_Ibid._ pp. 178, 179.

Footnote 667:

_Ibid._ p. 31.

Footnote 668:

_Ibid._ pp. 14-15.

Footnote 669:

_Ibid._ p. 166. To make things more difficult, the guardian sometimes

had a different name for every hour. Cf. _ibid._ p. 168.

Footnote 670:

_Ibid._ pp. 124, n. 2, 163. For the talismans or amulets, see Maspero,

“La Table d’Offrandes,” _R.H.R._ t. XXXV. (1897), p. 325.

Footnote 671:

Maspero, “Hyp. Roy.” pp. 113, 118.

Footnote 672:

_Ibid._ pp. 162, 163.

Footnote 673:

_Ibid._ pp. 41, 163.

Footnote 674:

_Ibid._ p. 178.

Footnote 675:

_Ibid._ p. 179.

Footnote 676:

The kings, according to a belief which was evidently very old in the

time of the Pyramid-Builders, were supposed to possess immortality as

being gods even in their lifetime. Later, the gift was extended to

rulers of nomes and other rich men, and finally to all those who could

purchase the spells that would assure it. In Maspero’s words “La vie

d’au delà n’était pas un droit pour l’Égyptien: il pouvait la gagner

par la vertu des formules et des pratiques, mais il pouvait aussi bien

la perdre, et s’il était pauvre ou isolé, les chances étaient qu’il la

perdit à bref délai” (_op. cit._ p. 174).

Footnote 677:

p. 254, Copt.

Footnote 678:

de Faye (_Intro._ etc. p. 110) shows clearly, not only that the aims

and methods of the school of Valentinus changed materially after its

founder’s death, but that it was only then that the Catholic Church

perceived the danger of them, and set to work to combat them

systematically.

Footnote 679:

To thinkers like Dean Inge (_Christian Mysticism_, 1899, p. 82) this

was the natural and appointed end of Gnosticism, which according to

him was “rotten before it was ripe.” “It presents,” he says, “all the

features which we shall find to be characteristic of degenerate

mysticism. Not to speak of its oscillations between fanatical

austerities and scandalous licence, and its belief in magic and other

absurdities, we seem, when we read Irenaeus’ description of a

Valentinian heretic, to hear the voice of Luther venting his contempt

upon some _Geisterer_ of the sixteenth century.” It may be so; yet,

after all, Gnosticism in its later developments lasted for a longer

time than the doctrines of Luther have done, particularly in the land

of their birth.

Footnote 680:

Cf. Maspero, _Life in Ancient Egypt and Assyria_, Eng. ed. 1892, pp.

90-92, for the distaste of the Egyptians of Ramesside times for the

life of a soldier and their delight in that of a scribe.

Footnote 681:

All these, especially alchemy, are illustrated in the Magic Papyrus of

Leyden known as W. See Leemans, _Pap. Gr._ t. II. pp. 83 _sqq._

Footnote 682:

Gibbon, _Decline and Fall_, vol. III. p. 214, Bury’s ed.

Footnote 683:

Renan, _L’Église Chrétienne_, pp. 154, 155, and authorities there

quoted. Cf. Hatch, _H. L._ pp. 129, 130, 293, 307-309.

Footnote 684:

Harnack, _What is Christianity?_ p. 210; Duchesne, _Early Christian

Church_, p. 32.

CHAPTER XI

MARCION

We have seen that Valentinus left Alexandria to settle in Rome before

promulgating his new doctrine[685], and the Eternal City seems at that

time to have drawn to itself as with a magnet all those Oriental

teachers of Christianity who wished to make innovation in religion. Rome

in the IInd century had become a veritable sink into which poured men of

all nations and creeds whether old or new. Besides the great flood of

Isiacists, Mithraists, and worshippers of the Great Goddess and of the

Syrian Baals, that now began to appear there, Alexander of Abonoteichos

came thither under Marcus Aurelius to celebrate his newly-invented

mysteries[686], and succeeded in gaining a foothold at the Imperial

Court. Moreover in A.D. 140, the terrible war of extermination which

Hadrian had been compelled much against his will to wage against the

Jewish nation was at length over, and the effect of this was to transfer

a great number of Asiatic and African Christians to the world’s

metropolis, while making it more than ever expedient for them to

disclaim connection with the Jews. The slightly contemptuous toleration,

too, which the statesmanlike Hadrian seems to have extended to the

Christians[687], was not likely to be withdrawn without reason by his

philosophic successor, Antoninus Pius; and it was doubtless the

consciousness of this which led to the appearance of the various

“apologies” for, or defences of, Christianity which Quadratus,

Aristides, Justin Martyr, and other persons with some philosophic

training now began to put forth. In such of these as have come down to

us, the desire of their authors to dissociate themselves from the Jews,

then at the nadir of their unpopularity, is plainly manifest, and no

doubt gave the note to the innovators[688]. It is certainly very marked

in the heresy of Marcion, which, unlike those of Valentinus and the

other Gnostics, was to culminate in the setting-up of a schismatic

Church in opposition to that founded on the Apostles.

Marcion was, according to the better account, a wealthy shipowner of

Pontus and probably a convert to Christianity[689]. He seems to have

been born at Sinope, at one time the most important of the Greek towns

on the Southern shore of the Euxine or Black Sea. Mithridates the Great,

who was also born there, had made Sinope his capital, and though it had

no doubt declined in rank since his time, it must still have been, in

the year 100 A.D. (the probable date of Marcion’s birth), a flourishing

and prosperous place[690]. As in all the cities of Asia Minor, the Stoic

philosophy had there obtained a firm hold, and there is some reason for

thinking that Marcion received lessons in this before his

conversion[691]. Of the circumstances which led to this event we have no

knowledge, and it was even said in later times that he was born a

Christian, and that his father had been a bishop of the Church. A better

founded story is that, on his conversion, he brought into the common

fund of the Church a considerable sum of money, which is said to have

been paid out to him on his expulsion[692]. When at the mature age of

forty he went to Rome, it seems reasonable to suppose that he accepted

the orthodox teaching, as it is said that there was some talk of his

being made bishop of what was even then the richest and highest in rank

of all the Christian Churches. At Rome, however, he fell in with one

Cerdo, a Syrian, who seems to have been already domiciled there and to

have taught in secret a pronouncedly dualistic system in which God and

Matter were set in sharp opposition to one another, and in which it was

held that a good God could not have been the author of this wicked

world[693]. This opinion Marcion adopted and elaborated, with the result

that he was expelled from the Catholic Church, and thereupon set to work

to found another, having bishops, priests, deacons, and other officers

in close imitation of the community he had left[694]. It is said that

before his death he wished to be reconciled to the Church, but was told

that he could only be readmitted when he had restored to the fold the

flock that he had led away from it. This, on the authority of

Tertullian, he would have been willing to do; but his rival Church had

by that time so enormously increased in numbers, that he died, probably

in 165 A.D., before he was able to make the restitution required[695].

This story also can only be accepted with a great deal of reserve[696].

It is abundantly plain, however, that Marcion was regarded not only by

the professed heresiologists of the succeeding age, but also by teachers

like Justin Martyr and the learned Clement of Alexandria, as one of the

most formidable enemies of the Church, whose evil influence persisted

even after his death[697]. By the reign of Gratian, his rival Church had

spread over Italy, Egypt, Palestine, Arabia, Syria, and Persia[698];

and, although the main authority for the increase is the always doubtful

one of Epiphanius, this last was not likely to have unduly magnified the

success of the Church’s rival, and his story has the confirmation of

Tertullian that in his time the Marcionites made churches “as wasps make

nests[699].” Every Father of note seems to have written against the

heresiarch who had thus dared, as was said, to turn away souls from

Christ, and Polycarp, the saint and martyr, when Marcion claimed

acquaintance with him in Rome on the strength of a former meeting in

Smyrna, replied with much heat, “Yes, I know thee! the first-born of

Satan[700].” So late as the Council in Trullo in the VIIth century,

special arrangements had to be made for the reception of Marcionites who

wished to be reconciled to the Church, and forms of abjuration of the

sect are said to have lingered until the Xth[701].

That this longevity was purchased by no willingness to make the best of

both worlds or to enjoy peace by compromising with heathenism in the way

we have seen prevalent among the Alexandrian Gnostics, is at once

evident. Alone among the heretics of the sub-Apostolic Age, the Fathers

declare, the Marcionites held fast their faith in time of persecution,

while they refused to frequent the circus and the theatre and practised

an austerity of life putting to shame even the ascetics among the

orthodox.[702] Marcion himself underwent none of the slanders on his

personal morals which theologians generally heap upon their

opponents[703], and none of his tenets are said by either Tertullian or

Epiphanius, who took his refutation most seriously in hand, to have been

borrowed from those Pagan rites or mysteries which they looked upon as

forming the most shameful source from which to contaminate the pure

doctrine of the Church. Irenaeus, who was his junior by some twenty or

thirty years, and may have known him personally, says indeed that he was

a disciple of Simon Magus[704], but in this he may have alluded merely

to his position as the founder of a rival Church. Hippolytus is silent

about this; but, true to his system of attacking philosophy on account

of its supposed connection with heresy, says that Marcion is a disciple,

not of Christ, but of Empedocles[705]. There is much to be said for the

view that Marcion’s heresy was so well and firmly established before the

end of the IInd century, that those who then denounced it really knew

little of its beginnings[706]. They are, however, unanimous as to the

more than Puritanical attitude adopted by its founders. The Marcionites

were allowed neither to drink wine nor to eat flesh, and those believers

in their tenets who were married had either to separate from their wives

or to remain among the catechumens until about to die, it being unlawful

for them to receive baptism save on their deathbeds[707].

Marcion’s, indeed, seems to have been one of those ruggedly logical and

uncompromising natures, not to be led away by reverence for authority or

tradition, which appear once or twice in the history of most religions;

and it is doubtless this quality which has led Prof. Harnack, as did

Neander in the last century, to claim him as the first reformer of the

Catholic Church[708]. Like another Luther, Marcion declared that the

Church had become corrupted by the additions made by men to the pure

teaching she had received from her Founder, and that only in return to

her primitive faith was safety to be found. For this primitive faith, he

appealed, like the makers of the German Reformation, to the words of

Scripture, but he differed from them most widely in the limitations that

he placed upon them. It was, he declared, impossible to find any

attributes in common between the God of the Old Testament and the

Supreme (and benevolent) Being of whom Jesus announced Himself the Son,

and he therefore rejected the Old Testament entirely. In the same way,

he said that the Canonical Gospels then received among Christians had

become overlaid with Jewish elements introduced by the Asiatic converts

among whom they were first circulated; and that the narrative in the

Gospel according to Luke was alone trustworthy[709]. From this also, he

removed the whole series of traditions concerning the Birth and Infancy

of Jesus; and made it begin in effect with the words of the fourth

chapter in which is described the coming-down of Jesus to “Capernaum, a

city of Galilee.” These he combined with the opening words of Luke iii.,

so that the event was described as taking place in the “fifteenth year

of the reign of Tiberius Caesar[710].” He also excised from the Gospel

everything which could indicate any respect shown by the Founder of

Christianity to the Torah or Law of the Jews, the allusions to the

Jewish traditions concerning Jonah and the Queen of Sheba, the supposed

fulfilment of the Jewish prophecies in the person and acts of Jesus, and

the statement that He took part in the Paschal Feast. He further removed

from it every passage which represents Jesus as drinking wine or taking

part in any festivity, and in the Lord’s Prayer he struck out the

petition for delivery from evil, while modifying the “Hallowed be thy

name!” It has been suggested that in this last case he may have given us

an older version than that of the Canon[711].

With the remainder of the New Testament, Marcion took similar liberties.

He rejected entirely the _Acts of the Apostles_, The Apocalypse of St

John, the _Epistle to the Hebrews_, and the Epistles generally called

“Pastoral,” as well as all those passing under the names of St John, St

James, St Peter and St Jude. For the Apostle Paul, however, Marcion had

a profound admiration, pronouncing him to be the only true follower of

Jesus, and he accepted with some alterations the ten epistles which he

thought could with confidence be attributed to him. These were the

Epistles to the Galatians, the two to the Corinthians, the one to the

Romans, both those to the Thessalonians, that to the Ephesians or, as he

preferred to call it, to the Laodiceans, and those to the Colossians, to

Philemon, and to the Philippians. From these ten epistles, he removed

everything which described the fulfilment of the prophecies of the

Jewish prophets, all allusions to the Parusia or Second Coming, and some

expressions which seemed to him to militate against the asceticism that

he himself favoured[712]. All these alterations seem to have been set

down by Marcion in a book to which he gave the name of the _Antitheses_,

and which contained his statement of the incongruities apparent between

the Old and New Testaments. This book is now lost, and the details of

Marcion’s emendations have in consequence to be picked out from the

treatise of Tertullian against him, the statements of Epiphanius, and

the anonymous discourse _de Recta Fide_ which is sometimes included in

the works of Origen[713].

If these alterations of the Scriptures generally received depended on

any independent tradition, or even upon a rational criticism, they would

be of the greatest use to modern textual critics, who have in

consequence hoped eagerly that some lucky chance might yet give us a

copy of Marcion’s Gospel.[714] But the Fathers make no allusion to any

claim of the kind; and in the absence of Marcion’s own words, it seems

likely that his alterations were merely dictated by the preoccupation

regarding the Divine nature which seems with him to have amounted to a

passion. Never, he said, could the jealous and irascible God of the Jews

be identified with the loving and benevolent Spirit whom Jesus called

His Father. Hence there was not one God; but two Gods. One of these was

the Supreme Being, perfect in power as in goodness, whose name, as

perhaps the Orphics and the Ophites taught, was Love[715]. Too great to

concern Himself with sublunary things, and too pure, as Plato and Philo

had both said, to have any dealings with an impure and sinful world, He

remained seated apart in the third or highest heaven, inaccessible to

and unapproachable by man, like the unknown Father of Valentinus and the

other Gnostic sects[716]. Below Him was the Creator, or rather the

Demiurge or Fashioner of the World, in constant conflict with matter,

which he is always trying unsuccessfully to conquer and subdue in

accordance with his own limited and imperfect ideas. Just, according to

Marcion, was the Demiurge, whom he identified with the God of the Jews;

and it was this attribute of justice which prevented him from being

considered wholly evil in his nature, as was Satan, the active agent of

the matter with which the Demiurge was always striving. Yet the Demiurge

was the creator of evil on his own showing[717], and as such is entitled

to no adoration from man, whom he has brought into a world full of evil.

Man’s rescue from this is due to the Supreme God, who sent His Son Jesus

Christ on earth that He might reveal to mankind His Heavenly Father, and

thus put an end to the sway of the Demiurge.

