Daily Gazette

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