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Back in the Roman era, Mithraism was perhaps Christianity's leading competitor for the hearts and minds of others. Today Mithraism is religiously a non-factor, but it still "competes" with Christianity, in another way: It is a leading candidate for the "pagan copycat" thesis crowd as a supposed source for Christianity.

Our walking papers are laid out for us by over a dozen things that Jesus supposedly has in common with Mithras and, by extension, Christianity allegedly borrowed to create the Jesus character. The points are:

Our goal in this essay is to offer an overview of Mithraic belief and at the same time analyze each of these claims in terms of the evidence. In order to lay some groundwork, however, it will be necessary to briefly explore the goings-on over the past few decades in the field of Mithraic studies. There is a certain caveat emptor that will be necessary in order to help the reader understand exactly how critics are misusing their sources -- and what to be on the lookout for in future comparisons.

From Cumont to Ulansey: The Mithraic Studies Revolution

In 1975, Mithraic studies scholar John Hinnells lamented "the practical difficulty of any one scholar mastering all the necessary fields" -- linguistics, anthropology, history (Indian, Iranian, and Roman!), archaeology, iconography, sociology -- in order to get a grip on Mithraic studies. Hinnells of course is on target with his lament; we have made the same observation here regarding Biblical studies. But Mithraism being a relatively dead religion, there are no equivalents of seminaries keeping the Mithraic studies flame alive, and no past history of "Mithraic Fathers" who produced voluminous works and meditations upon Mithra.

Thus it is not surprising that for the longest time, from the end of the 19th century until the middle of the 20th, there was only one person in the world who could be regarded as any sort of authority on Mithraism -- and that was Franz Cumont.

Cumont worked with the thesis that Mithraic belief was of a continuous, fairly invariable tapestry from its earliest history up into the Roman period. The first remaining record of a god named Mithra appears as a deity invoked in a treaty dated 1400 BC [Hinn.MS, ix]; thereafter he is one of several Indo-Iranian gods, and he is known for giving orders, assembling people, and marshalling them -- perhaps with some militaristic overtones. He also appears as one who represents the concept of fidelity -- one of many such abstractions and personifications of virtues in the ancient East, such as Bhaga the god of sharing and Aryaman the god of hospitality (think of them as divine-level Care Bears, if you will).

As such, Mithra was the guy who went around dishing out punishment to those who broke treaties. He was the "guardian of the truth," "most dear to men," one "whose long arms seize the liar," who "injures no one and is everyone's friend," one who was all-seeing and all-knowing -- the sun was his "eye" on the world.

Mithra was responsible also for bringing rain, vegetation and health -- for in the ancient eastern mind, it is the moral behavior of persons (especially the king) that determines the national welfare and brings a fertile climate. If the king in your land broke a treaty, you would be advised to pack up if you were a farmer, because Mithra would soon be gliding in on his chariot with a boar shape on the front (accompanied by a divine sidekick representing Victory) to kick some tail and put things right [MS.27-51].

At other times Mithra was paired with a deity named Varuna, who was his superior. Varuna was the god in charge of helping men cultivate rice (although rice "ripening in the untilled soil" was still Mithra's business), so the two of them together oversaw the agricultural aspects of men's lives.

The ancient Mithra was a great guy. Lord of the Contract, Upholder of Truth. Peaceful, benevolent, protector, provider of a nice place to live and cattle, not easily provoked. A little later in Aryan history, he did become more of a warrior (previously, he had left a lot of the tail-kicking duties to Varuna), but then switched back to pacifism.

But then Zoroastrianism came along, and Mithra had some new things to do. He served as mediator between Ohrmazd and Ahriman, the good and bad gods of Zoroastrian dualism; but at the same time, he underwent something of a demotion as he became one of a group of seven lesser yazatas who served the upper-level deities [Cum.MM, 5] and was assigned some special escort duties: bringing demons to hell, and bringing souls to Paradise.

