Initiation across cultures and historical periods provides the wider context for an examination of Masonic initiation, its symbolism, purposes and place in contemporary society.
Leadbeater explores the origins and symbolism of ancient mystery traditions and Freemasonry, drawing connections with the mysteries of Egypt, Greece and Rome, including the cult of Mithras.
The sacred phallus in ancient and contemporary religion, from the Shiva linga and the cult of Priapus to Roman phallic symbolism, the curious but suggestive case of the Mithras cult at Tiddis and the modern idea of phallicism.
Restoring the Mysteries: A Conversation with Peter Mark Adams on his new book ‘Ritual & Epiphany in the Mysteries of Mithras’.
Behzad Bolout
I love the idea of this book and I’m looking forward to to buy and read it.
Only one thing looking at the text above there seems to be no mention of the origin of Mithraism, which is Iran and has nothing to do with Zoroastrianism,
In fact, the prophet Zoraostara raised against it.
And instead of looking for toots in europe it all goes to mystic Persia & Iran where it developed and during Parthian wars and trades took over Rome.
The roman version has local signs and philosophy then after the birth of Mithras goes to its original Persian form.
The Parthian belief and religion (Mithras) was wiped out after Sassanians took over.
Thank god that their religion lived in in Roman empire (so we can discover its doctrine.
Which later wiped out by christianity.
That said, the earliest account of the tauroctony that exactly matches the more famous frescoes and sculptures of the Roman era is that described in the Epic of Gilgamesh circa 2,000 BCE - and even that is likely to be a relatively ’late’ account of an already ancient oral tradition).
The gods Mitra, Varuna and Indra are all cited in the famous Hittite - Mitanni peace treaty circa 1,380 BCE. These people appear to have entered Anatolia circa 2,000 BCE, the Hittites by way of the Caucasus.
The earliest image of what looks like the tauroctony appears on a ring of King Saussatar (Shaushtatar) of Mitanni from the fifteenth century BCE.
Of course our understanding of the origins of the Hittite and Mitanni leaves something to be desired, but they appear to have entered the culturally Luwian zone of Anatolia sometime in the second millennium BCE. Certainly in the case of the Hittites they tended to assimilate themselves to the Luwian pantheon and language in their religious rites. All of this is, admittedly, somewhat foggy - the decipherment of Luwian hieroglyphics is still ongoing.
For the Hellenistic Age it is clear that the syncretism arising from the Greek, native Anatolian and Persian influence gave rise to a rich cultural mix and that the Hellenistic Kingdoms (who claimed ancestry from Cyrus, Darius & Alexander) acknowledged Mithras as Apollo-Mithras-Helios-Hermes.
The native Carian dynasty, the Hekatomnids, were appointed Persian satraps for south west Anatolia, adopted Persian monumental architecture (at Labraunda) where they also conducted sacred banquets in purpose built Andron (which are neither a Greek nor a Roman tradition) and whose layout is identical to the later mithraea of the Roman Empire.
As far as the transmission of the cult to Rome goes I agree that this was entirely due to the Parthian king, Tiridates I, soujourn in Rome under Nero in 66 CE.
I conjecture that the introduction of the cult to the Roman elite was part of the process of underwriting the political settlement between Rome and Parthia over Armenia - Mitra / Mithras was, after all, the god of treaties and agreements par excellence.
That said we still have the early attestation concerning the Cilician pirates celebrating secret mystery rites of Mithras in the first century BCE.
Beneath all of these ’royal’ goings on we know that trade routes connected vast swathes of the Near/Middle East with Europe and Asia and as far as Afghanistan - how early? Certainly by the Bronze Age; but if the evidence of the Amber, Lapis Lazuli and Obsidian trades are anything to go by long, long before.
So yes, the Cult of Mithras was introduced to the Roman elite by the Parthian King of Armenia - but the roots and question of ultimate origins remain far from clear.
I do hope that you enjoy the book - hopefully it will (fingers crossed) be emerging from the printers in the next week or so.
Thank you for taking an interest in my work, I do hope that you find the book of interest.
From Richard Payne Knight to Magnus Hirschfeld, the authors explore how ancient objects, phallic imagery and antiquarian scholarship helped shape modern ideas about sex and sexuality.
Indeed, Stephen. The catalogue is highly recommendable for all audiences, academic, professional and the simply curious. By the way, some of its articles can be found on this very site thanks to the generous support of the publisher, the Musée Royal Mariemont.
Manfred Clauss's introduction to the Roman Mithras cult has become widely accepted as the most reliable and readable account of this fascinating subject.