That Jesus on His coming was seized and slain by the Jews, with at least

the connivance of the Demiurge, Marcion admitted. But as this might seem

like a defeat of the Supreme Being by His inferior, he was forced to

accept the theory called Docetism which was in favour with many other

Gnostics. According to this, the body of Jesus was not real flesh and

blood, and had indeed no actual existence, but was a phantasm which only

appeared to mankind in the likeness of a man[718]. Hence it mattered

nothing that this body, which did not really exist, appeared to suffer,

to be slain, and even to rise again. The Supreme God was not mocked, and

the resurrection of the body was to Marcion a thing unthinkable.

In lesser matters, Marcion’s dislike of the God of the Jews is, perhaps,

more marked. Man’s body, according to him, was made by the Demiurge out

of matter[719], but without any spark from a higher world infused into

it, as the Ophites and Valentinus had taught. Hence man was naturally

inclined to evil, and the Law which the Demiurge delivered to him was

more or less of a snare. Man was sure to give way to the evil desires

inherent in matter, and on doing so became with all his race subject to

the power of matter and the evil spirits inhabiting it. It is true that

the Demiurge had devised a plan of salvation in the shape of the Law of

the Jews delivered to them on Sinai. But this concerned one small people

only, and it was but a fraction of that community which could hope to

observe it in all its forms and ceremonies. Did they do so, the Demiurge

would provide for them a modified felicity in that region of Hades

called the Bosom of Abraham[720]. For those Gentiles, and even for those

Jews who from weakness or obstinacy did not obey the Law, he had

prepared punishment and, apparently, eternal tortures. It is true that

he promised the Jews a Messiah who should lead them to the conquest of

the earth, but this leader certainly was not Jesus[721]; and it is

probable that Marcion thought that His Mission had put it out of the

power of the Demiurge to fulfil any of these promises.

Possibly it was the same dislike of the Jews that led Marcion to

consider St Paul as the only real apostle of Jesus. The others, he said,

had overlaid the faith that they had received with Jewish traditions;

but Paul, chosen by Jesus after His Ascension[722], had resisted their

attempt to reintroduce the Law of the Jews, and was, in his own words,

an apostle sent not from men, nor by man, but by Jesus Christ and God

the Father who raised Him from the dead.[723] Marcion also seems to have

laid stress upon St Paul’s wonder that the Galatians were “so soon

removed from Him who hath called you to His grace to another

Gospel[724],” with the suggestion that this second gospel was the

contrivance of the Demiurge; and generally to have accentuated the

controversy between St Peter and St Paul mentioned in the Epistle

bearing their name[725]. From the same Epistle to the Galatians, Marcion

appears to have erased the name of Abraham where his blessing is said to

have “come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ[726]”; and in like

manner, to have read into the passage in the First Epistle to the

Corinthians[727], where it is said that “the world by wisdom knew not

God,” expressions implying that it was the “Lord of this World,” _i.e._

the Demiurge, who was ignorant of the Supreme Being[728]. As this

ignorance of the Demiurge was a favourite theme of the Ophites and other

Gnostics, it is possible that Marcion was more indebted to these

predecessors of his than modern commentators on his teaching are

inclined to allow; but he perhaps justified his reading by tacking it on

to the passage in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians which says that

“the God of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not,

lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of

God, should shine upon them[729].” From the Epistle to the Romans, in

which he seems to have made very large erasures[730], Marcion draws

further arguments in favour of his contention that the Jews were kept in

ignorance of the Supreme God, relying upon texts like:

“For they [_i.e._ Israel] being ignorant of God’s righteousness and

going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted

themselves unto the righteousness of God[731].”

So, too, in the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, Marcion rejects the

passage which declares that Jesus shall come “in flaming fire taking

vengeance[732],” which he considered inconsistent with the benevolence

of Himself and His Father. We do not know whom he considered to be the

Antichrist there predicted, as Epiphanius leaves us in doubt whether

Marcion accepted the verses which go by the name of the Little

Apocalypse, but Tertullian seems to imply that Marcion may have assigned

this part to the Messiah of the Demiurge[733]. In like manner, he is

said to have altered the passage in the Epistle to the Ephesians which

speaks of “the mystery which from the beginning of the world hath been

hid in God[734],” so as to make it appear that the mystery was hid not

_in_ God, but _from_ the god who created all things, meaning thereby the

Demiurge[735].

Until some lucky discovery gives us the text of Marcion’s _Antitheses_

it is difficult to say whether he has been correctly reported by his

adversaries, or whether, which is probable enough, they have suppressed

evidence brought forward by him in support of these erasures and

interpolations. That in putting them forward, he did so in such a way as

to leave many an opening to a skilled controversialist is easy to

believe, and there are many passages in Tertullian’s refutation which

show that his forensically-trained adversary took advantage of these

with more eagerness than generosity. But the noteworthy thing about the

long drawn out dialectic of Tertullian’s treatise _Against Marcion_, is

the way in which Marcion throughout resolutely abstains from any of the

allegorical or figurative interpolations of Scripture which we have seen

so prevalent among all the Gnostic writers from Simon Magus down to the

authors of the _Pistis Sophia_ and its connected texts. Everywhere, it

would seem, he took the Biblical texts that he quotes at their literal

meaning and never seems to have attempted to translate any of them by

trope or figure. In like manner, we find him, so far as his adversaries’

account goes, entirely free from that preoccupation concerning the

divisions and order of the spiritual world which plays so large a part

in the speculations of the systems hitherto described. Nor does he show

any tendency to the deification of abstract ideas which is really at the

root of all Gnostic systems whether before or after Christ. Nowhere does

Marcion let fall an expression which could make us think of the Sophia

or Wisdom of God as a separate entity or personified being, nor is the

Logos of Plato and his Alexandrian admirers ever alluded to by him.

Hence, he in no way contributes to the growth, so luxuriant in his time,

of mythology and allegory[736]. In everything he exhibits the hard and

unimaginative quality of the practical man.

These considerations have great bearing on the question of the source of

his heresy. Had he busied himself, like the Gnostics, with elaborate

descriptions of the invisible universe, one would have thought that he

owed something to the ancient Egyptian theology, in which such

speculations occupied nearly the whole care of its professors. Had he,

on the other hand, studied to personify the attributes and qualities of

the Supreme Being, one would have been able to connect his teaching with

that of the Persian religion, in which, as will be seen in the next

chapter, the idea of such personification took the principal place. This

connection would have been natural enough, because the province of

Pontus, whence Marcion came, had long been subject to the Persian power,

and did not become Roman in name until the reign of Nero. Yet no trace

of such a connection is even hinted at by adversaries perfectly well

informed of the main tenets of the Persian religion[737]. The inference

is therefore unavoidable that Marcion’s views were original, and that

they were formed, as was said by a critic of the last century, by a sort

of centrifugal process, and after rejecting in turn all heathen and

Jewish elements, as well as most of the traditions which had already

grown up in the Catholic Church[738]. That Marcion was aware of this

seems probable from the many efforts made by him to be reconciled to the

Church, or rather to convert the whole Church to his way of thinking. In

this, as in the emphasis which he laid on faith rather than knowledge as

the source of man’s happiness in this world and the next, he again

anticipated in a most striking manner the views of the German Reformers

some fourteen centuries later[739].

A like analogy is to be seen in the practices of the Marcionite

churches, so far at any rate as we may trust to the reports of their

orthodox opponents. True, as it would seem, to his conviction of the

complete failure of the scheme of the Demiurge, Marcion set his face

even more sternly than our own Puritans of Cromwell’s time against

anything that should look like enjoyment of the things of this

world[740]. His followers were enjoined to eat no meat, to abstain from

wine even in the Eucharist, which in the Marcionite churches was

celebrated with water, and to observe perpetually the strictest

continence[741]. The Sabbath was kept by them as a fast and, although

this may look like an obedience to Jewish custom, Epiphanius, who is our

sole authority for the observance, tells us that Marcion expressly

rejected this attribution[742]. Virginity was, according to him, the

only state of life for the true Christian; and although he freely

baptized unmarried men and eunuchs, he refused baptism to married

persons, as has been said, until they were divorced or on the point of

death[743]. To the enticements of the circus, the gladiatorial shows,

and the theatre, the Marcionites used, according to Tertullian, to

return the answer “God forbid!”; and they made the same reply, he tells

us, when invited to save their lives in time of persecution by

sacrificing a few grains of incense to the genius of the Emperor[744].

The reason of all this austerity was apparently their contempt for the

kingdom of the Demiurge and their resolve to do nothing to prolong his

rule.

Of the spread of the Marcionite heresy we have very little more

information than that given above. Prof. Harnack thinks 150-190 A.D. was

the “golden age of the Marcionites[745],” but Tertullian evidently

considered that some thirty years after the last of these dates they

were nearly as numerous as the Valentinians, whom he speaks of as the

largest sect of heretics[746]. An inscription found in a Syrian village

refers to a “synagogue” of Marcionites occupying a site there in 318

A.D.[747], which is, as has been remarked, older than the earliest dated

inscription of the Catholic Church. Theodoret, too, about 440 A.D.,

boasts of having converted more than a thousand of them, a statement

which afterwards swells into eight villages and supposes that they were

pretty thickly clustered together[748]. Yet they must have led a

miserable existence, being persecuted by the Imperial authorities and

their Christian brethren at once, and it is not to be wondered at that

Marcion himself addresses some followers in a letter quoted by

Tertullian as “my partners in hate and wretchedness[749].” It speaks

volumes for their faith that they continued to hold it in spite of

everything.

This was the more to their credit that they were by no means at one in

matters of belief. In a passage quoted in a former chapter, Tertullian

says that the Marcionites thought it fair to do what Marcion had done,

that is, to innovate on the faith according to their own pleasure. This

is a rhetorical way of putting it; for the successors of Marcion seem to

have differed among themselves mainly upon one point, which was, in

fact, the number of “principles” which lay at the beginning of

things[750]. Thanks to his Stoical training, Marcion was forced to

assign a large part in the formation of the cosmos to Matter, which he

nevertheless thought to be essentially evil. But in that case, how did

it come into existence? It surely could not be the creation of the

Supreme and benevolent Being whose name was Love; and if not, how did it

come to exist independently of Him? To these questions it is possible

that the essentially practical genius of Marcion saw no need to return

any answer, and was content to regard them, like Epicurus before him, as

insoluble problems. But his followers apparently refused to do so; and

hence there arose considerable diversity of opinion. According to an

Armenian author of late date, Marcion himself taught that there were

_three_ principles, that is, the Supreme God, the Demiurge or Creator,

and Matter, which he regarded as a sort of spouse to the Demiurge[751].

This, however, is extremely unlikely in view of the unanimous assertion

of the Fathers nearer to him in point of time that he taught the

existence of two principles only; and it is probable that the theory of

three principles, if seriously advanced, must have been the work of one

of his followers. Tertullian, whose sophistry in combating Marcion’s

teaching in this respect is here particularly apparent, points out,

indeed, that if the Creator be held to be self-originated and not

himself the creature of the Supreme God, there must be nine gods instead

of two[752]; but there is no reason to suppose that Marcion ever

troubled himself about such dialectical subtleties.

The case was different with Apelles, who was certainly later in date

than Marcion and perhaps succeeded him in the headship of the sect,

either immediately or at one remove[753]. According to Tertullian,

Apelles left Rome for Alexandria where he no doubt came in contact with

the Gnostic opinions there rife[754]. The slander that Tertullian sets

on foot about him to the effect that he forsook his master’s continence

and was addicted to the company of women is unexpectedly refuted by

Tertullian’s contemporary, Rhodo[755]. But Apelles must have come in

contact in Alexandria with the followers of Valentinus and other Gnostic

teachers, and their arguments no doubt compelled him to modify the

strict dualism of his master. According to Rhodo, Apelles asserted that

there was only one principle of all things, which would imply that the

Demiurge was the creature of the Supreme God, and that Matter, instead

of being essentially evil and independent, must have been also created

by Him. Hippolytus, who was possibly a little later than Rhodo,

amplifies this by the statement that Apelles held the Demiurge to be the

fashioner of things coming into being (subsequent to him)[756], and that

there was a third god or angel of a fiery nature who inspired Moses, and

even a fourth who was the cause of evil. In this the Gnostic idea of

correspondence or reflection of one world in another is manifest; but it

is evident that it also approaches more nearly than does the

uncompromising dualism of Marcion himself to the teaching of the

Catholic Church. The same tendency to compromise is evident in Apelles’

willingness to use the books of both the Old and the New Testament,

quoting with regard to them, if Epiphanius is to be believed, the

apocryphal saying of Jesus “Be ye wise money-changers!” to be found in,

among other works, the _Pistis Sophia_[757]. Apelles seems also to have

modified his master’s teaching with regard to the body of Jesus, which

was, he said, no phantasm, but a real body of flesh and blood assumed by

Him on His descent to the earth, and returned by Him piece by piece on

His Ascension to the different elements whence it was drawn. His

indebtedness in this to the sources from which the author of the _Pistis

Sophia_ drew the same doctrine needs no demonstration. Yet there is no

reason to assert that Apelles considered these “corrections” of

Marcion’s teaching in any way essential or binding on his followers. He

seems, too, to have adopted one of the practices of the primitive Church

in paying attention to the ecstatical visions of “prophets” of both

sexes, his faith in the prophecies of a virgin named Philumene being the

foundation of Tertullian’s slander on his morals. There can be no doubt,

however, that in spite of these tendencies, he remained in essentials a

true follower of Marcion, and that like his master, he deprecated

enquiry into insoluble problems. “One ought not,” he said, as Rhodo

reports, “to examine doctrine, but everyone should be steadfast in the

faith. Those who trust in Him that was crucified will be saved, if only

they do good works[758].” Herein he also, like Marcion himself, seems to

have anticipated by many centuries the teaching of the German Reformers.

Other followers of Marcion there were who, thanks to our lack of

information concerning them, are to us merely names. Thus Tatian, who

was according to tradition a disciple of Justin Martyr but fell away

from orthodoxy after his teacher’s death, seems to have held a kind of

intermediate position between the two great schools of heresy. While

teaching, according to Irenaeus, a system of aeons not unlike that of

Valentinus, he adopted in full the notions of Marcion as to abstinence

from marriage, from the eating of flesh, and from the use of wine, and

may have been the founder of a separate sect called Encratites[759]. We

hear, too, of one Prepon, “an Assyrian” or native of Syria, a follower

of Marcion, whom Hippolytus represents as teaching that Jesus Himself

was intermediate between the good and evil deities and came down to

earth to be freed from all evil[760]. Rhodo also speaks[761] of Potitus

and Basilicus, followers of Marcion, who held fast to his doctrine of

two principles, while Syneros, as he affirms, led a school which

asserted that there were three “natures.” Lucian also, who, according to

Hippolytus and Epiphanius, came in point of time between Marcion and

Apelles[762], may have inclined to the same doctrine, and taught, unlike

Marcion, that there would be a resurrection, not of the body nor of the

soul, but of some part of man which he also defined as being of a “third

nature[763].”

