There are books on my shelf I am not able to use. The Mithras Liturgy is not one of them — every word of it sits in translation, free, online, and I have read all of it. That is exactly what makes the Mithras Liturgy the most unsettling document in this series.
I can read the others too. Some describe practices I will never do from the page alone, because the page was never meant to be the whole of it — the text assumes a living person standing beside you, and without that person what you are holding looks complete and is not. For years I found that frustrating. It looked like a gate held shut by people who enjoyed holding gates.
My Lama even warned me: no practice without the explanation and the blessing. He was trying to keep me honest. He was trying to keep everyone honest.
Then I read the Mithras Liturgy properly, and I understood what the gate was for.
The Mithras Liturgy Is Not Its Name
Let me dismantle my own title before we go any further.
The name Mithras Liturgy is a modern label stuck onto an ancient document, and the man who stuck it there was Albrecht Dieterich, who published the text in 1903 as Eine Mithrasliturgie and argued it preserved the highest sacrament of the Mithraic mysteries.
He dedicated the book to Franz Cumont, the greatest Mithras scholar of the age. Cumont read it and did not agree. Neither did Reitzenstein. Neither have a great many scholars since, and their objection is hard to argue with: the Mithras Liturgy papyrus is Egyptian, and Egypt is precisely where evidence for the Mithraic cult is thinnest on the ground.
Disagreement among experts about the Mithras Liturgy is not disproof. It means the evidence is thin enough that honest people read it differently — and thin evidence has a way of thickening.
The name survives because it is a good name, and because the Mithras Liturgy does invoke a great god called Helios Mithras. Marvin Meyer, who produced the first complete English translation, landed on a careful verdict: if there is Mithraism in the Mithras Liturgy at all, it is a Mithraism on the fringe — private, syncretic, tangled up with magic, one man’s version rather than a cult’s.
I am going to keep calling it the Mithras Liturgy, because that is what the world calls it. But hold the name loosely. What follows matters regardless of whose god the Mithras Liturgy belonged to.
What the Mithras Liturgy Actually Preserved
Everything preserved. Nothing transmitted.
The Mithras Liturgy sits inside the Great Magical Papyrus of Paris — a codex acquired by the French national library in 1857, written out in the early fourth century, and belonging by all appearances to the working library of a practising Egyptian mystic. The Mithras Liturgy is not scripture. It is a professional’s notebook: hymns, spells, prescriptions, procedures, the accumulated toolkit of a man who did this for a living. It is one of the Greek Magical Papyri, and the Mithras Liturgy occupies lines 475 to 834 of it.
Here is why the Mithras Liturgy is unlike anything else in this series.
Everything else we have looked at is a report. The Mithras Liturgy is not. Ezekiel tells us what he saw at the river. Enoch tells us what he saw above the crystal wall. Arda Viraf dictates his crossing to a scribe. In every case the vision survived and the method did not — the priesthood is gone, the container is gone, and we are left reconstructing the machine from the shape of the hole it left behind.
The Mithras Liturgy is the exception. The Mithras Liturgy comes in two halves. The first, lines 475 to 750, is the ascent itself — the prayers, the stages, what you will see and in what order. The second, lines 750 to 834, is the instructions for using it. What to prepare. What to make. What to say. How long to wait. Who you may share it with, and how.
Somebody wrote the operating manual down. The Mithras Liturgy is the only complete one we have.
And he tells us why. In the opening lines of the Mithras Liturgy the writer says he is setting these mysteries down not for gain but for instruction, and asks immortality for an only child. That is a man breaking the rule of his own tradition — putting in writing what was meant to stay in the room — and doing it, by his own account, out of love.
Tier 3 — Speculation
I am not claiming this is true. I am claiming it is where the pattern leads when I follow it past the point of comfort. Read the opening again — not for gain but for instruction, immortality asked for an only child, the whole apparatus written out in full by a man who knew he was not supposed to. That is not how a working professional guards his trade. That is how someone behaves when there is no one left to hand it to in person.
