The Mitraic Path of Immortality and the Mithraic Mysteries
Part 1 of 2
Basing his interpretations on Franz Cumont's work The Mysteries of Mithra as well as the ancient text known as the “Mithraic Liturgy,” the comments of various ancients such as Nonnus the Grammarian, and the well-known Mithraic reliefs, Julius Evola lays out a speculative reconstruction of the inner meaning of the Mithraic initiation in his essay “The Path of Enlightenment in the Mithraic Mysteries.” According to Evola, the initiate, reenacting the actions of the god Mithras, goes through several stages with a series of attendant trials. He begins as Mithras born in the rock by the side of a river, the rock and waters symbolism indicating the material element into which the divine spark has descended. From this rock, which is both a prison and necessary foundation, Mithras must break free, and then must traverse the waters, which symbolize the cravings of the material body. He then is chafed by strong winds which he must endure, symbolizing the passions and energies which inhabit his being and which he must overcome, but also from which he must differentiate and separate his spirit. He next approaches a tree whose fruit he eats and whose leaves he uses to clothe himself with a new garment. Eventually, he enters the presence of the Aeon, also identified as the Sun God himself, the keeper of the Golden Glow of Sovereignty, ontological elevation, and immortality, which Evola identifies with the Iranic concept of the Hvareno (also conventionally spelled Khvarenah). “Beyond them all is the Sun, the flaming Aeon” says Evola (16). Mithras must confront the Sun God's “solar stare” with his own, which is to say he must withstand and overcome this high god. When he is able to do so, the Sun god yields and offers a pact of friendship, and Mithras is thereafter identified with the solar principle itself, being depicted with the solar "halo." As Evola puts it, “The brightness of the hvareno, of the glorious and radiant Mithraic halo, arises only out of a frightful tension, and it only crowns the “eagle,” which was capable of “staring” at the Sun” (11). Finally, Mithras enacts the famous climactic scene from the hundreds of known reliefs that remain of him, called the tauroctony, the killing of the bull. Evola describes the way in which this bull represents the life-force, comparable to the tantric kundalini, and when Mithras rides this bull back to its cave and slays it, its blood generates spikes of wheat as it falls, which Evola calls “the food of Life.”
However, the bull has also alternately been interpreted as a symbol of Father Sky himself, the great Bull of Heaven, as in Peter Georgiev's The Mysteries of Mithra or the Mysteries of Sabazios. If so, the relief would represent a slaying of the sky sovereign by Mithras. This highly charged possibility could then perhaps be reminiscent of the defeat and castration of Ouranos by his son Cronus, after which the genitals symbolic of fecundating virility were cast into the ocean and spawned giants, nymphs and furies; or it may even remind us of Óðinn's killing of the giant Ymir to make the world with his body, the same Ymir who is born from the ice licked by the cosmic cow Adhumbla, herself a bovine embodying the great source of cosmic fertility and life. Indeed cosmic cows and bulls were frequent symbols of general fecundity, and on this level of meaning overlapped with Father Sky seen as the great fecundator, the bringer of rain and the impregnator of the earth, massive and powerful. Mircea Eliade argues that Father Sky only became symbolized by the bull once his mythos had deteriorated from its original high and remote dignity, and he had become seen as only an instrument of the Earth Mother, as her subservient impregnator, reduced only to his fecundating function as opposed to his transcendental function (see: Eliade, Patterns, “The Sky and Sky Gods”). Though it cannot be said for certain whether the Mithraic bull is intended to signify Father Sky, and with what exact implication, we can see how these symbolisms may run together.
