Mithraism
Mithraism
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Contact Bruce About PWP Links Photo Credits:- Sol Banquet (Mithraic relief, side B, white marble, 2nd-3rd century CE, found near Rome, held in Louvre Museum; Wikimedia Commons) Raised to the Sun (kellepics, Pixabay) Tube to God (kellepics, Pixabay) |
Mithraism Mithraism was a Roman mystery religion centered on the god Mithras. It was popular in the Roman Empire army from the 1st to the 4th century CE. In an iconic scene, Mithras has a banquet with the god Sol, the Sun.  Sol [Sun] and Mithras banqueting with Luna [Moon].
At the base are Sol’s attendants and twin divinities Cautes [Sunrise] and Cautopates [Sunset]. This is side B of a double-sided Roman marble relief, 2nd or 3rd century CE. In Mithraism, prayers were addressed to the Sun three times a day, and Sunday was especially sacred. The name Mithras is a form of Mithra, the name of an old, pre-Zoroastrian, and, later on, Zoroastrian, god. Mithra was an exalted deity of light and became a common word for "Sun". Mithraism seems to be based on Roman perceptions of Zoroastrian ideas (popular from 6th century BCE to 7th century CE in ancient Iranian empires). Here is part of an exercise from ‘The Mithraic liturgy’, or “The Mithras Liturgy”, a magical text that may have been Mithraic or based on Mithraism, using the text of Albrecht Dieterich: Draw
breath from the rays, draw in three times as strongly as you can and
you will feel yourself raised up and walking towards the height, and
you will seem to be in the middle of the aerial region…
The path of the visible gods will appear through the disc of the sun, who is God my father. Likewise the so-called tube, the origin of the ministering wind. For you will see hanging down from the disc of the sun something that looks like a tube. And towards the regions westward it is as though there were an infinite east wind. But if the other wind should prevail towards the regions of the east, you will in like manner see the vision veering in that direction.’...  Carl Jung comments (quoted in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious and Symbols of Transformation by C.G. Jung): The
fire- or sun-god here invoked is a figure which has close historical
parallels, for instance with the Christ-figure of the Apocalypse...
The vision is embedded in a religious context of a distinctly ecstatic nature and describes a kind of initiation into mystic experience of the Deity... The meaning of the “ministering wind” is probably the same as the procreative pneuma, which streams from the sun-god into the soul and fructifies it. The association of soul and wind frequently occurs in ancient symbolism... The probable meaning is that the vision moves or is carried hither and thither according to the direction of the wind. The thing seen is the tube, the “origin of the wind”, which turns now to the east, now to the west, and presumably generates the corresponding wind.  |
Also see:- Solar Culture & Sun articles Solar Culture Exercises Solar Culture Exercises Index |
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