For a while after, things seem to have been quiet for Mithra. As late as the first century BC, Mithra is still associated with the sun along with Apollos and Hermes. [MS.129] So, why all this background? The problem was that Cumont was entirely wrong about very ancient (we shall say for convenience, Iranian) Mithraism being in continuity with Roman Mithraism.

For you see, the Roman Mithra was best known for his act of slaying a bull; yet there is no indication that the Iranian Mithra ever made his way into a bullpen for any reason. [MS, xiii] The Roman Mithra didn't appear at all interested in contract enforcement or escorting demons into hell. (Most likely, because demons are terrible tippers.)

And to make matters more complex, his followers in Iran, unlike the Roman Mithraists, did not worship in cave-like rooms (although Porphyry did think, incorrectly, that Zoroaster, the "putative founder of the cult," originated the idea of a cave as the image of the cosmos -- Beck.PO, 8), design levels of initiation, or pursue secrecy. [Ulan.OMM, 8]

There was simply no solid connection between the two faiths except for the name of the central god, some terminology, and astrological lore of the sort that was widely imported into the Roman Empire from Babylon anyway [Beck.PO, 87].

Nevertheless, because Cumont was locked into the notion of continuity, he assumed (for example) that the Iranian Mithra must have done some bull-slaying somewhere along the line, and he molded the evidence to fit his thesis, straining to find an Iranian myth somewhere that involved a bull-killing (it was done not by Mithra, but by Ahriman) and supposing that there was some connection or unknown story where the Iranian Mithra killed a bull.

Cumont's student Vermaseren [Ver.MSG, 17-18] also tried to find a connection, but the closest he could get was a story in which Soma, the god of life (who, as rain, was described as the semen of the sacred bull fertilizing the earth), was murdered by a consortium of gods which included Mithra -- as a very reluctant participant who had to be convinced to go along with the plan.

But simply put, the Roman Mithra wasn't anything like the Iranian one. He dressed really sporty, with a Phrygian cap (typical headgear for Orientals of the day) and a flowing cape that would have made Superman green with envy. He slayed a cosmic bull and earned the worship and respect of the sun god. He had new friends, animals that gave him a helping hand (or paw, or claw) with the bull-slaying, as well as two torch-bearing twins who could have passed for his sons.

If this was the Iranian Mithra, he obviously went through a midlife crisis at some point. The only thing that remained the same was that Mithra kept a loose association with the sun, which was something many gods had.

By the time of the First International Congress of Mithraic Studies in the early 70s, the lack of evidence of an Iranian/Roman continuity led Mithraic scholars to suspect that Roman Mithraism was "a new creation using old Iranian names and details for an exotic coloring to give a suitably esoteric appearance to a mystery cult" [MS, xiii] -- and that Roman Mithraism was Mithraism in name only, merely a new system that used the name of a known ancient Eastern deity to attract urbane Romans who found the east and all of its accoutrements an enticing mystery. Think of it as repackaging an old religion to suit new tastes, only all you keep is the name of the deity!

And what was that new religion? For years Mithraic scholars puzzled over the meaning of the bull-slaying scene; the problem was, as we have noted, that the Mithraists left behind pictures without captions. Thus in the 70s, one scholar of Mithraism lamented [MS.437]:

At present our knowledge of both general and local cult practice in respect of rites of passage, ceremonial feats and even underlying ideology is based more on conjecture than fact.

And Cumont himself observed, in the 50s [Cum.MM, 150, 152]:

The sacred books which contain the prayers recited or chanted during the [Mithraic] survives, the ritual on the initiates, and the ceremonials of the feasts, have vanished and left scarce a trace behind...[we] know the esoteric disciplines of the Mysteries only from a few indiscretions.

But before too long, Mithraic scholars noticed something (or actually, revived something first posited in 1869 that Cumont, because of his biases, dismissed -- Ulan.OMM, 15) about the bull-slaying scene: The various human, animal, and other figures comprised a star-map! The bull corresponded with Taurus; the scorpion coincided with Scorpio; the dog matched up with Canis Major, and so on.

