Mithra

Mithra (Avestan Miθra, Old Persian Mitra/Miθra, later Mihr) is among the most ancient gods of the Iranian world, and one of the very few whose worship the Iranians can be shown to have carried, already fully formed, out of the Indo-Iranian past they shared with the Vedic Indians. His Indian counterpart is the Ṛgvedic Mitra, and the correspondence runs so deep, in name and in function alike, that the god must be older than the parting of the two peoples. What he is the god of is unusually plain, because his name is also a common noun that the language kept using: miθra means "contract", with the whole train of senses that word gathers, covenant, agreement, treaty, alliance, promise, the binding word between men. Mithra is that word made a god, and to grasp him one must hold the deity and the noun together, as the Magi and the poets of the Avesta did.

The name: Miθra, "contract"

The recognition that miθra is the common noun "contract" was won in the nineteenth century and codified by Christian Bartholomae in his Altiranisches Wörterbuch of 1904; but it was Antoine Meillet, in a short paper of 1907, who drew the decisive conclusion, that the abstract meaning of the noun "largely agrees with the character and functions of the god", so that Mithra is best understood as "the personification and deification of the concept contract" (Meillet, cited via Schmidt's Encyclopaedia Iranica article).^[1] This corrected an older habit, going back through Bartholomae himself, of taking Mithra first as a sun-god or a god of light and deriving the contract-sense secondarily from that; the truth is the reverse, or at least the covenant is primary and the solar association a later accretion (below). De Jong states the point plainly: the name "means 'contract' and guarding or overseeing contracts is one of his oldest functions", a function "especially prominent in Yt. 10", the hymn to Mithra.^[2] Boyce puts it the same way, that the common noun mithra "demonstrably" means "pact, contract, covenant".^[3]

The range of the noun is caught in two Avestan passages that the philologists return to. In the Vidēvdād (4.2) there is a scale of miθras graded by how they are struck, a contract concluded by word, one by handshake, and then contracts reckoned in the value of a sheep, an ox, a man, or a land, each with its penalty for breach. And the Mihr Yašt itself (10.116-17) grades the sanctity of contracts by the relationship they bind: twenty-fold between friends, thirty-fold between fellow-citizens, fifty-fold between husband and wife, seventy-fold between pupil and teacher, a hundred-fold between father and son, a thousand-fold between two countries, and ten-thousand-fold the miθra of the Religion itself, whose breach would be apostasy. Because that list folds in natural bonds of blood, the sense here widens past "contract" toward "alliance", the more encompassing notion, and it is alliance (the moral tie on which a society at peace depends) that predominates in the hymn. One small technical point should be recorded honestly: the genuine Old Persian form of the name would have been Miça, and the Mitra/Miθra found in the royal inscriptions is not the regular Persian development but a form imported or preserved from the wider Iranian tradition (Schmidt, Encyclopaedia Iranica).^[4]

"He of the wide pastures": the god of the Mihr Yašt

The great Avestan document of the god is the tenth Yašt, the Mihr Yašt, the hymn to Mithra, the fullest and one of the finest of the Yašts, edited and translated in Ilya Gershevitch's classic study The Avestan Hymn to Mithra (1959).^[5] It opens with an astonishing sanction: Ahura Mazdā declares that when he created Mithra, he made him "as worthy of worship and prayer as myself" (Yt. 10.1).^[6] What follows is a portrait of a god of enormous reach and vigilance. He is a warrior who drives a chariot across the sky, his chief weapon the mace; he is attended by a retinue of lesser divine beings, Sraoša (Obedience), Rašnu (the Judge), the fravashis, and above all Vərəθraγna (Victory), who as a boar does the truly bloody work against the enemy. He brings the rain and makes the plants grow for the land whose ruler keeps faith (Yt. 10.61), and withholds them where the covenant is broken.

His single most frequent epithet is vouru.gaoiiaoiti, "of the wide cattle-pastures", "he of wide pastures", and it is not idle scenery: cattle can graze the open range in safety only where neighbours keep the peace, that is, where the miθra between peoples holds, so the epithet names precisely the condition the covenant-god secures. He is "the lord of the country", indeed "the lord of the country of all countries" (Yt. 10.145), the drawer of borderlines that keep neighbours from strife (Yt. 10.61), master of both peace and war. The welfare of a whole land is made to hang on the good faith of its ruler, which is why the hymn dwells so on the ruin that follows when a lord, a clansman, or a king breaks his word.

