The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World

[Robert Tulip]

The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World by David Ulansey Average Customer Review 4.5 out of 5 stars (19 customer reviews)

5.0 out of 5 stars Stellar Religious Research, January 7, 2012
By Robert Tulip (Canberra Australia) - (REAL NAME)

This is a book I have wanted to read for about a decade, because I share Ulansey's interest in how the precession of the equinox is a guiding theme in ancient cosmology. Mithraism was a religion popular among ancient Roman men around the time of Christ, but its beliefs were secret, and almost nothing is known of its doctrines. Its planetary grades of initiation bear some similarity to Freemasonry. There are a large number of Mithraic sites all over Europe, and these provide the fragmentary clues for scholars to attempt to reconstruct Mithraic belief.

Mithra was an eastern sun god, but the extent to which the Roman religion linked to the Persian origins is a matter of speculation. The central icon of Mithraism, known as the Tauroctony, depicted Mithras knifing a bull to death, surrounded by other animals including a scorpion eating the bull's testicles, a dog, crow and snake, and two human figures. Ulansey provides a clear argument that these figures depict the star field stretching across the celestial equator from the constellation Taurus to the constellation Scorpio, and that the two humans depict the spring and autumn equinoxes.

Where I feel Ulansey is on shakier ground is in his central hypothesis that the Tauroctony represents the precession of the equinox. Before reading his book I was very attracted to this idea, because of my own research on precession as a central mythic theme in Christianity. However, I did not find Ulansey persuasive on this point.

His argument is that discovery of precession in the second century BC by the Greek astronomer Hipparchus led to a new vision of the ultimate movement of the heavens as a basis of new religion, with Mithraism celebrating a precessional movement that occurred in about 2000 BC, the shift of the equinox from Taurus to Aries. The key problem I found in Ulansey's hypothesis is that he demonstrates fairly clearly that the Mithras figure in the Tauroctony represents the constellation Perseus, a major non-zodiacal star group just to the north of Taurus. But if Mithraism was about precession, it would be focussed on the shift of the equinox from Taurus into Aries, so the victory over the bull would be by the ram, not Perseus. The absence of ram symbolism in Mithraism, despite the well known association between Aries and the ram, indicates that precession is not central.

What makes more sense to me, and I admit this is my speculation based on fragmentary knowledge, is that the bull and scorpion of the Tauroctony represent the points where the zodiac crosses the Milky Way galaxy in Taurus and Scorpio. These points are readily observable in the night sky, and at the time of ancient Rome they were visible at the time of the equinoxes. This matches to the old idea in the Epic of Gilgamesh of a celestial gate in the Mountain of the Sun guarded by scorpion men, opening a path to paradise. It is surprising that Ulansey barely mentions the Milky Way, apart from Porphry's rather strange linkage of it to Cancer and Capricorn, neither of which are actually on the galactic plane. If Taurus and Scorpio are the gates of heaven, they stand as symbols of transmigration of the souls, with no need for any precessional meaning.

Ulansey argues that precession was unknown before Hipparchus. This seems highly unlikely, given the Biblical imagery of Moses and Joshua inaugurating an age of the Ram and condemning the golden calf, and also the image in the Odyssey of Ulysses escaping from the cow-herding Cyclops by holding the stomach fleece of a ram. It seems more plausible to me that precession formed a central idea of secret cults in the ancient world for a long time, and it only became a matter of public knowledge among the Greeks with the work of Hipparchus. Egyptians had a highly developed stellar religion for thousands of years before Christ, and they regularly rebuilt their stellar temples to align with shifting positions of the stars due to precession. Hipparchus derived his discovery of precession from study of Babylonian star charts, and it is implausible that the authors of those charts had no knowledge of the deep movement of the cosmos, given their antiquity by comparison to the Greek children.

