An Ancient Roman Cult’s Rituals Included Feasting, Fire, and Floor Cleaning (By Mithra!)

INSIDE THE CHAMBER IT IS dark, and the flickers of torchlight play across the features of the men gathered. The meal over, they sit relaxed on long stone benches that face each other in the narrow nave. Their god has left them for the time being, but embers of the fire that brought him to share the feast still glow red on the altar nearby. Soon, the devout will gather and burn the scraps, including chicken bones and suckling pig carcasses picked clean of meat. Then they will disperse the ashes across the floor and pace deliberately back and forth over them. The ritual completed, the men will walk out with charcoal-blackened feet—a mark of their cult that will remain unstudied for millennia.

With no written records of their rituals or beliefs, details of the cult of Mithraism have long been a mystery. Centuries of scholars have explored Mithraea, the temples they left behind adorned with carvings of gods and animals, and hypothesized about the rites that may have taken place within. Now, new approaches to studying these sites, including those highlighted in a recent paper published in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, may finally bring Mithraism to light: Ceremonial feasts, fiery offerings, and a ritual involving the renewal of the ground all may have been central to the cult’s worship of the god Mithras.

The Greco-Roman world had many secretive cults, each devoted to a specific deity, and Mithraism is actually one of the less obscure—though much of what has been claimed about it is suspect at best. Some contemporary texts, particularly by early Christian authors, hint at fearsome rituals involving fire, live burials, and simulations of death. But researchers today are skeptical of many of these stories, most of which are hearsay.

Symptomatic of the later Roman Empire, when the various Emperors claimed the mantle of deity, that they were Gods themselves, equal to the modified Greco-Roman pagan pantheon. The problem with this practice is that it degrades the source belief and eventually it destroys both the claimant and belief! It is one thing to praise the ‘Divine Caesar’ or ‘Divine Augustus’, but when you get to the nadir, the year of the ‘Five Caesars’ (193AD), the public has become very jaded!

Thus comes the search for a real religion. While there were many in practice in the years leading to Constantine, the major popular one was the ‘Cult of Isis’, coming out of Egypt and its antiquity. At its height in the 200s under Caracalla, it rivaled the established Greco-Roman Pantheon and the official deification of the Emperors. A Goddess religion, it also was a cloaked religion, where initiates, male & female, participated in ‘the mysteries’

As always, where there is a Goddess, there is a rival God mystery religion that was the Mithraism of this thread. Male oriented, a bull as a representation, it appears to have come out of Persia and was taken up by the military as many had served on the eastern borders.

Yet, despised and persecuted, even more than the rebellious Jews, were the followers of the fish, the fisherman, the Christ, who came out of that troublesome Syria-Galilee area. They got no public temples, no right to worship and were instead prosecuted and persecuted for their aberrant belief. Still, every wave of martyrs produced more adherents with stronger affiliations. Bit by bit, belief in the risen God crept into Roman society to where slave and aristocrat worshipped together.

Then, in 306AD, Constantius, inheritor of his father’s rank as a Caesar in the Tetrarchy established by Diocletian, started from his base in Roman Britain to take control of the entire Roman Empire. In 312, Constantius fought his strongest rival, Maxentius, at the Milvian Bridge outside Rome itself. Outnumbered, he gave his soldiers a new sigil, the Chi-Rho, ☧, a cipher of the Christ, that he said was given to him in a vision with the slogan of “In Hoc Signo Vinces” (In this sign thou shalt conquer). As history relates, he did conquer and united the fracturing Roman Empire under him as a single ruler by 324.

While he waited to his death (337) to accept Baptism and official personal acceptance of Christianity, it was his effort that created the ‘Edict of Milan’ which legalized ALL RELIGIONS within the Roman Empire. As such it removed the persecutions and restored confiscated properties. As history informs us, though all religions were legalized, it is Christianity that survives in direct line from those days!

A. E. Housman (1859–1936). A Shropshire Lad. 1896.

LXII. Terence, this is stupid stuff


‘TERENCE, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can’t be much amiss, ’tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,	5
It gives a chap the belly-ache.
The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
It sleeps well, the horned head:
We poor lads, ’tis our turn now
To hear such tunes as killed the cow.	10
Pretty friendship ’tis to rhyme
Your friends to death before their time
Moping melancholy mad:
Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.’

Why, if ’tis dancing you would be,	15
There’s brisker pipes than poetry.
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,	20
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot	25
To see the world as the world’s not.
And faith, ’tis pleasant till ’tis past:
The mischief is that ’twill not last.
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,	30
And carried half way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad;
And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,	35
Happy till I woke again.
Then I saw the morning sky:
Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,	40
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.

Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure	45
Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,
I’d face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
’Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:	50
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head	55
When your soul is in my soul’s stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.

There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast,	60
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all that springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,	65
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;	70
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
—I tell the tale that I heard told.	75
Mithridates, he died old.

https://www.bartleby.com/123/62.html

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