CX

At some point after my business plan is written and defended for grad school (in about a week) I will get around to writing a full overview of the Roman Cult of Mithras and it's relation to Xianity given the absolute mountain of misinformation currently circulating on the internet. That being said I'll make a few points of clarification in this thread.

1)Trust nothing you read on the internet with regard to the Roman Cult of Mithras. The vast majority is either based on century old scholarship which has since been superceded or downright fabrication.

2)Read the work of Manfred Klauss if you are interested in what contemporary mithraic scholarship has to say. Take David Ulansey with a grain of salt. His foundations jibe with modern Mithraic scholarship but the theoretical edifices he builds on top of it are speculative at best and crackpottery at worst. The most often sited scholar in the field of Mithraic studies is Franz Cumont. His work is nearly 100 years old, was based on much less archaeological evidence than we have today, and presupposed a link between the Roman Cult of Mithras and the Persian demigod Mitra; A view which is largely rejected by modern scholars.

3)It is important to understand the syncretistic relationship between Mithras and Sol Invictus. The latter was the official imperial cult of Rome in the period in which Mithraism developed. December 25th was the festival of Sol Invictus, called Dies Natalis Invicti Solis, not the Roman Cult of Mithras. The confusion arises because in various images and inscriptions, Roman Mithras is either conflated with Sol Invictus or treated as an agent of Sol Invictus. It is important to remember that Roman paganism was not comprised of mutually exclusive religious systems as we have in the west today. People were very often members of more than one cult and frequently syncretised ideas and practices from multiple cults. Additionallythe fact that the Xian celebration of the nativity is on December 25th is a direct result of the popularlity of Sol Invictus and his annual festival. December 25th was chosen out of expediency not because anyone believed that Jesus was born at that time. It was widely recognized that the birthday of Jesus was unknown and his birth was celebrated in different areas at different times. In fact some groups of adherents did not celebrate his birth at all and for most early Xians it was Easter that was the significant religious holiday.

4)We actually know relatively little about the Roman Cult of Mithras. There are no surviving liturgical or theological texts related to the cult. It was also a mystery religion and as such it's rituals and principle philosophical and metaphysical positions are largely unknown because they were intentionally kept secret. Our only evidence comes from inscriptions and archaeological remains of mithreaum, most notably the iconography of the Tauroctony (The slaying of the sacred bull by Mithras).

5)The lists we see again and again of the commonalities between the Roman Cult of Mithras and Xianity are unsupported by the evidence. Mithras was not the product of a virgin birth, for example, he is depicted as having sprung fully formed out of a rock. Although he is commonly depicted with two attendants there is no reason to suppose they are either shepherds or magi or even human for that matter. He was not the savior of mankind, but rather its creator. In the foundational cosmogonic myth of the cult depicted in the tauroctony it is apparent that Mithras' slaying of the sacred bull and the subsequent journey back to his cave seeded the earth with life (from the blood and semen of the bull). Mithras was not resurrected from the dead. After his victory over the sacred bull he ascended directly to the heavenly realm of the chief deity in the pantheon (generally accepted to be Sol Invictus though in some instances it appears Mithras was considered to be Sol Invictus himself).

6)Modern scholars reject almost entirely any connection between the Roman Mithras and the Persian Mitra save a nominal one and even that is disputed. The primary reason is because there is none of the iconography generally attendant to Roman Mithraism anywhere in the textual or archaeological record for Mitra in Persia. Nor any evidence that Roman adherents to the cult had any familiarity with the Persian deity (who was a minor deity in the pantheon of Ahura-Mazda and not a primary deity in his own right and was the god of contracts).

7)It is quite likely that the name Mithras was adopted in the Roman Cult to give it the authenticity of antiquity and an Eastern provenance as was the custom in imperial Rome in the period in question. Hundreds of cults existed at the time and most took names or images divorced entirely of their original contexts from older Eastern religions to add some weight to them. One of the reasons so may Roman pagans derided Xianity was not because of the supernatural claims it made, which were legion in all religions of the time, but because it was considered "new" and thus inauthentic.

Rick Sumner

I was beginning to wonder if your voice of reason was going to make the show!

Regards,
Rick Sumner

CX

I have rightly been chastised for my sloppy use of Latin.

The deity is named Sol Invictus.

The festival is called Dies Natalis Invicti Solis or simply Natalis Invicti for short. I have mistakenly been conflating the two. Sol Invictus means "Unconquerable Sun" whereas Sol Invicti would mean something like "Sun of Unconquerability" which sounds silly. Thanks to Spin for the correction.

spin

I dragged the following off the net:

Roman emperor Aurelian, in 247 A.D., had established December 25 as the feast of sol invicti [sic] (invincible sun), also referred to as natalis invicti (birth of the unconquerable) or sol novus (new sun), to celebrate when the sun began to conquer the long nights.
Does anyone know an ancient source for Aurelian's act of establishment, if it were his (given the error in dating him to 247 CE, perhaps a typo for 274?)?


spin

Toto

Must be a typo

Roman Emperors

spin

You just pulled the same page I just pulled (not the one I used for the above).


spin