This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Mithraism left almost no doctrine in its own words. Its temples, called Mithraea, were built underground or windowless to imitate a cave, and initiation advanced through seven ranked grades, Raven, Bridegroom, Soldier, Lion, Persian, Sun Runner and Father, each apparently carrying its own teaching, oath and symbol. None of that teaching survives as text. What survives instead is image: nearly every excavated Mithraeum across the Roman Empire, from Britain to Syria, centers on the same fixed composition, the tauroctony, Mithras kneeling on a bull and driving a dagger into its throat, flanked by a dog, a snake, a scorpion, a raven and the sun and moon. This relief, carved for the Mithraeum at the Roman garrison town of Dura-Europos on the Euphrates, is one specific instance of that composition, dated by its own Greek inscription to around 170 CE. A modern reader wants the relief to explain itself, but that is exactly what Mithraic initiation withheld from outsiders and largely withheld from its own lower grades. What the image can honestly support is narrower: that this scene mattered enough to be repeated identically across a scattered empire for centuries, and that a real garrison community at Dura-Europos paid to carve their own version of it. The doctrine behind the scene is the part the cult kept.