Mithras. Typengeschichtliche Untersuchungen

The New Mithraeum

Published in 1931, Mithras. Typengeschichtliche Untersuchungen is Fritz Saxl’s major contribution to the study of the Mithraic mysteries. In the absence of doctrinal texts, Saxl approaches Mithraism as a fundamentally visual religion and reconstructs its theology through reliefs, sculptures and spatial arrangements found in Mithraea across the Roman world.

Saxl interprets the tauroctony as a cosmogonic act in which light is brought down into the dark cave of the world through the sacrifice of the bull. Mithras appears as a mediating figure between light and darkness: first the agent of the sun god, then his conqueror, and finally a second Helios who ascends to heaven. The Mithraic myth is thus read as a cycle of descent, sacrifice and re-ascent, offering a model for the fate of the human soul.

The book situates Mithraic imagery at the crossroads of Iranian, Babylonian and Greek traditions, while emphasising the decisive role of Greek heroic and cosmological models. Saxl also explores the striking visual parallels between Mithraism and early Christianity – baptism, ascent, banquet – while underlining their theological divergence: in Mithraism, creation itself is the moment of suffering; in Christianity, suffering becomes the means of redemption.

Although some of Saxl’s hypotheses have been revised by later scholarship, Mithras remains a foundational work for understanding Mithraism as a complex visual language shaped by late antique syncretism and by the long survival of ancient images.