GardenBanter.co.uk - View Single Post - "Vote for insanity. You know it makes sense." -Lord Sutch

19-11-2004, 06:52 PM

In article ,
(Roger Pearse) wrote:

(paghat) wrote in message
...
In article ,
(Roger Pearse) wrote:

Larry Blanchard wrote in message
...
In article ,
says...
A devottee of a single Christian sect remains so by being blind to &
rejecting the full range of belief. I do not claim to be an authority,
though, just have a deeper interest than dunderheads who blame their
prejudices & sillier observations on their religion, when they
obviously
learned only enough about faith to justify hating whatever they
already
hated.

Bring back Mithras! It's all a bunch of bull anyway :-).

Sorry, couldn't resist that one :-).

Glad to see someone else can see the possibilities. "Get rid of the
bull, with Mithras"

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Mithras is just another resurrected divinity like Tamuz and Jesus. A rose
by any other name is still just a fertility daemon worshipped as god. so
Mithras worship is still very much with us. Nothing wrong with that, only
whimsical that modern Mithras-Tamuz-Jesus worshippers think there's a
difference.

Your statements about the cult of Mithras are imaginary. Mithras was
not resurrected.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

You must have a corrupt perhaps christian reference book that doesn't like
to admit these savior-myths are all pretty much the same myth. Some
Christian references falsely state that Mithraism post-dates Christianity,
to explain the similarities; others leave out the resurrection myth in
order to cloud the similarities. The Christian claims that their
"mysteries" predate Mithras started while Mithraism was still spreading
out of Persia along Roman roads, & continues to this day, but it was just
propoganda to pretend Christian rituals were novel, when the reason
Christianity spread so easily throughout the pagan world was because the
rites & the idea for this savior was already well known (and failed to
take hold in Jerusalem because it was so well known to be a gentilic faith
exclusively).

A trick of some Christian scholars is to insist the Vedic, Persian, &
Roman Mithras are actually three divinities only coincidentally with the
same name, so any portion of the Mithras myth they don't like because too
similar to Christian mystery-rites they can discarded or alleged not to
predate Jesus, thus making Mithras rather than Jesus the imitation. So
Plutarch's statement that Roman Mithraism was introduced by soldiers
returning from Persia is dismissed because that religion did not thrive in
Rome (but it did), therefore the thriving Roman Mithras who so closely
resembled Jesus did not appear until at least 90 years into the Christian
Era. Or, all information about Mithraism from India or Arabia is dismissed
as allegedly anti-christian & therefore baseless (two unfounded premises
in a row in order to get rid of Mithras as a precursor to Jesus). This
leaves mainly the anti-Mithras statements of the early Church fathers as
acceptable "witnesses" of Mithraic mythology -- anti-Mithras testimony,
good; all other testimony, dismissable. The Mithraists themselves did not
reveal their mysteries except in a very few fragments of verse which fit
the archeological evidence (the temples including dark central initiate
chambers of death & rebirth). All kinds of silly antic methods of getting
rid of Mithras are tried, so that specifically christian scholarship on
Mithras tends even today merely to continue that ancient anti-Mithras
tradition that began when two PAGAN mystery cults of very similar
character (Mithraism & Christianity) competed vigorously for the soul of
Rome.

The arguments that Christianity "did to" or "did not" imitate Mithras are
all silly because the cultic pattern was almost universal from Sumer
onward, & NEITHER Mithras NOR Jesus-as-God were the least bit novel. But
central to Mithra worship was his descent (into darkness/death) & ascent
(into light/immortality) as a pattern for all Mithraists to imitate
ritually, & this Descent & Ascent myth is the same as for the death &
resurrection of Jesus, Attis, Dionysios, Adonis, Osiris, & especially
Tamuz/Damuzi, though one also finds descent & ascent myths for goddess
figures like Persephone & Inanna which show Light's conquest even of the
depths of the land of the dead.

Mithras was born into the world to experience its sadness & terror, then
was slain & entombed in a cavern underneath Mount Ararat, then restored to
life bringing gifts of a world that was, like Mithras himself, renewed
(much as Christians thought Jesus supplanted a more cruel Jewish god). His
alleged birthday (as for so many sun-divinities) was winter solstice,
today Christmas; & the mother of Mithras was a virgin, his father was the
Sun. During his death his spirit entered the underworld where he conquered
Ahriman's demons of darkness & possibly bound even Ahriman, then sprang
back to life & came out of his cavern tomb bringing the world gifts of
justice, beauty, loyalty, honesty, & bravery, all of which Ahriman had
been hording in order to keep goodness out of the world. A similar
extrabiblical story is told of Jesus who, during his entombment, entered
into the land of darkness to release suffering souls. Mithras served
thereafter as a mediator between the world (Earthmother) & the Sun-god,
which some view as the same as the Christian Trinity, the Holy Ghost being
noted by the earliest Christian gnostics as the Mother. On the day of
judgement Mithras will select which souls will or will not persist
eternally (in an Islamic myth, Mohammed's daughter does this, dividing the
righteous from the unrighteous with her sword of flame). Mithras also had
a parallel myth for the Last Supper, but it occurred upon his resurrection
when he called his twelve disciples to the feast.

Initiates reenacted Mithra's death & resurrection by spending a period of
time in a lightless chamber at the center of a temple, then issuing reborn
into the light. Before entering the Cavern/Tomb the initiate would be
ritualistically tortured (or a kind of mummery acted out in which torture
was pretended), undergoing the same tortures & death as Mithras:
blindfolded, burned, bound in ropes or chains, cut with a sword, tossed
into the tomb, then crowned & given bread upon release). Much the same
ritual existed for one of Demeter's fertility daemons, & was intended to
incite terror of the afterlife as it will be experienced by the unsaved,
followed by salvation.

Other versions have Mithras die seasonally & reborn from the cave each
year. There is some indication that he originated as a god-personification
of a Bull annually sacrififed to the Sun, just as Christians tie the death
& resurrection of Jesus to the sacrificial Red Heifer &/or the Pascal
Lamb. (Some scholars speculate the bull was Ahriman whose blood restored
the stolen beatitudes, but no Roman, Greek, nor even Persian myth
identifies the bull with evil, & it would be much more apt to be
identified with Zeus, Jupiter, or Mithras himself, & with the fertility of
Aphrodite or Europa).

Parallelling Christians' macabre drinking of Jesus's blood & eating of
Jesus's flesh, Mithras (or his father), in the form of a bull, was slain,
his followers were baptized in His blood, & then the Mithras bull was
eaten. In Vedic literature Mithra is a form of the god Varuna who also
received bull or ox as sacrifice -- Varuna rules the night sky, Mithras
the day sky. The Vedic Mithra was called "the first bull." His/their
worship was displaced by or absorbed into the worship of Shiva who
likewise died or dreams eternally in a cavern, trampled by his death-bride
Kali -- and Shiva worshippers do recognize Jesus as an avatar of Shiva.

-paggers

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
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