The Roman cult of the bull-slaying sun-hero Mithras, whose seven-degree path Steiner read as a feeling-knowledge of cosmic rhythm in the human being.
The Mithras Mysteries were the Romano-Persian initiation cult of the bull-slaying sun-hero Mithras, carried across the Empire by the legions. Rudolf Steiner described their seven graded degrees, from Raven to Father, as a training in feeling the supersensible group-spirit of a people, a knowledge once living in the human organism that the Mystery of Golgotha later made inward and individual.
In Steiner's Own Words
If one wants to understand the true spirit of the Mithras mysteries, which played a major role even in the first centuries of the spread of Christianity, even deep into Western Europe, one must know that they were based entirely on a fundamental view that was justified in the ancient world; which remained entirely justified in this ancient world until the mystery of Golgotha. These Mithras mysteries were based on the fundamental view that the human community, or that individual human communities, for example, communities of peoples or other communities within communities of peoples, do not consist merely of individual atoms that can be called human beings, but that a group spirit, a spirit of community, which has a supersensible existence, lives and must live in communities if things are to have any roots in reality at all.
What it Means Today
The academic study of the cult begins with Franz Cumont, whose The Mysteries of Mithra reached English readers in 1903 and fixed the long-held picture of a Persian faith repackaged for Roman soldiers. A century later Roger Beck, in The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire (Oxford University Press, 2006), overturned much of Cumont and read the windowless Mithraeum, the tauroctony relief of Mithras slaying the bull, and the seven grades from Corax (Raven) through Leo (Lion) to Pater (Father) as a deliberate star-map: an image of the soul descending through the planetary spheres and climbing back toward the sun. Beck calls the tauroctony a "star-talk," a coded astronomy the initiate learned to read. Set this beside the GA 175 passage and the two accounts touch at a precise point. Beck recovers, from carved stone and grade-names alone, an ascent through cosmic order; Steiner names the inner faculty that ascent was meant to wake, the feeling for a supersensible group-spirit binding the living to their long-dead forefathers. Thalira synthesis: the Raven was not a costume but a function, the first-degree initiate who carried the unsleeping experience of daily life back into the Mysteries so the group-spirit could speak through him, which is why the legends of Barbarossa and Charlemagne, both taught underground by ravens, are the cult's last folk-echo in Western Europe.
Where to Read More
- Building Stones for an Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, GA 175
- Find at SteinerBooks
- Mithraism: Rome's Secret Mystery Religion and the Seven Grades of Initiation
- The Minotaur and the Labyrinth: Theseus, the Beast, and the Path to the Centre
- The Chaldean Oracles: Ancient Theurgy and the Fire of the Gods