The conversion of Constantine put a violent end to any open propagation

of the doctrines of Marcion or his successors. In the picturesque words

of Eusebius “the lurking-places of the heretics were broken up by the

Emperor’s commands, and the savage beasts which they harboured were put

to flight.” Hence, he goes on to tell us, many of those who had been

“deceived” crept secretly into the Church, and were ready to secure

their own safety by every sort of dissimulation[764]. This practice, as

we have seen, had always been popular among the Gnostics properly so

called, whose religion consisted in part in the knowledge of the

formulas secretly imparted and preserved with jealous care from all but

the initiated. Although there is no distinct proof that the same course

was now adopted by the Marcionites, there is some reason for thinking

that this was the case. The postponement of baptism noticed above must

have early divided the members of the Marcionite churches into grades of

which the largest was in an inferior position to the others. It is

unlikely that these catechumens, who might witness but not share in the

sacraments celebrated for their higher-placed brethren, should have

courted persecution on behalf of a faith with which they were not fully

entrusted. The outbreak of the Arian controversy, which followed so

closely on the conversion of Constantine, also carried within the

Catholic Church those speculations about the Divine nature which had

hitherto formed a fruitful source of dissension among the Marcionites

themselves. With their synagogues and meeting-places taken away from

them and handed over to the Catholics, many of them must have looked

about for some tolerated community which they could join, and of all

that thus offered themselves, the Catholic Church offered the greatest

inducements to them.

Yet another way was open to the convinced Marcionite who could not bring

himself to reject Marcion’s view that the true purport of Jesus’

teaching had been obscured by the additions of Judaizing apostles. The

sect of the followers of Manes, who began to show themselves in the

Western part of the Roman Empire shortly before Constantine’s

conversion, professed a dualism more uncompromising than any that

Marcion had taught, and coupled with it an organization so skilful and

effective that it was able for some ten centuries longer to defy the

efforts of the rest of Christendom for its suppression. In its division

of all Manichaeans into the two great classes of Perfect and Hearers it

drew very close to Marcionite practice; and the liberty which it allowed

the Hearers of outwardly professing any faith they pleased must have

enabled the Marcionite who joined it to keep those articles of his

former creed most dear to him without coming into violent collision with

either Church or State. Hence the tradition seems well founded which

asserts that the majority of those Marcionites, who did not become

reconciled with the Catholic Church after Constantine’s alliance with

it, joined the ranks of the Manichaeans, and so ceased to exist as a

separate community[765].

The direct influence of Marcion’s teaching upon that of the Catholic

Church was probably very small. In spite of the efforts of recent

writers to maintain the contrary[766], it is difficult to see that this

first attempt, honest and sincere as it undoubtedly was, at the

reformation of Christianity ever bore fruit of lasting value. Its main

principle which, as we have seen, was the rejection of the Jewish

scriptures and their bearing upon the Mission of Jesus, has been

ignored, since Marcion’s death as in his lifetime, by every other Church

and sect professing Christian doctrines. His common-sense view, that the

words of the Christian Bible must mean what their authors and their

contemporaries would have naturally taken them to mean, and do not for

the most part contain any deeply hidden or allegorical significance, was

in like manner repudiated by the whole of Christendom, which, up to the

latter part of the XIXth century, continued to construe the greater part

of its sacred books by trope and figure[767]. There remains then only

the asceticism and austerity that Marcion practised which the orthodox

could have borrowed from him. But, we have seen that the religious

abstinence from procreation, and from the use of meat and wine, can be

traced back to the appearance of Orphism in Greece some five hundred

years before the Birth of Christ; and if the Christian Church adopted,

as it partly did, these practices in a modified form, it was by way of

inheritance from a source which was much nearer to it than Marcion’s

heresy. That many of Marcion’s ideas have been revived in our own day is

likely enough, and this opinion has been put forward with much skill and

point by Dr Foakes-Jackson in his Hulsean Lectures. But this is a case

of revival rather than of descent, and a reformer who has to wait some

eighteen centuries before his ideas meet with acceptance, may well be

held to have failed to influence after ages.

Notwithstanding this, the heresy of Marcion will always have great

interest for the student of the History of Religions. The

success—fugitive as such things go, but real enough for a time—with

which Marcion set up a Church over against that tremendous polity which

has been called without much exaggeration “the very master-piece of

human wisdom,” would be alone sufficient to make it precious in the eyes

of those who are not blind to the romance of history. To archaeologists

it is the more interesting that it is only in its direction that we are

likely to receive in future much additional light upon the struggles of

nascent Christianity with one category of its competitors. The very

voluminous writings of the other Gnostics were destroyed by the

triumphant Church with such minute care that the Coptic texts described

in the last chapter form the only relics of this once enormous

literature that have survived to us. The heathen religions which for

some time disputed the ground with the Church have also left few traces

partly for the same reason, and partly because the secrecy to which they

pledged their votaries made it unlikely that many written documents of

these faiths would survive. But the _Antitheses_ of Marcion were in the

hands of Photius in the Xth century; and, although it is dangerous to

prophesy in such matters, it is by no means impossible that some lucky

discovery within the borders of the Turkish Empire may yet give us a MS.

that will enable us to reconstruct them. If that should ever be the

case, we shall be in a far better position than we are now to decide

whether the analogies between Marcionism and Protestantism that have

been detected of late years are essential or superficial.

Footnote 685:

Chap. IX. p. 118 _supra_.

Footnote 686:

Renan, _Marc Aurèle_, p. 49. Cf. Dill, _Nero to Marcus_, pp. 473-477.

Footnote 687:

Renan, _L’Église Chrétienne_, pp. 31-33, and Hadrian’s letter there

quoted.

Footnote 688:

Of the defences mentioned in the text the Apology of Quadratus is the

only one still lost to us. Justin Martyr’s two Apologies are among the

best known of patristic works. That of Aristides was found by Dr

Rendel Harris in a Syriac MS. in 1889. For the identification of this

by Dean Armitage Robinson with the story of Barlaam and Josaphat, see

_Cambridge Texts and Studies_, vol. 1. No. 1.

Footnote 689:

The account of Marcion’s life given by Salmon (_s.v._ Marcion) in the

_Dict. Christian Biog._ is here mostly followed. Abundant references

to the Fathers and other sources are there given.

Footnote 690:

Tertullian’s talk (_adv. Marcion._ Bk I. c. 1) about its barbarism and

the natives living in waggons is mere rhetoric. He probably knew

nothing about the place.

Footnote 691:

_Stoicae studiosus._ Tertullian, _de Praescript._ c. XXX.

Footnote 692:

_Id._ _adv. Marc._ Bk IV. c. 4; and _de Praescript._ c. XXX., where

the money is said to have been 200 sestertia or nearly £1800.

Footnote 693:

Tertullian, _adv. Marc._ Bk I. c. 2. Cf. Pseudo Tertullianus, _adv.

omn._ _Haer._ c. XVI.

Footnote 694:

Neander, _Ch. Hist._ II. p. 150; cf. Tertullian, _de Praescript._ c.

XLI.

Footnote 695:

_Ibid. op. cit._ c. XXX. Salmon (_Dict. Christian Biog._ _s.v._

Marcion) wishes to transfer this story to Cerdo.

Footnote 696:

Neander, _Church Hist._ II. p. 139, disbelieves it.

Footnote 697:

Justin Martyr, _First Apol._ cc. XXVI., LVIII. He writes as Marcion’s

contemporary. Cf. Clem. Alex. _Strom._ Bk III. c. 3.

Footnote 698:

Epiphanius, _Haer._ XLII. p. 553, Oehler.

Footnote 699:

Tertullian, _adv. Marc._ Bk IV. c. 5.

Footnote 700:

Eusebius, _Hist. Eccl._ Bk IV. c. 14.

Footnote 701:

The council was held 692 A.D. See Salmon in _Dict. Christian Biog._

_s.v._ Marcion.

Footnote 702:

Tertullian, _adv. Marc._ Bk I. c. 27.

Footnote 703:

The story that he seduced a virgin is now generally held to mean

merely that he corrupted the unsullied faith of the Church. Cf.

Hegesippus in Eusebius, _Hist. Eccl._ Bk V. c. 22. So Salmon, _art.

cit._ _supra_. As Neander points out (_Ch. Hist._ II. p. 136 note),

Tertullian, had he known the story, would certainly have published it.

Yet he contrasts Marcion’s chastity with the real or supposed

incontinence of his follower, Apelles (_de Praescript._ c. XXX.).

Footnote 704:

Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 25, p. 219, Harvey.

Footnote 705:

Hippolytus, _op. cit._ Bk VII. c. 3, p. 370, Cruice.

Footnote 706:

So Salmon, _art. cit._, Renan, and others. This view, however, cannot

apply to Justin Martyr who was, as we have seen, his contemporary. See

n. 5. p. 205 _supra_.

Footnote 707:

See Salmon (_Dict. Christian Biog._ _s.v._ Marcion) for authorities.

Footnote 708:

See Harnack’s article on _Marcion_ in _Encyc. Brit._ (11th ed.).

Footnote 709:

Tertullian, _adv. Marc._ Bk IV. c. 2. Marcion apparently knew nothing

of St John’s Gospel, which may not have become public till after his

death. Had he done so, as Renan says (_L’Égl. Chrétienne_, p. 71), he

would probably have preferred it to any other, because of its markedly

anti-Jewish tendency.

Footnote 710:

According to him, Jesus was not born of woman. Cf. Hippolytus, _op.

cit._ Bk VII. c. 31, pp. 383-384, Cruice.

Footnote 711:

The whole controversy is well summed up in Matter, _Hist. du Gnost._

t. II. pp. 238-242.

Footnote 712:

See Matter, _op. cit._ t. II. pp. 246-260, where Marcion’s emendations

are given chapter by chapter and their sources cited.

Footnote 713:

Hahn, in his _Antitheses Marcionis gnostici_, Königsberg, 1823,

claimed to have restored this book, while Hilgenfeld has examined the

extant remains of Marcion’s Gospel in _Das Evangelium Marcions_. He

attempted to restore Marcion’s _Apostolicon_ in the _Zeitschr. für

hist. Theol._ 1855.

Footnote 714:

The _Antitheses_ seem to have been seen by Photius in the Xth century,

so that we need not despair.

Footnote 715:

Like the Eros-Phanes of the Orphics and the Ophite Agape. So

Pausanias, Bk IX. c. 27, says the Lycomidae sang in the Mysteries

hymns to Eros, which he had read, thanks to a δαδοῦχος or torch-bearer

at Eleusis.

Footnote 716:

Tertullian, _adv. Marc._ Bk I. c. 2, says that Marcion is obliged to

admit the existence of a Creator, because his work is manifest; but

that he will never be able to prove that of a higher God than he—a

mode of reasoning which might take him further than he intends.

Footnote 717:

Isaiah, xlv. 7.

Footnote 718:

Tertullian, _adv. Marc._ Bk III. c. 8.

Footnote 719:

Neander, _Ch. Hist._ II. pp. 142 _sqq._

Footnote 720:

Tertullian, _adv. Marc._ Bk III. c. 24.

Footnote 721:

_Op. cit._ Bk III. c. 4. Cf Neander, _Ch. Hist._ II. p. 144.

Footnote 722:

Tertullian, _op. cit._ Bk V. c. 1.

Footnote 723:

Gal. i. 1. Tertullian, _adv. Marc._ Bk V., contains most of Marcion’s

dealings with the Pauline Epistles.

Footnote 724:

Gal. i. 6, 7.

Footnote 725:

Gal. ii. 11 _sqq._

Footnote 726:

Gal. iii. 14.

Footnote 727:

1 Cor. i. 21.

Footnote 728:

Tertullian, _adv. Marc._ Bk V. c. 5.

Footnote 729:

2 Cor. iv. 4. Cf. Tertullian, _op. cit._ Bk V. c. 11.

Footnote 730:

Tertullian, _op. cit._ Bk V. c. 14.

Footnote 731:

Rom. x. 2, 3.

Footnote 732:

2 Thess. i. 8. Cf. Tertullian, _op. cit._ Bk V. c. 16.

Footnote 733:

Epiphanius, _Haer._ XLII. p. 676, Oehler; Tertullian, _loc. cit._

Footnote 734:

Ephes. iii. 8, 9.

Footnote 735:

Tertullian, _op. cit._ Bk V. c. 18.

Footnote 736:

But see n. 2, p. 217, _infra_.

Footnote 737:

As is plain from the words of Plutarch quoting, as is generally

thought, Theopompus of Chios. See _Is. et Os._ cc. XLVI., XLVII.

Al-Bîrûnî, _Chronology_, p. 189, says indeed that both Bardesanes and

Marcion borrowed from Zoroaster. But this was eight centuries after

Marcion’s death, and we have no evidence as to Al-Bîrûnî’s means of

knowledge of his tenets.

Footnote 738:

Harvey’s _Irenaeus_, I. p. cli. There is a curious resemblance to

Marcion’s Demiurge in the Clementine _Homilies_, XX. c. 2, where the

king of this world who rules by law and rejoices in the destruction of

sinners is mentioned. But the _Homilies_ are probably Ebionite and

certainly, in the form in which they have come down to us, later than

Marcion.

Footnote 739:

Neander _Antignostikus_, Eng. ed. vol. II. p. 490, calls him the

representative of the Protestant spirit. In modern times, it is

perhaps sufficient to notice Harnack’s predilection, as shown in his

_Dogmengeschichte_, for Marcion and his works. Foakes-Jackson, _Some

Christian Difficulties of the Second and Twentieth Centuries_ (Hulsean

Lectures), Cambridge, 1903, pp. 19 _sqq._, thinks the study of the

controversy between Marcion and Tertullian should especially appeal to

Modernists.

Footnote 740:

Hippolytus, _op. cit._ Bk VII. c. 29, p. 378, Cruice.

Footnote 741:

Epiphanius, _Haer._ XLII. p. 556, Oehler.

Footnote 742:

_Op. et loc. cit._

Footnote 743:

Tertullian, _adv. Marc._ Bk IV. c. 11. Cf. p. 207, _supra_.

Footnote 744:

Tertullian, _op. cit._ Bk I. c. 27.

Footnote 745:

Harnack in _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ (11th ed.) _s.v._ “Marcion.”

Footnote 746:

He always couples Valentinus and Marcion together. Cf. _de Praescpt._

cc. XXIX., XXX. Justin Martyr, Marcion’s contemporary, says (_First

Apolog._ c. XXVI.) that “he is even now teaching men of every nation

to speak blasphemies.” Renan, _L’Égl. Chrétienne_, p. 363, thinks that

the Marcionites were “much the most numerous sect before Arius.”

Footnote 747:

Foakes-Jackson, _Hulsean Lectures_, p. 108. Cf. Sanday, _The Gospels

in the 2nd Cent._, Oxford, 1876, p. 236.

Footnote 748:

Theodoret, _Epp._ 113 and 145.

Footnote 749:

συμμισούμενοι καὶ συνταλαίπωροι: Tertullian, _adv. Marc._ Bk IV. cc.

9, 30.

Footnote 750:

See Neander, _Ch. Hist._ vol. II. pp. 151 _sqq._ and Matter, _Hist. du

Gnost._ t. II. pp. 298, 304.