A second strong option for the possible identity of the Mithraic bull is the god known to the Vedics as Soma. Soma himself (RV 9.83.3) and his Greek form Dionysus both occasionally appear in bull form. “Or, quite often, Soma is a bull racing to mate with a herd of cows, who represent the milk with which the juice can be mixed,” say Jamison and Brereton (The Rig Veda: A Guide, 80). The possibility of identifying Soma with the Mithraic bull arises from the fact that a myth exists in the Taittiriya and Caraka-Kasha Samhitas of the Yajur Veda, and in the Shatapatha Brahmana, about the killing of the god Soma, which symbolizes the pressing of the soma plant for the soma sacrifice. Herman Lommel (in Adolf Jensen, Das religiose Weltbild einer fruhen Kultur, Stuttgart 1948) has shown that in the Yajur Veda, Mitra, at first refusing to participate in the slaying of Soma, eventually does so: “(Although) he is Mitra [friend] he has done a cruel deed” (TS 6, 4, 8, 1). Lommel connects this to a West-Iranian cult of Mithra wherein he slays a bull (Lommel, Mithra und das Stieropfer). P.B. Chakrabarty comments how the Iranic reformer Zoroaster disclaimed with "holy anger" against the popular bull sacrifice, condemning "the Haoma [Soma] sacrifice although he did not mention the name Haoma but used instead, an old unmistakeable title of Haoma" (Chakrabarty, 4). B. Schlerath has furthermore traced the myth of the Soma slaying back from the Yajur to possible traces in the earlier Rig Veda: for example, in RV 9.67.19 violent language is used when it is said that “Bruised [or wounded, per Schlerath] by the press-stones and extolled, Soma, thou goest to the sieve.” Furthermore, he argues that the word for "kill" may be euphemistically avoided in this context throughout the Rig Veda, suggesting that the poets were tiptoeing around and thus tacitly acknowledging the violence of the myth, which would indirectly suggest that this violence against Soma was known to them. "If the verb han- [slay, kill] was intentionally avoided and given instead of it euphemistic circumscriptions, we can conclude, that the idea of killing the Soma even in Rgvedic times existed" (B. Schlerath, The Slaying of the God Soma). If this myth of the slaying of Soma existed in Yajurvedic and perhaps even Rigvedic times, and can be connected to the Mithraic slaying of a bull in West Iran, as Lommel claims, then Soma certainly stands as one possible identification of the bull of Roman Mithras. And if so, the myth would prove archaic indeed. In yet another Iranic variant, found in the Bundahishn, the great opponent, Ahriman, kills a primordial hermaphroditic bovine called Gavaevodata, producing the abundance of the world, including grains and medicinal plants that grow from the bovine's marrow. This bovine is said to be in the care of or to be contained in the moon. Though Ahriman's role in this act may be the product of the Zoroastrian reforms, the question remains unresolved.
Eliade also cites a possible Egyptian parallel to the killing of the great bull in the initiation rites of the Pharaoh which conveyed immortality and true sovereignty upon him: “It was from the Field of Reeds that the Pharaoh's soul set off to meet the sun in heaven, to be guided by it to the Field of Offerings. At first, this ascent was no easy matter. In spite of his divine character, the Pharaoh had to fight the guardian of the " Field ", the [Bull of Offerings], for the right to take up his abode in heaven. The Pyramid texts refer to this heroic testing-of an initiatory character-which the Pharaoh had to undergo.” Mithra/s, as we will see further, is the god whose mythic path must be walked by the king in order for him to become a bridge between heaven and earth for his people, to gain the golden glory of sovereignty and immortality.
Looking, then, at the pattern we have uncovered in the epics and mythologies of Europe and India, and in particular in the path of the Lawful Sovereign, the Mitra archetype, it is difficult to ignore the similarities between that narrative and the one proposed by Cumont and Evola for the path of Mithras in his mysteries. Our mythical Mitraic path seems to be remarkably similar to Evola's proposed initiatic Mithraic path. Both Cumont/Evola's narrative and our own can be called products of speculative reconstruction, yet the similarities must be recognized all the same. As we have summed up the clarified meaning of the Iliad narrative, for one, the Mitraic hero Menelaus begins, symbolically speaking, in a state of naivety wedded to the beautiful Helen, which we have identified as the marriage of the god of early morning sky with the goddess of Dawn (or a similar goddess), or the god of sovereignty married to the goddess of the regal glory, the golden glow of Dawn being the same as the golden glow of the Hvareno mentioned by Evola. The Sun God figure, Paris, then steals this Dawn princess away from Menelaus, which in esoteric terms is the breaking up of the primordial unity by birth, the divine spark separating from the pleroma and entering the world which is ruled by the Sun as lord over Time and Samsara. Menelaus then marshals all his allied forces and, significantly, crosses the waters of the Aegean sea, as Mithras too crosses the waters. Menelaus is shot by Pandarus, but does not succumb, a symbolic death from which he presumably returns more determined in his mission. This "temporary or symbolic death" episode is made much more explicit in the parallel tale of Lleu Llaw Gyffes, in which Lleu is temporarily killed by Gronw, and then flies in the form of an eagle to the top of an otherworldly tree, from which his wounded or dead body drops carrion onto the ground. It is made even more explicit in the death of Norse Baldr. This is esoterically the state of death which allows the shedding of the material shell. Lleu's perching on the otherworldly tree and subsequent regeneration also seems to parallel the point at which Mithras encounters the tree from which he gains divine food and new clothing. Menelaus duels Paris and Lleu duels Gronw (though the order of the duel and the wounding are reversed in each case), in which confrontation the Mitraic hero bests his nemesis the Sun God with his Spear of Justice. For Menelaus, he must wait until later for Paris to be finished off, to kill Helen's second foreign husband, and ultimately to repossess Helen. But in the case of Lleu, his spear pierces the stone shield of Gronw, killing him on the spot. Gwydion turns Lleu's wife into a lunar bird, the owl, as punishment, likely signifying the glow of dawn undergoing a nightly penance before its reunion with the Mitraic King of Morning the next day/cycle. In the end, each figure, whether Yudhishthira, Menelaus, or Lleu/Lugh, confronts and overcomes the Sun God hero, and kills whoever has cuckolded him (the exception being in Mahabharata, where Yudhishthira has Arjuna kill his solar nemesis Karna for him just after Karna badly wounds Yudhishthira).
