Читать книгу Mushrooms, Myth and Mithras - Carl Ruck - Страница 16

Mithras was born on December 25.³⁶ For obvious reasons of the Sol Invictus, in the third century Pope Liberius finally decided to place the birth of Jesus also on this date, although there had been considerable controversy about the appropriateness of even specifying a birthday for a nonpagan god.³⁷

Although we share with them Sunday, we are not apprehensive lest we seem to be heathens.

—Tertullian of Carthage

Persian tradition describes the birth of Mithras from the immaculate virgin Anahita (Greek Anaïtis, assimilated to Aphrodite and Ishtar), who prior to the reformation of the religion was a popular fertility goddess, the primal source of waters flowing from the cosmic mountain. She conceived Mithras from the seed of Zarathustra as it was preserved in Lake Hamun in the Persian province of Sistan. Mithras ascended to the Empyrean sixty-four years later, and Parthian documents and coins bear double dates, one counting the intervals since the ascension in 208 BCE.

The myth as promulgated in the Mithraic initiation was that it was not from a woman that he was born, but from a rock thrust upwards as if by some magical force. The rock was called the “rock that gave birth to god,” petra genetrix dei. And he emerged as the “begetter of light,” genitor luminis, the “god who was the begetter born from a rock,” deus genitor rupe natus.³⁸ This strange birth is well attested in Mithraic art. (See color figures 6, 7, and 8, p. 99.)

The petra genetrix is the Greek lithos empsychos (“animate rock”) or baitylos, such as was called the stone that Kronos ate in the myth of the birth of Zeus, which similarly implicates a stone in the birth of the Olympian deities since the stone caused Kronos to regurgitate the siblings of Zeus.³⁹ There were various baetyls, or sacred stones, throughout the ancient Levant. They were venerated in cultic practice and were often associated with the sun god or the Phrygian mother goddess. Even the Kaaba in Mecca contains a holy black stone that predates the prophet Mohammad. They were thought to have fallen from heaven as meteorites and are often associated with eagles.

These rocks were apparently capable of inducing visions, as is indicated by the story of Jacob’s vision of the Heavenly Ladder: he laid his head down on a stone for use as a pillow and received the vision that God had granted him this land for his people. When he awoke he realized that the place was sacred as the Gate of Heaven, and he took the rock upon which he had laid his head, set it up as a cosmic pillar, and anointed it. He named the place Beth-El, that is to say, “House of God,” Baityl or Baitylos. The rock was preserved and venerated.⁴⁰ If it had an etymology in Greek, a tylos is a knobbed pillar, like a phallos, and baios indicates that it is a little one. It is also a “bolt” that acts as the key to unlock the Gateway. Both pillars and stone balls have been found in Mithraea.

The Goddess Ishtar summons the awakening of the sun god who cuts his way upwards from the mountain with a saw in hand. Akkadian cylinder seal, ca. 2250 BCE.

These sacred stones are a common pun on petra for “stone” and variants of pitra, which is the Hebrew word for “mushroom” (ptr) and occurs widely throughout Afro-Asian languages as indicating “seeing, beholding, explaining, and interpreting,” appearing in Egyptian, Nabitaean, Hebrew, Aramaic, Phoenician, Punic, and Neo-Punic.⁴¹ An inscription from a seventh-century divinatory temple at Ekron, thirty-five kilometers southwest of Jerusalem, bears the name of a Canaanite goddess that can be read as Ptryh (pronounced pet-ree-yah), with the final syllable as a suffix indicating divinity, as in the name of Yahweh. Ptryh is a variant of the Ugaritic Pidray, the goddess of illumination and lightning, who was the daughter of Baal-zeebub, the so-called Lord of the Flies.⁴² The inscription was found near a figurine, probably of this goddess, squeezing the milk from her breast as the divine potion, and the temple contained a number of drinking vessels, suggesting that the potion was drunk there. We should expect that the sacrament, therefore, was visionary. Since the goddess is a personification of the mushroom, it is not surprising that the vessels for her milk have a mushroom-like configuration.

