These rocks were apparently capable of inducing visions, as is indicated by the story of Jacob’s vision of the Heavenly Ladder: he laid his head down on a stone for use as a pillow and received the vision that God had granted him this land for his people. When he awoke he realized that the place was sacred as the Gate of Heaven, and he took the rock upon which he had laid his head, set it up as a cosmic pillar, and anointed it. He named the place Beth-El, that is to say, “House of God,” Baityl or Baitylos. The rock was preserved and venerated.40 If it had an etymology in Greek, a tylos is a knobbed pillar, like a phallos, and baios indicates that it is a little one. It is also a “bolt” that acts as the key to unlock the Gateway. Both pillars and stone balls have been found in Mithraea.
The Goddess Ishtar summons the awakening of the sun god who cuts his way upwards from the mountain with a saw in hand. Akkadian cylinder seal, ca. 2250 BCE.
These sacred stones are a common pun on petra for “stone” and variants of pitra, which is the Hebrew word for “mushroom” (ptr) and occurs widely throughout Afro-Asian languages as indicating “seeing, beholding, explaining, and interpreting,” appearing in Egyptian, Nabitaean, Hebrew, Aramaic, Phoenician, Punic, and Neo-Punic.41 An inscription from a seventh-century divinatory temple at Ekron, thirty-five kilometers southwest of Jerusalem, bears the name of a Canaanite goddess that can be read as Ptryh (pronounced pet-ree-yah), with the final syllable as a suffix indicating divinity, as in the name of Yahweh. Ptryh is a variant of the Ugaritic Pidray, the goddess of illumination and lightning, who was the daughter of Baal-zeebub, the so-called Lord of the Flies.42 The inscription was found near a figurine, probably of this goddess, squeezing the milk from her breast as the divine potion, and the temple contained a number of drinking vessels, suggesting that the potion was drunk there. We should expect that the sacrament, therefore, was visionary. Since the goddess is a personification of the mushroom, it is not surprising that the vessels for her milk have a mushroom-like configuration.
An “animate rock” that houses a god and that opens the divine gateway is a perfect metaphor for a psychoactive mushroom. Theophrastus even records the tradition that mushrooms could turn into stones when dried by the sun.43 The association of the mushroom goddess with flies betrays the identity of this particular mushroom. The egg stage of the fly agaric, while still enclosed in its universal veil, in fact, looks very much like a stone, and its sudden emergence from a rock is yet another suggestion of Mithras’s representation of the mushroom.
The mushroom was too sacred to be explicitly identified, and thus it was commonly referred to with descriptive metaphors, the parasol being the most frequent. Anthropomorphized versions of the mushroom can be seen in the example of the so-called Shade-foots or Skiapodes, who were a tribe of creatures with a single extremely vigorous leg and a single broad, webbed foot; when they tired from the exertion of leaping, they fell flat upon their backs and rested in the shade cast by the foot that served as a parasol. Similar creatures went by names like One-legs or One-eyes, the single eye being metaphoric of the visionary experience.44 Aja Ekapad, called the “Not-born One-foot,” is a deity mentioned six times in the Rig Veda and is apparently an archaic name for Soma. Unborn describes its seedless propagation.
The effect … became evident by the time the men had swallowed the fourth mushroom. Their eyes took on a wild look … with a positively blinding gleam, and their hands began to tremble nervously…. After a few minutes a deep lethargy overcame them, and they began quietly singing monotonous improvised songs…. They suddenly sprang raving from their seats and began loudly and wildly calling for drums…. And now began an indescribable dancing and singing, a deafening drumming and a wild running about…. during which the men threw everything about recklessly.
—Report of field research with Siberian tribes, 1903.45
Elder Brother watched aghast as Younger Brother became fused to that giant mushroom’s stipe. He beheld Younger Brother begin to grow a bright red cap. At first slowly, then faster and faster, Younger brother began to spin in the sun.
—Miskwedo of the Ahnishinaubeg.46
Mithras emerged from the rock often holding a torch as the rising light and a dagger,47 perhaps to both indicate the muscaria’s powerful “cutting through” of the earth and its luminous revelation as the white universal veil gives way to reveal the torchlike fiery red of its expanding cap. Similarly, the Mesopotamian sun god Shamash, with whom Mithras was equated, uses a saw to cut his way upward out of the mountain on an Akkadian cylinder seal in the British Museum.48 (See color figure 7, p. 99.)
Rock-birth from pinecone. Red sandstone (50 × 27 cm). Frankfurt, Heddernheim (left). Mithras being born from the rock. San Clemente Mithraeum, Rome. (See color figure 8, p. 99.)
In a stone relief from Vercovicium discovered outside the Roman Fort at Housesteads, Britain, Mithras is seen at the moment of his sudden birth as an anthropomorphized mushroom. Above the unworked base, in an open oval circle, the torso of the naked Mithras appears emerging from an egg with its two halves visible above the head and below the hips. His raised arms are lost, but his hands are preserved in the rim of the circle, holding a dagger and a torch. Above his head is the sign for the summer equinox.49
Thus the initiates could expect the same miraculous experience as they were lifted upwards out of the confining egglike subterranean chamber of the Mithraeum toward the fiery celestial Empyrean, for this rock of the Nativity was also called a “cave,”50 and the rock-birth was often depicted, like the tauroctony, as occurring in a cavernous chamber. The Armenians placed a very strong emphasis upon the fertility-based interpretation of Mithras’s birth, claiming that he is, in fact, reborn every year from his cave dwelling. Similarly, not only was Christ resurrected from a cave, but according to Eusebius and other Church Fathers, there was a version of His Nativity from a cave.51
God of birthing for the birthing of God.
—Mithraic inscription.52
Red Cap
Mithras emerged with a naked white torso but already wearing his characteristic red Phrygian cap, white stipe with red cap, sometimes speckled with stars, and often amidst fire, as in the Mithraeum of Dura-Europos, where both the cap and the rock are flaming.53 The hair is sometimes painted golden yellow, which is equally significant, not only for the god’s assimilation with Apollo-Helios but from its ethnopharmacological metaphor as Golden Fleece.54 The cap is such an essential item of his iconography, however, that he is almost never depicted without it, for which reason he has the epithet of Pileatus, the “capped one,”55 and since it is invariably red and often spotted or jeweled, he was appropriately termed the “red-capped one.”56
The metaphor of the cap is so naturally suggestive that the botanical term for the mushroom’s top is pileus, and it commonly figures in folklore and fairy tales, such as “Little Red Riding Hood,” called “Little Red-Cap” in German, and among the diminutive fairy folk frequenting forests.57 Altaic shamans who use Amanita muscaria consider their caps an essential aspect of