Some Notes on a Forgotten Religion

In the first centuries of our era several religions vied with Christianity for the domination of the then known western world. The most important of these rivals was Mithraism.

A single universal religion had only become possible as a result of the unifying influence of the Roman Empire. The conquests of Rome from the time of the Carthaginian wars until those of Vespasian, Trajan and Septimius Severus had brought into communion with one another peoples from Africa, Britain, Germany, the Danube basin, Asia Minor and even as far as the Euphrates. The Roman peace during the first three centuries allowed trade and commerce to flourish throughout the length and breadth of the Empire. There was a continuous movement of people and of ideas. Religions which at one time had only a local following soon spread to other parts of the Empire. The earliest important instance of this is the worship of the Magna Mater which arrived at Rome as early as 204 B.C. during the second Carthaginian war. Isis and Serapis made their appearance in Rome in the first century before Christ. The Carthaginian Astarte had a temple in the capital from the end of the Punic wars.

The god Mitra was worshipped by the ancient Persians and Indians at a period before they split into two separate ethnic groups. In the earliest times he was invariably coupled with Ahura, ruler of the sky, as joint sovereign of the world. He was the god of Light and it is in this form that he appears to the Mitanni, a people who inhabited North Mesopotamia about 1350 B.C. The Persian rulers subsequently worshipped him as a god of Truth. In the Zoroastrian system he lost his supreme position in the divine hierarchy and was relegated to an inferior role. He became the protector of warriors as well as the god who confers prosperity. He was rarely invoked alone and with two other deities he protected the souls of the righteous in the next world.