Mithra

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The little inscriptions that Artaxerxes II left at Susa and Hamadan in the fourth century before the common era are formulaic things, the boilerplate of empire. But they break a long silence. For two centuries the Achaemenid kings had named only one divine power in their stone, Ahura Mazda and Ahura Mazda alone. Then a king asks three names to keep him: Ahuramazda, Anahita, and Mithra protect me. The second name is a goddess of the waters. The third belongs to a god older than the dynasty, older than the prophet who had reformed the dynasty’s faith — a god whose name was not really a name at all but a common noun for the thing that holds people to their word.

The covenant older than its scriptures

The word is miθra in the Avestan of eastern Iran and mitrá in the Vedic Sanskrit of northern India, and the two are the same word, carried out of a single homeland by two peoples who would never meet again. Before either people had scripture, before the Iranian plateau and the Gangetic plain had been settled and named, their shared ancestors worshipped a being called by this word, and the word meant contract. The grammarians trace it to a root for binding, mi-, with the suffix that turns a verb into the instrument of its action: that which causes the binding, the bond itself made into a power. A contract is a kind of god. The thing two parties make between them when they swear — the invisible tie that survives the handshake and outlasts the witnesses — is what the old religion deified and set among the powers of the world.

So the Iranian Mithra and the Indian Mitra are among the very few deities that the two branches of the same ancestral religion kept under almost the same name. In the Vedic hymns Mitra is paired with the great sky-lord Varuna, the two of them ruling order and oath together; in the Sanskrit the word survives as an ordinary noun for friend and ally, the friendliness being only the other face of the bond — those who have sworn together are friends, and the god who joins them is friendship itself made divine. In Iran the god went his own way, but the office stayed the same: he is the divine guarantor of the sworn word, the witness no liar can deceive, the power a man swears by and the power that destroys him if he swears falsely. The two faces never separated. The Persian mehr, his name worn down by the centuries, still means love and kindness, and still means the contract; the language kept what the theology kept.

It is one of the puzzles of the tradition that Zarathustra himself does not name him. In the Gathas, the oldest hymns of the Avesta and the linguistically most archaic layer, the prophet’s own verse, Mithra is absent, as is most of the old pantheon; the reform set Ahura Mazda at the center and gathered the radiant abstractions, the Amesha Spentas, around him. But the god of the covenant was too deeply rooted to stay out. In the Younger Avesta, the later strata of the canon, he returns in full force, no longer a rival to the high god but ranged beneath him — a yazata, a being worthy of worship, one of the company of lesser divine powers that serve the order Ahura Mazda upholds.

A thousand ears, ten thousand eyes

The fullest portrait of him is the Mihr Yasht, the tenth of the hymns to the individual yazatas and, by the field’s reckoning, the longest and one of the best-preserved of them all. It is a strange and magnificent text, more catalog than narrative, heaping epithet on epithet until the god stands fully armed before the listener. He is the lord of wide pastures, the formula that opens nearly every stanza — a phrase that fixes him in a herding world, the god who watches over grazing land and the men who quarrel over it. The hymn opens with a startling instruction. Ahura Mazda tells Zarathustra that when he made Mithra he made him as worthy of worship, as worthy of prayer, as I myself, Ahura Mazda. The covenant is set, by the supreme god’s own word, beside the supreme god.

The investiture of Ardashir II at Taq-e Bostan (late fourth century CE): the rayed figure at left, standing on a lotus and holding the barsom, is read as Mithra; the king receives the diadem of kingship at center, Ahura Mazda at right. — dynamosquito (Flickr), via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

What he is, above everything, is awake. The hymn returns and returns to his sleeplessness. He has a thousand ears and ten thousand eyes; he keeps ten thousand spies who watch on his behalf; he is the strong, all-knowing, undeceivable one, watchful in darkness and undeceivable. No oath sworn anywhere escapes him, no whisper of a broken bargain. He does not sleep because the covenant does not sleep — the contract holds at night as in the day, in the dark of a tent as on the open road, and a god of the contract who could be eluded would be no guarantor at all. The thousand ears and ten thousand eyes are not decoration. They are the logic of his office rendered as anatomy.

