Mithra

Before the sun clears the mountains, another light is already moving. A golden chariot crests the highest peaks of the eastern ranges, drawn by white horses that never tire, and the figure standing in it has been awake all night. He is always awake. A thousand ears are listening and ten thousand eyes are open, and there is no valley dark enough or oath quiet enough to escape them. Mithra has come to see who kept their word.

His name is also an ordinary noun. In the old Iranian tongue mithra means a covenant, a contract, the bond between two parties who have given their word, and the god is that bond made divine. To break a promise is not only to wrong the person you promised. It is to injure Mithra himself, who stands invisibly between every pair of hands that have been clasped in agreement. He guards the treaty between nations and the bargain between neighbors with the same ferocity, and he does not weigh a broken alliance against a small betrayal. A lie is a lie.

He is imagined as a warrior in his prime, tall and bright, sometimes crowned with rays of light. His chariot is gold and its wheels shine, and the white horses that pull it are shod with gold and silver. His weapons ride with him: a mace of a hundred knobs and a hundred blades, well-aimed against the skulls of the daevas, the demons of the lie; a silver spear; a bow strung and hung with golden arrows; axes and daggers. The mace is the object that matters most. When a Zoroastrian priest is ordained he receives the mace of Mithra, and with it the charge to strike at falsehood for the rest of his life.

The everyday work of the god is surveillance. He sweeps the length of the land at the head of the sun and looks down on the wide grazing grounds he protects, and he counts. A herdsman who swears to return a borrowed ox and quietly keeps it has been seen. A merchant who takes payment and delivers short measure has been seen. His reach is described as physical and enormous, his arms stretching out to seize the oath-breaker wherever he stands, in the east or the west, at the mouth of a river or the middle of the sea. There is nowhere the treaty-breaker can go that Mithra’s hand cannot follow.

When he is roused, the effect on an army is total. The longest and best preserved of the Zoroastrian hymns, the one addressed to him, describes what befalls the war-band of a country that has lied. Mithra comes down the wind, and the horses will not carry their riders, the spears turn in the hand, the arrows fall short, the maces will not land, and the men are seized with panic and cut down where they stand. He fights for whoever kept faith. Kings poured out libations to him before a campaign, and soldiers took him for their particular patron, because victory was thought to belong to the truthful and Mithra decided who that was.

He is very old, older than the religion that carried him to us. Mithra and the Vedic god Mitra of India descend from a single Indo-Iranian deity of the covenant, worshipped before the two peoples parted, and in the oldest Indian hymns Mitra still stands beside Varuna as a keeper of cosmic and social order. When the prophet Zoroaster reformed Iranian religion around the one supreme lord Ahura Mazda, figures like Mithra might have been swept away. He was not. He was kept on as a yazata, one of the beings worthy of worship who serve the supreme god, and he kept his ancient duties intact. In the royal inscriptions of the later Persian kings he stands in a divine trio with Ahura Mazda and the water-goddess Anahita.

His authority did not stop with the living. At the Chinvat Bridge, the crossing every soul must attempt after death, Mithra sits in judgment with two companions: Sraosha, who is obedience, and Rashnu, who holds the scales. The tally of a life’s honest and dishonest dealings is read out there, and the verdict decides whether the bridge widens into an easy road or narrows to the edge of a blade. A god who spent his days counting broken promises was the natural one to preside over the final accounting.

On earth his day was Mehregan, the autumn festival second in importance only to the new-year feast of Nowruz under the Persian empire, a harvest celebration of friendship and love held near the equinox. Over the centuries he drew closer to the sun he had always travelled ahead of, until in later Persian the word for the sun and the word for the god blurred together, and Mehr came to mean Mithra, the sun, and plain human kindness all at once.

There is a second Mithra, and the confusion between them is ancient. In the first century of the common era a mystery cult spread through the Roman army worshipping a god called Mithras, shown killing a bull inside a cave and served through seven grades of secret initiation. The name is plainly taken from the Iranian god, and both carry solar associations, but the bull-slaying, the cave-temples, and the initiation ladder have no clear precedent in Persian religion. An early generation of scholars led by Franz Cumont argued that the Roman Mithras was simply the Iranian Mithra in Roman dress, and at a congress in 1971 that theory was largely abandoned. The Roman god now looks like a new creation that borrowed an old and prestigious eastern name. The covenant-keeper of Iran and the bull-killer of the Roman underground are relatives at most.

His powers are those of a witness who cannot be fooled and a judge who cannot be bought. Nothing sworn escapes him, distance gives the guilty no cover, and no darkness hides a lie from a thousand ears and ten thousand eyes. He grants victory, kingship, and the fertility of well-watered pastures to those who deal honestly, and he ruins those who do not.

His limits are stranger, because they are built into what he is. Mithra is bound wholly to the covenant. His terrible attention only ever falls on the oath and the treaty, and where no promise has been given there is nothing for him to guard and nothing to avenge. Under Zoroaster’s ordering he answers to Ahura Mazda and never climbs above him; he is a servant of the truth, not its author. And for all his sleepless vigilance he could not keep his own name from being carried off to a foreign cult that made a stranger of him. The god of the unbreakable bond was, at least once, taken somewhere he never agreed to go.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Mithra?

Mithra is an ancient Iranian god of covenants and oaths, worshipped in Persian religion and kept on in Zoroastrianism as a yazata, a divine being who serves the supreme god Ahura Mazda. He is an all-seeing guardian of truth who protects those who keep their word and punishes those who break agreements, and he also acts as a judge of the dead. Mithra is further associated with the sun, victory in war, and the protection of cattle and pastures.

What does the name Mithra mean?

The name Mithra comes from an old Iranian word meaning “covenant” or “contract,” and the god is essentially that bond personified. Because of this, breaking a promise or a treaty was believed to be a direct offense against Mithra himself, not merely against the other party. In later Persian the related word Mehr came to mean the god, the sun, and human affection all at once.

Is Mithra the same as the Roman god Mithras?

No. Mithra is the Iranian covenant god, while Mithras is the deity of a Roman mystery cult that spread in the first century CE, best known for images of him killing a bull inside a cave. The Roman cult borrowed the eastern name and some solar imagery, but its bull-slaying, cave-temples, and seven-grade initiation have no clear origin in Persian religion, and most scholars now treat the two as separate figures rather than one continuous tradition.

What is Mithra the god of?

Mithra is the god of covenants, oaths, and contracts, and by extension a protector of truth and justice. He guards agreements between individuals and treaties between nations, grants victory to the side that keeps faith, and serves as one of three judges of the soul at the Chinvat Bridge after death. He is also linked to the sun, light, and the fertility of well-watered pastures.

What is the festival of Mehregan?

Mehregan is the ancient Iranian autumn festival dedicated to Mithra, celebrated around the autumn equinox as a feast of friendship, love, and the harvest. Under the Persian empire it was the second most important festival of the year, ranking only behind the spring new-year celebration of Nowruz. It is still observed today by Zoroastrians and by many Iranians.

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