Footnote 751:

Eznig of Goghp, from whose History of the Armenian Church quotation

has been made above. He says that Marcion taught that there were three

heavens, in the highest of which dwelt the Good God, in the next the

God of the (Jewish) Law, and in the third his angels. Below this lay

Hyle or Matter who existed independently and was female. From the

union of the God of the Law and Hyle, this earth was produced, after

which its Father retired to his own heaven, leaving the earth to the

rule of Hyle. When he desired to make man, Hyle supplied the dust of

which he was formed, into which the God of the Law breathed his own

spirit. Adam became the adorer of Hyle, upon which the God of the Law

informed him that, if he worshipped any other God but him, he should

die. On this Adam withdrew from Hyle, and this last, becoming jealous,

made a number of gods and filled the world with them. Hence all men

were cast into hell at death, until the Good God looked down from the

highest heaven, had pity on them, and sent his Son to deliver the

“spirits in prison,” which He did directly He went down into hell

after His own death. After Jesus had revealed Himself to the Creator

and received his confession of ignorance, Jesus illuminated Paul and

made him His apostle. It is extremely unlikely that this story should

have formed part of Marcion’s own teaching, although it may possibly

have been told by some follower of his of Semitic blood, or, as Salmon

suggests, by Cerdo. It is to be found in Neumann’s translation of

Eznig in the _Zeitschr. für hist. Theol._ vol. IV. and in the _Dict.

Christian Biog._ _s.v._ Marcion.

Footnote 752:

Tertullian, _adv. Marc._ Bk I. c. 16.

Footnote 753:

Epiphanius, _Haer._ XLII. p. 688, Oehler, says Marcion was succeeded

by Lucian, whom Apelles followed. Hippolytus, _op. cit._ Bk VII. cc.

37, 38, p. 393, Cruice, is probably the source of Epiphanius’

statement; but he does not seem to have had any first-hand knowledge

of the Marcionite heresy or its chiefs, and is not here so good a

witness as Tertullian, or Irenaeus, who mentions neither Lucian nor

Apelles.

Footnote 754:

Tertullian, _de Praescript._ c. XXX.

Footnote 755:

Eusebius, _Hist. Eccl._ Bk IV. c. 13.

Footnote 756:

ἐδημιούργησε τὰ γενόμενα. Hippolytus, _op. cit._ Bk VII. c. 37, p.

393, Cruice.

Footnote 757:

Epiphanius, _Haer._ XLII. p. 694, Oehler. The same Logion or saying is

also found in Clem. Alex. _Strom._ Bk I. c. 28, in the _Apostolical

Constitutions_, Bk II. c. 37, and in Clem. _Hom._ XVIII. c. 20.

Footnote 758:

Eusebius, _Hist. Eccl._ Bk V. c. 13.

Footnote 759:

Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 26, § 1, p. 220, Harvey. According to Hippolytus,

_op. cit._ Bk VIII. c. 16, p. 416, Cruice, he had been a disciple of

Justin Martyr.

Footnote 760:

Hippolytus, _op. cit._ Bk VII. c. 31, p. 382, Cruice.

Footnote 761:

Eusebius, _op. et loc. cit._ _supra_.

Footnote 762:

Hippolytus, _op. cit._ Bk VII. c. 37, p. 393, Cruice; Epiphanius,

_Haer._ XLIII. p. 688, Oehler.

Footnote 763:

Tertullian, _de Resurrectione_, c. II.

Footnote 764:

Eusebius, _Vita Constantini_, Bk III. cc. 64-66.

Footnote 765:

So Salmon in _Dict. Christian Biog._ and Harnack in _Encyclopaedia

Britannica_, both _s.v._ Marcion.

Footnote 766:

Hatch, _H.L._ p. 77, n. 1, quoting Harnack.

Footnote 767:

Hatch, _op. cit._ pp. 75, 76, shows that the allegorical method

introduced by the Gnostics in order to avoid the difficulty of

reconciling the Old Testament with the New was at first scornfully

rejected, but was soon adopted by the orthodox, and was pursued by

both Catholic and Protestant writers up to a few years ago.

CHAPTER XII

THE WORSHIP OF MITHRAS

Few of us, perhaps, are inclined to recognize that, from its first

establishment down to the Mahommedan Invasion of the VIIth century, the

Roman Empire found itself constantly in the presence of a bitter,

determined, and often victorious enemy. Alexander had conquered but had

not destroyed the Persians; and, although the magic of the hero’s

personality held them faithful to him during his too brief life, he was

no sooner dead than they hastened to prove that they had no intention of

tamely giving up their nationality. Peucestas, the Royal bodyguard who

received the satrapy of Persia itself on his master’s death, and was

confirmed in it at the first shuffling of the cards at Triparadisus,

found it expedient to adopt the Persian language and dress, with the

result that his subjects conceived for him an affection only equal to

that which they afterwards showed for Seleucus[768]. Later, when the

rise of the Parthian power under Arsaces brought about the defeat of

Seleucus II Callinicus, the opposition to European forms of government

found a centre further north[769], whence armies of lightly-equipped

horsemen were able to raid up to the Eastern shores of the

Mediterranean[770]. Thanks probably to the knowledge of this support in

reserve, when Western Asia found the military power of the Greek kings

becoming exhausted by internecine wars, she began to throw off the alien

civilization that she had in part acquired, and to return more and more

to Persian ways[771]. When the Romans in their turn set to work to eat

up the enfeebled Greek kingdoms, they quickly found themselves in

presence of a revived nationality as firmly held and nearly as

aggressive as their own, and henceforth Roman and Parthian were seldom

at peace. The long struggle with Mithridates, who gave himself out as a

descendant of Darius[772], taught the Romans how strong was the reaction

towards Persian nationality even in Asia Minor, and the overthrow of

Crassus by the Parthians convinced his countrymen for a time of the

folly of pushing their arms too far eastwards.

With the establishment of the Empire, the antagonism between Rome and

Persia became still more strongly marked, and a struggle commenced which

lasted with little intermission until the foundation of the Mahommedan

Caliphate. In this struggle the advantage was not always, as we should

like to think, on the side of the Europeans. While Augustus reigns,

Horace boasts, there is no occasion to dread the “dreadful

Parthians[773]”; but Corbulo is perpetually fighting them, and when Nero

commits suicide, the legend immediately springs up that the tyrant is

not dead, but has only betaken himself beyond the Euphrates to return

with an army of Rome’s most dreaded enemies to lay waste his rebellious

country[774]. Towards the close of the first Christian century, Trajan,

fired, according to Gibbon, by the example of Alexander, led an army

into the East and achieved successes which enabled him to add to his

titles that of Parthicus[775]; but the whole of his Oriental conquests

were given back by the prudent Hadrian on his succession to the throne.

During the reign of Marcus Aurelius, Avidius Cassius obtained some solid

victories on the frontier; but Macrinus is said to have bought off the

Parthians with a bribe of nearly two millions of money. The rise of the

Sassanian house and the retransfer of the leadership from the Parthians

to their kinsmen in Persia proper brought about the reform of the

Persian religion, and added another impulse to the increasing strength

of Persian national feeling. Alexander Severus may have gained some

successes in the field over Ardeshîr or Artaxerxes, the restorer of the

Persian monarchy[776]; but in the reign of the last named king’s son and

successor Sapor, the capture of the Emperor Valerian with his whole

army, and the subsequent ravaging of the Roman provinces in Asia by the

victors, showed the Republic how terrible was the might of the restored

kingdom[777]. Aurelian, the conqueror of Palmyra, did much to restore

the prestige of Roman arms in the East; and although he was assassinated

when on the march against Persia, the Emperor Carus shortly after led a

successful expedition into the heart of the Persian kingdom[778]. In the

reign of Diocletian, indeed, the Persians lost five provinces to the

Romans[779]; but under Constantine the Great the Romans were again

vanquished in the field, and the Persians were only prevented by the

heroic resistance of the fortified town of Nisibis and an incursion into

their Eastern provinces of tribes from Central Asia from again

overrunning the Asiatic possessions of Rome[780].

Henceforward, the history of the long contest between the two great

empires—“the eyes,” as the Persian ambassador told Galerius, “of the

civilized world[781],” is the record of almost uninterrupted advance on

the part of Persia and of continual retreat on the side of Rome. The

patriotic enthusiasm of a Julian, and the military genius of a

Belisarius, aided by the dynastic revolutions common among Oriental

nations, might for a time arrest the progress of the conquering

Persians; but, bit by bit, the Asiatic provinces slipped out of the

grasp of the European masters of Constantinople. In 603 A.D., it looked

as if Persia were at length in the position to deliver the final blow in

a war which had lasted for more than five centuries. By the invasion of

Chosroes and his successive captures of Antioch, Jerusalem, and Egypt,

it seemed as if the Persians had restored the world-empire of Cambyses

and Darius; but the Persians then discovered, as Xerxes had done a

millennium earlier, how dangerous it is for Orientals, even when flushed

by conquest, to press Europeans too far. The Roman Emperor Heraclius,

who never before or afterwards gave much proof of military or political

capacity, from his besieged capital of Constantinople collected an army

with which he dashed into Persia in a manner worthy of Alexander

himself. After six brilliant campaigns he dictated to the Persians a

triumphant peace in the very heart of their empire[782]. A few years

later, and its shattered and disorganized remains fell an easy prey to

the Mahommedan invaders.

The effect of this long rivalry might have been expected to produce in

the Romans during its continuance a hearty dislike of the customs and

institutions of the nation opposed to them; but almost the exact

contrary was the result. It may be argued that Rome’s proved skill in

government was in no small measure due to her ready adoption of all that

seemed to her admirable in the nations that she overcame. Or it may be

that the influence which the memory of Alexander exercised over all

those who succeeded to his empire led them to imitate him in his

assumption of Persian manners. The fact remains that, long before the

division of the Roman Empire into East and West, the Romans displayed a

taste for Oriental luxury and magnificence which seems entirely at

variance with the simplicity and austerity of the republican conquerors

of Carthage. It is hardly too much to say that while Alexander’s

conscious aim was to make Asia Greek, the Romans, on possessing

themselves of his Asiatic conquests, allowed themselves to become to a

great extent “Medized,” and showed an unexpected admiration for the

habits and culture of Alexander’s Persian subjects.

It may of course be said that this was in external matters only, and

that the “Persian furniture” which excited Horace’s wrath[783] might if

it stood alone be looked upon as merely a passing fashion; but the Court

ceremonial introduced by Diocletian argues a steady tendency towards

Persian customs and forms of government that must have been in operation

for centuries. The household of a Julian Caesar was no differently

arranged from that of a Roman noble of the period, and his title of

Prince of the Senate showed that he was only looked upon as the first of

his equals. But Diocletian was in all respects but language a Persian

emperor or Shah, and his style of “Lord and God,” his diadem, his silken

state dress, the elaborate ritual of his court, and the long hierarchy

of its officials, were all designed to compel his subjects to recognize

the fact[784]. As usual, the official form of religion in the Roman

Empire had for some time given indications of the coming change in the

form of government. The sun had always been the principal natural object

worshipped by the Persians, and a high-priest of the Sun-God had sat

upon the Imperial throne of Rome in the form of the miserable

Heliogabalus. Only 13 years before Diocletian, Aurelian, son of another

Sun-God’s priestess and as virile and rugged as his predecessor was soft

and effeminate, had also made the Sun-God the object of his special

devotion and of an official worship. Hence Diocletian and his colleague

Galerius were assured in advance of the approval of a large part of

their subjects when they took the final plunge in 307 A.D., and

proclaimed Mithras, “the Unconquered Sun-God,” the Protector of their

Empire[785].

In spite of this, however, it is very difficult to say how Mithras

originally became known to the Romans. Plutarch says indeed that his

cult was first introduced by the Cilician pirates who were put down by

Pompey[786]. This is not likely to be literally true; for the summary

methods adopted by these sea-robbers towards their Roman prisoners

hardly gave much time for proselytism, while most of the pirates whom

Pompey spared at the close of his successful operations he deported to

Achaea, which was one of the few places within the Empire where the

Mithraic faith did not afterwards show itself. What Plutarch’s story

probably means is that the worship of Mithras first came to Rome from

Asia Minor, and there are many facts which go to confirm this. M.

Cumont, the historian of Mithraism, has shown that, long before the

Romans set foot in Asia, there were many colonies of emigrants from

Persia who with their _magi_ or priests had settled in Asia Minor,

including in that phrase Galatia, Phrygia, Lydia, and probably

Cilicia[787]. When Rome began to absorb these provinces, slaves,

prisoners, and merchants from them would naturally find their way to

Rome, and in time would no doubt draw together for the worship of their

national deities in the way that we have seen pursued by the worshippers

of the Alexandrian Isis and the Jewish exiles. The _magi_ of Asia Minor

were great supporters of Mithridates, and the Mithridatic wars were no

doubt responsible for a large number of these immigrants.

Once introduced, however, the worship of Mithras spread like wild-fire.

The legions from the first took kindly to it, and this is the less

surprising when we find that many of them were recruited under the

earliest emperors in Anatolian states like Commagene, where the cult

was, if not indigenous, yet of very early growth[788]. Moreover the wars

of the Romans against the Persians kept them constantly in the border

provinces of the two empires, where the native populations not

infrequently changed masters. The enemy’s town that the legions besieged

one year might therefore give them a friendly reception the next; and

there was thus abundant opportunity for the acquaintance of both sides

with each others’ customs. When the Roman troops marched back to Europe,

as was constantly the case during the civil wars which broke out on the

downfall of the Julian house, they took back with them the worship of

the new god whom they had adopted, and he thus became known through

almost the whole of the Roman Empire[789]. “From the shores of the

Euxine to the north of Brittany and to the fringe of the Sahara[790],”

as M. Cumont says, its monuments abound, and, he might have added, they

have been met with also in the Egyptian Delta, in Babylon, and on the

northern frontiers of India. In our own barbarous country we have found

them not only in London and York, but as far west as Gloucester and

Chester and as far north as Carlisle and Newcastle[791]. The Balkan

countries, like Italy, Germany, Southern France, and Spain, are full of

them; but there was one part of the Roman Empire into which they did not

penetrate freely. This was Greece, where the memories of the Persian

Wars long survived the independence of the country, and where the

descendants of those who fought at Salamis, Marathon, and Thermopylae

would have nothing to do with a god coming from the invaders’

fatherland. It is only very lately that the remains of Mithras-worship

have been discovered at the Piraeus and at Patras, in circumstances

which show pretty clearly that it was there practised only by

foreigners[792].