Not only do these Mitraic figures confront and overcome the Sun God, they also often (in the Iliad and Mahabharata at least) lead the forces that overcome Father Sky. For Father Sky, as a god too neutral and distant to be seen as a god of society, is relegated in the great wars of these branches to the side of the gods of Fate and Time, the ambivalent gods who are positioned as obstacles to the gods of ordered society. In Father Sky's case, whether he is found in his incarnations Bhishma or Sarpedon, he is reluctant to fight the heroes of society and has no animosity toward them, but is forced to fight them due to his bonds of alliance with the other non-societal heroes. In Bhishma's case, he is even the societal heroes' uncle, and tries his best not to kill them in battle, until at last they slay him and he dispenses to them an extended outpouring of wisdom about Dharma and good rulership. Thus the societal gods' confrontation and slaying of Father Sky is not one of animosity, but of circumstance and of Fate itself. However, the scenes of Bhishma and Sarpedon's deaths do not appear similar in their details to the Mithraic tauroctonies, unless we would say that the bull returning to his cave is reminiscent of Sarpedon and Bhishma both being returned to their native soil after death. Hence, this comparison of tauroctony to the death of the Sky Father is difficult to make. The imagistic details simply may have been changed beyond recognition between the different cases, the sky god reduced to his barest symbolic form as the great bull in the Mithraic case, or the comparison may not hold in the end. Nonetheless, we still must observe the fact that in the epic myths themselves the Mitraic god-hero confronts the Sun god in order to regain his Hvareno or sovereign glow of glory, also sometimes leads the confrontation of Father Sky, known as the Bull of Heaven, and that in the end of each myth this same Mitraic figure is either the only one to attain immortality and to reach Paradise, or is accompanied by one of the Horse Twins (i.e. Diomedes in the Iliad) who has made his own path to immortality as well.
This would only be expected if we consider the fact that Mitra is the paragon of the just ruler, the ideal king, even called by the cover name Dharma in the Mahabharata. He is the natural possessor of the Khvarenah, without which his kingship would not be blessed and his society would not flourish. The apparent derivation of Mithras' name from the Iranic Mithra should be indication enough, as well, that he too derives from the Mitraic archetype of the Lawful Sovereign, somehow (how this derivation occurred is what is most controversial), Mithra retaining much importance still in Avestan texts as a great sovereign and warrior, with the longest Yasht of the Avesta devoted to him.
There is a tendency in current scholarship to judiciously deny that direct links between the Mithraic Mysteries and the Iranic religion are demonstrable. However, this tendency seems to us based largely on a lack of information regarding the Mitraic mythos as a whole. Not enough is left of this mythos in the Rig Veda and Iranic Avesta alone, and it requires a full comparative reconstruction, as we have attempted, in order to visualize why this Roman god bears the name of the Iranic Mithra. Could it then be that the framework of the Mithraic mysteries was after all not invented whole cloth, as some believe, not simply a wild derivation or a fantastical bit of oriental fetishism, but that somehow at its core it was derived from a mythic and religious narrative framework which seems to have been widespread and deeply ingrained across Europe and Western Asia, if not always spelled out for us in the records? Could it be that the Mithraic mysteries derived their general narrative framework from the archaic Indo-European mythological narrative itself, from the clearly central and important path of the great sovereign of Justice, the Mitraic god? If so, then we can also deduce immediately that this path was originally a path reserved for the Sovereign, the king being the one who must follow the mythic path trod by Mitra/Lugh/Menelaus himself.
