Mithras

The Roman Mithras is known almost entirely from what his worshippers left in stone rather than in writing, for the cult kept no scripture that survives. At the heart of every sanctuary stood the tauroctony: Mithras, in a Phrygian cap, kneeling on a bull and driving a dagger into its neck while a dog and a serpent leap at the wound, a scorpion grips the bull's genitals, and a raven looks on, flanked by the twin torch-bearers Cautes and Cautopates. The scene is thought to carry an astronomical or cosmological meaning now lost.

Worship took place in small windowless mithraea built to resemble caves, where men, and only men, advanced through seven graded initiations named for the planets, from Raven to Father, and shared a communal meal. The cult spread with the army and the imperial administration from the later first century and was strongest in the second and third. Its name and some motifs descend from the Indo-Iranian god Mithra, but scholars stress that the Roman mysteries were a new creation; the once-popular claim that Christianity simply copied Mithraism rests on parallels that specialists regard as exaggerated or invented.

Murdock's specific parallel claims fail against the same primary sources this atlas already cites for each figure. For Horus, she leans heavily on a scene at the Luxor temple depicting the divine birth of a pharaoh, read as a virgin nativity; the historian Richard Carrier, who himself argues Jesus was not a historical figure and so has no religious motive to defend, has separately examined and rejected her reading of that inscription, which shows the evidentiary problem is independent of any apologetic stake in the outcome.

For Mithras, Murdock's Suns of God repeats claims of a virgin birth and a 25 December date; the Roman cult's own central myth instead has Mithras born fully grown from solid rock, and no surviving Mithraic evidence fixes 25 December as the god's own festival date earlier than evidence for the Christian date itself. For Krishna, she asserts a crucifixion; the Mahabharata and the Puranas instead record Krishna's death by an arrow shot by the hunter Jara, who mistook his exposed foot for a deer, and his mother Devaki conceived him by ordinary marriage to Vasudeva as her eighth child, not virginally.

Bart Ehrman's Did Jesus Exist? (2012) reviews this entire family of claims and rejects them on the same grounds argued here: not one Zeitgeist-popularized parallel survives a direct check against the actual ancient sources for Horus, Mithras or Krishna.

Mithras never held a public priesthood or a state temple; his was a private mystery, spread by word and initiation rather than by civic festival. The evidence of dedications shows his worshippers concentrated among soldiers, freedmen, imperial slaves, customs officers, and merchants, the mobile personnel of the army and administration who carried the cult along the frontiers of the Rhine and Danube and into the ports of the Mediterranean. Because initiation was graded and the meetings small, a mithraeum rarely held more than a few dozen men, and a large garrison town might contain several.

The god was addressed as Deus Sol Invictus Mithras, binding him to the wider third-century devotion to the Unconquered Sun, though the two were not simply identical. What the cult offered its members is not spelled out in any surviving text, but the imagery of the bull-slaying, the planetary grades, and the shared meal points to a promise of order, fellowship, and a soul's ascent through the cosmos.

The cult declined through the fourth century as the empire turned Christian; mithraea were abandoned, and some were deliberately desecrated, their reliefs smashed or buried. Because the initiates left no doctrine in writing, the meaning of what they did had to be reconstructed from the monuments alone, and that reconstruction has swung sharply.

The Belgian scholar Franz Cumont, around 1900, argued that Roman Mithraism was essentially imported Iranian Mazdaism in Roman dress, a view that dominated for decades but is now largely rejected: specialists such as Roger Beck and Manfred Clauss treat the Roman mysteries as a fresh creation of the imperial period that borrowed a name and a few motifs from the East. A rival line of interpretation, developed since the 1970s, reads the tauroctony as a star-map encoding the precession of the equinoxes. The old popular claim that Christianity copied Mithraism, once repeated as fact, rests on parallels that scholars regard as loose, late, or invented.