I think the Mithras Liturgy may be the notes of the last man in a line, writing everything down because the alternative was that it ended with him. The papyrus we hold is a fourth-century copy, so this is a guess about an author we cannot see, standing behind a scribe we can. But if I follow the tone of those opening lines honestly, that is where it takes me.
Inside the Mithras Liturgy Ascent
The disk opens. The stars come out of it. The doors are shut tight behind.
The ascent recorded in the Mithras Liturgy is one of the strangest sequences in the ancient world.
It begins with an invocation of extraordinary construction — a man taking himself apart into elements and naming each one as his own: the first of the spirit in me, the first of the fire in me, the water, the earthy substance.
Tier 2 — My Framing
I could not read that passage of the Mithras Liturgy without thinking of Kalu Rinpoche’s description of the dissolution sequence — the elements releasing one into the next as the ordinary mind comes apart. That parallel is mine, not the scholarship’s, and I offer it as a resemblance rather than a lineage. But it is the first thing I thought of, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
Between the phrases run strings of vowels and unpronounceable syllables, AEEIOYO and the rest, the voces magicae that fill these papyri. These are names of power, and they come from everywhere. Some are Egyptian — PHRE is Re, the sun. Some are Semitic — SEMESILAM, the eternal sun, and IAO, which is Yahweh. This is a man in Roman Egypt reaching for every name of power he has ever heard of and using all of them at once. He is calling everyone he can in his contact list of power — and I do not think he is doing it to improve his odds. I think he is doing it because he already recognises them as one.
Many names. One state.
Then the breath, and then the ascent of the Mithras Liturgy begins in earnest.
He rises. Sound falls away — nothing of any living thing, nothing of mortal affairs on earth. He sees the order of the sky from outside it, gods rising and setting, and a strange tube or pipe hanging from the disk of the sun, which he calls the origin of the ministering wind. Then the gods notice him. They turn and rush at him, and the text tells him exactly what to do: finger to the mouth, and Silence, silence, silence. A long hiss. A popping sound. And they settle, and go back about their own business, and leave him be.
The disk opens. Five-pronged stars pour out of it and fill the air. There is thunder loud enough to shock him. Behind the disk is a fireless circle and doors shut tight, and when the doors open there is a world of gods inside them.
A youthful god comes first, with fiery hair, in a white tunic and a scarlet cloak, wearing a crown of fire. Then seven women come out of the depths in linen, carrying golden wands, and they have the faces of asps — these are the seven Fates of heaven. Then seven more, in linen loincloths and golden diadems, with the faces of black bulls: the Pole-Lords, who turn the axis of the sky.
— G.R.S. Mead, A Mithriac Ritual, 1907
🕯️ “Hail Guardians of the Pivot, ye, sacred sturdy Youths, who all, at once, revolve the spinning Axis of Heaven’s Circle, ye who let loose the thunder and the lightning, and earthquake-shocks and thunder-bolts upon the hosts of impious folk, but who bestow on me, who pious am and worshipper of God, good-health, and soundness of my frame in every Part, and proper stretch of hearing and of sight, and calm, in the now Present good-hours of this day, O mighty Ruling Lords and Gods of me!”
That is Mead’s 1907 rendering of the Mithras Liturgy, and it is worth saying what it is. Mead was a Theosophist who believed he could recover the original rite by stripping away what he judged to be later magical accretion. His English is gorgeous and his editing is an argument. Where I quote him on the Mithras Liturgy it is because the language carries something; where accuracy matters more, I follow Meyer.
And last, with lightning going down and the earth shaking, the great god descends — young, golden-haired, in a white tunic and golden crown, wearing trousers, which is how a Greek writer signals someone Persian. In his right hand he holds the golden shoulder of a young bull. The Egyptians knew that constellation as the Bull’s Foreleg; we call it the Great Bear. Lightning comes out of his eyes. Stars come off his body.
The initiate greets him, asks his question, and then says the line I cannot get out of my head:
— Meyer translation, PGM IV.719–721
🕯️ “while being born again, I am passing away”
I wonder how many Christians would find this disturbing to read?
