Mithra, A Compendium of the Ancient Gods

Mithra was one of the oldest of the Iranian yazatas, with cognates in the Vedic Mitra and a clear Indo-Iranian background; he was the lord of the covenant, the warrant of oaths, the patron of the warrior who fought for the just cause and of the king who ruled by righteous compact. His name in Avestan and Old Persian meant "covenant, agreement, contract," and the god personified that bond by which men committed themselves to one another and to the divine.

Mithra rode in a chariot drawn by four white horses, with the dawn going before him; he saw with ten thousand eyes everything that happened in the world, and he heard with ten thousand ears every oath sworn anywhere on earth. The man who broke an oath sworn by Mithra was hunted down by the god himself, who would never rest until the perjurer was brought to justice; the man who kept his oaths was Mithra's friend, and the god rode beside him in battle and gave victory.

His great Avestan hymn — Yasht 10, the Mihr Yasht — runs to over a thousand verses and is one of the most extended poetic compositions in the Iranian sacred literature. It celebrates Mithra in every aspect: as the rising sun, as the warrior on his horse, as the judge of the dead, as the guardian of cattle and pastures, as the protector of the righteous in battle and on the journey. The hymn is in some respects the most generous in the Avesta, a portrait of a god who is not merely worshipped but loved.

From this Iranian Mithra descended, through complex routes that we do not fully understand, the Roman cult of Mithras — the secret men's society of the Roman army that flourished from the second to the fourth century of our era, with its underground temples (mithraea), its grades of initiation, its banquet of bread and wine, and its iconic scene of the bull-killing. The Roman Mithras was a different god in many respects from the Iranian Mithra (the bull-killing has no Iranian counterpart, for example), and the relationship between the two was probably mediated by Hellenistic Cilician communities and by the wider Mediterranean syncretism of the post-Alexander period. But the name and the foundation were Iranian, and the Roman Mithras was at the deepest level a transformed version of the Avestan lord of the covenant. The Roman cult disappeared with the triumph of Christianity in the late fourth century; the Iranian Mithra, in his original form, was preserved by the Zoroastrian community and continues to be invoked by Parsis and Iranian Zoroastrians today.

Curator’s note

What the sources say, and what later tradition added. The sources for this bay

Mithra is the central figure of Yasht 10 (the Mihr Yasht), the great Avestan hymn; he is invoked also throughout the Yasna and in numerous Achaemenid royal inscriptions (Artaxerxes II particularly invokes Mithra alongside Ahura Mazda and Anahita). The Vedic cognate Mitra has a parallel hymn in Rigveda 3.59. The Roman Mithras is documented archaeologically through hundreds of mithraea throughout the empire, particularly in Italy, Britain, the Rhine and Danube frontiers, and Syria; key textual sources are Porphyry's De Antro Nympharum and several Christian polemics. The standard modern study of the Roman cult is Manfred Clauss's The Roman Cult of Mithras (1990, English 2000); the relation to the Iranian original is the subject of David Ulansey's The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries (1989), Roger Beck's Beck on Mithraism (2004), and Mary Boyce's various contributions in History (Vol. 3). The two Mithras / Mithra are best treated as a parent-and-radically-altered-child rather than as the same figure.

Kin in the sources

Each tie is quoted from the entry that states it.

Child ofMithras (Roman)The two Mithras / Mithra are best treated as a parent-and-radically-altered-child rather than as the same figure.
Companion ofAnahitaArtaxerxes II particularly invokes Mithra alongside Ahura Mazda and Anahita
Companion ofAhura MazdaArtaxerxes II particularly invokes Mithra alongside Ahura Mazda and Anahita

When the sources speak

Dated witnesses for The Yazatas. A date marks when the evidence was written down, not when the belief began. The whole timeline

late 2nd–early 1st millennium BCE, debated: The Old Avestan Gathas and Yasna Haptanghaiti emerge in an eastern Iranian ritual-poetic setting; Zarathustra’s date remains disputed.
1st millennium BCE: Younger Avestan hymns, ritual texts, and legal-purity materials develop over a long period of oral transmission.
c. 550–330 BCE: Achaemenid inscriptions invoke Ahuramazda in imperial royal ideology; their relationship to later Zoroastrian orthodoxy requires care.
330 BCE–224 CE: Hellenistic and Parthian eras preserve Iranian cults through sparse and regionally varied evidence.
224–651 CE: Sasanian institutions sponsor priestly learning and the redactional organization associated with the Avesta and Zand.
7th–10th centuries CE: After the Islamic conquest, Middle Persian books record cosmology, law, exegesis, and summaries of lost material.
c. 9th century CE: The Bundahišn, Dēnkard, Wizīdagīhā ī Zādspram, and related works preserve systematic late antique and early Islamic syntheses.
c. 977–1010 CE: Ferdowsi composes the Shāhnāmeh from epic and royal traditions with both pre-Islamic and Islamic-period mediation.