(Mithraism - A 'Pilgrims Progress' by Paternus2001)

Chapter Two.

The True Identity of that Bull.

Perhaps one of the reasons why the Cumontian interpretation of the Bull-slaying has persisted is that there has been no coherent interpretation to refute it, and all this is in spite of the efforts of J. R. Hinnells and his contemporaries?

I am fully aware that there is still a caucus of opinion that still wants to believe that Cumont's explanation is the correct one, the original and best?

For these people, Cumont has passed into the realm of 'source material' and they do not want to be disturbed!

The Primal Bull of the Bundahisn still appears in popular works, and is still described as such at the Newcastle Museum of Antiquity's reconstructed Mithraeum?

Occasionally, one reads nebulous references to the 'Bull of Heaven' and there it ends (Gilgamesh)

Now, I am not a trained archaeologist, no more than Darwin was a trained Naturalist, or Farraday a trained Physicist, but they made their contribution, as history will attest?

I am somewhat bemused, considering the evidence readily available, that 2 & 2 have not been put together far sooner!

Let me state categorically that the Bull that Mithras slays is not the Primal Bull of the Bundahisn, neither is it Hadhayans, the heavenly Bull of the present day (Sassanid) Zoroastrians?

Hadhayans is the heavenly Bull that will be slain by Soshyans (the Saviour, who will be a man, not a God) at the formation of the 'Final Body' at the end of time!

One of my correspondents appears to believe that the bull that Mithras slays is the final form of Dionysus/Zagreus in his flight from the Titans; this idea is proferred on the strength of evidence from one Mithraea, the Dura-Europus Mithreaum, which is fairly intact, and does indeed show an 'Orphic' myth cycle, but different Mithraea depict different myth cycles, and just what Mithras is doing slaying a form of Dionysus, when it was clearly some other deity's responsibility to save the still beating heart of Dionysus/Zagreus is not explained, perhaps I was not worthy to receive the information, and this appears to be a Cumont style bending of evidence of one myth, to answer another, something that Hinnells warns against, one must let the Tauroctony, and only the tauroctony, speak for itself!

The writings of Ammianus Marcellinus have been around long enough to have turned a spotlight on the Apis Bull of Egypt, in connection with the Emperor, Julian (the Apostate).

Julian, as I have said, was a well known, convinced Mithraist, and Ammianus goes to great lengths to record the importance that Julian attached to receiving the news that a New Apis had been found in Egypt, while Julian himself was still yet at Antioch, planning his invasion of Persia?

This, coupled with extensive reliefs from the Dieburg Mithraeum (See Vermaseren - 'Mithras, the Secret God') and freely available descriptions of the finding, transport, and enthronement of a new Apis, described by Herodotus, and present day Egyptologists, and the answer suggests itself as to who that Bull was that Mithras slew???

Now, I have either overestimated the prominence of this subject to the archaeological world, or most of them have been asleep?

Richard Gordon in describing the relief's of the Dieburg Mithraeum sees what Vermaseren and I describe as a 'Bull in a Barge' - as a Bull standing in a Crescent moon, which is fine if the crescent moon depicted occurs on the equator?

I believe that Gordon here is too influenced by the Persian connection as enunciated by Cumont, he is strangely silent on the next relief that follows on from the Bull 'standing in a crescent moon, the depiction of a bull in a temple?

In the transport of a New Apis, it would leave its point of embarkation, where it had been kept for 40 days, and 40 nights, and would be loaded onto a Barge with a golden Cabin, it would then be transported to Memphis where it would be instated in a Temple of Vulcan!

The completes the Dieburg depiction!

G.R.S. Mead had already presented the world with the Egyptian doublet of  'As above, so below' in his tree volume work on the hermetica "Thrice Greatest Hermes." Circa 1900AD.

In practical terms then, no one who should have already known was obliged to wait for Adrian Gilbert to resurrect the Hermetica before the connections could be made?

The prominence of the Apis Bull turns on the very old Egyptian belief in the 'transmigration of souls' which, expressed in the simplest terms involves the movement of a soul from the lowliest of living things up an evolutionary scale, until it finally comes to reside in the body of a man?

According to Herodotus, the whole process spanned 3 thousand years?

Except for the 'creationists' we now know that living things evolve over thousands/millions of years, and since Einstein and his contemporaries, we now know that non-living matter evolves into more complex structures at the center of Stars like our Sun, and when large unstable Stars come to the end of their existence and become Super-Nova, their death throws seed surrounding space with the elements that go to make life possible?

Now this belief in the transmigration and evolution of souls was a revealing insight into the nature of things by the Egyptians, it puts me in mind of a quote by a Physicist 'Max Born' who stated that 'The more I have studied theoretical physics the more I have come to believe that it is pure philosophy!"

The second important thing is the place of the 'Heavenly' (as opposed to the 'earthly') Apis in the 'Zodiac', and at what time, and thirdly, the phenomenon of the 'Precession of the equinoxes'?

The precession of the equinoxes is a westward drift of the nodes of the first day of spring, and autumn through the Zodiac, or circle of the animals (except for Libra, the only non-animate sign)

Put in more technical terms, those points in the sky where the 'ecliptic' that is, the plane of the Solar system (the apparent path of the Sun and planets) bi-sect the celestial equator, which is the reflection of the Earth's equator onto the sky.