The all-seeing enemy of the mithra-druj

Because Mithra oversees every covenant, he must see everything, and the Mihr Yašt makes him the very type of the all-seeing god. He is "ever wakeful", sleepless (Yt. 10.7); he has "a thousand ears and ten thousand eyes", with watchers posted "on every height and every outlook" (Yt. 10.45); he watches even in the dark (Yt. 10.141); with his long arms he reaches out and seizes the liar whether the man is in the east or the west (Yt. 10.104); and he catches the very person who imagines that the god does not see his evil and deceitful deeds (Yt. 10.105). Against this watchfulness the oath-breaker has no cover.

The object of Mithra's wrath is the miθrō.druj, "the deceiver of the contract", the man who lies to Mithra by breaking his sworn word, the covenant-Lie that is a special case of the general Lie. The Avestan idiom is exact and terrible: to break a contract is miθrəm √druj, "to deceive a contract", or miθrəm √jan, "to smash a contract", and it is a sin that does not stay with the sinner. A single treaty-breaker, the hymn says, destroys a whole country, killing the faithful as surely as would a hundred sorcerers (Yt. 10.2); Mithra robs the covenant-breakers of the vigour of their arms, the strength of their feet, the light of their eyes, the hearing of their ears (Yt. 10.23), and the arrows and spears and maces of those who enrage him are turned aside and made to miss (Yt. 10.39-40).^[6] The dwellings of the deceivers are destroyed (Yt. 10.38). It is one of the sharpest formulations in any religion of the idea that to break faith is to invite cosmic, and communal, catastrophe.

Mithra and the sun

Mithra is universally associated with the sun and the light of day, and in the popular mind the two ran together, so that in the later Pahlavi books the sun could simply be called "the god Mihr". But the association is not, in the oldest layer, an identity, and the distinction matters. In the Avesta Mithra is not the sun: the Mihr Niyāyišn and the Xoršēd Niyāyišn, the litanies of Mithra and of the sun, are recited together in daily prayer but remain two things, and the hymn is careful to place Mithra as the first of the divine beings to rise over the great mountain-range Harā in front of the swift-horsed, immortal sun (Yt. 10.13), his herald and forerunner, not the disc itself. Mary Boyce and Gershevitch both insisted on this point against Herman Lommel, who had argued the two were virtually one; the identification of Mithra with the sun, both scholars held, is a secondary and later development, in Iran as in India (Boyce 1975; Gershevitch 1975, cited via Schmidt's Encyclopaedia Iranica article).^[3]

When the identification does surface unmistakably, it is in a Greek source. The geographer Strabo, writing at the turn of the era, reports the Persian worship and equates their sun straightforwardly with the god:

"Now the Persians do not erect statues or altars, but offer sacrifice on a high place, regarding the heavens as Zeus; and they also worship Helius, whom they call Mithras, and Selene and Aphrodite, and fire and earth and winds and water." (Strabo, Geography 15.3.13, trans. Jones)^[7]

Strabo's "Helius, whom they call Mithras" is the first explicit statement that the Persians called the sun by the god's name. Yet even this was not a fixed dogma of the Achaemenid centuries: Curtius Rufus has Darius III, on the eve of battle, invoke "the Sun, and Mithra, and the sacred and eternal fire" as three distinct things (a passage de Jong likewise reads as keeping the sun and Mithra apart), and Xenophon's report of the Persians sacrificing bulls to Zeus and horses to the Sun (Cyropaedia 8.3.11-12) keeps the Sun unnamed.^[2] The prudent conclusion, drawn by Schmidt, is that "in Achaemenid times there was no consistent identification of Miθra with the sun" (Encyclopaedia Iranica).^[4] The compendium follows that caution: Mithra is a god of the light and closely bound to the sun, but the flat equation "Mithra = the sun" is a later simplification.

Mithra, the oath, and the fire-ordeal

If Mithra oversees the covenant, he presides above all over the oath, the covenant sworn and put to proof, and here the Iranian material and the Greek notices agree. In the Avesta the oath and the ordeal (varah) take place before the fire and in the presence of Rašnu the Judge, Mithra's companion (Yt. 12.3); a suspect could be made to drink the "golden oath-water", which by causing jaundice was believed to reveal the man who had knowingly perjured himself by "contradicting Rašnu the Judge and deceiving Mithra the contract" (Vidēvdād 4.54-55). The god of the covenant, the fire before which it is sworn, and the judicial ordeal that tests it, all belong together.

