The New Mithraeum Database

Collection of early passages on the cult of Mithras, curated and translated by A. S. Geden.

A series of polemical passages in which a leading fourth-century Christian theologian presents the cult of Mithras as a religion defined by cruelty, bodily suffering, and shameful initiation rites.

In polemical passages from the late second and early third centuries, Tertullian portrays the cult of Mithras as a demonic imitation of Christian rites and provides rare early references to Mithraic initiation and ritual symbolism.

Late antique legendary biography of Alexander the Great (c. AD 300), where history, myth, and imperial ideology merge around figures of divine kingship and solar power.

In the eighteenth year of Diocletian’s reign, Galerius Maximianus, persuaded by the sorcerer Theoteknos, consulted demonic oracles in a cave and was urged to initiate the persecution of the Christians.

The Mithraeum under and behind S. Prisca on the Aventine is without doubt the most important sanctuary of the Persian god in Rome.

Two extracts from De abstinentia ab esu animalium by Porphyry on sacrifices and the importance of abstinence from animal food among Persian Magi.

Of Isis and Osiris or Of the Ancient Religion and Philosophy of Egypt, Plutarch, The Moralia.

Dion Chrysostom, c. 100 A.D., a philosophical writer under the emperors Nerva and Trajan, composed a series of discourses or essays (λόγοι) on various subjects, in one of which he reports concerning the doctrines and practices of the magi.

Commentaries by Pseudo-Nonnus, also known as Nonnus the Abbot, on Gregory Nazianzen’s In Julianum Imperatorem Invectivae Duae and In Sancta Lumina.

The scholiast Lactantius Placidus comments on Statius’ passage identifying the Sun as Titan, Osiris, and Mithras, interpreting the Persian cave figure with the bull.

Questions on the old and new testaments, 113.11. Ambrosiaster, 5th cent.

Two excerpts from the ’Life of Commodus’ in Lampridius’ Historia Augusta, dating from the 4th century CE.