He is not describing the afterlife. The Mithras Liturgy is describing what is happening to him at that moment, standing in front of the god. Born and dying in the same breath. Every tradition in this series has been circling that sentence; the Mithras Liturgy simply hands it over as a line to be said out loud, in the room, while it is happening.
Then the god answers in verse and departs. And the Mithras Liturgy notes, quite matter-of-factly, that afterwards you will be weak and not quite yourself — but that you will remember what was said, perfectly, even if it ran to thousands of lines.
Here Is the Mithras Liturgy Procedure. You Still Cannot Use It.
So: the Mithras Liturgy procedure, in full.
You take a scarab beetle with twelve rays and drop it into a deep turquoise cup at the dark of the moon. You add lotus seed and honey, grind it, make a cake. The beetle eats and dies. You put it in a glass vessel of good rose oil, stand the vessel on sacred sand, and speak over it for seven days at noon. On the seventh day you take the beetle out and bury it with myrrh and Egyptian wine and fine linen in a flourishing bean field, and then you and your companions eat together, and the ointment for the immortalization is finished.
If you want another person to see, you take the juice of a herb called kentritis, mix it with rose oil, and anoint their eyes. There are amulets, one copied onto the skin of a black sheep in myrrh ink and tied with sinew from the same animal, one onto the skin of a white sheep. And the text tells you where the herb grows — a single reddish stem, crinkled leaves, fruit like the tip of wild asparagus, found by the riverbanks in Menelaitis near the Besas plant, gathered at the conjunction in Leo.
That is the complete procedure of the Mithras Liturgy, and it is worth nothing at all.
Nobody has ever identified the kentritis of the Mithras Liturgy. Not Dieterich, not Preisendanz, not Betz, not anyone in the century of scholarship since. The description is detailed and useless, the way a description of a face is useless in a crowd of strangers. The plant either no longer exists, or exists under another name in a landscape that no longer looks like that, or was never one plant to begin with.
And look at how hard he is trying. In that one paragraph he names three plants to help you: kentritis itself, the Besas plant it grows beside, and the Talapes it resembles. He picked those two landmarks precisely because they were obvious — the way you would tell someone the house is next to the church. We cannot securely identify any of the three. Every reference point the man chose has dissolved underneath him.
Tier 2 — My Framing
There is a candidate for the Besas plant, and it got considerably stronger in 2024. Across the eastern Mediterranean, Syrian rue carries a family of names built on the same consonants — baššāšā in ancient Syria, bešaš in Aramaic, basous in Coptic, bêsasa in Egypt, and bêsa in the Greek medical papyri. Scholars have traced bêsa and bêsasa to the god Bes and read them as the plant of Bes.
The Mithras Liturgy is a Greek magical papyrus, and it sends you to a riverbank to find kentritis growing beside the Besas plant. It would not change the ritual — Besas is a landmark, not an ingredient — but it would tell us the ground kentritis grew in. I said in an earlier draft that nothing supported this. That was wrong, and I would rather correct it in public than quietly.
There is a reason to suspect these holes were sometimes dug on purpose. Elsewhere in the Greek Magical Papyri there survives a decoder — a list of interpretations attached to the Leiden papyrus, explaining what the temple scribes actually meant by their ingredient names. Its preamble says so outright: the scribes wrote the names of their herbs onto the statues of the gods, so that the curious and untrained would meddle, misunderstand, and fail. A lock, admitted in writing, by the people who fitted it.
And then you read the list, and it is a garden. Semen of Hephaistos is fleabane. A Hawk’s Heart is heart of wormwood. Semen of Helios, white hellebore. A Titan’s Blood, wild lettuce. Blood of Hestia, chamomile. Semen of Ares, clover. The one decoder we possess conceals almost nothing you could not grow in a window box. And a serious scholar, Jacco Dieleman, reads the whole passage not as cryptography at all but as scribal advertising — the same instinct that makes these spells announce themselves as ancient, tested, and handed down from famous priests.