A small marble statuette of naked Mercury from the Mithraeum at Walbrook in London, sitting on a rock with the stumps of wings in his hair and a purse in his left hand, with a ram lying at his feet beside which is a tortoise.
A theological experiment in Neo-Platonic realism, theology of arithmetic, and teleological metamorphoses of powers in the divine, terrestrial, and chthonic worlds across the cosmic symphony.
A collection of Gerhard Hallstatt’s writings from Aorta and Ahnstern, exploring Mithras, paganism, esotericism, art and the survival of ancient traditions in the modern West.
Alain Daniélou explores phallic symbolism across religious traditions, from prehistory to India, Egypt and the Greco-Roman world, taking the lingam and the cult of Shiva as his main points of reference.
The M Rites — seven musical reflections on the Mithraic mysteries
Hello everyone,
Andreu kindly invited me to share this work here, so I thought I would introduce it by saying a little more about the ideas behind it.
I record as Ystrith, and The M Rites is a seven-part dark ambient album inspired by the Mithraic mysteries.
What drew me to Mithraism was not an attempt to imagine or reconstruct what its rituals may actually have sounded like. I became fascinated instead by the peculiar condition in which the cult survives today: mithraea, reliefs, tauroctonies and symbolic figures remain extraordinarily tangible, while the lived experiences, gestures and beliefs of the people who once gathered around them are largely beyond our reach.
That tension between material presence and human absence became one of the central ideas of the album.
There is also a much older and more personal association behind the work. When I was young, I encountered the ancient distinction between Phosphorus, the morning star, and Hesperus, the evening star — two apparently different celestial bodies eventually understood to be the same planet, Venus. Over the years I began, purely imaginatively rather than historically, to associate this with Cautes and Cautopates: two almost mirror-like figures, essentially alike except for the opposing directions of their torches. The thought of an apparent duality concealing an underlying unity stayed with me for a very long time.
The seven pieces approach this world from different angles:
1. Cautes
The album begins with the raised torch: emergence, ascent and the suggestion of something becoming visible. For me, Cautes also represents one half of that unresolved duality that frames the entire work.
2. Fading Gates
This piece is about thresholds — not simply entrances into physical sanctuaries, but the distance separating us from a world whose doors can no longer truly be crossed. We can approach it through archaeology and imagination, but never completely enter it.
3. Marble Tauroctonies
Here my attention turned to the surviving images themselves: stone scenes that have endured long after the meanings, gestures and people surrounding them disappeared. Their permanence is strangely inseparable from everything they cannot tell us.
4. Myth of the Petrogenesis
This piece takes its starting point from the image of Mithras emerging from the rock. I was interested less in illustrating the myth than in its extraordinary visual idea: life, divinity and revelation arising directly from apparently inert matter.
5. Voces Magicae
The title refers to the mysterious power of utterance — words, names and sounds whose significance may be only partly recoverable to us. The human voice here is approached less as the bearer of a clear message than as a trace of ritual presence.
6. Solstice at the Spelaeum
The longest piece on the album. I imagined the mithraeum as a space where architecture, darkness, carefully
directed light and ideas of the cosmos could momentarily converge. Rather than depicting an actual ceremony, the piece lingers on the experience of standing within such a space and sensing the immense distance between ourselves and those who once knew it as a living ritual environment.
7. Cautopates
The lowered torch closes the album. Rather than simply opposing Cautes, I think of the two figures as completing one another: descent and ascent, evening and morning, apparently opposite movements that may belong to the same cycle — just as Hesperus and Phosphorus proved to be two appearances of the same celestial body.
I would be very interested to hear how these ideas resonate — or fail to resonate — with people who know the Mithraic material far better than I do. I approached the subject as a musician, not as a historian, and the album is deliberately a contemporary response rather than an attempt at reconstruction.
I hope some of you find something in the work worth exploring, and I’d be genuinely interested in any thoughts, associations or disagreements it may prompt.
Only one thing looking at the text above there seems to be no mention of the origin of Mithraism, which is Iran and has nothing to do with Zoroastrianism,
In fact, the prophet Zoraostara raised against it.
And instead of looking for toots in europe it all goes to mystic Persia & Iran where it developed and during Parthian wars and trades took over Rome.
The roman version has local signs and philosophy then after the birth of Mithras goes to its original Persian form.
The Parthian belief and religion (Mithras) was wiped out after Sassanians took over.
Thank god that their religion lived in in Roman empire (so we can discover its doctrine.
Which later wiped out by christianity.