An “animate rock” that houses a god and that opens the divine gateway is a perfect metaphor for a psychoactive mushroom. Theophrastus even records the tradition that mushrooms could turn into stones when dried by the sun.⁴³ The association of the mushroom goddess with flies betrays the identity of this particular mushroom. The egg stage of the fly agaric, while still enclosed in its universal veil, in fact, looks very much like a stone, and its sudden emergence from a rock is yet another suggestion of Mithras’s representation of the mushroom.

The mushroom was too sacred to be explicitly identified, and thus it was commonly referred to with descriptive metaphors, the parasol being the most frequent. Anthropomorphized versions of the mushroom can be seen in the example of the so-called Shade-foots or Skiapodes, who were a tribe of creatures with a single extremely vigorous leg and a single broad, webbed foot; when they tired from the exertion of leaping, they fell flat upon their backs and rested in the shade cast by the foot that served as a parasol. Similar creatures went by names like One-legs or One-eyes, the single eye being metaphoric of the visionary experience.⁴⁴ Aja Ekapad, called the “Not-born One-foot,” is a deity mentioned six times in the Rig Veda and is apparently an archaic name for Soma. Unborn describes its seedless propagation.

The effect … became evident by the time the men had swallowed the fourth mushroom. Their eyes took on a wild look … with a positively blinding gleam, and their hands began to tremble nervously…. After a few minutes a deep lethargy overcame them, and they began quietly singing monotonous improvised songs…. They suddenly sprang raving from their seats and began loudly and wildly calling for drums…. And now began an indescribable dancing and singing, a deafening drumming and a wild running about…. during which the men threw everything about recklessly.

—Report of field research with Siberian tribes, 1903.⁴⁵

Elder Brother watched aghast as Younger Brother became fused to that giant mushroom’s stipe. He beheld Younger Brother begin to grow a bright red cap. At first slowly, then faster and faster, Younger brother began to spin in the sun.

—Miskwedo of the Ahnishinaubeg.⁴⁶

Mithras emerged from the rock often holding a torch as the rising light and a dagger,⁴⁷ perhaps to both indicate the muscaria’s powerful “cutting through” of the earth and its luminous revelation as the white universal veil gives way to reveal the torchlike fiery red of its expanding cap. Similarly, the Mesopotamian sun god Shamash, with whom Mithras was equated, uses a saw to cut his way upward out of the mountain on an Akkadian cylinder seal in the British Museum.⁴⁸ (See color figure 7, p. 99.)

Rock-birth from pinecone. Red sandstone (50 × 27 cm). Frankfurt, Heddernheim (left). Mithras being born from the rock. San Clemente Mithraeum, Rome. (See color figure 8, p. 99.)

In a stone relief from Vercovicium discovered outside the Roman Fort at Housesteads, Britain, Mithras is seen at the moment of his sudden birth as an anthropomorphized mushroom. Above the unworked base, in an open oval circle, the torso of the naked Mithras appears emerging from an egg with its two halves visible above the head and below the hips. His raised arms are lost, but his hands are preserved in the rim of the circle, holding a dagger and a torch. Above his head is the sign for the summer equinox.⁴⁹

Thus the initiates could expect the same miraculous experience as they were lifted upwards out of the confining egglike subterranean chamber of the Mithraeum toward the fiery celestial Empyrean, for this rock of the Nativity was also called a “cave,”⁵⁰ and the rock-birth was often depicted, like the tauroctony, as occurring in a cavernous chamber. The Armenians placed a very strong emphasis upon the fertility-based interpretation of Mithras’s birth, claiming that he is, in fact, reborn every year from his cave dwelling. Similarly, not only was Christ resurrected from a cave, but according to Eusebius and other Church Fathers, there was a version of His Nativity from a cave.⁵¹

God of birthing for the birthing of God.

—Mithraic inscription.⁵²