Download The Mysteries of Mithras: The History and Legacy of Ancient Rome's Most Mysterious Religious Cult AudioBook Free
In the early Roman Empire, as Christianity battled to get a foothold and survive in the polytheistic pool of Roman theology, its most significant rivals weren't the Caesars or the Roman aristocracy but instead the faith and devotion of the normal Roman legionary. The faith of these men was centered on the god Mithras, who, they assumed, led those to victory upon the field of struggle and got done so for practically four centuries. Not surprisingly widespread perception among troops, the cult of Mithras was not a creation of the Romans, although they might eventually add their own rituals and mysteries to the historical religion. In fact, the Mithraic religion was an Indo-Persian creation, a theology which managed to travel from India and back to the Hellenic and Roman world by way of Alexander the Great's conquest of the Persian Empire. Eventually, the cult of Mithras would pass on across the historical world, and Mithras would be worshiped from the mountains of India to the coasts of Spain. As a result, the cult of Mithras could in the end be within every area of the Roman Empire. The Mithras cult was one of the numerous "mystery religions" that the Romans implemented, many of which originated from cultures beyond Rome. Isis, an Egyptian goddess, and Cybele, an Anatolian goddess, were both favored by Roman women, while Mithras, that was a variation of the name of the Zoroastrian demigod Mithra, was favored by Roman troops and the political top notch for over 400 years. Since the Mithras cult, like every one of the Roman unknown cults, was esoteric in character, the exact character of the effect other cultures got on the cult remains unknown, but some archaeological data has led modern scholars to make educated deductions. Some assume that the conscription of Persian troops into the Roman military and prolonged contact between the Parthians and Romans led to some people of the ever-eclectic Roman contemporary society implementing the cult immediately from the Parthian/Zoroastrian religion (Clark 2001, 157). This appears like the most plausible explanation, but others have argued that the Mithras cult was actually a Roman religion that was given a Parthian façade to make it look more exotic in order to entice Romans who were enthralled with eastern spirituality (Clark 2001, 157). The very best evidence to determine the roots of the Mithras cult can be found in the countless temples throughout Europe that the Romans erected to the god. These temples, known as mithraea, were subterranean chambers where in fact the key rituals of the cult took place. The best data from extant mithraea are the reliefs on the altars, which depict a graphic mythological tale. The altar reliefs usually depict the god slaughtering a bull, often accompanied by a leaping dog (Clark 2001, 158). The personal references to Zoroastrian theology are unmistakable; the bull slaughter is similar to a merchant account from a Zoroastrian wording (the Bundahishen), while pet dogs were seen as asha pets or animals in Zoroastrian theology and an important part of the funerary ritual (Clark 2001, 158). The detailed iconography on the Mithras altars shows that the inventors of the Mithras cult got more than just a superficial knowledge of Zoroastrianism, which shows a provenance of the religion somewhere in Persian or Parthia.
