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Mithras Biography

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MITHRAS, One of the chief deities of the ancient Persian religion. The god seems to have been known to the Indo-Iranians before their separation, as he appears in both the Avesta and the Veda. He is a god of light, invoked in company with the heaven (Ahura and Varuna), and is the guardian of truth and the enemy of all falsehood. In India this deity seems to have been early superseded but in Persia he retained his place as one of the chief gods. It may be considered very doubtful whether the god was borrowed from the early Babylonians at a date long before our knowledge begins, more especially as in the earlier texts Mithras is not the sun but the light of heaven. In the Zoroastrian religion he is one of the Yazata, or spirits of the second-rank, though even here he occupies a high position, seeing and knowing everything, a being whom it is impossible to deceive and in constant conflict with the powers of darkness, so that he becomes a warrior god, who is the chief helper of Ahura-Mazda in his struggle with Ahriman (see ZOROASTER; ZOROASTRIANISM) and, by a natural development, of truth and loyalty. In the Old Persian inscriptions, it should be said, he is invoked by the Achaemenidae along with Ahura-Mazda and Anahita, and his festival (on the sixteenth day of the seventh month) was one of the solemn functions of the state religion. Honored by the numerous princes who built up small principalities throughout western Asia after the division of Alexander's kingdom, the god was a prominent divinity in Cilicia, Cappadocia, and Commagene though practically unknown in the Greek world. From these regions his worship came to the West to the Romans, through the Cilician pirates conquered by Pompey. It is not mentioned, however, by contemporary Roman writers till the first century of our era, and the earliest Latin inscriptions that name Mithras belong to the early second century. The cult with its mysteries was popular in the army and quickly spread over the whole Roman world, as its monuments in all the frontier provinces plainly show, and became the chief opponent of Christianity. The nature of the religion is obscure, as the sacred writings have perished and information must be drawn either from the writings of Christian adversaries or from the representations in the numerous places of worship. It seems clear that the basis of the cult was derived from the Mazdean worship, but with a considerable mixture of Chaldaean worship of the heavenly bodies. Mithras seems to have owed his prominence to the belief that he was the source of all life and could also redeem the souls of the dead and bring them into the better world. This worship was celebrated. in underground chambers of small size, to which only those who belonged to the higher degrees were admitted, and was probably conducted according to elaborate ritual prescriptions. (For such a Mithraeum at Rome, consult W. Dennison, "The Newly Discovered Mithraeum at the Baths of Caracalla," in the Classical Weekly, vii, 151-152, New York, 1915.) The ceremonies included a sort of baptism to remove sins, anointing, and a sacred meal of bread and water, while a. consecrated wine believed to possess wonderful power played a prominent part. With the cult of Mithras went a belief in the immortality of the soul and in the resurrection of the dead; it was this belief in particular that brought the followers of Mithras and the Christians into collision. The mysteries contained seven degrees, of which the first three seem to have been probationary and not to have admitted to the sacred ceremonies. The degrees are given in this order: (1) Corax or Raven; (2) Gryphus or Grilling (3) Miles or Soldier; (4) Leo or Lion; (5) Perses or Persian; (6) Heliodomos or Courier of the Sun; (7) Patres or Fathers, who were at the head of the cult, and whose chief was the pater patrum. The other initiates called themselves brethren (fratres). Women seem to have been excluded from the rites proper of Mithras, but in the western part of the world those rites were brought in close alliance with the worship of the Great Mother of the Gods (q.v.), which was open to women as freely as to men. The nature of the initiation is not known. The undoubted similarity in much of this worship to the new religion of Christianity seems only to have made the battle between the rivals bitterer, and with the triumph of Christianity and the loss of the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire began the destruction of the Mithras worship, and by the end of the fourth century it seems to have been practically extinct in the West.

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XVI (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 40-41.