When the Sun, traveling north along the ecliptic crosses the celestial equator, the first day of spring is said to occur in the northern hemisphere, the reverse happens when the Sun, traveling south along the ecliptic crosses the celestial equator traveling south in the northern hemisphere and the first day of autumn occurs.

Due to the effect of precession, which is a consequence of the gravitational pull of the Sun and the Moon on the equatorial bulge of the earth, this first day of spring will change its Zodiacal sign once every 2,100 years, a complete circuit taking 25, 940 years to end-up back where it started?

This transmigration of the equinoxes through the signs of the Zodiac mimicked the transmigration of Souls embraced by the Egyptians.

Did the Egyptians know about the mechanics of Precession?

Apparently, yes they did, and long before it was announced to the western consciousness by Hippharchus circa 150-128BC.

How can I be so sure?

Julian (the Apostate) makes an unambiguous statement to that effect in his writings, which any reader may check for him/herself in the 3-volume work 'Julian' his extant writings, Loeb Classical Library. W.C. Wright!

I have mentioned this a number of times to Mr Ulansey, who's theory seems to be based on the belief that Mithrasim, as the Romans knew it, came about as the result of the 'discovery' of Precession by Hippharchus?

As Julian points out, Hippharchus came to know of this through the Egyptians!

The Egyptian Priests had, up until the time of the Ptolemies, guarded their knowledge carefully, and many Greeks traveled to Egypt in antiquity to receive knowledge at the hands of its Priests, and many things which were once believed to be of Greek origin in the western world were actually the property of the Egyptians that taught them!

I have reduced the astronomical mechanics here to the simplest of terms as there is freely available information on the subject from previous authors, and copyright requirements throughout this discourse prevent me form elaborating with drawings and diagrams?

The heavenly Apis is here identified with the constellation of 'Taurus' the Bull in the Zodiac, and it is interesting to note here that the Egyptians equated Taurus with their deity for chaos and destruction - Seth, (Greek; Typhon)

In the 'Hermetica' there is a discourse between Hermes and his son 'Tat' where Hermes states that the land of Egypt is an image of the heavens, and, as it is above, so it is below?

This means that as there was a 'Heavenly Apis' so there was an 'Earthly Apis'?

Apis or 'Hapy' was originally the 'Calf of Ptah, an Egyptian 'Creator God' but in time Apis became an embodiment of their God 'Osiris; for those who know the story of the search by Isis for the parts of her dead Husband's body after he was cut-up and scattered by his jealous brother Seth, knows that each time she discovered a part of his body she gave it into the safe-keeping of a nearby temple, when she recovered his head, near Memphis she gave it into the safe-keeping of the Priests of Apis (Hapy), that they preserve it for her return.

I will not here break into a discourse on the identification, selection, transport, and enthronement of a new Apis, for brevities sake, for the text for the same is extensive, but it is worth pointing-out here that the selection of an Apis was carried-out according to an 'ancient ordinance of Hermes' and that when an Apis died, the soul of Osiris would migrate to the new Apis, for which Priests specially selected for the purpose, would go in search of?

We can be sure that most Apis Bulls died of natural causes, but, according to a formula laid down in the Secret Books' of the Priests' - in the event that an Apis Bull reached the age of 25 years, he would be taken, along with his consort heifer, and ritually drowned in the Lake of the Priest's!

The astute reader will note that there is a correlation here between the allowed 25 year life-span of the Apis Bull, and the 25,000 + years cycle of the precession of the Equinoxes?

There is a discrepancy of 940 years, but this can be accounted for by the degradation of information that takes place over even short periods of time, and the fact that most of this information comes through third-hand from archives which were originally 'secret' !

In a painfully foreshortened way, I hope I have laid the foundations for what is to come?

In the syncretism which was to take place when the Greek Ptolemy began his dynasty in Egypt, Osiris was to become the Greaco-Egyptian Serapis, this particular syncretism began it is muted with a dream by Ptolemy Ist (Sotar; Saviour), which was interpreted and acted upon by the Priest Manetho?

A conflation of the terms Asar and 'Hapy' or, Osiris/Apis  = Serapis.

Serapis is depicted as wearing a 'Corn Measure' on his head, no doubt recalling one of the many epithets of the Egyptian Osiris, as the 'Corn God'; he was also known as the God of the Nile!

The Greeks had identified Osiris with their own God of vital natural forces, Dionysus (Roman Bacchus).

Serapis frequently crops-up in Mithraea?

Manetho states in his history of Egypt and its Kings that the Pharaoh Raneb, of the II Dynasty (circa 2890-2880BC) instigated the worship of the Sacred Goat of Mendes, but also of the Sacred Bull of Mnevis at Heliopolis, and the Apis Bull of Memphis?

Scholars now believe an earlier Pharaoh, Den, (Udimu) founded the worship of Apis, as a stele dated from his reign attests?

In any event, as David Ulansey points-out, the last time the node of the spring equinox occurred in the constellation of Taurus the Bull was between 4000-2000BC!

Both nodes of the equinoxes, spring, and autumn, were held to be embodiments of Osiris/Serapis, and each Zodiacal sign would possess his generative spirit in their turn.