A version of the Persian religion became popular in the Roman Empire from the first century BCE, centered upon Mithras, who is almost indistinguishable from the Greek hero Perseus. (The former slaughtered a bull, while the latter is known for decapitating the Gorgon Medusa.) Mithraism became one of the dominant religions of the Roman Empire. Although derived from the Zoroastrianism of the Achaemenid monarchs, it had assimilated many additional elements as it passed through the Middle East, including certain astrological metaphors and incorporating the latest discoveries in astronomy. It also absorbed the symbolism of the agricultural fertility cults of Mesopotamia, although its most ancient cultural roots pertained to nomadic hunter peoples of the Asiatic steppes. Nevertheless, even before its advent to the West, many prominent guests of the Persian elite were apparently offered an opportunity to be initiated into something that seems very similar to the Greco-Roman version, and even in its Persian original, it was a brotherhood of warriors cemented by a visionary Eucharist.
Mithraism initiated its members through seven stages of transcendence, culminating with an ecstatic vision in which one journeyed into a sacred realm where one experienced the entire pattern of the Universe, an experience that was expressed in the prevalent Roman philosophical system known as Stoicism.
Mithraism was a fierce competitor with Christianity, as was the more ancient Mystery religion of Eleusis. With the conversion of the Roman Empire under Constantine and the subsequent persecutions by Theodosius, the sanctuaries where the secret Mithras rituals were practiced were demolished. The Church fathers were well aware of the similarities between the two religions, and they desperately argued that Satan must have had advanced knowledge of the coming of Christ and preemptively mocked the Christian rites. Indeed, as the earlier of these popular Roman religions, Mithraism had a wide and formative influence upon the fledging Christian cult. Despite the loss of Imperial patronage, the fall of the Roman Empire, and the best efforts of the Church Triumphant to relegate it to oblivion, Mithraic traditions survived and even thrived in the esoteric undercurrents of Western civilization, and they do so to this day.
It is essential for our understanding of the Classical heritage of ancient Greece and the spread of Greco-Roman culture to Europe to come to terms with the fact that Western civilization was profoundly influenced by a secret spiritual practice that revolved around the use of entheogenic plants and mushrooms to usher transcendent states of consciousness.
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The Entheogenic Eucharist of Mithras
The Foundation of Empire
In ancient Rome and throughout most of its vast empire which stretched from Asia Minor and northern Africa to the British Isle, starting sometime around what would come to be known as the Christian era and lasting until the triumph of the Church Dominant, elite groups of twenty to thirty men gathered in small, vaulted, windowless chambers decorated with religious frescoes and stone carvings to celebrate their god Mithras.1
There they initiated new members into their secretive religion with a sacramental meal that the Christians considered the equivalent of their own Eucharist. Membership was exclusively male,2 and included soldiers, merchants, and officials of the highest bureaucratic levels of government; even emperors such as Nero, Diocletian, and Julian were initiated. The Mithraic rites must have played an essential role in forming social bonds that united the men of the Roman army, and hence it was fundamental to the Roman Empire’s political and military power structure.
Nero was apparently the first Roman emperor to be initiated with entheogens, i.e., a “magical dinner” (cenis magicis)3 in 66 CE when Tiridates I, the newly proclaimed Roman-sponsored king of Armenia, traveled overland to Rome. He refused, as a scruple of his religion, to pollute the sacred element of water by a naval voyage, instead traveling accompanied by his Magi priests and 3,000 Parthian horsemen. (This is about the same time that the Gospel of Matthew recorded the journey of the three Magi to Jerusalem to authenticate the divinity of the Hebrew infant, Jesus.) Upon the king’s triumphant entry into the city, he declared to Nero that he had come to offer himself as a worshipful slave to his divinity as the incarnation of the god Mithras.
For the festivities in honor of Tiridates, a purple awning was stretched over the Theater of Pompey in the Campus Martius, on which Nero was depicted in a sun-chariot surrounded by golden stars. He also installed an enormous statue of himself in his Golden House as the Sun God. What is surprising is that even though the Mithraic initiation was always a banqueting ceremony, no one bothered to inquire as to what Tiridates served Nero.
The Zoroastrian magus Tiridates came to celebrate Nero’s conquest over Armenia, and he brought with him other magi. And he even went so far as to initiate the Emperor in the repasts of the craft, but even though he had received a kingdom from him, he wasn’t able to make Nero a magus.
—Pliny, Natural History, 3.6.
In Pliny’s opinion, Nero’s initiation was not a success. He cynically speculates that even though Nero found nothing more gratifying than sacrificing humans in order to attain the art of the Magi, the failure may have been due to his freckles! He was not a perfect physical specimen, despite his flaming red hair. The citation must be taken seriously, however prejudiced and garbled, because it offers invaluable evidence about the emperor’s initiation. It is clear that Pliny has a low opinion of magic and the art of the Magus, although he betrays that it has a shadow of truth, too often polluted, as he says, by the use of poisons or drugs. This indicates that the Magi, and what was served at the dinner, most likely involved pharmaceutical expertise.
In this pharmacological context, Pliny goes on to discuss Apion, a Hellenized Egyptian Neo-Pythagorean grammarian whom he had actually met when he was a young man. Apion also had pharmaceutical expertise. He claimed that an Egyptian plant named after Osiris had divinatory properties and that he had used it himself to summon back the spirit of Homer. Although technically a grammarian, as a Neo-Pythagorean, Apion could more properly be called a shaman or magician, especially in view of his conversations with the long dead poet Homer. In all probability, the initiatory dinner of Tiridates included entheogens, or even a sequence of them. The Mithraic banquets were traditionally a sequence of seven grades of initiation, the highest of which Nero in his solar identity had apparently attained. The cult, moreover, must already have taken root in the city of Rome so that suitable accommodations in the form of some kind of temple were available for Nero’s initiation dinners.
It is likely that even as early as Augustus the military included initiates. In 45 BCE, Augustus himself met the great Stoic philosopher Athenodorus Cananites from Anatolian Tarsus, a hotbed of Mithraism. He brought him to Rome, where he stayed as an advisor until 15 BCE, when the philosopher returned to his native city to reform its constitution. It would be highly unlikely that the two never discussed philosophy or religion. In fact, Augustus styled himself as the putative son of Apollo4 and once officiated at a sacramental meal dressed as the Sun with twelve of his colleagues costumed as the signs of the zodiac.5
There is a tradition about Pontius Pilate that indicates he may also have participated in the entheogenic rituals. Around 10 BCE, Augustus sent envoys to the troubled Scottish Highlands at the northern border of his empire. One of the soldiers had a son there. The infant returned to Rome with his father and took the family name of Pontii, and upon attaining adulthood, he was freed from slavery. As the customary sign of liberation, he was awarded the red felt Phrygian cap called the pileus or (pilos in Greek). Pileatus means capped with that headdress and is an epithet of Mithras. Pilatus is either a corruption of that title or describes him as armed with the javelin or pilum. He rose in the military ranks through nepotism, as the husband of an illegitimate daughter of the future Emperor Tiberius.6
As a Hellenized Jew from Tarsus and a soldier, it is likely that Paul was also an initiate. One can only wonder to what degree his version of Christian practice was derived from the model of a Mystery religion, with its numerous similarities to Mithraism.7
The Imperial