Mithras has been worshipped in more religious traditions than perhaps any other deity in history. Aryan tribal pagans, Hindus, Iranian pagans, Zarathustrians, the Mitanni people of the Middle East, the Romans, and even the Manicheans have all worshipped him. In the Roman Empire, his followers formed one of its own esoteric, moral, and ritual principles which led the followers deeper into the secrets of the god.
Roman Mithrasism taught concepts of esoteric anatomy and adeptship. It may even have had a secret from of astrology with an alternative system of signs and portents.
But for all this, occultists and psychic investigators have largely ignored Mithras. Few know anything about him, and fewer still have written more than the odd line or two such as that found in Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code.
This is a religion which very nearly became the foundation of our modern world. The god Mithra contended with Christ on equal terms for almost five hundred years. In fact, modern historians like those fictionalized in The DaVinci Code recognize Mithrasism as the greatest rival to early Christianity - a greater threat even than the religion of Isis. Indeed, in retrospect there is every reason to believe that if Rome had not become Christian, it would have become Mithrasian.
To combat the threat, Christian writers went to extraordinary lengths and indulged in extremely underhanded tactics. They claimed Mithrasians had stolen Christian theology and ritual, although clearly the Mithrasian religion embraced that theology and those rituals earlier than Christianity's existence. The Christian writers changed the story, saying the Devil, knowing in advance of the coming of the Christian sacrements, imitated them before they existed in order to denigrate them.
Mithrasism did have a sacrament which strongly resembled a Christian rite. It included wine as a symbol of sacrifical blood and used bread in wafers or small loaves marked with a cross to symbolize flesh. And other parallels abound. Mithrasians called themselves "brother" and were led by a priest called a "father" whose symbols were his staff and ring, his hat, and a hooked sword. Christianity adopted the hook and staff as the shepard's as the Shepard's crook; the hat became stiffened and was called a Miter (the name came from the name of the god, Mithras); the ring remained. Thus was derived the symbolic heraldry of the bishop. Similarly, Mithrasian priests were ruled by a "father of fathers" who lived in Rome. This "father of fathers," like the Pope, was elected by a council of priests. The religion of Mithras, though, set the number of that council at ten. In many other ways the Mithrasians predated the Christians in precisely those areas which are supposedly identifiably and uniquely Christian.
But there were many differences, too. Mithras appealed to a different kind of follower than Christ. He offered a salvation based not only on faith and compassion, but also on knowledge and valor. In this he appealed not only to the poor, the slave and the freedman, but to the traditionalist Roman aristocracy, soldiers, and honest merchants as well. Even some Emperors followed him. Mithras posed no threat to the traditions and civilization of Rome. The new god made peace with the old gods, Jupiter, Saturn, Oceanus, Venus, and Sol. He made peace, too, with the newer gods, Isis and Serapis.
Christ made no such accommodation. When the Christians gained ascendancy, they took the churches of Isis and made them their own. They destroyed all the liturgies of other gods. And they attacked Mithras. They attacked his temples with axes. They smashed the sacred ststuary. They burned his books and attacked his followers. They dumped rubbish and the refuse of graveyards in his temples to desecrate them, and built their own churches on the ruins of Mithrasian temples. In one case they murdered his priest and left the corpse on the altar. They sought in every way to wipe the memory of the god Mithras from the face of the earth.
But in the end, they failed. The temples remained and during the 20th century have yielded up their secrets to psychic investigators and wiccans. Despite attempts to destroy it, Mithra's secret lives on the Internet now, as invincible as the god's title "invictus" promised. Mithra's secret has remained untouched, pure, and open to those who seek it.
Mithra was the most important Zoroastrian god on the side of Truth. He was the god of contracts and keeping your promises, like the German god Tyr. He's related to the Hindu god Mitra, mentioned in the Rig Veda, who was also a god of honesty and contracts. Because the farming people of the Persian Empirewere always fighting with the nomads around them, Mithra also began to represent civilization, order, and living in one place as opposed to crime, confusion, and always moving around (this is from the point of view of the settled people! the nomads weren't really criminals).
The Persian army, and later theParthian and the Sassanianarmies, believed that since Truth was on their side, so was Mithra, and West Asian soldiers often sacrificed to Mithra and prayed to him.
When Roman soldiers fought in the East (that is, in West Asia), they saw their enemies praying to Mithra. They thought he must be a very strong god, and began trying to take him over for themselves. They didn't know much about Zoroastrianism, though, so they worshipped Mithras (they called him Mithras) very differently from the way the Persians worshipped him.
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