle blown back by the wind, with a Phrygian cap upon his head, kneels on the shoulder of the bull, as he buries his poniard in its throat, was for four centuries reproduced in countless chapels from the mouth of the Danube to the Solway. That symbolic scene, conveying so many meanings in its hieratic rigidity, became to the pious Mithraist what the image of the Divine Figure on the Cross has been for so many centuries to the devout Catholic.
The revelation of the spread of Mithra worship in the Roman Empire is one of the greatest triumphs of modern archaeology. Only faint notices of the cult are found in Herodotus, Xenophon, and Strabo.[3025] Quintus Curtius knew the Persian god as the soldier’s special patron, inspiring courage in battle.[3026] From the verses in the Thebaid of Statius we [pg 590]may conclude that he knew something of the service in Mithra’s grottoes, and that he had seen the figure of the “bull slaying” god.[3027] Plutarch knows Mithra as the mediator between Ormuzd and Ahriman.[3028] Lucian had probably seen the rites in his native Samosata; he knew the figure with the candys and tiara, and, from the sneer at the god’s ignorance of Greek, he may perhaps have heard the old Mazdean litany.[3029] But he had probably little notion of the hold which Mithra had already obtained on the farthest regions of the West. Still less had he any prevision of his great destiny in the third and fourth centuries. Literature, down to the Antonine age, teaches us little of the character and strength of the worship. Without votive inscriptions and the many ruins of his chapels, along with the indignant, yet anxious, invective of the Christian apologists, we should never have known how near the Persian god came to justifying his title of the “Unconquered.”
It is impossible to fix the precise date when the worship of Mithra first crossed the Aegean. The silence of inscriptions must not indeed be taken as proving that he had no devotees in Italy before the Flavian age. A famous passage in Plutarch’s life of Pompey would seem to refer the first appearance of the worship in the West to the conquest of the pirates of Cilicia by Pompey, in 70 B.C.[3030] A religion of the alien and the slave may well have been long domiciled in Italy before it attracted general notice. And there may have been humble worshippers of Mithra at Rome or Puteoli even in the days of Julius Caesar. The Mithraist inscription of the time of Tiberius is now admitted to be a forgery.[3031] But from his reign may probably be dated the first serious inroads of the cult. Under Tiberius, Cappadocia was incorporated in the Empire, and Pontus under Nero; Commagene, the home of Jupiter Dolichenus, who was a firm ally of Mithra, was finally absorbed in the reign of Vespasian.[3032] The official organisation of these districts, and the constant intercourse established between central Asia Minor and the capital, must have opened many channels for the importation of new forms [pg 591]of devotion from the East. Almost in the very year in which Statius was penning his verses about Mithra in the Thebaid, a freedman of the Flavian house erected a tablet to the god on the Esquiline,[3033] and soldiers of the East carried his mysteries to the camps on the Danube. The 15th Legion, which had fought under Corbulo against the Parthians, and taken part in the conquest of Palestine in 70 A.D., in the first years of the reign of Vespasian, established the worship of Mithra at Carnuntum in Pannonia, which became henceforth the sacred city of Mithra in the West.[3034] In 102 A.D. a marble group was dedicated by the slave of a praetorian prefect of Trajan.[3035] It is probable that at Ostia we have records of the cult from the year 162.[3036] The Mithraeum, found under the church of S. Clement at Rome, has yielded an inscription of the last years of Antoninus Pius. That emperor erected a temple to Mithra at Ostia.[3037] Rome and Ostia were probably the earliest points in Italy invaded by the Persian worship. All the conditions were favourable to an early and rapid propagation of the cult in the capital of the world. Soldiers from the East would be serving in the garrison, or settled after their release from service. Eastern slaves swarmed in all the great houses, including that of the emperor. A large proportion of the dedications are made by men of servile origin, and the very name of the dedicator would often be enough to indicate his nationality. More than 100 inscriptions, more than 75 pieces of Mithraist sculpture, with the ruins of many chapels of the god, attest his powerful influence at Rome.[3038] Ostia which, since the reconstruction of Trajan, had overshadowed Puteoli, was hospitable to all alien rites.[3039] The port had at least four temples of Mithra in the second century, and it is significant of the alliance between the two worships, that a Mithraeum there was built close to a shrine of the Great Mother,[3040] and that members of the college of the Dendrophori sometimes made offerings and dedications to Mithra.[3041] [pg 592]The remains at Ostia disclose some other indications of the prevailing syncretism. The Roman Sylvanus has a niche in one Mithraeum, and, in another, Saturn and Jupiter, Mars, Mercury and Venus, are figured beside the purely Eastern symbols of the planets and the signs of the zodiac.[3042]