Lands of Asia layouts (Eng) 26.11.21

part iii | cultural and spiritual development
Mithraic symbols. Relief
from Ptuj (Slovenia).
fixed in human consciousness: the two most important
symbols of Christianity – the birth of Christ in a cave
and the first day of great celebration (Christmas),
on 25 December (for Catholics), are most likely
borrowed from Mithraism – it is the same day that
Mithraists celebrated the birth of Mithras.
Mithra, known as Mithras in the Roman Empire
during the first centuries AD, who gave the religion
its name, was the god of the Sun, the treaty and
the union. Mithra was originally a deity of the
Indo-Aryan peoples and had the auxiliary status of
yazata. The earliest mention of Mithra (mid-second
millennium BC), along with the deities Varuna, Indra
and Nasatya, is in a treaty between the Hittites and the
Mitanni recorded on the so-called Boghaz Keui tablets.
Later, the image of Mithra (Mihr, Miiro) entered
the religion of Zarathushtra, where it became one of
the main deities of many great empires of the East: the Achaemenid, Kushan and
Sassanian.
However, Mithraism, which was widespread in the Roman Empire in the first
centuries AD, had very little in common with the cult of Mithra of the Indo-Aryan
peoples and Zoroastrianism.
Sources relating to Mithraism are mainly lapidary inscriptions: dedications of
zealous worshippers to the god Mithras, found in large numbers especially in the
Pannonia area on the Danube, surviving examples of Mithraic art, and Mithraic
temples (mithraeum/mithraea). No Mithraic sacred texts have survived, and the
nature of the religion or cult has to be inferred from individual texts on Mithraism,
contained in the essays of Roman and Christian authors. There are two main
hypotheses about the provenance of Mithraism. According to the first, proposed
by the Belgian scholar Franz Cumont, Mithraism had its roots in an ancient Iranian
religion.
His hypothesis suggested that Mithraism originated in Syria, and its dissemination
westwards to Rome and Pannonia was facilitated by ‘Hellenised Magi’. The soldiers
of the Legio XV Apollinaris are considered to have played an important role in this
process. This legion was sent from Pannonia in AD 62 to fight the Parthians and then
returned. There is evidence to suggest that it was in this legion that Mithraists first
appeared in the Roman army. We shall turn to the fate of one of the soldiers of the
legion later.
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