The Mithras Liturgy

The text takes the form of an instruction handed to a single recipient, and what it promises is not an outcome in the world but a journey. The speaker asks to be released from the constraint of a mortal body, and is then carried upward. Air, fire and the fixed stars are passed in turn. Powers appear at each stage and have to be addressed. Doors open. At the top a figure of overwhelming brightness is seen face to face, and the vision is the point: nothing is asked for beyond it.

That structure is what separates the passage from everything around it in the codex. The other items in the Paris papyrus are transactional. They want a dream, a cure, a rival's silence, a woman's attention. This one wants sight, and it describes the experience of ascent in enough detail, including the sensory particulars of what the traveller hears and feels, that it reads as an account of something rather than a set of instructions for producing it.

Scholars have consequently used it as the best available window onto late antique religious experience outside the institutional cults, and it is the passage most often set beside the Hermetic treatises, the Chaldean Oracles and the Jewish ascent literature of the same centuries. Whether the writer had made the ascent, expected a reader to make it, or was working a literary form, cannot be decided from the manuscript, and each of the three has been argued.

The name is Albrecht Dieterich's. Publishing the passage in 1903, he identified it as a surviving initiation text of the mysteries of Mithras, which would have made it the only ritual script from a mystery cult otherwise known almost entirely from its archaeology and its images. That claim is the reason the passage is famous, and it was contested immediately.

Franz Cumont, whose reconstruction of Mithraism dominated the subject for a generation, held that the identification failed on the evidence. The Mithraea are full of a recognisable iconographic programme, the bull-slaying, the torchbearers, the grades, and almost none of it appears in the text. What the text does contain, Egyptian divine names and the technical vocabulary of the magical papyri, appears nowhere in Mithraic archaeology. The passage, on that reading, is Graeco-Egyptian material that happens to use a fashionable Persian name.

The atlas records the identification as debated because both positions are live and have serious holders. Dieterich's side points to the Mithraic name itself, to the solar imagery and to the seven-stage structure. Cumont's side points to the total absence of corroboration from the cult sites. Hans Dieter Betz's 2003 commentary, which is the standard modern treatment, occupies a middle position: the composition is Graeco-Egyptian, but the borrowing of the name is not accidental and tells us something about how a Mithraic reputation circulated. The label is now used as a convenience, and most scholars who use it say so.