The Greek witnesses catch the same practice from the outside: that the Persians, and above all their kings, swore by Mithra. Xenophon has Cyrus the Great swear by Mithra (Cyropaedia 7.5.53) and the younger Cyrus do the same (Oeconomicus 4.24); Plutarch reports the oath "by Mithra" in the mouth of Artaxerxes II. De Jong gathers the same notices, and enters a sober caveat: in a Greek or Latin author the name of Mithra is often merely the oriental substitute for a Greek divinity in an exclamation, so that not every such oath is firm evidence for the Iranian cult, though the pattern as a whole is.^[2] It is that royal oath-formula, the covenant-god invoked to witness a king's word, that surfaces in a saying preserved by Aelian, where Artaxerxes, shown a great pomegranate a gardener had grafted by his own patient labour, exclaims:

"By Mithra, this man by like care and diligence might also, in my opinion, make a little city great." (Aelian, Varia Historia 1.33, trans. Thomas Stanley, 1665)^[8]

The oath is casual in the telling, but it is the god of the sworn word who is called to witness even a king's offhand judgement, exactly the everyday hold on Persian life that Mithra's cult implies.

The bond with arta and the drauga

Mithra belongs, by his whole nature, to the Achaemenid spine of Truth (Avestan aša) set against the Lie (drauga). To keep a covenant is to stand in the Truth; to break it, to become a miθrō.druj, is to fall to the Lie in its most concrete and social form, the betrayal of the given word. The royal ideology of Darius, carved at Behistun, turns on exactly this axis, the king a friend to the right and no friend to the follower of the Lie, and the Persian horror of falsehood that the god enforces is precisely what the outsider Herodotus noticed as the moral centre of the whole culture:

"The most disgraceful thing in the world, they think, is to tell a lie; the next worst, to owe a debt: because, among other reasons, the debtor is obliged to tell lies." (Herodotus 1.138, trans. Rawlinson)^[9]

Herodotus does not name Mithra here, and the sentiment is broader than any one god; but the dread of the lie he records, and the training of Persian sons "in riding, in shooting, and in speaking the truth" (1.136), is the human face of the covenant-ethic that Mithra guards. In the Persian scheme the debtor is shameful because debt drives a man to break his word, and it is the word, the miθra, that the god watches over. The compendium's whole treatment of good faith, the oath before the fire, the bond that holds or is forsworn, sits at the meeting of Mithra and arta.

The late epigraphic debut: Darius's silence, the triad of Artaxerxes II

Here lies the most important, and most easily mistaken, fact about Achaemenid Mithra: for all his antiquity and his hold on Persian life, he is absent from the royal inscriptions of the early kings. Darius and Xerxes name Ahura Mazdā again and again, and beyond him only "the other gods who are" (the bagas), whom they never individually name. Mithra is not among the named; and he is likewise absent from the Persepolis Fortification tablets, the administrative archive that does record local sacrifices to a range of minor Iranian gods (Koch, cited via Schmidt). On the evidence, Mithra "was apparently not individually worshipped" at the level of the crown under Darius, whose devotion, Schmidt suggests, stood still close to that of the Gāthās of Zarathustra, where none of the old gods is named (Encyclopaedia Iranica).

The change comes only with Artaxerxes II (r. 405/4-359/8 BCE), a century and more after Darius, and it is abrupt. In his inscriptions Mithra and the water-goddess Anāhitā appear beside Ahura Mazdā, replacing the anonymous "other gods" with a named triad, the king praying that "Ahuramazdā, Anāhitā and Mithra" protect him and his works. Artaxerxes III adds, beside Ahuramazdā, "Mithra Baga", generally read "Mithra, the Baga" (though Boyce argued the phrase conceals Apąm Napāt, the Child of the Waters). Whether this marks a genuine religious revolution or merely the surfacing into royal epigraphy of gods long and popularly worshipped is debated. Schmidt frames it as a shift of register: Darius's piety kept close to the Gāthic manner, which addressed the great Ahura and the powers about him but not the old gods by name, while Artaxerxes II "followed the more popular trend, represented in the Yašts, which dedicated individual worship to the gods by addressing them by name" (Encyclopaedia Iranica).^[10][4] Either way, the epigraphic Mithra of the Persian kings is a late Mithra, and any account of Achaemenid religion must reckon with his long silence in the royal record before it.

Theophoric names and the feast of Mithra

If the crown was slow to carve his name, ordinary Persian life was saturated with it. The clearest measure is the flood of personal names compounded with the god's, of which Mithradates (Old Iranian Miθradāta, "given by Mithra") is only the most famous, borne by satraps, generals, and later by whole dynasties of kings in Pontus and Parthia; such theophoric names are among the surest signs of a living cult, since a man's very name declared the god who gave him. The other measure is the great autumn festival of Mithra, the Mithrakana (Old Persian), later Middle Persian Mihragān, modern Mehregān, one of the two hinges of the Iranian year with the spring Nowruz. Later Greek writers, Ctesias and Duris among them, tie royal and tribute occasions to it and preserve the report that the King drank hard and danced the Persian dance only at the feast of Mithra, and Strabo records the satrap of Armenia rendering up thousands of foals yearly for the Persian Mithra-festival (Geography 11.14.9). The exact Achaemenid-period form of the festival is reconstructed from these later notices and must be held with the appropriate caution, but that Mithra was honoured in a great seasonal feast, and in the names Persians gave their sons, is not in doubt.

