Keith’s Reviews > The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World > Status Update

I find Mithraism pretty weird. Pretty weird.

I'm still learning, so I haven't formed much of an opinion, but so far it doesn't sound any weirder than eating the flesh of the executed son of Sky-Daddy, or killing people who refuse to follow the contradictory sayings of an illiterate camel herder

I find it a lot weirder. Eating the flesh of the executed son of the Sky-Daddy combines the most ubiquitous religious images in the world's heritage. When you strip it of its historically-contingent wrappings, the core symbols are at the heart of symbolic consciousness. The child of the spirit, not the child of the flesh. Death and resurrection, time and eternity. The ceremony by which we become one with the mystery.

Add to that the timeless existential-political message - the world being what it is, would you doubt that the son of God would be executed by the state as quickly as possible? As The The put it, "If the real Jesus Christ were to stand up today / He'd be gunned down cold by the CIA."

In the late classical cults like Mithraism, many of the symbols seems to stand for themselves and nothing else, or to be symbols of symbols, like signs for the zodiac. To me, they feel deeply unrooted in the human spirit, and more like arbitrary symbolic systems. I think that's not a bad working definition for what I would call esoteric systems - the central focus moves to the symbols as such, and away from their human meaning.

I've seen many Mithraic shrines and statues in my travel around Europe, and to me, it's like the Mormonism of the late classical age. A hodgepodge of cleaved-together symbols propagated by soldiers who don't themselves have much religious depth, serving more as a badge of allegiance than a gateway to deeper experience.

I daresay that the mass of popular religiosity—regardless of whatever deeper meaning may be contained within for those with the skill & inclination to draw it out—amounts to very little more, and frankly too often rather less, than what you so aptly call "more… a badge of allegiance than a gateway to deeper experience." But I think too that I've always been more cynical than you.