Secret Societies Revisited The Mithraic Mysteries: Soldiers of the Bull, Book 2, (Paperback)

<p>Over 420 underground temples. From Hadrian's Wall to the Euphrates. More than 700 images of the same scene carved in stone, painted on walls, sculpted in marble: a young god in a Persian cap, killing a bull in a cave while a dog, a snake, a scorpion, and a raven attend the sacrifice. Hundreds of dedicatory inscriptions naming soldiers, officers, imperial freedmen. Seven grades of initiation, each assigned to a planet. A religion that spread across three continents without producing a single word of scripture.</p><p>And then it vanished. Completely.</p><p><i>The Mithraic Mysteries: Soldiers of the Bull</i> is the investigation. Who worshipped Mithras? Roman soldiers, overwhelmingly. Why? The cult offered a graded hierarchy, a sworn brotherhood, and a cosmic framework that made sense of lives spent on distant frontiers. How did 420 underground temples maintain the same iconographic program without a central authority, a canonical text, or a coordinating hierarchy? Nobody knows. The standardization was transmitted through initiation itself, person to person, grade to grade, and it worked for three hundred years. How it worked is not documented.</p><p>The scholarly debate is as fascinating as the cult itself. Franz Cumont spent seventy years convincing the world that Mithraism was an Iranian survival. The 1971 Manchester congress overthrew him. David Ulansey argued the tauroctony is a star map encoding the precession of the equinoxes. Roger Beck said the stars are the language, not the message. Manfred Clauss mapped the demographics. Richard Gordon mapped the social function. They agree on the evidence. They disagree on what it means. The worshippers themselves left no explanation.</p><p>The Mithras-Christianity comparison gets the honest treatment. The documented parallels are real: the sacred meal, December 25, ritual purification. Justin Martyr acknowledged the sacred meal and blamed it on demonic plagiarism. The fabricated parallels are fabricated: Mithras was not born of a virgin, did not have twelve disciples, was not crucified, did not rise from the dead. <i>Zeitgeist: The Movie</i> made those claims in 2007. None of them have any basis in any ancient source. Where the scholarly debate is genuinely open (the December 25 question, the calculation thesis vs. the borrowing thesis), the investigation says so. Where the popular mythology is demonstrably wrong, the investigation says that too.</p><p>Every claim sourced to the archaeological record, the epigraphic corpus, the ancient literary sources, and the peer-reviewed scholarly literature. Every scholarly debate presented with both sides at full strength. No conspiracy endorsement. No religious apologetics. No New Age credulity.</p><p><b>The evidence is the story. The silence is what remains.</b></p> <p><b>Secret Societies Revisited</b> is a fifty-book investigative nonfiction series examining the organizations built around secrecy, initiation, and concealed knowledge. From the ancient mystery cults through the medieval military orders to the Freemasons, each book investigates a single secret society with the same methodology: take the institution seriously, examine the mythology with equal seriousness, and let the evidence speak.</p><p>Each book stands alone. Each follows the evidence wherever it leads.</p>

• Secret Societies Revisited The Mithraic Mysteries: Soldiers of the Bull, Book 2, (Paperback)
• Author: Independently Published
• ISBN: 9798257414237
• Format: Paperback
• Publication Date: 2026-04-14
• Page Count: 236