Herodotus's confusion: Mithra, not a goddess of love

One classical passage on Mithra needs careful handling, because it is wrong, and the way it is wrong is instructive. In his account of Persian worship, Herodotus reports that the Persians learned to sacrifice to a heavenly Aphrodite (Aphrodite Urania), a cult he thought borrowed from the Assyrians and Arabs, and he adds that the Persians call this goddess "Mitra" (1.131). Taken at face value the sentence makes Mithra a goddess, a female divinity of love, and it has sometimes been repeated in just that loose form.

That reading should be corrected, and the Encyclopaedia Iranica corrects it. Mithra is no goddess and no divinity of love: he is a male Iranian god of the covenant, closely bound to the sun. What Herodotus has done, working at second hand and fitting the strange onto the familiar, is confuse two Persian divinities: the heavenly goddess the Greeks equated with Aphrodite Urania is Anāhitā, the great goddess of the waters, and it is her place in Persian worship that Herodotus has wrongly labelled with Mithra's name. Robert Rollinger, in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, treats the passage precisely as "a confusion between Mitra and Anāhitā", and as a plain measure of the limits of Herodotus's grasp of Persian religion.^[11] De Jong reaches the same verdict from the side of the classical texts, calling 1.131 "the earliest (but doubtful) occurrence of Mithra's name", one in which the name is "wrongly given as that of the Celestial Queen worshipped by the Persians".^[2] The point to carry away is not that "Mithra was a goddess of love", which is simply false, but that a careful outsider could garble the Persian pantheon badly enough to weld the covenant-god's name onto the water-goddess's cult, a caution about how Persian religion reached the Greeks, and how it reaches us through them.

A caution: the Roman Mithras

The most persistent error about Iranian Mithra is to read him through the Roman Mithras, the god of the mystery cult that spread among soldiers and merchants across the Roman Empire in the first four centuries CE, with its underground sanctuaries and its central image of the god slaying a bull. The Roman Mithras took the Iranian god's name and a deliberately "eastern", Persian colouring, and the two are not unrelated; but the Roman cult was a distinct Western creation, with a myth (the bull-slaying, the tauroctony) and a theology that cannot be traced back into attested Iranian religion. The temptation to bridge the gap is old: Herman Lommel argued that the bull-slaying was Indo-Iranian, on the strength of a Brahmana legend in which the gods (Mithra among them, reluctantly) kill Soma in the form of a bull, and his hypothesis was welcomed by several scholars of the Roman mysteries. But the Iranist Ilya Gershevitch rejected it, and the caution has held: there is no evidence for a bull-slaying Mithra in the Iranian sources, and no warrant for reading the Roman iconography back onto the Achaemenid god (Gershevitch, cited via Schmidt's Encyclopaedia Iranica article).^[12] De Jong, whose subject is exactly the Greek and Latin evidence, draws the same line: the mystery cult described by the classical authors "was not a religion practised by Iranians", nor one in which Iranians would have recognised much of their own heritage.^[2] For this compendium the rule is firm: the splendid, all-seeing covenant-god of the Mihr Yašt and the Persian oath is not to be equipped with the bull, the cave, and the mysteries of his Roman namesake.

From Achaemenid Mithra to Mihr

Mithra outlived the empire that was slow to name him. In Plutarch's philosophical account of Persian religion he appears as Mithres, set as the mesitēs, the "mediator", between Horomazes (Ahura Mazdā) and Areimanios (Angra Mainyu), the good and the hostile principles, a role the Avestan Mithra does not clearly hold but which the later Iranian and Greek tradition gave him (De Iside et Osiride 46). In Sasanian and later Zoroastrianism he becomes Mihr, the yazata of the covenant still, judge of souls at the Činvat bridge, patron of the seventh month and the sixteenth day (both named for him), his festival kept as Mihragān; and his name survives in living Persian, where mehr means both "the sun" and, tenderly, "love, friendship", the last a softening of the old severe god of the sworn and binding word. Through all of it the core holds: Mithra is the covenant made divine, the god before whom oaths are sworn and by whom they are kept, the watcher of a thousand eyes who does not sleep and cannot be deceived, and the terror of every man who would break his given word.