Mithraism and Christianity
It has became the vogue in rationalistic circles to view Christianity, and especially its oldest form, the Catholic Church, as a composite institution built up partly from Jewish, and largely from pagan elements. There is scarcely a religion of the past to which Christianity has not been declared a debtor. One of the favorite sources from which Christianity is alleged to have drawn with a generous hand is Mithraism. The fatal weakness of Mithraism, as pitted against Christianity, was that its very organization was esoteric. Now, an esoteric institution can never take hold of the ignorant masses. Mithraism was always a sort of freemasonry, never a public organization. The Mithraic worship was by Christian physical force suppressed in Rome and Alexandria, about the end of the fourth century.
The religion of the Magi had made a very distinct impression on Judaism in its formative stage, and several of its cardinal doctrines were disseminated by Jewish colonists throughout the entire basin of the Mediterranean, and subsequently even forced themselves on orthodox Catholicism. In the later Roman era the nations of the Occident felt vividly the superiority of the Mithraic faith over their ancient national creeds, and the populace thronged to the altars of the exotic god. But the progress of the conquering religion was checked when it came in contact with Christianity. The two adversaries discovered with amazement, but with no inkling of their origin, the similarities which united them; and they severally accused the Spirit of Deception of having endeavored to caricature the sacredness of their religious rites.
Mithra came to occupy a singular position as between the two great powers of good and evil, Ormazd and Ahriman (the Ahura-Mazda and Angra-Mainyu of Mazdeism), being actually named the Mediator and figuring to the devout eye as a humane and beneficent God, nearer to man than the Great Spirit of Good, a Saviour, a Redeemer, eternally young, son of the Most High, and preserver of mankind from the Evil One. In brief, he is a pagan Christ.
One reason for regarding the Zend-Avesta as essentially ancient is the comparative simplicity of the Mithra cultus it sets forth. Just as happened with Christianity later, the spreading faith assimilated all sorts of ancient symbolisms and new complications of ritual; and Mithra later figures in the strange symbolic figures of the lion-headed serpentine god, but above all in that of the slayer of the bull. It has been variously decided that the bull slain by Mithra is the symbol of the earth, the symbol of the moon, the bull of the zodiac, and the cosmogonic bull of the Magian system. Now, any one who has studied such a work of ancient theosophy as Plutarch's treatise on Isis and Osiris, — a singularly interesting document, by the way, — will be perfectly prepared to believe that for the ancients the bull of Mithra could represent all four of these things.
Mithraism was as hospitable to mystic meanings as Osirianism. It is perfectly intelligible and probable that Mithra slaying the bull should have meant the rays of the sun penetrating the earth, and so creating life for mundane creatures, as the dog1 feeds on the blood of the slain bull. But those who adopt this as the whole explanation, overlook a principle bound up with the very origin of Mithraism—the significance of the bull as one of those signs of the zodiac through which the sun passed in his annual course.
By the precession of the equinoxes, the constellation of the Bull had ceased to be the sun's place at the vernal equinox for about 2,100 years before the reign of Augustus, the constellation of the Ram taking its place. What gives the zodiacal theory its crowning vindication, however, is the remarkable fact that, in Persia, the sign Aries, the ram, was known as the lamb ; and in the Mithraic mysteries at the Christian era, it was a lamb that was slain. And though the notion of a Fish-God is deeply rooted in several of the older Eastern religions, the zodiac is one plausible explanation of the early Christian habit of calling Jesus Christ the Fish. The sign of the Fishes comes next the Ram in the zodiac; and that constellation was actually taking the place of the Ram, at the spring equinox, about the time this symbol came into use.
The image of the slaying of the bull, whatever its original bearing, came to be associated specially with the idea of sacrifice and purification; and the great vogue of the Phrygian institutions of the Taurobolia and Criobolia, or purification by the blood of bulls and rams, must have reacted on Mithraism. In connection with these is the literal and original meaning of the phrase "washed in the blood of the lamb "; the doctrine being, that resurrection and eternal life were secured by drenching or sprinkling with the actual blood of a sacrificial bull or ram (often doubtless a lamb, that being a common sacrifice from time immemorial).
The Mithraic mysteries of the burial and resurrection of the Lord, the Mediator and Saviour, — burial in a rock tomb and resurrection from that tomb—the sacrament of bread and water, and the marking on the forehead with a mystic mark, — all these were in practice, like the Egyptian search for the lost corpse of Osiris, and the representation of his entombment and resurrection, before the publication of the Christian Gospel of a Lord who was buried in a rock tomb, and rose from that tomb on the day of the sun, or of the Christian mystery of Divine communion, with bread and water or bread and wine, which last were before employed also in the mysteries of Bacchus, sun-god and wine-god, doubtless as representing his body and blood. Not only did they in Phrygia fix a young man to a tree in the worship of the Mother of the Gods, and in other cults imitate the crucifixion in similar ways, but in one mystery in particular the Pagans were wont to consecrate a tree and, towards midnight, to slay a ram at the foot of it This cult may or may not have been the Mithraic; there is a very strong presumption that it was.
The central incidents of the Gospel story are seen in the mystic rites of Mithraism and other old solar religions— rites which symbolized abstract ideas and not concrete facts. In this way the sacrosanct episodes of the holy supper and the resurrection from the rock tomb, as well as the legend of the birth at Yuletide in a cave, the Sunday worship, and the Easter tragedy, all become intelligible. And when in the First Epistle of Peter (ii. 4, 5), there is a phrase about Jesus being a "living stone," and in the gospels the Lord said, "Thou art Peter, and upon this Rock I will build My Church," such an obviously unhistoric utterance derives from the Mithraic rites, the sacred rock of Mithra, the rock from which the god comes.
Of course it was not merely Mithraism that was assimilated by Christianity. The new faith absorbed matter from many sides. Take, for instance, the Fourth Gospel, which, written under Alexandrian influences, represents some of the later accretions ; and turn to such a story as that of the seamless robe of Jesus. Here is a new myth-motive: whence did it come? Turn to Osirianism, and of Osiris it was taughts that his robe, unlike that of Isis, was one, whole, indivisible, that robe being the universal light — the ideal robe of the sun.
These developments of mystical doctrine and symbolism into concrete myth point to a part of the explanation of the supersedence of Mithraism by Christianity. The older sun-worship, Apollo, Mithras, Dionysos, was always soluble into a mysterious abstraction: in the Christian legend the god was humanized in the most literal way; and for the multitude the concrete deity must needs replace the abstract.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
|
Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list
|
|
|
