The Cult Dossier · No. 008 · Ancient Mystery Cult
Mysteries of Mithras
Mithraism
c.80 – c.400 CE · Roman Empire — Rome, Ostia, the Rhine and Danube frontiers, Britain
I. ANTIQUITY — THE MYSTERY CULTS
Fully religious
Who led it
No central hierarchy. Each mithraeum was independent, headed by a PATER (Father). Extremely popular with the legions and the imperial civil service.
What it worshipped and taught
Mithras, shown killing a bull (the tauroctony) in a cave, attended by the torchbearers Cautes and Cautopates, a dog, a snake, a scorpion and a raven. Modern scholarship (Ulansey, Beck) reads the icon as a star map, the bull as Taurus and the killing as the precession of the equinoxes. Seven initiation grades, each under a planet: Corax (Raven/Mercury), Nymphus (Bride/Venus), Miles (Soldier/Mars), Leo (Lion/Jupiter), Perses (Persian/Moon), Heliodromus (Sun-runner/Sun), Pater (Father/Saturn).
Who was in it
Mithras; Sol Invictus; Cautes and Cautopates. Men only — no female initiate is attested in roughly 1,000 surviving monuments.
How it ended, or where it stands
Violently suppressed as Christianity became dominant.
The dead
Unknown
Of note
LEFT NO SCRIPTURE — EVERYTHING KNOWN IS RECONSTRUCTED FROM ARCHAEOLOGY, and the numbers in this entry show exactly what that costs. EIGHT MITHRAEA SURVIVE IN ROME; the estimated original total runs to around 700. Nearly everything is inference from the gap between those two figures. Its supposed rivalry with early Christianity is routinely overstated in popular writing. A religion with no surviving text and a 99 per cent loss rate on its buildings is one that can be made to mean almost anything, which is precisely why it so often is.
Its timeline
- c.80 CE First datable evidence in the Roman world.
- 2nd–3rd c. CE Peak: THE FIGURE PREVIOUSLY GIVEN HERE — ‘over 100 mithraea in Rome alone’ — CORRESPONDED TO NOTHING AND IS REPLACED. ONLY EIGHT MITHRAEA SURVIVE IN ROME. The estimated original total is far higher: Coarelli put it at AS MANY AS 700, with other estimates around 680–690, alongside some 300 further Mithraic monuments from the city. The old number was too high for what stands and an order of magnitude too low for what is thought to have existed; heavy legionary presence on the frontiers.
- c.240 CE London Mithraeum built beside the Walbrook.
- c.308 CE Diocletian, Galerius and Licinius dedicate an altar at Carnuntum to Mithras, protector of their empire.
- 4th c. CE Christian suppression; many mithraea deliberately desecrated, some with skeletons of priests found chained inside.