He is also the first thing the light reaches. The hymn places him on the holy mountain, Hara Berezaiti, the cosmic height the Iranians set at the world’s center: he is the one who, of the heavenly gods, first ascends above the Hara, before the undying, swift-horsed sun; who foremost in a golden array, takes hold of the beautiful summits, and from thence looks over the abode of the Aryans — the dwelling of the Iranian peoples — with a beneficent eye. He rises before the sun and surveys the whole inhabited land. Here is the association that has confused readers for two thousand years and that the tradition itself keeps carefully poised. Mithra is bound up with light. He travels the bright sky, he comes with the dawn, he sees because he stands in the place from which everything can be seen. But he is not the sun. The hymn names the sun as a separate body, swift-horsed and undying, that Mithra precedes. He is the light that exposes — the illumination by which a lie is caught and a hidden breach laid bare — and only by that route a god of the day. To collapse him into the solar disk is to lose the point: he is the watcher who needs the light, not the light itself.

Set against him in the hymn is a single enemy, named with a single compound: the miθrō.druj, the one who lies to Mithra, the contract-breaker. This is the deep antagonism of the whole Iranian worldview rendered at its most concrete. The cosmos is a war between aša, the truth or right order, and druj, the lie; and the man who breaks his sworn word has crossed that line, has let the lie into the structure that holds society up. Against him Mithra is not merciful. The same god who guards the faithful with a beneficent eye is, to the false-swearer, an armed and dreadful power. The Mihr Yasht loads his chariot with weapons — a thousand bows, a thousand arrows, a thousand spears, a thousand maces of cast metal — and sends him against the dwellings of the men who have broken faith, against their lands and their herds. The covenant defended is gentle. The covenant betrayed is catastrophe.

This is the distinctive thing the god carries, and it is worth stating plainly because the modern ear tends to soften it. Mithra is not chiefly a sun-god or a war-god, though he gathers both. He is the deification of the binding word itself — the social fact that a promise, once made, has weight; that the order in which strangers can deal with strangers and tribes can hold a truce rests on something more than force, on a power that watches and remembers and exacts. The Iranians did not regard the contract as a human convenience that the gods happened to bless. They regarded it as one of the structural beams of the created world, and they gave it a face and a thousand eyes.

The faravahar, the winged emblem of Zoroastrian Iran — the world-order beneath the high god within which Mithra holds his office of covenant. — Shaahin, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The name that empires were built on

A god of the sworn word is a god kings need. The covenant is what a treaty is, what an oath of loyalty is, what the bond between a ruler and his subjects is; and so Mithra rose with the dynasties. After Artaxerxes II named him in the royal inscriptions — the first Achaemenid to invoke any power but Ahura Mazda by name — the god moved to the center of Iranian political life and stayed there for a thousand years. The Sasanian relief at Taq-e Bostan shows what that center looked like: a king receives the ring of kingship while, behind him, a radiant figure standing on a lotus and holding the bundle of sacred twigs called the barsom lends the transfer its sanction. The figure is read as Mithra. The covenant that makes a king a king is the same covenant the hymn praises, scaled up to an empire.

His name spread through the dynasties as a kind of blessing. The kings of Pontus and Parthia, of Cappadocia and Commagene and Armenia, called themselves Mihrdāt — Mithradates, in the Greek and Latin form that history remembers — and the name means given by Mithra, a child handed to a family by the god of the bond. There were six kings of Pontus by that name and several of Parthia; the most famous of them fought Rome for a generation. To be named for Mithra was to be marked as the covenant’s gift, and a great many Iranians, royal and common, carried that mark.

