Wednesday Nite @ The Lab

How do we reconstruct a “mystery religion” practiced two thousand years ago? Contemporary with the rapid spread of Christianity through the Roman Empire, another “new” religion attracted droves of worshippers from Britain to Syria in the second and third centuries CE: the cult of the Persian god Mithras. Our modern understanding of Mithraism, though, depends largely on a few short (and very problematic) literary mentions, mostly written by the cult’s Christian rivals.