Читать книгу Mushrooms, Myth and Mithras - Carl Ruck - Страница 12

The front wall or altar niche opposite the entrance of the typical Mithraeum, facing eastward toward the rising sun,¹ commonly depicted the central heroic exploit of Mithras, his slaying of the bull, the so-called tauroctony. The event takes place in a cave, and the placement of the tauroctony in the altar niche effectively identifies the Mithraeum chamber itself as such a cave. Mithras characteristically averts his gaze from the dying beast,² upon whose back he kneels. The pose, which is unlikely in reality, is obviously symbolic. Significantly, as he kneels upon the beast, he essentially has only one operative leg, with his right foot pinning the bull’s extended right hind hoof, with the bull also kneeling.

When color is an option, as in a fresco, Mithras is characteristically all in red, with Persian trousers, tunic, and a flowing cape, sometimes painted with the starry firmament on its underside. The cap is sometimes speckled with white, or with stars when the color is absent. This motif, white specks against a red background, sometimes also ex tends to the clothed body of Mithras, as we see in the fresco in the Marino Mithraeum in the Alban Hills near Rome. The bull is always white. The entire configuration is a red- and-white speckled god, cap and hemispherical cape, with a single leg atop a white pediment comprised of the similarly one-legged bull. (See color figures 1 and 2, p. 97.)

The tauroctony depicts Mithras as being one with the bull, itself a secret representation of the Amanita muscaria mushroom, the most probable botanical original of the Vedic Soma³ sacrament and, given the research presented presently, its Avestan analogue haoma,⁴ even though it is well established that other psychoactive subtances could have been substituted in the later traditions and often in fact were.⁵ Thus Yasht 10 of the Avesta speaks of “all the haomas … having many species” wherever they are found. These substitutes range from cannabis, ephedra, ergot, and perhaps datura, to simple alcohol. Even when surrogates were employed, the attributes of the original, embedded in the mythological tradition, persisted and are often descriptive of the mushroom.

The Amanita muscaria mushroom is characterized by its red top, speckled with white, upon a white leg or stipe. Thus Mithras and the bull present this distinctive combination, for it is characteristic of the hero myth that the hero-shaman acquires attributes of the god and the sacramental entheogen that unites the three of them together. That is to say that all three—shaman, entheogen, and deity—are of one divine-botanical identity, which is also the essential ritual purpose of the sacramental communion meal that the initiates, too, will be privileged to share.⁶ One is what one eats, or more explicitly, the state of mind is determined by the nature of the ingested drug, as the prophet Teiresias explains in the Bacchae tragedy.⁷ More simply put, Mithras, as well as the bull, can be expected to have attributes descriptive of the sacred mushroom, which similarly shares an identity with the solar god.

The Mithras-bull configuration is a pictorial personification of the mushroom at the moment of its sacrifice or harvest. Thus there is a flow of cosmic energy through the configuration, with Mithras looking up toward the head of the Sun rising behind the bull and shedding its rays directly at the god’s eyes, while the bull, with arched neck pulled back forcefully, and usually vertically like the white stipe of the muscaria mushroom, looks up directly toward the Moon’s head descending in front of it. A similar flow is personified by the two torchbearers who flank the tauroctony; one in front, beneath the Moon, with his torch inverted downwards, while the other behind lifts his torch upwards toward the Sun. This flow of light or energy through the Tauroctony indicates a cosmic axis or a gateway to another universe.

In the Vedic Rig Veda, Soma is a bellowing red bull⁸ associated with Agni, the god of fire (cognate with English “ignite”). Agni was manifested as fire, lightning, and the Sun, with the lightning bolt as the pathway uniting the solar and terrestrial fires, and also was seen as the generating source of the mushroom. Mithras is also part of this complex. In the Rig Veda, he “was pleased by Soma.”⁹ In the Persian Avesta, haoma is offered to him.¹⁰ Those ancient associations persisted. Thus the ninth or tenth-century medieval Armenian epic David of Sasun preserves Mithraic themes and contains many references to haoma. A most revealing example is the hero David, son of Mher, who actually eats mushrooms and becomes disoriented.¹¹ Armenia was the ancient Parthia, whose Roman-sponsored king Tiridates initiated the Emperor Nero.

Another mushroom-like attribute of Mithras in the Avesta is his thousand ears and ten thousand eyes.¹² Similarly in the Rig Veda, Soma sees with one thousand eyes.¹³ Multiple eyes or other sense organs make each a separate entity and indicate altered perception. They are the equivalent of the metaphor of the “disembodied eye” for visionary experience.¹⁴ A similar theme occurs in Greek mythology with the multiple eyes that are the distinctive epithet of the cowherd Argos as the “all-seeing” Panoptes.¹⁵ The white speckled cap and raiment of Mithras both depict the multiplicity of these “eyes” and the red cap of the entheogenic mushroom. His repeated epithet as the lord of the cattle pastures, moreover, can only be describing him as the bull itself. Mithras and the bull he slaughters are one entity, and Mithras is offering himself up as sacrifice.

It should be remembered that there was no public display of Mithraic art. It was viewed only within the ritual space of the Mithraeum chambers and the secret meaning or interpretation of the depictions would have formed an essential part in the indoctrination of initiates. In fact, some Mithraea included additional subterranean rooms that apparently functioned as a schoolhouse.

The Mithraic bull was no ordinary bull, it was the Cosmic Bull. Its flesh and blood was not beef, but the main item of the Mithraic Eucharist, the equivalent of the Christian transubstantiated Body and Blood of Christ. Ingesting it made the initiate one with the living diety. The sacrificed bull represents the harvested plant-god Soma-haoma¹⁶ The bull is the secret society’s encrypted metaphor for their consciousness-altering Eucharist.