Notwithstanding this popularity, it is not easy to say exactly what god

Mithras’ European worshippers considered him to be. If length of

ancestry went for anything in such matters, he might indeed claim a

greater antiquity than any deity of the later Roman Pantheon, with the

single exception of the Alexandrian gods. Mithras was certainly

worshipped in Vedic India, where his name of Mitra constantly occurs in

the sacred texts as the “shining one,” meaning apparently the material

sun[793]. He is there invoked in company with Varuna, generally

considered the god of the sky, and therefore according to some, the

prototype of the Greek Zeus and the Latin Jupiter[794]. His appearance

in a similar connection in the sacred books of the Persians led the

founders of the comparative study of religion to think that he must have

been one of the primitive gods of their hypothetical Aryan race, and

that his worship must go back to the imaginary time when Persians and

Hindus dwelt side by side in the plains of Cashmere. But this theory is

giving way before proof that the original home of the Indo-European race

was Europe, and has been badly shaken by the discovery at Boghaz Keui of

tablets showing that the gods Mithra and Varuna were gods of the

Mitannians or Hittites[795] at some date earlier than 1500 B.C., and

therefore long before the appearance of the Persians in history. If the

worship of Mithras were not indigenous in Western Asia, it may therefore

well have come there independently of the Persians[796].

There is no doubt, however, that the roots of Mithras-worship went very

far down into the Persian religion. In the Yashts or hymns which are the

earliest evidence of primitive Iranian beliefs, Mithra—to use the

Avestic spelling of his name—frequently appears, not indeed as the

material sun, but as the “genius of the heavenly light” which lightens

the whole universe[797] and is the most beneficent among the powers of

Nature. Mithras is not here, however, the Supreme Being, nor even the

highest among the gods benevolent to man. This last place is occupied in

the Zend Avesta by Ahura Mazda, “the omniscient lord,” who appears to be

the Persian form of Varuna, the god of the sky whom we have seen

associated with Mitra in the Vedas[798]. Nor is Mithras in the Zend

Avesta one of the six Amshaspands, the deified abstractions or

personified attributes of Ahura Mazda, who, in the later developments of

the Persian religion, occupy towards him much the same position that the

“Roots” of Simon Magus and the Aeons of the Pleroma among the Gnostics

do towards the Boundless Power or the Ineffable Bythos[799]. In the

later Avestic literature, he appears as the chief of the Izeds or

Yazatas, a race of genii created by Ahura Mazda, who are the protectors

of his universe and the helpers of mankind in their warfare against the

powers of darkness[800]. In the latest as in the earliest Persian view

of the personality of Mithras, therefore, it is plain that he occupies

an intermediate position between the Creator and man.

It is not, however, in the religion associated with the name of

Zoroaster that we must look for the origin of Mithraism. The date of the

sacred books of Mazdeism and the historical existence of Zoroaster

himself have recently been brought down to as late as the VIIth century

B.C.[801] and the appearance in Asia of the Persian tribes as

conquerors, whereas Mithras was, as we have seen, worshipped in Asia

Minor nearly a millennium earlier. Moreover, the strict dualism which

set Ahriman, the god of darkness and evil, in eternal and perhaps equal

opposition to Ormuzd, the god of light and goodness, seems to have been

unknown before the Sassanid reform in 226 A.D., by which time the

worship of Mithras in Europe was at its apogee[802]. M. Cumont is,

therefore, doubtless right when he thinks that Mithraism was derived not

from Mazdeism, but from Magism or the religion of the Magi, the tribe of

Medes whose domination was put an end to by Darius the son of Hystaspes,

and whose name was afterwards given to a priestly caste and has passed

into our own language as the root of the word “magic.”

That these Magi practised a religion different from that taught in the

Avestic literature is plain enough. The romantic story told by Herodotus

of the Magian who seized the throne of Persia during Cambyses’ absence

in Egypt on the pretence that he was the king’s brother whom Cambyses

had privily put to death[803], is fully confirmed by Darius’ trilingual

inscription on the Rock of Behistun, first copied and deciphered by Sir

Henry Rawlinson and lately published in elaborate form by the British

Museum[804]. Darius here narrates how “a certain man, a Magian, Gaumata

by name ... lied unto the people (saying) ‘I am Smerdis, the son of

Cyrus, the brother of Cambyses.’ Then all the people revolted from

Cambyses and went over to him, even Persia and Media and the other

provinces.” Darius goes on to record that “thereupon Cambyses died by

his own hand[805],” that the seven Persian nobles overthrew the

pretender much in the way described by Herodotus, and that “I rebuilt

the temples of the gods, which that Gaumata, the Magian, had destroyed.

I restored that which had been taken away as it was in the days of

old[806].” This he tells us he did “by the grace of Ahura Mazda,” and

that by this grace he always acted. The memory of these events was kept

up by the festival of the Magophonia or Massacre of the Magi which was

yearly celebrated in Persia and during which no Magus dared show himself

in the streets[807]. Darius’ words show that there was a religious as

well as a dynastic side to the Magian revolt, though whether the false

Smerdis restored the old worship of the land, which he found in danger

of being supplanted by Zoroastrianism or the worship of Ahura Mazda, may

still be doubtful. In any event, the reformation or counter-reformation

made by Darius did not succeed in entirely uprooting the old Magian

faith, for Herodotus speaks of the Magi as still being in his time the

priestly caste among the Persians, and as acting as diviners and

sacrificers to the Achaemenian kings who ruled Persia up to Alexander’s

Conquest[808].

The Magian religion as it appears in Herodotus and other Greek authors,

however, seems to have shown none of the hostility to the powers of

darkness so apparent in the religious literature collected by the

Sassanian kings. “The whole circuit of the firmament” was, according to

Herodotus, their greatest god or Zeus; and he says that they also

“sacrifice to the sun and moon, to the earth, to fire and water, and to

the winds”; but that “they do not, like the Greeks, believe the gods to

have the same nature as men[809].” He also tells us that later they

borrowed from the Arabians and the Assyrians the worship of a goddess

whom he calls Mitra, and although he is probably wrong as to the origin

and sex of this deity, his evidence shows that Semitic admixture counted

for something in the Magian worship. In other respects, the Magian seems

to have been a primitive faith given up to the worship of the powers of

nature or elements, which it did not personify in the anthropomorphic

manner of either the Semites or the Greeks, and to have paid little

attention to public ceremonies or ritual. It follows therefore that,

like the religions of many uncivilized people of the present day, it

would draw no very sharp distinction between good and evil gods, and

would be as ready to propitiate or make use of the evil, that is those

hostile to man, as the good or benevolent. Plutarch, who describes the

religion of the Magi more than three centuries after Herodotus, when the

name of Zoroaster the Persian prophet and the dualistic belief favoured

by his teaching had long been popularly known in the West, says that the

Magi of his time held Mithras to be the “Mediator” or intermediary

between “Oromazes” or Light on the one hand, and “Areimanios” or

Darkness and Ignorance on the other, and that they used to make bloody

sacrifices to the last-named in a place where the sun never comes[810].

It is easy to see how such a cult, without the control of public

ceremonies and with its unabashed traffic with the powers of evil, would

be likely to degenerate into compulsion or magic.

There was, however, another popular superstition or belief which, about

the time when Mithraism made its appearance in Europe, had spread itself

over Western Asia. This was the idea that the positions and changes of

the heavenly bodies exercise an influence over the affairs of the world

and the lot both of kingdoms and individual men. It probably began in

Babylonia, where the inhabitants had from Sumerian times shown

themselves great observers of the stars, and had been accustomed to

record the omens that they drew from their motions for the guidance of

the kings[811]. This kind of divination—or astrology to call it by a

familiar name—received a great impulse after Alexander’s Conquest, in

the first place from the break up of the Euphratean priestly colleges

before referred to, and the driving out of the lesser priests therein to

get their own living, and then from the fact that the scientific enquiry

and mathematical genius of the Greeks had made the calculation of the

positions of the heavenly bodies at any given date and hour a fairly

simple matter to be determined without direct observation[812]. It was

probably no mere coincidence that the Chaldaei and the Mathematici, as

the astrologers called themselves, should have swarmed at Rome under

just those emperors in whose reigns Mithraism began to push itself to

the front[813].

While we may be sure that these factors, the religion of the Magi, the

practice of magic, and the astrological art, all counted in the

composition of the worship of Mithras, we yet know but very little of

its tenets. No work has come down to us from any devotee of Mithras

which will give us the same light on the way his worshippers regarded

him that the romance of Apuleius and the encomium of Aelius Aristides

have cast on the mental attitude of the devotees of the Alexandrian

cult. The extensive books of Eubulus and Pallas on Mithras and the

history of his worship, which Porphyry tells us were extant from the

reign of Hadrian down to his own time[814], are entirely lost, and our

only source of information, except a very few scattered notices in the

Fathers and in profane writers like the Emperor Julian and Porphyry

himself, are the sculptures and inscriptions which have been found in

his ruined chapels. These texts and monuments the scholarly care of M.

Cumont has gathered into two large volumes, which will always remain the

chief source from which later enquirers must draw their materials[815].

From their study he comes to the conclusion that, in the religion of

Mithras, there figured above him the Mazdean gods of good and evil

respectively called in the Zend Avesta Ahura Mazda and Angro Mainyus, or

in more familiar language, Ormuzd and Ahriman. Behind and above these

again, he would place a Supreme Being called Zervan Akerene or Boundless

Time, who seems to be without attributes or qualities, and to have acted

only as the progenitor of the opposing couple. This is at first sight

very probable, because the Orphic doctrine, which, as we have seen, made

Chronos or Time the progenitor of all the gods, was widely spread in

Asia Minor before Alexander’s Conquest, and the Persian colonies formed

there under his successors must therefore have come in frequent contact

with this most accommodating of schools[816]. Traditions of a sect of

Zervanists in Western Asia, who taught that all things came from

Infinite Time, are also to be found[817]. But most of these are recorded

after Mithraism had become extinct; and M. Cumont’s proofs of the

existence of this dogma in the European religion of Mithras can be

reduced on final analysis to a quotation from a treatise by Theodore,

the Christian bishop of Mopsuestia who died in 428 A.D., directed, as it

would seem, against the “Magi” of his time, in which he admits that

their dogmas had never been written, and that the sectaries in question,

whom he calls Magusaeans, said “sometimes one thing and deceived

themselves, and sometimes another and deceived the ignorant[818].” M.

Cumont’s identification of the lion-headed statue often found in

Mithraic chapels with the Supreme God of the system has been shown

elsewhere to be open to serious question, and the figure itself to be

susceptible of another interpretation than that which he would put upon

it[819]. On the whole, therefore, while M. Cumont’s mastery of his

subject makes it very dangerous to differ from him, it seems that his

theory of a Boundless Time as the pinnacle of the Mithraist pantheon

cannot be considered as proved.

Whether Ormuzd and Ahriman played any important part in the Roman

worship of Mithras is also doubtful. With regard to the first-named,

both Greeks and Romans knew him well and identified him unhesitatingly

with Zeus and Jupiter[820]. Hence we should expect to find him, if

represented at all on the Mithraic sculptures, with the well-known

features, the thunderbolt, and the eagle, which long before this time

had become the conventional attributes of the Roman as well as of the

Homeric father of gods and men. We are not entirely disappointed, for we

find in a bas-relief formerly in a chapel of Mithras at Sissek (the

ancient Sissia in Pannonia) and now in the Museum at Agram, the

bull-slaying scene in which Mithras figures and which will be presently

described, surmounted by an arch on which is ranged Jupiter seated on

his throne, grasping the thunderbolt, wielding the sceptre, and

occupying the place of honour in a group of gods among whom we may

distinguish Mars and Mercury[821]. In another bas-relief of the same

scene, now at the Rudolfinum in Klagenfurt, he is depicted in a similar

position in an assembly of the gods, which although much mutilated seems

to show Zeus or Jupiter in the centre with Hera or Juno by his

side[822]. But the most conclusive of these monuments is the great

bas-relief found at Osterburken in the Odenwald, wherein the arch

surmounting the usual bull-slaying scene contains an assembly of twelve

gods with Zeus in the centre armed with thunderbolt and sceptre, while

around him are grouped Apollo, Ares, Heracles, Hera, Athena, Aphrodite,

Nike, Poseidon, Artemis, Hades, and perhaps Persephone[823]. When by the

side of these we put the many inscriptions left by the legionaries to

“the holy gods of the fatherland, to Jupiter best and greatest, and to

the Unconquered One”; to “Jupiter best and greatest, and to the divine

Sun, the Unconquered Sun,” and other well-known names of Mithras, there

can be no doubt that his worshippers used to adore him together with the

head of the Roman Pantheon, and that they considered Mithras in some way

the subordinate of or inferior to Jupiter[824]. Yet there is nothing to

show that the Mithraists as such identified in any way this Jupiter

Optimus Maximus with the Persian Ahura Mazda, Oromasdes, or Ormuzd, or

that they ever knew him by any of these outlandish names.

The case is different with Ormuzd’s enemy Ahriman, who evidently was

known by his Persian name to the Roman worshippers of Mithras. In the

Vatican can be seen a triangular marble altar dedicated by a

_clarissimus_ named Agrestius who was a high-priest of Mithras, to “the

god Arimanius[825],” and altars with similar inscriptions have been

found at Buda-Pesth[826]. At a Mithraic chapel in York also, there was

found a statue, now in the Museum of the Philosophical Society in that

city, which bears an inscription to the same god Arimanius[827]. There

is therefore fairly clear evidence that the Mithraists recognized

Ahriman under his Persian name, and that they sacrificed to him, as

Plutarch said the “magi” of his time did to the god whom he calls

Hades[828], and this agrees with Herodotus’ statement that the Persians

used to do the same to “the god who is said to be beneath the

earth[829].” Although this gave occasion to the Christian Fathers to

accuse the Mithraists of worshipping the devil, we are not thereby bound

to conclude that they looked upon Arimanius as an essentially evil

being. It seems more probable that they considered him, as the Greeks

did their Hades or Pluto, as a chthonian or subterranean power ruling

over a place of darkness and discomfort, where there were punishments

indeed, but not as a deity insusceptible of propitiation by

sacrifice[830], or compulsion by other means such as magic arts[831]. It

has been shown elsewhere that his image in a form which fairly

represents his attributes in this capacity appears with some frequency

in the Mithraic chapels, where a certain amount of mystery attached to

its exhibition[832]. It seems to follow from these considerations that

the worshippers of Mithras attributed to their special god no

inferiority to Ahriman as M. Cumont’s argument supposes, and that the

only power whom they acknowledged as higher than Mithras himself was the

Roman equivalent of Ormuzd, the Jupiter Optimus Maximus adored

throughout the Roman Empire of their time as the head of the

Pantheon[833].

