Posted on 08/30/2010 7:13:52 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Foreign religions grew rapidly in the 1st-century A.D. Roman Empire, including worship of Jesus Christ, the Egyptian goddess Isis, and an eastern sun god, Mithras. Of the religions that expanded rapidly in the 1st-century Roman Empire, worship of Mithras was particularly popular among Roman soldiers, who spread his cult during their far-flung travels... Mithras's temples, called Mithraea, are the best archaeological evidence of the god's worship, and most of them featured a characteristic depiction of Mithras slaying a bull, a scene called the tauroctony... In the later Roman Empire, Mithras blended in with another sun god, Sol Invictus, the "unconquered sun." Both gods appeared in the Spanish provinces around the same time... Some 1st-century votive offerings in Rome even conflate the two gods into one deity, "Sol Invictus Mithras."
...The first mentions of "Mitra" come from India and Iran. The Rig Veda is a collection of sacred Sanskrit texts composed as early as 1200 B.C. Its Hymn 66 invokes "Mitra," a protector of the law and a god of light. In Iran, Mithras continued in the same vein: the modern Farsi word for "sun" is "mehr," also the root of "Mithras." The Greek historiographer Strabo (63 B.C.-A.D. 23) corroborates this report in Book XV of his Geography, noting that the Iranians "worship the sun also, whom they call Mithras." In Hymn 10 of the Yasht, an Iranian collection of praise poems to gods dating from after 250 B.C., Ahura Mazda, the god of light, commends Mithras. He tells his disciple, Zoroaster, that Mithras respects justice and brings "down terror upon the bodies of the men who lie...to [him]." ...Roman Mithras was a distant relative, not a direct descendant, of Indo-Iranian gods.
(Excerpt) Read more at archaeology.org ...
But seriously... I’ve often wondered if the “bull-leaping” in the Minoan frescoes was somehow related to Mithras.
Because Mithracism did not prevent you from worshiping the god-emperor.
Christians could not worship the divine emperor. It was forbidden. And while the Empire admitted reluctantly that Jews were a special case Christians who were multicultural and multiracial were not considered such. They were a unpatriotic lot who didn't pour out a offering to Roma Dia or the emperor.
It very well could have been. There's been evidence of the practice found in the Indus Valley and Anatolia. Not sure if it spread from east to west, west to east or sort of developed independently (which I would think is the least likely).
Probably was. I think we are talking the same thing until that whole Tower incident.
Pisa? Power? Orthanc?
It may have been introduced by extraterrestrials who traveled to Earth aboard Cattlecar Galactica. But that’s even less likely. ;’)
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