In his Mitra-Mithra-Mithras: The Roman Mithras and His Indo-Iranian Background, Jaan Lahe charts a prudent road between the extremes of seeing the Mithraic Mysteries as either being a direct import of a complete Iranic cult and seeing them as having no relation to the Iranic religion other than the name of the god. Evola and Cumont’s reconstructions may be said to be approximations, not exact or complete, and only give us a framework from which to assess possible parallels and lost esoteric meanings. Lahe puts it well when he explains that the coexistence of a set of motifs (“connection of Mitra/Mithras with friendship and a contract of friendship; certain military traits; connection with cosmogony and the cosmic order; connection with light, the Sun and the chariot of Sol; the role of the god as a giver of water and fertility; the idea of a sacrifice that stimulates fertility”) “in the mythology of the Roman cult of Mithras cannot be a coincidence but testifies to the wider Indo-Iranian background of the central figure of the cult, the god Mithras, which should not be ignored even if the Roman cult of Mithras is viewed as a new cult that evolved in the Roman Empire and within the context of the Greco-Roman religion” (Mitra-Mithra-Mithras: The Roman Mithras And His Indo-Iranian Background). Whether the cult of Mithras was a new creation by Romans rather than an import of actual Iranic cult practices is not our dispute at present. We only would add support to the idea that the existence of this set of motifs connected both to the Roman Mithras and Indo-Iranic Mitra/Mithra cannot have been coincidence, but that what was admittedly a new Roman formation must have been at minimum inspired by Iranic iconography, mythology, or theology, and more than that is possible given the cultural interchange of the Roman empire, as Lahe implies. While Cumont's optimism about Roman Mithraism being a full and direct theological borrowing from Iranian religion seems untenable to most scholars today, including Lahe, he concludes fairly, saying, “we cannot prove that Mithras’ mysteries grew out of the Iranian religion, as was argued by Cumont and Widengren, but nevertheless similar features of those two deities allow one to talk about the contribution of Iranian (or, more broadly, Indo-Iranian) mythology to the emergence of the new god in the era of the Roman Empire.”
The idea that this path was originally intended for the King matches what we know of ancient initiatic cults, which in the most archaic times were elitist and reserved only for the High Priest-King, and perhaps appropriated by other high priests as well, the King considered as originally also the High Priest. For when we look at the Mithraic Mysteries, it is odd to consider that this religion, seemingly practiced by the general populous, bears the name of a king of the gods, and outlines a path to ontological elevation which, in the myths, even the other high gods or god-heroes, besides the Mitraic god or hero, fail to attain. It must then be that this archaic Mitraic path was gradually appropriated, following the widespread democratization of religion and initiatic cults leading up to and including the Roman Age, by the military and civic layers of society, particularly via Mithras' strong association with war and law, as a leader of soldiers and a god of justice. Eliade explains: “In fact, we have actually seen how the idea that immortality was something heroic, requiring initiation, offered to a handful of privileged persons who could win it by a struggle, turned into an idea that immortality was given to all privileged persons. Osiris [compare the Soma god as his IE parallel] developed this profound change in the notion of immortality further in the direction of " democracy " : anyone could attain immortality by emerging victorious from the trial. The theology of Osiris took up and developed the notion of trial as a sine qua non of after life ; but for the heroic, initiatory type of trial (the struggle with the Bull) [compare the Mithraic Mysteries], it substituted trials of an ethical and religious nature (good works and so on). The archaic theory of heroic immortality gave way to a new conception, humbler and more human.”
As a god of war (both Tyr and Lugh having at times been identified by Romans with Mars), Mithras would have been well-known and loved by soldiers of all levels, and over time he must have been seen as their patron and ideal leader. Hence, by the time of the Roman Empire and the rise to the light of day of the Mithraic Mysteries, the path once reserved only for the King himself must have emerged, perhaps containing a germ of, or at least being inspired by, genuine Persian sacred practices of some kind, and become a path for, if not the common man per se, then at least for any soldier of sovereign mind, even if not sovereign birth. If indeed the mythic pattern we find in Menelaus' story in the Iliad, in Yudhishthira's story in the Mahabharata, in Lugh/Lleu's story in Irish myth, and divided between the Tyr and Baldr's stories in Norse myth, is the underlying framework, perhaps half forgotten but culturally ingrained on a deeper level, of the Mithraic Mysteries, and if this root framework originally was the framework of the esoteric path of the strata of society represented by the Mitraic archetype, that is, the sovereign and sometimes priestly caste, then perhaps we may say that the Mithraic Mysteries represent the survival, indirect and altered in whatever degree, of a genuine archaic path, once seen as eminently actualizable, and as absolutely necessary for the king, whose role is to center his society and to act as a bridge between this world and the realm of the divine. This then would be the Kingly path of immortality, the solar Mitraic path of divinization.
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Works Cited:
Peter Georgiev's The Mysteries of Mithra or the Mysteries of Sabazios
Mahabharata
The Mysteries of Mithra
“The Path of Enlightenment in the Mithraic Mysteries.”
Iliad
Herman Lommel, "Mithra und das Stieropferin Adolf Jensen," Das religiose Weltbild einer fruhen Kultur, Stuttgart 1948
Taittiriya and Caraka-Kasha Samhitas of the Yajur Veda
Shatapatha Brahmana
Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion
Stephanie Jamison and Joel Brereton, The Rig Veda: A Guide
The Poetic Edda
The Rig Veda
Jaan Lahe, Mitra-Mithra-Mithras: The Roman Mithras and His Indo-Iranian Background
P.B. Chakrabarty, "Parallelism Between Indo-Iranian Soma Haoma Rituals & the Chi-dyo Rituals of the Lephchas of Sikkim"
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