The god kept his place in the calendar as well. In the Zoroastrian reckoning each day of the month and each month of the year belongs to a divine power, and the sixteenth day and the seventh month both belong to Mithra — to Mihr, in the later Persian form of his name. When the day of Mithra fell within the month of Mithra, the coincidence became a feast: Mehregān, the great autumn festival, ranked in the Iranian year second only to Nowruz, the spring new year. It was a harvest festival and a festival of the covenant at once, a time of gifts and gratitude — the season when accounts were settled and bonds renewed, fitting for a god whose business was the keeping of the word. The Iranian peoples have kept it, in one form or another, for as long as there has been a record. The seventh month of the modern Iranian civil calendar still bears his name. Among the Parsis of India and the Zoroastrians of Iran the day of Mihr is observed still, the covenant’s god still given his date.

The Greeks who met the Persians, and the Romans after them, recorded the oath as the thing they noticed most. To swear by Mithra was the Persian’s most binding word; the king himself was said to swear by the god when he meant to be believed. A Greek writer could call Mithra the Persians’ sun, flattening him into the nearest familiar shape, but what the foreigners were actually seeing was the covenant at the heart of Iranian public life — the bond between satrap and king, between army and commander, between word and deed — given the form of a watching god. It is no accident that when the divine kingship of the Sasanians needed a witness to sanctify the handing-over of power, it was Mithra who was carved into the rock to hold the ring.

The Roman question, kept at arm’s length

There is a second Mithras, and the most useful thing this entry can do is to refuse to merge him with the first.

Across the Roman Empire, from roughly the late first century of the common era to the fourth, men gathered in small underground chambers built to look like caves and worshipped a god they called Mithras. The central image of that worship was a young man in a Phrygian cap plunging a knife into a bull — the tauroctony — flanked by two torchbearers and watched by the sun and moon. The cult had seven grades of initiation, a star-keyed cosmology, a communal meal, and a membership that ran heavily to soldiers and officials. It left behind a thousand sanctuaries and thousands of inscriptions and reliefs, and almost no words of its own: not one line of its doctrine survives from inside it. This is the Roman cult of Mithras, and it is a distinct subject with its own entry.

The relation between the two has been argued for more than a century. The Belgian scholar Franz Cumont, in monumental work published at the close of the nineteenth century, framed the Roman cult as the Iranian Mithra carried west — Zoroastrian religion in Greco-Roman dress, the bull-killing read back into Iranian myth. For seventy years this was the field’s settled picture. Then, at the First International Congress of Mithraic Studies, held at Manchester in 1971, it came apart. The decisive objections were structural. In the Iranian material the killer of the primordial bull is the evil power, Ahriman, not a savior; in the Roman image the bull-killer is the hero himself, the god the worshippers loved — the two scenes cannot be one scene. And the sparse Roman record, examined on its own, pointed away from Zoroastrian doctrine and toward something built in the Roman world. The dominant position since then, associated with Richard Gordon and Roger Beck, treats the Roman mysteries as a largely Roman creation that wrapped itself in Iranian costume — the name Mithras, the Persian caps, the grade called Perses, the magi in the founding story — as a self-presentation, an aura of ancient Eastern wisdom, rather than as inheritance. Mary Boyce, the foremost modern student of Zoroastrianism, conceded from the Iranian side essentially only the name.

So the honest report is a line, not a bridge. The Iranian Mithra of the Mihr Yasht — the sleepless guardian of the contract, the watcher who rises over Hara, the armed enemy of the false-swearer — and the Roman Mithras of the cave and the slain bull share a name and a few trappings and, on the current consensus, very little else. The continuity once asserted between them is widely held to be unproven. That distinction is not a failure of knowledge to be apologized for; it is the knowledge. The two gods are kept apart here on purpose, and the reader should keep them apart too.

What endures, in any case, is the older figure: not the Roman invention but the Indo-Iranian god whose name is a common noun, who was worshipped before there were scriptures to record him and is worshipped still by the peoples who never forgot him. The covenant remains a power with a thousand ears. He watches the keeping of the word, and he watches its breaking, and between those two things lies the whole order he was set to guard.

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