Ulansey draws attention to the lion-headed God with body of a man and wings of an eagle, wrapped by six coils of a snake, often known as Aion, the god of time, found in association with Mithraic ceremony. Aion seems much more plausibly associated with precession than is Mithras, as the lion and man form a precessional axis from Leo to Aquarius, separated by six ages, represented in the statue by the six curls of the snake. Aion stands on top of a globe marked by the Chi Rho cross. Plato in the Timaeus had said this cross represented the same and the different. It may well be that the same is the ecliptic path of the sun along the unchanging stars of the zodiac, while the different is the moving position of the celestial equator caused by precession. Alternatively, the same might be the galaxy, and the different could be the zodiac, with the shifting positions of the planets indicating change. Both these readings are plausible. In any event, we cannot rule out that precession was central to a secret oral mystery tradition going back at least to Plato, and probably much further into the distant past in Egypt and Babylon and India. Mithraism looks like a superficial latecomer.

In associating Mithras with Perseus, Ulansey presents an intriguing parallel with the myth of the slaying of the Gorgon Medusa. Readers will recall that vision of the Gorgon caused instant death, with anyone unfortunate enough to see the monster turning immediately to stone. With the help of the Gods including Hermes and Athena, Perseus used a mirror so that he could behead the gorgon without looking at it. In the Tauroctony, Ulansey notes that we similarly see that Mithras looks away from the bull as he slits its throat. This typology of bull and gorgon appears strong, given the range of links between Mithras and Perseus, especially around Saint Paul's home town of Tarsus.

I would like to venture my own speculative reading of this parallel. Mithraism was especially popular among the Roman legions, just as Perseus was one of the greatest of Greek mythical heroes. Greece and Rome shared a western civilizing imperial mission, with deep racial prejudice against older races whom they condemned as barbarians. It seems quite plausible to me that this attitude of killing a monster while looking away from it has an archetypal resonance with the imperial mission of conquest of empire, with the bull and gorgon representing other cultures whom the white rulers had to ignore and defeat. If the bull of the Tauroctony represents the `inferior' races, while Mithras represents the manifest destiny of conquering Rome, this might help to explain the popularity of this religion among the legions.

Ulansey discusses another celestial parallel, with Mithras symbolizing the celestial pole as lord of the universe. There does not seem to be any extant reference in Mithraism to how the north pole has precessed to its current location in the bear, from its previous position in the dragon, so once again this cosmic parallel does not really indicate a centrality for precession in Mithraism. By contrast, we can observe that Christianity speaks in Revelation 13 of how the dragon `gave his power and seat and authority' to the `bear-lion-leopard', symbolising the movement of the pole from its former position in Draco during the Age of Taurus to its current position in the bear, adjacent to the lion among the leopard spots of the stars.

Mithraic scholars have contended that it is an accident of history that Christianity defeated Mithraism. Considered against the celestial framework that Ulansey so ably discusses, we see that Christianity has abundant clear precessional imagery, especially with fish and loaves symbolism indicating the New Age of Pisces/Virgo, with Christ and Mary symbolising on earth the events visible in heaven. By contrast, Mithraism was a male imperial cult with an ambiguous reference to a shift that had happened millennia previously. In supposedly celebrating the triumph of the Age of Aries, Mithraism was extremely out of date. It is as though the USA today celebrated a cosmic event two thousand years old, in spiritual competition against another belief system that was grounded in reflection of current cosmic shifts.

I admire David Ulansey's courage and scholarship in presenting his precessional hypothesis for Mithraism. The prima facie parallel of man kills bull as symbolising Aries defeating Taurus does not really seem to work out, at least in my view. But this idea is immensely helpful in assessing the milieu of early Christianity, and as I have briefly noted, the precessional parallels in the New Testament are far more clear, albeit hidden in plain sight. I think Ulansey did not realize the depth of cultural taboo that surrounds this material. Even though his claims are open to challenge, they present an extremely important milestone in the gradual reconstruction of ancient cosmology.