The Long Afterlife of a Lost Mystery

The cult declined through the fourth century as the empire turned Christian; mithraea were abandoned, and some were deliberately desecrated, their reliefs smashed or buried. Because the initiates left no doctrine in writing, the meaning of what they did had to be reconstructed from the monuments alone, and that reconstruction has swung sharply.

The Belgian scholar Franz Cumont, around 1900, argued that Roman Mithraism was essentially imported Iranian Mazdaism in Roman dress, a view that dominated for decades but is now largely rejected: specialists such as Roger Beck and Manfred Clauss treat the Roman mysteries as a fresh creation of the imperial period that borrowed a name and a few motifs from the East. A rival line of interpretation, developed since the 1970s, reads the tauroctony as a star-map encoding the precession of the equinoxes. The old popular claim that Christianity copied Mithraism, once repeated as fact, rests on parallels that scholars regard as loose, late, or invented.