The connection of Mithras with the sun is also by no means easy to

unravel. The Vedic Mitra was, as we have seen, originally the material

sun itself, and the many hundreds of votive inscriptions left by the

worshippers of Mithras to “the unconquered Sun Mithras[834],” to the

unconquered solar divinity (_numen_) Mithras[835], to the unconquered

Sun-God (_deus_) Mithra[836], and allusions in them to the priests

(_sacerdotes_), worshippers (_cultores_), and temples (_templum_) of the

same deity leave no doubt open that he was in Roman times a

sun-god[837]. Yet this does not necessarily mean that he was actually

the day-star visible to mankind, and the Greeks knew well enough how to

distinguish between Apollo the god of light who was once at any rate a

sun-god, and Helios the Sun itself[838]. On the Mithraic sculptures, we

frequently see the unmistakable figure of Mithras riding in the chariot

of the Sun-God driven by the divinity with long hair and a rayed nimbus,

whom we know to be this Helios or his Roman equivalent, going through

some ceremony of consecration with him, receiving messages from him, and

seated side by side with him at a banquet which is evidently a ritual

feast. M. Cumont explains this by the theory that Mithras, while in

Persia and in the earliest Aryan traditions the genius of the celestial

light only[839], no sooner passed into Semitic countries and became

affected by the astrological theories of the Chaldaeans, than he was

identified with their sun-god Shamash[840], and this seems as reasonable

a theory as can be devised. Another way of accounting for what he calls

the “at first sight contradictory proposition” that Mithras at once was

and was not the sun[841], is to suppose that while the Mithraists wished

those who did not belong to their faith to believe that they themselves

worshipped the visible luminary, they yet instructed their votaries in

private that he was a deity superior to it and in fact the power behind

it. As we shall see, the two theories are by no means irreconcilable,

although absolute proof of neither can yet be offered.

One can speak with more certainty about the Legend or mythical history

of Mithras which M. Cumont has contrived with rare acumen to reconstruct

from the monuments found in his chapels. It is comprised in eleven or

twelve scenes or tableaux which we will take in their order[842]. We

first see the birth of the god, not from the head of his father Zeus

like Athena, or from his thigh like Dionysos, but from a rock, which

explains his epithet of “Petrogenes” or rock-born. The god is

represented in this scene as struggling from the rock in which he is

embedded below the waist, and always uplifts in one hand a broad knife

of which we shall afterwards see him make use, and in the other a

lighted torch[843]. He is here represented as a boy, and wears the

Phrygian cap or so-called cap of liberty which is his distinctive

attribute, while the torch is doubtless, as M. Cumont surmises,

symbolical of the light which he is bringing into the world[844]. The

rock is sometimes encircled by the folds of a large serpent, probably

here as elsewhere a symbol of the earth, and is in the Mithraic chapel

discovered at Housesteads in Northumberland represented in the form of

an egg, the upper part remaining on the head of the nascent god like an

egg-shell on that of a newly-hatched chicken[845]. This is probably due

to some confusion or identification with the Orphic legend of the

First-born or Phanes who sprang from the cosmic egg; but the central

idea of the rock-birth seems to be that of the spark, hidden as it were

in the stone and leaping forth when struck. In one or two examples of

the scene, the miraculous birth is watched by a shepherd or shepherds,

which leads M. Cumont to draw a parallel between this and the Adoration

of the Shepherds at the Birth of Christ.

The next two scenes are more difficult to interpret with anything

approaching certainty. In one of them[846], Mithras is represented as

standing upright before a tree from which he cuts or tears a large

branch bearing leaves and fruit. He is here naked, save for the

distinctive cap; but immediately after, he is seen emerging from the

leafage fully clothed in Oriental dress. In the next scene—the relative

order of the scenes seems settled by the places they most often occupy

on different examples of the same sculptures[847]—Mithras in the

Phrygian cap, Persian trousers, and flowing mantle generally worn by

him, kneels on one knee drawing a bow, the arrows from which strike a

rock in the distance and draw from it a stream of water which a kneeling

man receives in his hands and lifts to his mouth[848]. Several variants

of this scene exist, in one of which a suppliant is kneeling before the

archer-god and raising his hands towards him as if in prayer; while in

another, the rock may well be a cloud. M. Cumont can only suggest with

regard to these scenes, that the first may be an allusion to the Fall of

Man and his subsequently clothing himself with leaves as described in

the Book of Genesis, and that the second scene may depict a prolonged

drought upon earth, in which man prays to Mithras and is delivered by

the god’s miraculous production of rain. He admits, however, that this

is pure conjecture, and that he knows no Indian, Persian, or Chaldaean

legend or myth to which the scenes in question can be certainly

attached. It seems therefore useless to discuss them further here.

Passing on, we come to a series of scenes, the meaning of which is more

easily intelligible. In all of these a bull plays a principal part. It

is abundantly clear that this bull is no terrestrial creature, but is

the Goshurun or Heavenly Bull of the Zend Avesta, from whose death come

forth not only man, but beasts, trees, and all the fruits of the

earth[849]. In the Mithraic sculptures, we see the Bull first sailing

over the waters in a cup-shaped boat[850] like the coracles still used

on the Euphrates, or escaping from a burning stable to which Mithras and

a companion have set fire[851]. Then he is depicted grazing peaceably or

raising his head now and then as if alarmed by some sudden noise[852].

Next he is chased by Mithras, who seizes him by the horns, mounts

him[853], and after a furious gallop casts him over his shoulders,

generally holding him by the hind legs so that the horned head dangles

to the ground[854]. In this position, he is taken into the cave which

forms the chapel of Mithras.

Here, if the order in the most complete monuments be followed, we break

off to enter upon another set of scenes which illustrate the relations

between Mithras and the sun[855]. In what again seems to be the first in

order, we see Mithras upright with a person kneeling before him who,

from the rayed nimbus round his head, is evidently the god Helios or

Sol[856]. In one representation of this scene, Mithras extends his left

hand towards this nimbus as if to replace it on the head of its

wearer[857] from which it has been displaced in yet another

monument[858], while in the other, he displays an object not unlike a

Phrygian cap which may, however, be, as M. Cumont suggests, something

like a water-skin[859]. Generally, Mithras is represented as holding

this object over the bared head of the kneeling Sun-God, as if to crown

him with it[860]. Then we find Mithras with the ray-crowned Sun-God

upright beside him, while he grasps his hand in token, as it would seem,

of alliance or friendship[861]. If we accept the hint afforded by the

theory that the rock yielding water on being split by the arrows of

Mithras is really a cloud producing the fertilizing rain, we may imagine

that we have here the unconquered god removing clouds which obscure the

face of the great life-giving luminary and restoring to him the crown of

rays which enables him to shed his kindly light upon the earth. The

earth would thus be made fit for the creation of man and other animals

which, as we shall see, follows; but in any event, the meaning of the

scene which shows the alliance is, as M. Cumont has pointed out, not

doubtful[862]. In one monument, where Mithras grasps the hand of the

person we have identified with the Sun-God before an altar, he at the

same time draws his sword, as if to perform the exchange of blood or

blood-covenant usual in the East on swearing alliance[863]. Possibly the

crowning scene, as M. Cumont also suggests[864], is to be connected with

Tertullian’s statement that in the initiation of the Mithraist to the

degree of _miles_ or soldier, he was offered at the sword’s point a

crown, which he cast away from him saying that Mithras was his crown. If

so, it would afford some proof that the initiate here, as in the

mysteries of Isis, was made to impersonate the sun, which is on other

grounds likely enough.

We return to the scenes with the Bull, which here reach their climax.

This is the sacrifice of the Bull by Mithras, which forms the central

point of the whole legend. Its representation, generally in bas-relief,

was displayed in the most conspicuous position in the apse of the

Mithraic chapel, where it occupied the place of the modern altar-piece,

and such art as the Roman sculptors succeeded in displaying was employed

to make it as impressive and as striking as possible[865]. It shows the

god grasping with his left hand the nostrils of the beast, and kneeling

with his left knee in the middle of the Bull’s back, while with his

right hand he plunges the broad-bladed dagger with which he was armed at

his birth into the Bull’s shoulder[866]. A dog leaps forward to lap the

blood flowing from the wound, while at the same time a scorpion seizes

the Bull by the genitals. A serpent also forms part of the group, but

his position varies in the different monuments, while that of the other

animals does not. Sometimes, he lifts his head towards the blood, as if

to share it with the dog, sometimes he is extended along the ground

beneath the Bull’s belly in apparent indifference to the tragedy enacted

above him[867]. Before the Bull stands generally a youth clothed like

Mithras himself in Phrygian cap, tunic, and mantle, as well as the

anaxyrides or tight trousers in which the Greeks depicted most Easterns,

while another youth similarly attired stands behind the dying victim.

These two human figures are alike in every particular save that one of

them bears a torch upright with the flame pointing upwards, while the

other holds a similar torch reversed so that the flame juts towards the

earth. We know from a Latin inscription that the torch-bearer with

uplifted torch was called Cautes, he with the reversed one Cautopates,

but of neither name has any satisfactory derivation or etymology yet

been discovered[868].

The meaning of the group as a whole can, however, be explained by the

documents of the later Persian religion. The _Bundahish_ tells us that

Ahura Mazda created before all things the Bull Goshurun, who was killed

by Ahriman, the god of evil, and that from his side came forth Gayômort,

first of men, while from his tail there issued useful seed-plants and

trees, from his blood the vine, and from his seed the different kinds of

beasts[869]. Save that the bull-slayer is here not the god of evil but

the lord of light himself, the myth is evidently the same in the

Mithraic bas-reliefs, for in some of the earliest monuments the Bull’s

tail is actually shown sprouting into ears of wheat, while in others the

production of animals as a consequence of the Bull’s death may be

indicated, as well as the birth of the vine[870]. That the dog plays the

part of the guardian of the Bull’s soul is probable from what we know of

later Persian beliefs[871], while the scorpion as the creature of

Ahriman may be here represented as poisoning the seed of future life at

its source[872]. That Mithras is not supposed to kill the Bull from

enmity or other personal reasons, but in obedience to orders from some

higher power, is shown by the listening pose of his head during the

sacrifice. This is M. Cumont’s opinion[873], as also that the serpent

here takes no active part in the affair, but is merely a symbolic

representation of the earth[874]. The whole drama is clearly shown as

taking place in a cave or grotto, as appears from the arch of rocks

which surmounts, and, as it were, acts as a frame to, the Tauroctony or

bull-slaying scene in most Mithraic chapels. This cave, according to

Porphyry, represents the universe.

The Legend, however, does not end with the death of the Bull. In the

chapel at Heddernheim, the great slab on which the Tauroctony is

sculptured in bas-relief is pivoted so as to swing round and display on

its other face another scene which we find repeated in a slightly

different form on many monuments[875]. Mithras and the Sun-God are here

shown as partaking of a ritual feast or banquet in which grapes seem to

figure. At Heddernheim, the grapes are tendered to the two gods over the

body of the dead bull by the two torch-bearing figures Cautes and

Cautopates, while on an arch above them various quadrupeds, dogs, a

boar, a sheep, and a cow, are seen springing into life. In other

monuments, the same scene generally appears as a banquet at which

Mithras and Helios are seated side by side at a table sometimes alone,

but at others in company with different persons who can hardly be any

other than initiates or worshippers[876]. That this represents some sort

of sacrament where a drink giving immortality was administered seems

probable, and its likeness to representations of the Last Supper is

sufficient to explain the complaint of Justin Martyr and other Fathers

that the devil had set on the Mithraists to imitate in this and other

respects the Church of Christ[877]. The final scene of all comes when we

see Mithras arresting the glorious chariot of the Sun-God drawn by four

white horses, and, mounting therein, being driven off by the ray-crowned

Helios himself to the abode of light above the firmament[878]. In this

also, it is easy to see a likeness between representations of the

Ascension of Mithras and that of Elijah or even of Christ[879].

However this may be, the Legend of Mithras, as thus portrayed, shows

with fair closeness the belief of his worshippers as to his place in the

scheme of the universe. Mithras was certainly not the Supreme God, a

rank in the system filled by Ahura Mazda, or his Latin counterpart,

Jupiter Best and Greatest[880]. But this being, like the Platonic Zeus

and the Gnostic Bythos, was considered too great and too remote to

concern himself with the doings of the visible universe, in which

Mithras acts as his vicegerent. Whether Mithras was or was not

considered as in some sort the double or antitype of the Supreme Being

cannot be said; but it is worth noticing that in the Vedas, as among the

Hittites, Varuna and Mitra form an inseparable couple who are always

invoked together, and that the same seems to have been the case with

Ahura Mazda and Mithra in the oldest religious literature of the

Persians[881]. It may therefore well be that the learned doctors of the

Mithraic theology regarded their Supreme Being and Mithras as two

aspects of the same god, an idea that, as we have seen, was current at

about the same period among the Gnostics. It is, however, impossible to

speak with certainty on such a point in the absence of any writings by

persons professing the Mithraic faith, and it is highly improbable that

the rugged soldiers who formed the majority of the god’s worshippers

ever troubled themselves much about such questions. For them, no doubt,

and for all, perhaps, but a few carefully-chosen persons, Mithras was

the Demiurge or Divine Artizan of the universe[882], which he governs in

accordance with the laws of right and justice, protecting and defending

alike man and those animals and plants useful to him which Mithras has

himself created from his own spontaneous goodness. Hence he was the only

god to whom they admitted allegiance, and although the existence of

other heavenly beings was not denied, it is probable that most of them

were looked upon as occupying at the best a position less important to

us than that of Mithras himself.

It is probable, moreover, that all the scenes in the Mithraic sculptures

in which we have seen the god taking part were considered as being

enacted before the creation of man and in some heaven or world midway

between the abode of Infinite Light and this earth. That the grotto into

which Mithras drags the primordial Bull is no earthly cavern is plain

from Porphyry’s remark that the Mithraic cave was an image of the

universe[883], as well as from the band of zodiacal figures or the arch

of rocks which sometimes encloses the bas-reliefs, the sky being looked

upon by the Babylonians as a rocky vault. The sun and moon in their

respective chariots also appear above the principal scene; and a further

hint as to its whereabouts may be found in the fact that the flowing

mantle of Mithras is sometimes depicted as spangled with stars, thereby

indicating that the scenes in which he appears are supposed to take

place in the starry firmament. Hence is explained the epithet of μεσίτης

or Mediator, which Plutarch gives him[884], and which should be

interpreted not as intercessor but as he who occupies a position midway

between two places[885]. That the higher of these in this case was the

Garôtman or abode of Infinite Light of the Avestic literature, there

can, it would seem, be no question; but what was the lower?

Although the statement must be guarded with all the reserves imposed

upon us in all matters relating to the religion of Mithras by the

absence of written documents, it is probable that this lower division of

the universe was our earth. The monuments give us with fair certainty

the Mithraic ideas as to how life was brought thither; but they tell us

little or nothing as to the condition in which the earth was at the

time, nor how it was supposed to have come into existence. Porphyry

tells us that the “elements” (στοιχεῖα) were represented in the Mithraic

chapel[886], and we find in some examples of the bull-slaying scenes,

the figures of a small lion and a crater or mixing-bowl beneath the

belly of the bull, which M. Cumont considers to be the symbols of fire

and water respectively; while the earth may be typified, as has been

said above, by the serpent, and the fourth element or air may be

indicated by the wind which is blowing Mithras’ mantle away from his

body and to the left of the group[887]. If this be so, it is probable

that the Mithraist who thought about such matters looked upon the four

elements, of which the ancients believed the world to be composed, as

already in existence before the sacrifice of the primordial bull brought

life upon the earth; and that the work of Mithras as Demiurge or Artizan

was confined to arranging and moulding them into the form of the cosmos

or ordered world. As to what was the ultimate origin of these elements,

and whether the Mithraists, like the Gnostics, held that Matter had an

existence independent of, and a nature opposed to, the Supreme Being, we

have no indication whatever.