What Mithra himself corresponded to took a bit longer to decide; Spiedel first made a case for a correspondence with Orion [Spie.MO], but Ulansey has led the way with the thesis that Mithra is here to be identified with Perseus [Ulan.OMM, 26ff], and that Roman Mithraism was founded upon a "revolutionary" discovery in ancient astronomy (which was closely linked to astrology in that time) that "the entire cosmic structure was moving in a way which no one had even known before" -- a process we now call the precession of the equinoxes. In line with the Stoic belief that a divine being was the "source of every natural force," the personifying of natural forces in the form of mythical divine figures, and the origin on the cult in Tarsus, a city long under Persian domination and where Perseus was the leading god, Perseus was the perfect choice -- but this wasn't the type of thing that the cultists wanted everyone to know about, so, Ulansey theorizes, they chose the name of Mithra (a Persian god), partly to cover the identity of Perseus (who was often associated with Persia), partly because of an alliance between the Ciclian pirates who first introduced Mithraism to the Romans and a leader in Asia Minor named Mithridates ("given of Mithra"). [Ulan.OMM, 89]

What has been the point of this diversion? The point is to give the reader a warning, to be on the lookout any time a critic makes some claim about Mithraism somehow being a parallel to Christianity. Check their sources carefully. If they cite source material from the Cumont or pre-Cumont era, then chances are excellent that they are using material that is either greatly outdated, or else does not rely on sound scholarship (i.e., prior to Cumont; works by the likes of King, Lajard, and Robertson).

Furthermore, if they have asserted anything at all definitive about Mithraic belief, they are probably wrong about it, and certainly basing it on the conjectures of someone who is either not a Mithraic specialist or else is badly outdated.

Mithraic scholars, you see, do not hold a candle for the thesis that Christianity borrowed anything philosophically from Mithraism, and they do not see any evidence of such borrowing, with one major exception: "The only domain in which we can ascertain in detail the extent to which Christianity imitated Mithraism is that of art." [MS.508n]

We are talking here not of apostolic Christianity, note well, but of Christianity in the third and fourth centuries, which, in an effort to prove that their faith was the superior one, embarked on an advertising campaign reminiscent of our soft drink wars. Mithra was depicted slaying the bull while riding its back; the church did a lookalike scene with Samson killing a lion. Mithra sent arrows into a rock to bring forth water; the church changed that into Moses getting water from the rock at Horeb. (Hmm, did the Jews copy that one?)

Think of how popular Pokemon is, and then think of the church as the one doing the Digimon ripoff -- although one can't really bellow about borrowing in this case, for this happened in an age when art usually was imitative -- it was a sort of one-upsmanship designed as a competition, and the church was not the only one doing it. Furthermore, it didn't involve an exchange or theft of ideology.

As to any other parallels, in the late 60s, before the coming of age of the astrological thesis, appeal was made to the "possibility of Mithraic influence" as appearing "in many instances" -- and then again, the idea that Mithraism borrowed from Christianity was said to have "not been taken seriously enough into consideration." [Lae.MO, 86] But regarded as more likely in any case was that the two systems "could have spoken to a Roman condition, a social need, and a theological question without having known of each other's existence.”

As in so many other instances of philosophy and literature, parallel thoughts and social patterns can appear independently of one another as 'new' elements with the authentic consciousness of such newness."[ibid.] But such parallels have not been so much as suggested in the wake of the astrological thesis. Today (and even by Cumont) the parallels drawn between the two faiths (by professional Mithraic scholars) are almost entirely either "universal" religious traits (i.e., both had a moral code; what religion doesn't!?) or sociological: Both spread rapidly because of the "political unity and moral anarchy of the Empire." [Cum.MM, 188-9] Both drew large numbers from the lower classes. (And of course, numerous differences are cited as well: Christianity was favored in urban areas habited by the Jewish diaspora, whereas Mithraism was indifferent to Judaism and was popular in rural areas; Mithraism appealed to slaves, troops, and functionaries vs. Christianity's broader appeal; etc.)

