Truls Ljungström’s Reviews > RELIG MITHRAS CULT ROMAN EMP:MYSTERIES UNCONQ SUN PAPER: Mysteries of the Unconquered Sun > Status Update

Hunden, Ormen, Korpen, Skorpionen; betydelser av.

Mithradeet användes (kanske) som ett solur rituellt sett.

Chamulas sol/månsystem

n a peculiar idiom. This idiom is a form or jargon of
one of Graeco-Roman culture’s most pervasive languages, the language of astronomy and astrology.

"Star-talk" I do not intend merely talk in words or symbols about the stars.
I intend also, following the ancients’ own conception of the stars as language signs and the heavens as text, the talk of the stars.

I shall distinguish 4 modes in which, singly or concurrently, the symbol
system of the Mithraic mysteries could be apprehended by its initiates: (1) ritual action; (2) the perception of meaningful iconography; (3) the giving and receiving of words (logia, explications, teaching, esoteric epigraphic phrases, etc.); (4) ethical behaviour consonant with the mysteries (e.g. Mithraic Lions behave esoterically leonine way)

2. ‘harmony of tension in opposition’.

(inherited of course from Judaism) and acceptance of Jesus as the effective redeemer, the latter encapsulated in the saying ‘Christ is Lord’.
For the Mithraic mysteries I shall propose, likewise, just two axioms (ultimate sacred postulates):
1. deus sol invictus mithras ; it establishes that the religion’s eVective power is a god, is the sun, is unconquered, is mithras.

In this sense, all Mithraic axioms are now invalid because there are no Mithraists left to live by them. An example, often cited by Rappaport,7 of a religious axiom is the Jewish Shema (‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One’), words which are ideally the first a child learns and the last the dying hope to utter. Theissen (1999) finds just two axioms for the early Christian churches, covenantal monotheism

a phrase from a passage of Origen, Contra Celsum 1.12. Origen claims that a distinction which he drew within Egyptian religion between the approaches of the wise and the vulgar is valid also for the ‘Persians’ (by whom he means Mithraists).
The ‘mysteries’ (teletai) of the Persians, he says, ‘are cultivated rationally by the erudite but realized symbolically by common, rather superficial persons (trans. Chadwick).