Of Mithraic eschatology or the view that the worshippers of Mithras held

as to the end of the world, we know rather less than we do of their

ideas as to its beginning. The Persian religion, after its reform under

the Sassanid kings, taught that it would be consumed by fire[888]; and,

as this doctrine of the Ecpyrosis, as the ancients called it, was also

held by the Stoics, whose physical doctrines were then fashionable at

Rome, it is probable enough that it entered into Mithraism also. But of

this there is no proof, and M. Cumont’s attempt to show that a similar

conflagration was thought by the Mithraic priests to have taken place

before the Tauroctony, and as a kind of paradigm or forecast of what was

to come, is not very convincing[889]. Yet some glimpse of what was

supposed to happen between the creation of the world and its destruction

seems to be typified by a monstrous figure often found in the ruined

chapels once used for the Mithraic worship, where it seems to have been

carefully guarded from the eyes of the general body of worshippers. This

monster had the body of a man[890] with the head of a lion, while round

his body is twined a huge serpent, whose head either appears on the top

of the lion’s or rests on the human breast. On the monster’s back appear

sometimes two, but generally four wings, and in his hands he bears

upright two large keys, for one of which a sceptre is sometimes

substituted; while his feet are sometimes human, sometimes those of a

crocodile or other reptile. On his body, between the folds of the

serpent, there sometimes appear the signs of the four quarters of the

year, _i.e._ Aries and Libra, Cancer and Capricorn[891], and in other

examples a thunderbolt on the breast or on the right knee[892]. The

figure is often mounted on a globe which bears in one instance the two

crossed bands which show that it is intended for our earth, and in one

curious instance he appears to bear a flaming torch in each hand, while

his breath is kindling a flame which is seen rising from an altar beside

him[893]. It is possible that in this last we have a symbolical

representation of the Ecpyrosis. Lastly, in the Mithraic chapel at

Heddernheim, which is the only one where the figure of the lion-headed

monster was found _in situ_, it was concealed within a deep niche or

cell so fashioned, says M. Cumont, that the statue could only be

perceived through a little conical aperture or peep-hole made in the

slab of basalt closing the niche[894].

M. Cumont’s theory, as given in his magnificent work on the _Mystères de

Mithra_ and elsewhere, is that the figure represents that Zervan Akerene

or Boundless Time whom he would put at the head of the Mithraic

pantheon, and would make the father of both Ormuzd and Ahriman[895]. M.

Cumont’s opinion, on a subject of which he has made himself the master,

must always command every respect, and it may be admitted that the

notion of such a supreme Being, corresponding in many ways to the

Ineffable Bythos of the Gnostics, did appear in the later developments

of the Persian religion, and may even have been known during the time

that the worship of Mithras flourished in the West[896]. It has been

shown elsewhere, however, that this idea only came to the front long

after the cult of Mithras had become extinct, that M. Cumont’s view that

the lion-headed monster was represented as without sex or passions has

been shown to be baseless by later discoveries, and that the figure is

connected in at least one example with an inscription to Arimanes or

Ahriman[897]. M. Cumont has himself noted the confusion which a

Christian, writing before the abolition of the Mithras worship, makes

between the statues of Hecate, goddess of hell and patroness of

sorcerers, and those of the lion-headed monster[898], and Hecate’s

epithet of Περσείη can only be explained by some similar

association[899]. At the same time, M. Cumont makes it plain that the

Mithraists did not regard these infernal powers Ahriman and Hecate with

the horror and loathing which the reformed Zoroastrian religion

afterwards heaped upon the antagonist of Ormuzd[900]. On the contrary

the dedications of several altars and statues show that they paid them

worship and offered them sacrifices, as the Greeks did to Hades and

Persephone, the lord and lady of hell, of whom the Mithraists probably

considered them the Persian equivalents. From all these facts, the

conclusion seems inevitable that the lion-headed monster represents

Ahriman, the consort of Hecate[901].

If we now look at the religious literature of the time when the worship

of Mithras was coming into favour, we find a pretty general consensus of

opinion that the chthonian or infernal god represented in the earlier

Persian religion by this Ahriman, was a power who might be the rival of,

but was not necessarily the mortal enemy of Zeus. Whether Neander be

right or not in asserting that the prevailing tendency of the age was

towards Dualism[902], it is certain that most civilized nations had then

come to the conclusion that on this earth the bad is always mixed up

with the good. Plutarch puts this clearly enough when he says that

nature here below comes not from one, but from two opposed principles

and contending powers, and this opinion, he tells us, is a most ancient

one which has come down from expounders of myths (θεολόγοι) and

legislators to poets and philosophers, and is expressed “not in words

and phrases, but in mysteries and sacrifices, and has been found in many

places among both Barbarians and Greeks[903].” The same idea of

antagonistic powers is, of course, put in a much stronger form in the

reformed Persian religion, where the incursion of Ahriman into the

kingdom of Ormuzd brings upon the earth all evil in the shape of winter,

prolonged drought, storms, disease, and beasts and plants hurtful to

man[904]. But this does not seem to have been the view of Ahriman’s

functions taken by the older Magism, whence the worship of Mithras was

probably derived[905]. In Mithraism, it is not Ahriman, as in the

_Bundahish_, but Mithras, the vicegerent of Ormuzd, who slays the mystic

Bull, and by so doing he brings good and not evil to the earth. Nowhere

do we find in the Mithraic sculptures any allusion to Ahriman as a god

of evil pure and simple, or as one who is for ever opposed to the

heavenly powers. We do, indeed, find in several Mithraea representations

of a Titanomachia where the Titans, represented as men with serpent

legs, are depicted as fleeing before a god like the Greek Zeus who

strikes them with his thunderbolts[906]. But this is not more

necessarily suggestive of two irreconcilable principles than the Greek

story of the Titans, those sons of Earth who were persuaded by their

mother to make war upon their father Uranos, who put their brother

Kronos upon his throne, and who were in their turn hurled from heaven by

Kronos’ son Zeus. Even if we do not accept the later myth which

reconciles Zeus to his adversaries[907], the story does not go further

than to say that the Titans attempted to gain heaven and were thrust

back to their own proper dwelling-place, the earth.

It is in this way, as it would seem, that the lion-headed monster of the

Mithraic chapels must be explained. Ahriman, the god girt with the

serpent which represents the earth, has rebelled against Ormuzd or

Jupiter, and has been marked with the thunderbolt which has cast him

down from heaven. But he remains none the less lord of his own domain,

the earth, his sway over which is shown by the sceptre which he wields

while standing upon it[908]. As for the keys which he bears, they are

doubtless those of the gates behind which he keeps the souls and bodies

of men, as the Orphics said, imprisoned, until he is compelled to

release them by a higher power[909]. In all this, his functions do not

go beyond those of the Greek Hades, with whom Plutarch equates him.

It is however, possible that he was conceived by the Mithraists as

occupying a slightly different place in the material universe from that

of his Greek prototype. The true realm of Hades was generally placed by

the Greeks below the earth, but that of the Mithraic Ahriman may

possibly be just outside it. M. Cumont shows many reasons for supposing

the lion-headed god to be connected with the idea of destiny[910], and

in one of the very few contemporary writings which make distinct

allusion to the Mithraic tenets, there is something which confirms this

view. This occurs in a fragment embedded, as it were, in a Magic Papyrus

or sorcerer’s handbook now in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris[911].

The document itself is probably not, as Prof. Albert Dieterich has too

boldly asserted, a “Mithraic Liturgy”; but it is evidently connected in

some way with the Mithraic worship and begins with a statement that the

writer is a priest who has received inspiration from “the great Sun-God

Mithras.” M. Georges Lafaye is of opinion that it narrates in

apocalyptic fashion the adventures of the soul of a perfect Mithraist on

its way to heaven, and this is probably correct, although it is here

told for no purpose of edification but as a spell or charm[912]. The

soul, if it be indeed she who is speaking, repeatedly complains to the

gods whom she meets—including one in white tunic, crimson mantle and

anaxyrides or Persian trousers who may be Mithras himself—of “the harsh

and inexorable necessity” which has been compelling her so long as she

remained in the “lower nature[913].” But the Sphere of Destiny or

necessity, as we have seen in the _Pistis Sophia_, was thought to be the

one immediately surrounding the earth, and although the document in

which we have before met with this idea belongs to a different set of

religious beliefs than those here treated of, it is probable that both

Gnostic and Mithraist drew it from the astrological theories current at

the time which came into the Hellenistic world from Babylon. It is

therefore extremely probable that the Mithraists figured Ahriman as

ruling the earth from the sphere immediately outside it, and this would

agree well with his position _upon_ the globe in the monuments where he

appears. It is some confirmation of this that, in another part of the

Papyrus just quoted, the “World-ruler” (Cosmocrator) is invoked as “the

Great Serpent, leader of these gods, who holds the source of Egypt [Qy,

The Nile?] and the end of the whole inhabited world [in his hands], who

begets in Ocean Pshoi (_i.e._ Fate) the god of gods[914]”; while the

Great Dragon or Outer Darkness in the _Pistis Sophia_ is said to

surround the earth. That both orthodox Christians and Gnostics like the

Valentinians looked upon the Devil, who, as lord of hell, was sometimes

identified with Hades, as the Cosmocrator or World-Ruler requires no

further demonstration[915], and in this particular as in others the

Mithraists may have drawn from the same source as the Gnostic

teachers[916].

That they did so in a related matter can be shown by direct evidence.

Like the Ophites of the Diagram before described, the Mithraists thought

that the soul descended to the body through seven spheres which were

those of the “planets” Saturn, Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, the Moon,

and the Sun in that order, which Origen, who mentions the fact, says

that the Persian theology declared to be symbolized “by the names of the

rest of matter,” and also gave for it “musical reasons[917].” He further

describes the different qualities which the soul in her passage receives

from each sphere, and which it seems fair to conclude she gives back to

them on her reascension. M. Cumont is no doubt right when he attributes

the origin of this tenet to the _mathematici_ or astrologers and says

that it too came originally from Chaldaea[918]. The seven heavens are

also found in many Oriental documents of the time, including the _Book

of the Secrets of Enoch_[919] and the _Apocalypse of Baruch_[920].

According to Origen, they were symbolized in the Mithraic chapels by a

ladder of eight steps, the first seven being of the metals peculiar to

the different planets, _i.e._ lead, tin, copper, iron, an alloy of

several metals, silver, and gold, with the eighth step representing the

heaven of the fixed stars[921]. The Stoics who held similar views,

following therein perhaps the Platonic cosmogony, had already fixed the

gate of the sky through which the souls left the heaven of the fixed

stars on their descent to the earth in Cancer, and that by which they

reascended in Capricorn[922], which probably accounts for the two keys

borne by the lion-headed god on the Mithraic monuments, and for those

two Zodiacal signs being displayed on his body. The other two signs,

_viz._ Aries and Libra, may possibly refer to the places in a horoscope

or genethliacal figure which the astrologers of the time called the

_Porta laboris_ and _Janua Ditis_ respectively, as denoting the gate by

which man “born to labour” enters life, and the “gate of Hades” by which

he leaves it[923]. If, as Porphyry says, the doctrine of metempsychosis

formed part of the Mithraic teaching, the keys would thus have a meaning

analogous to the Orphic release from “the wheel[924].”

The other gods who appear on the Mithraic monuments are those known to

us in classical mythology and are represented under the usual human

forms made familiar by Greek and Roman art. By the side of, but in a

subordinate position to Jupiter, we find, if M. Cumont be justified in

his identifications, nearly all the “great gods” of the Greco-Roman

pantheon. Five of these, that is to say, Jupiter himself, Saturn, Mars,

Venus, and Mercury may be intended as symbols of the planets which, then

as now, bore these names. But there are others such as Juno, Neptune and

Amphitrite, Pluto and Proserpine, Apollo, Vulcan, and Hercules who

cannot by any possibility be considered as planetary signs[925]. M.

Cumont’s theory about these divinities is, if one understands him

rightly, that these are really Persian or Avestic gods, such as

Verethragna, represented under the classic forms of their Greek

counterparts to make them attractive to their Roman worshippers[926].

This does not seem very probable, because the Persians did not figure

their gods in human form[927]. Nor is there any reason to think that the

Mithraists confined themselves to the _theocrasia_ or the practice of

discovering their own gods in the divinities of the peoples around them

which we have seen so rife in Greece, Italy, and Egypt. But in the age

when the worship of Mithras became popular in the Roman Empire, all

paganism was groping its way towards a religion which should include and

conciliate all others, and there is much evidence that the votaries of

Mithras were especially determined that this religion should be their

own. Isis, as we have seen, might proclaim herself as the one divinity

whom under many names and in many forms the whole earth adored; but the

Mithraists apparently went further and tried to show that their religion

contained within itself all the rest. They appear to have first gained

access to Rome under an alliance with the priests of Cybele, whose

image, with its emasculated attendants the Galli, was transported from

Pergamum to the Eternal City during the critical moments of the Second

Punic War[928]. Externally there were many analogies between the two

cults, and Cybele’s consort Attis, like Mithras, was always represented

in a Phrygian cap and anaxyrides. One of the most impressive, if most

disgusting practices in the religion of Cybele—the Taurobolium or

blood-bath in which a bull was slaughtered over a pit covered with

planks pierced with holes through which the blood of the victim dripped

upon the naked votary below—was borrowed by the Mithraists, and many of

them boast on their funereal inscriptions that they have undergone this

ceremony and thereby, as they express it, have been “born again.” The

_clarissimi_ and high officials of the Empire who have left records of

the kind are careful to note that they are worshippers of “the Great

Mother” (Cybele) and Attis, as well as of Mithras[929], and a similar

statement occurs so frequently on the funereal and other inscriptions of

their wives as to lead to the hypothesis that the ceremonies of the

Phrygian Goddess were the natural refuge of Mithras’ female

votaries[930]. So, too, the worship of the Alexandrian divinities, which

that of Mithras in some sort supplanted, and which, as being as popular

in the Greek world as the last-named was in the Latin, might have been

expected to be hostile to it, yet had relations with it not very easy to

be understood. In the assembly of the gods which in some of the

monuments crowns the arch set over the Tauroctony, the central place is

in one instance taken by Sarapis with the distinctive _modius_ on his

head instead of Zeus or Jupiter[931], the same priest often describes

himself as serving the altars of both gods, and “Zeus, Helios, Mithras,

Sarapis, unconquered one!” is invoked in one of those spells in the

Magic Papyri which contain fragments of ritual prayers or hymns[932].

Possibly it is for this reason, that the initiating priest in Apuleius’

story whom the grateful Lucius says he regards as his father, is named

Mithras, as if the initiate had been led to the Mysteries of Isis

through the worship of that god[933].