It's a Conspiracy?

You may ask whether the copycat theorists know of any of this newer work on Mithraism by Mithraic scholars, and if so what they make of it. The answer is yes, they are becoming aware of it; but what they make of it is no more than a conspiracy. In her latest effort Acharaya says of the star-map thesis, and the lack of evidence that Mithra in his Iranian period ever slew a bull: The argument is in the main unconvincing and seems to be motivated by Christian backlash attempting to debunk the well-founded contention that Christianity copied Mithraism in many germane details. At the point when scholars like Ulansey are implicitly accused, as here, of being "motivated by Christian backlash" (or as elsewhere, of being covert Christians!), the critics are clearly holding a counsel of despair. We are told, "In reality, the bull-slaying motif and ritual existed in numerous cultures prior to the Christian era, regardless of whether or not it is depicted in literature or iconography in Persia." No one doubts that the bull-slaying motif existed; the question is whether it appears as something that Mithra did in the pre-Roman era, and the other instances are completely meaningless in this context. Ulansey shows that Mithra's act was related to the discovery of the precession of the equinoxes; Acharya offers the response that: In fact, the bull motif is a reflection of the Age of Taurus, around 4500-2300 BCE, one of the 2,150-year ages created by the precession of the equinoxes. The presumption by scholars is that the precession of the equinoxes was only "discovered" during the second century BCE by the Greek scientist Hipparchus; nevertheless, it is quite evident that the precession was well known, by the ruling elite and priestly faction, for millennia prior to its purported "discovery." That the ancients followed precessional ages is revealed abundantly in the archaeological record. In stating this, Acharya places herself against not only Ulansey, but as Ulansey states, historians of science who agree that Hipparchus was the discoverer of the precession [Ulan.OMM, 76] -- as well as against evidence from Aristotle and others showing that such knowledge was not known prior to Hipparchus [ibid., 79]. She posits otherwise unknown and unnamed "ruling elite" and "priests" who allegedly knew about the precession; yet when it comes to details, all she has to offer is one example: "The change between the ages of Taurus and Aries is recorded even in the Bible, at Exodus 12, where Moses institutes the sacrifice of the lamb or ram instead of the bull." The problem here at face value is that even if true, this would be in the wrong order, if Ulansey is correct: If Exodus is symbolizing the precession, it should be ordering the sacrifice of the bull instead of the ram, not vice versa, for the bull was killed according to Ulansey's record c. 300 BC. Not that it matters, since Exodus 12, the implementation of Passover, says nothing about bulls, as "instead ofs" or for any other reason, and a lamb is still not a ram by any stretch of the imagination. Achraya is blowing bubbles here. That "Dupuis insisted upon the identification, as did Volney," is a nice personal insight into their lives, but means nothing. Bunsen's wild speculations also are without grounding; to wit: "Like Ormuzd, Mithras is represented riding on the bull, and Jehovah is described as riding on the Cherub, Kirub or bull." Mithras is nowhere shown riding a bull; he is on the bull's back, killing it; on the other end, where is it, and when, that Jehovah is said to be riding a cherub, and how, linguistically, does this get to "bull"? Solar myths in which other gods of no relation to Mithra (Apis, etc.) are depicted as or called bulls, and sacrifices of bulls in various places, are of no relevance to the issue; merely asserting that they are "essentially the same motif as Mithra slaying the bull" and quoting another of like mind does not make it so -- especially since there is no iconographic or literary evidence to prove this point.

Priming the Pump with Parallels?

We are now ready to embark upon the practical part of our essay in which we consider in turn each of the claims made of alleged "parallels" between Mithraism and Christianity.