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Updated: August 8, 2024
The exact form which the image took is uncertain; but probability is in favor of the well-known type of a human figure slaying a prostrate bull, which was to the Greeks and Romans the essential symbol of the Mithraic worship.
In the feasts of the Mithraic initiates, in which mythological symbolism is prominent, a more spiritual element becomes visible: the participant absorbs something of the nature of the god power to overcome evil, with hope of immortality. +1044+. In the ancient records of these ceremonies there is no theory of the means by which man comes into friendly relations with the deity.
However that may be, there can be no doubt that the Mithraic religion proved a formidable rival to Christianity, combining as it did a solemn ritual with aspirations after moral purity and a hope of immortality. Indeed the issue of the conflict between the two faiths appears for a time to have hung in the balance.
In the Mithraic religion this conception is graphically set forth in some of the numerous sculptures which represent Mithras kneeling on the back of a bull and plunging a knife into its flank; for on certain of these monuments the tail of the bull ends in three stalks of corn, and in one of them corn-stalks instead of blood are seen issuing from the wound inflicted by the knife.
The Mithraic Mysteries of the Persians, the Orphic and Bacchic Mysteries and the later Eleusinian semi-Mysteries of the Greeks, the Mysteries of Samothrace, Scythia, Chaldea, are familiar in name, at least, as household words.
It extended to Great Britain, and numerous remains of Mithraic monuments and sculptures in this country at York, Chester and other places testify to its wide acceptance even here.
Cumont believes that Mithraism did not imitate the organization of the Greek secret societies. The New Testament use of the term 'mystery' in the sense of 'esoteric doctrine' may have come from the Asian cult; the Mithraic worship was practiced in Tarsus, the native city of the Apostle Paul, in the first century of our era.
See Robertson's Christianity and Mythology, Part II, pp. 129-302; also Doane's Bible Myths, ch. xxviii, p. 278. Justin Martyr clearly had no doubt about the resemblance of the Mithraic to the Christian ceremony. But the best example of this practice is afforded by the rites of Dionysus, to which I will devote a few lines. December.
One such Mithraic group was found at Ostia, where there was a large subterranean Temple "to the invincible god Mithras." The 24th was called the "Day of Blood"; the High Priest first drew blood from his own arms; and then the others gashed and slashed themselves, and spattered the altar and the sacred tree with blood; while novices made themselves eunuchs "for the kingdom of heaven's sake."
So in the Mithraic temples we find seven ladders, the ascent of which by the Initiate typified his passage to the seventh and supreme Heaven. Bousset points out that the original idea was that of three Heavens above which was Paradise; the conception of Seven Heavens, ruled by the seven Planets, which we find in Mithraism, is due to the influence of Babylonian sidereal cults.
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