The same syncretistic tendency is particularly marked in the leaning of

the Mithraists to the worship of the gods of Eleusis. “Consecrated to

Liber [the Latin name of Dionysos] and the Eleusinian [goddesses],”

“Mystes of Ceres,” “priest” or “Chief Herdsman (_archibucolus_) of the

god Liber,” “hierophant of Father Liber and the Hecates,” “Consecrated

at Eleusis to the god Bacchus, Ceres, and Cora” are some of the

distinctions which the devotees of Mithras vaunt on their

tombstones[934]; while we learn that when the last survivors of the two

sacred families who had for centuries furnished priests to the

Eleusinian Mysteries died out, the Athenians sent for a priest of

Mithras from one of the neighbouring islands, and handed over to him the

care of the sacred rites[935]. It is even possible that the complaisance

of the Mithraists for other religions went further than has hitherto

been suspected. Not only does Justin Martyr after describing the

celebration of the Christian Eucharist say,

“Wherefore also the evil demons in mimicry have handed down that the

same thing should be done in the Mysteries of Mithras. For that

bread and a cup of water are in these mysteries set before the

initiate with certain speeches you either know or can learn[936]”;

but we know from Porphyry that the initiate into the rites of Mithras

underwent a baptism by total immersion which was said to expiate his

sins[937]. Among the worshippers of Mithras, on the same authority, were

also virgins and others vowed to continence[938], and we hear that the

Mithraists used, like the Christians, to call each other “Brother” and

address their priests as “Father[939].” St Augustine tells us that in

his time the priests of Mithras were in the habit of saying, “That One

in the Cap [_i.e._ Mithras] is a Christian too!” and it is not unlikely

that the claim was seriously made[940]. During the reigns of the Second

Flavian Emperors and before Constantine’s pact with the Church, we hear

of hymns sung by the legionaries which could be chanted in common by

Christians, Mithraists, and the worshippers of that Sun-God the

adoration of whom was hereditary or traditional in the Flavian

House[941]. The Mithraists also observed Sunday and kept sacred the 25th

of December as the birthday of the sun[942].

Of the other rites and ceremonies used in the worship of Mithras we know

next to nothing. As appears from the authors last quoted, the whole of

the worship was conducted in “mysteries” or secret ceremonies like the

Eleusinian and the rites of the Alexandrian divinities, although on a

more extended scale. The Mithraic mysteries always took place in a

subterranean vault or “cave,” lighted only by artificial light. The

ruins of many of these have been found, and are generally so small as to

be able to accommodate only a few worshippers[943], whence perhaps it

followed that there were often several Mithraea in the same town or

city[944]. The chief feature seems to have been always the scene of the

Tauroctony or Bull-slaying which was displayed on the apse or further

end of the chapel, and was generally carved in bas-relief although

occasionally rendered in the round. The effect of this was sought to be

heightened by brilliant colouring, perhaps made necessary by the dim

light, and there were certainly altars of the square or triangular

pedestal type, and a well or other source from which water could be

obtained. The benches for the worshippers were of stone and ran at right

angles to and on either side of the Tauroctony, so as to resemble the

choir stalls in the chancel of a modern church[945]. We have seen that

the lion-headed figure was concealed from the eyes of the worshippers,

and we know that they used to kneel during at least part of the service,

which was not in accord with the practice of either the Greeks or

Romans, who were accustomed to stand with upturned palms when praying to

the gods[946]. Sacrifices of animals which, if we may judge from the

débris left in some of the chapels, were generally birds[947], seem to

have been made; but there is no reason to believe the accusation

sometimes brought against the Mithraists that they also slaughtered

human victims in honour of their god. Lampridius tells us, on the other

hand, that the Emperor Commodus on his initiation sullied the temple by

converting a feigned into a real murder[948], and we hear from another

and later source that in consequence of this only a bloody sword was

shown to the candidate[949]. It seems therefore that somebody was

supposed to suffer death during the ceremony, perhaps under the same

circumstances as already suggested in the kindred case of the

Alexandrian Mysteries[950].

We are a little better informed as to the degrees of initiation, which

numbered seven. The initiate ascended from the degree of Crow

(_corax_), which was the first or lowest, to that of Father (_Pater_),

which was the seventh or highest, by passing successively through the

intermediate degrees of Man of the Secret (_Cryphius_), Soldier

(_Miles_), Lion (_Leo_), Persian (_Perses_), and Courier of the Sun

(_Heliodromus_)[951]. It would seem that either he, or the initiating

priests, or perhaps the other assistants, had to assume disguises

consisting of masks corresponding to the animals named in the first

and fourth of these degrees, and to make noises like the croaking of

birds and the roaring of lions[952]. These rightly recall to M. Cumont

the names of animals borne by initiates or priests in other religions

in Greece and Asia Minor and may be referred to totemistic times. We

also know from a chance allusion of Tertullian that on being admitted

to the degree of soldier, the initiate was offered a crown or garland

at the point of a sword, which he put away from him with the speech,

“Mithras is my crown!”, and that never thereafter might he wear a

garland even at a feast[953]. Porphyry, too, tells us that in the

degree of Lion, the initiate’s hands and lips were purified with

honey. It has also been said by the Fathers that before or during

initiation, the candidate had to undergo certain trials or tortures,

to swim rivers, plunge through fire, and to jump from apparently vast

heights[954]; but it is evident from the small size of the Mithraea or

chapels which have come down to us that these experiences would have

demanded much more elaborate preparation than there was space for,

and, if they were ever enacted, were probably as purely “make-believe”

as the supposed murder just mentioned and some of the initiatory

ceremonies in certain societies of the present day[955]. Lastly, there

is no doubt that women were strictly excluded from all the ceremonies

of the cult, thereby justifying in some sort the remark of Renan that

Mithraism was a “Pagan Freemasonry[956].”

It has also been said that the true inwardness and faith of the religion

of Mithras was in these mysteries only gradually and with great caution

revealed to the initiates, whose fitness for them was tested at every

step[957]. It may be so, but it is plain that the Mithraist was informed

at the outset of at least a good many of the tenets of the faith. The

whole Legend of Mithras, so far as we know it, must have been known to

the initiate soon after entering the Mithraic chapel, since we have

ourselves gathered it mainly from the different scenes depicted on the

borders of the great central group of the Tauroctony. So, too, the

mystic banquet or Mithraic Sacrament which, if the Heddernheim monuments

stood alone, we might consider was concealed from the eyes of the lower

initiates until the proper moment came, also forms one of the subsidiary

scenes of the great altar piece in the chapels at Sarmizegetusa, Bononia

and many other places[958]. In a bas-relief at Sarrebourg, moreover, the

two principal persons at the banquet, _i.e._ Mithras and the Sun, are

shown surrounded by other figures wearing the masks of crows and perhaps

lions[959], which looks as if initiates of all grades were admitted to

the sacramental banquet. One can therefore make no profitable conjecture

as to what particular doctrines were taught in the particular degrees,

though there seems much likelihood in M. Cumont’s statement that the

initiates were thought to take rank in the next world according to the

degree that they had received in this[960]. The belief that “those who

have received humble mysteries shall have humble places and those that

have received exalted mysteries exalted places” in the next world was,

we may be sure, too profitable a one for the priests of Mithras to be

neglected by them. It certainly explains the extraordinary order for the

planetary spheres adopted by Origen[961], according to which the souls

which had taken the lowest degree would go to the heaven of Saturn,

slowest and most unlucky of the planets, while those perfected in the

faith would enter the glorious house of the Sun.

Whether they were thought to go further still, we can only guess. It

should be noticed that the mystic ladder of Mithras had _eight_ steps,

and we have seen that when the soul had climbed through the seven

planetary spheres there was still before her the heaven of the fixed

stars. The Sun seems in Origen’s account of the Mithraic faith to have

formed the last world to be traversed before this highest heaven could

be reached; and it was through the disk of the Sun that the ancients

thought the gods descended to and reascended from the earth. This idea

appears plainly in the Papyrus quoted above, where the Mithraist is

represented as an eagle who flies upwards “and alone” to heaven and

there beholds all things[962]. He prays that he may, in spite of his

mortal and corruptible nature, behold with immortal eyes after having

been hallowed with holy hallowings, “the deathless aeon, lord of the

fiery crowns,” and that “the corruptible nature of mortals” which has

been imposed upon him by “inexorable Necessity” may depart from him.

“Then,” says the author of the fragment—which, it will be remembered,

claims to be a revelation given by the archangel of the great Sun-God

Mithras—the initiate “will see the gods who rule each day and hour

ascending to heaven and others descending, and the path of the visible

gods through the disk of the god my father will appear.” He describes

the machinery of nature by which the winds are produced, which seems to

be figured on some of the Mithraic monuments, and which reminds one of

the physics supposed to be revealed in the Enochian literature. Then,

after certain spells have been recited, the initiate sees the disk of

the Sun, which opens, disclosing “doors of fire and the world of the

gods within them.” Then follow more invocations to the gods of the seven

planetary worlds who appear in due course, and presumably give him

admission to their realms. After another invocation, in what may

possibly be some Asianic or Anatolian language very much corrupted, the

initiate beholds “a young god, beautiful, with fiery hair, in white

tunic and purple mantle, and having on his head a crown of fire,” who

seems to be Helios or Sol, the driver of the sun’s chariot on the

Mithraic monuments. He is saluted as “Mighty in strength, mighty ruler,

greatest king of gods! O Sun, lord of heaven and earth, God of Gods!”

Next appear “seven virgins in linen robes having the heads of serpents,”

who are called “the seven Fortunes of heaven” and are, as M. Georges

Lafaye surmises, the seven stars of the constellation of the Great

Bear[963]. They are followed by seven male gods also dressed in linen

robes and with golden crowns, but equipped with the heads of black

bulls, who are called “the rulers of the Pole.” These are they, we are

told, who send upon the impious thunders and lightnings and earthquakes.

And so we are led at last to the apparition of “a god of extraordinary

stature, having a glance of fire, young and golden-haired, in white

tunic and golden crown, clothed in anaxyrides, holding in his right hand

the golden shoulder of a young bull.” This, _i.e._ the shoulder, we are

told, is called “Arctos, who moves the sky, making it to turn forwards

and backwards according to the hour.” But the god appears to be intended

for Mithras, and the shoulder of the bull is probably an allusion to the

bull-slaying scene which may serve to show that there were more

interpretations than one placed upon the Tauroctony. The initiate hails

this god as “Lord of water, consecrator of the earth, ruler of the air,

shining-rayed One, of primeval rays!” and the like, and continues:

“O Lord, having been born again, I die! Having increased and again

increasing, I come to an end by life-begotten birth, and coming into

existence, and having been released unto death, I pursue my way, as

thou hast ordered from the beginning, as thou hast ordained: And

having accomplished the mystery, I am _Pheroura miouri_.”

Here the fragment abruptly breaks off, and plunges into directions for

the manufacture of oracles and the other stuff common in Magic Papyri.

One is not much inclined to believe with M. Cumont that the author of

the galimatias knew nothing about Mithraism[964], and merely introduced

Mithras’ name into his opening to impress his readers with a sense of

the value of his recipes. It seems more likely that the writer of the

fragment had really got hold of some part of a Mithraic ritual, which he

had read without understanding it, and that he was trying to work more

or less meaningless extracts from it into his spells on the same

principle that the sorcerers of the European Renaissance used when they

took similar liberties with the words of the Mass. If this view be

adopted, it follows that the concluding words given above confirm the

view that the Mithraists, like the Orphics before them, taught the

metempsychosis or reincarnation of souls[965]. Did the Mithraist think

that his soul, when released from this “dread necessity,” finally

escaped from even the planetary spheres and, raising itself into the

heaven of the fixed stars, became united with the Deity Himself? We can

only ask the question without being able to suggest an answer supported

by any evidence.

With regard to the priests who acted as celebrants in these strange

mysteries, there are instances to be found in the inscriptions which

make it plain that the priestly office was not confined or attached to

any particular degree of initiation. _Pater Patrum_ (Father of Fathers)

is a designation which occurs too frequently on the monuments for it to

mean anything but eldest or president of those who had taken the seventh

or highest degree in one congregation[966]. But _Sacerdos_ or _Antistes_

indifferently is the name by which the priest of Mithras is described by

himself and others, and the holding of the office seems not to have been

inconsistent with the tenure at once of other priesthoods and of high

office in the State. Thus the _clarissimus_ Vettius Agorius

Praetextatus, who was Urban Praetor, Proconsul of Achaea, Prefect of the

City, Prefect of the Praetorians of Italy and Illyricum, and Consul

Designate at the time of his death, was Father of Fathers in the

religion of Mithras besides being Pontiff of the Sun and Pontiff of

Vesta[967]. This was at a very late date, when probably only a man of

high civil rank dared avow on his tombstone, as did Vettius, his

fidelity to the god; but earlier, we find Lucius Septimius, a freedman

of Severus, Caracalla, and Geta, acting as “Father and Priest of the

Unconquered Mithras in the Augustan house”—evidently a Court chaplain—,

and a certain _clarissimus_ Alfenius Julianus Kamenius who is of

consular rank, a quaestor and a praetor, as a “father of the sacred

things of the Highest Unconquered One Mithras[968].” So, too, we find a

veteran of the IVth Flavian Legion acting as _pater sacrorum_, a

decurion as _antistes_ and another as _sacerdos_ of Mithras[969].

Evidently, the cares of the priesthood did not occupy the priest’s whole

time, and he never seems to have lived in the temple as did the clergy

of the Alexandrian divinities. There was, on the faith of Porphyry, a

_summus pontifex_ or Supreme Pontiff of Mithras, who like the Christian

bishop in the Epistle to Timothy was forbidden to marry more than

once[970]; but this was probably a high officer of State appointed

directly by the Emperor. No proof is forthcoming that a fire was kept

perpetually burning on the altar in the European chapels of Mithras, as

perhaps was the case with the temples of the faith in Asia Minor, or

that daily or any other regularly repeated services were held there, and

such services moreover could seldom have been attended by the soldiers

with the colours, who seem to have made up the majority of the god’s

worshippers. Prayers to the Sun-God and other deities were no doubt

offered by Mithraists, possibly at sunrise and sunset, and perhaps

special ones on the first day of the week, which they very likely held

sacred to their god. But the small size of the Mithraea, and the scanty

number of the members of the associations supporting each[971], make it

extremely unlikely that there was anything like regular congregational

worship, or that the faithful assembled there except for initiations or

meetings for conferring the different degrees. The extremely poor

execution of the bas-reliefs and other sculptures found in the majority

of these chapels all points the same way. Most of these, together with

the furniture and what are nowadays called “articles de culte,” were

presented to the chapel by private members of the association[972]. The

fact that the congregations of many chapels must have frequently changed

by the shifting of garrisons from one end of the Empire to the other

caused by the operations of war both external and civil, also helps to

account for their temporary and poverty-stricken appearance when

compared with the great and stately temples reared to rival gods like

Serapis.