you are the missing light you are Mithras
you straddle the hidden moon in Taurus
and lead skies of Saturn - our eucharist
is to feast with the Sun in chorus
down caverns - where you are matador
and lucifer wearing a cape of stars
for you are the bridegroom and creator
of all lunar female avatars
the good news is - we soldiers bear the flame
and knife - do our lion’s share in time’s scheme
because you the Persian took the blame
so even our Evil might be redeemed
by blood of the bull from this pseudo
world - et nos servasti sanguine fuso
Blackwells
Oxford
18 December 2018
Happy Mithras. Mithras Day was 25 December. At the Winter Solstice I resume my Mithraic theme from April - May. In no way am I endorsing the religion, which is poorly understood anyway, and I am certainly not acceding to its doctrine that the feminine in our world ( forget goddesses ) is a male creation by imprint and reflection. Mithras created the Moon and female and male life in this ” lower” world through his tauroctony, or bull-slaying.
Roman Mithraism had seven grades - the Raven, the Nymphus or Bride of Mithras, the Soldier, Leo, the Persian, the Heliodromos, or ” Sun-runner ” or Sun courier, and “the Father”, associated with Saturn. Curiously the male brides of Mithras were dedicated to Venus, and given a veil, mirror and tiara or diadem. Welcome to the Roman locker-room.
The concluding words in Latin are taken from a scrap of ritual that has survived. It translates as ” and you delivered us by shed blood”, or “blood poured out”. The full lines discovered at the Santa Prisca Mithraeum in Rome might read - ” et nos servasti eternali sanguine fuso” although the first words are debated by epigraphists.
Roman Mithraism is a heresy all round. It is possibly related to Zoroastrian heresies that opposed Parthian and Sassanian orthodoxy. It was certainly regarded as worse than a heresy by Christians, and similar ideas entered Christianity to become the Manichean heresy. It is certainly a modern heresy for us on account of its gender ideas.
The name is cognate with Indo-European words for covenant or pact-maker, but the Roman Mithras is a cattle-rustler and transgressor. No such tauroctony exists for his Persian original. Ahriman the Evil Spirit in Zoroastrianism appears on some Roman Mithraic statuary to be a more positive force, although the evidence is highly debatable. I suggest there might have been a ” Star Wars” theodicy in Roman Mithraism. Such a prospect of redemption might have been the ” evangel” for Roman soldiers. Still an eschatologcal show-down with the Evil Spirit itself was posited.
Plato’s “Timaeus” contains all elements of the cosmology of Mithraism, except for the white Bull. At 69 E Plato describes how the thymotic or mortal soul is inserted into the male human chest by the Demiurge. This is of great importance to the development of a politics of thymos or ” virtu” in Machiavelli.