Mithra and the old Iranian gods

The Iranian peoples shared a religious world with the peoples of ancient India long before either wrote anything down. The clearest witness is a treaty of about 1380 BCE between the Hittite king and the kingdom of Mitanni in northern Mesopotamia, which calls on Mitra, Varuna, Indra and the Nasatyas: names that also appear in the Rig Veda. Among the Iranians several of these older divinities survived Zarathushtra’s reform and entered the Avesta as yazatas, ‘beings worthy of worship’, honoured under Ahura Mazda. Others, the daevas, were demoted, and the word became Persian div, a demon.

The greatest of the survivors is Mithra (Avestan Mithra, Middle Persian Mihr, Persian Mehr). His name means ‘contract’ or ‘covenant’, and his long hymn, the Mihr Yasht, shows him as a watchful god of a thousand ears and ten thousand eyes who punishes the breaker of promises, rides before the sun and guards the pastures. Because a covenant binds people together, Mehr also came to mean friendship and love, and in modern Persian mehr is affection and the name of the autumn month. The festival of Mehregan falls in it.

Beside him stand Aredvi Sura Anahita, the ‘moist, strong, undefiled’ lady of the waters, praised in the Aban Yasht; Tishtrya, the star Sirius, who battles drought and gives his name to the month of Tir; Verethragna, god of victory, who became Bahram; and Haoma, the sacred plant and its pressed juice. The Achaemenid king Artaxerxes II broke with the habit of his predecessors and named Anahita and Mithra alongside Ahuramazda in his inscriptions at Susa and Hamadan. Centuries later, at Taq-e Bostan near Kermanshah, a Sasanian relief shows a figure with a rayed halo, widely identified as Mithra, standing on a lotus at the investiture of a king.

Mithra is not Mithras

A Roman cult of a god called Mithras spread through the army and the trading towns of the empire from the late first century CE to the fourth. Its initiates met in small cave-like temples, mithraea, under an image of the god slaying a bull, and passed through seven grades. In the early twentieth century the Belgian scholar Franz Cumont argued that this was Iranian religion carried west. Since the 1970s most specialists have rejected the direct line. They see Roman Mithraism as a new mystery cult that borrowed a Persian name, Persian dress and a Persian aura of ancient wisdom, while its bull-slaying, its grades and its star lore have no clear Iranian source. The Iranian Mithra was worshipped openly as a god of covenant; the Roman Mithras was a secret saviour of initiates. They share a name and some light, not a creed.

Between the two lies the kingdom of Commagene, where Antiochus I set up colossal statues on Nemrut Dağ in the first century BCE, naming one god as Apollo-Mithras-Helios-Hermes. The Kushan kings of Bactria struck coins with a solar god labelled Miiro. In Armenia, Mihr had a temple before the conversion to Christianity.

What remains

The old gods live on in names: Mehrdad, Mehran and Mehri; Bahram; Nahid, the Persian form of Anahita; Tir and Mehr in the calendar. Many Iranians link the winter-solstice night of Yalda to the birth of Mithra. That link is a modern popular reading rather than a documented ancient rite, but the love of the longest night is old, and real.