Tier 3 — Speculation
It is tempting to say kentritis is one of these cover names — that the plant is missing because somebody hid it. I do not think the evidence supports that, and I will say why rather than let it slide past. Cover names are short and evocative and carry no botany: blood of, semen of, heart of. Kentritis in the Mithras Liturgy comes with a field guide and a diagnostic test — dip a black-tipped ibis feather, smear it, watch the feathers fall away. That is not a man hiding a plant.
That is a man trying to help you find one. What I will say is the weaker and truer thing: the practice of hiding ingredient names is documented beyond dispute, and it tells us the priesthood was willing to build failure into its own manuals. Whether they did it here, I do not know.
But the plant is the least of what the Mithras Liturgy needs. Read the procedure again and count what else it asks for. A scarab of a particular species. Rose oil of a quality he did not have to specify because everyone knew. The sacred sand. The bean field. The right hour. A sky in which the Bull’s Foreleg means something. And a man beside you who has done it before.
Nothing was burned here. No emperor legislated this away, no council struck it from a canon. The Mithras Liturgy came through completely intact, and the technology died anyway — because a technology was never only its text. That is a harder truth than suppression, and I think it is the truer one. Most of what we lose, we lose by simply stopping.
The Mithras Liturgy and the Manual That Never Left the Teacher and the Eighth Book of Moses
Which brings me back to the books I cannot use — and to what the Mithras Liturgy finally taught me about them.
There is one thing in the Mithras Liturgy I have not mentioned yet, and it is the most human sentence in it. Near the end, the writer explains what to do if you want to bring someone else in. First, judge whether the man is completely worthy — treat it, he says, as though you were the one being judged for immortality in his place. Then have him stay pure, off meat and off the bath. Then say the words over his head in a voice so soft that he cannot hear them.
Selection. Preparation. And a transmission deliberately kept below the threshold of reading. You would never trip with people you do not like. You just wouldn’t.
The man who wrote the Mithras Liturgy knew. Whoever he was, sitting in Egypt with his scarabs and his borrowed divine names, he understood that the thing he was handing on could not travel as information — that it had to pass through a person who had already been through it. And then he wrote it down anyway, for a child he loved, and the writing is why we have it, and the writing was not enough.
One of his contemporaries took the opposite view. In the same century, in the same country, somebody compiled the manual we call the Eighth Book of Moses — another of the Greek Magical Papyri, now in Leiden. It is a procedure for obtaining the secret name of a god, and it is addressed, like ours, to a child. Near the middle the writer reminds his student of an oath sworn in the temple at Jerusalem, and gives him an instruction about the book itself:
— The Eighth Book of Moses, PGM XIII (Betz)
🕯️ “dispose of the book so that it will not be found”
That is a pagan writer telling his own student to destroy his own manual — concealment from the inside, not from above. Which is worth saying plainly, because there is a separate history of these books being destroyed from outside, and I will come back to it another time.
— Acts 19:19 · KJV
✝︎ “Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver.”
Fifty thousand pieces of silver, burned in a single afternoon. Hold that one; it belongs to another post.
Both books were written for a child. Both told the child to destroy them. Somebody, twice, did not let go.
Back to our two mystics. A manual that orders its own destruction is the burial pattern speaking in the first person — not inferred from a gap in the record, but written down as a command, by a man who understood exactly what a book can and cannot carry. And there is a detail in that text worth holding: the practitioner does not get the Name from the book. He gets it from the god who arrives. The book can only walk him to the door.
Two manuals — the Mithras Liturgy and the Eighth Book of Moses. Same century, same country, opposite instincts. One man writes everything down against the rule; the other tells his student to make sure it is never found. We have both. Which means both were disobeyed — and the only reason any of this reached us is that somebody, twice, failed to follow the instructions about instructions. I would like to see IKEA depict that in pictures.
The tradition I practise in solved the problem the Mithras Liturgy could not, a third way. In the Vajrayana the texts exist, and the texts are not the transmission. There is a thing called lung — the reading transmission, received by hearing the words spoken aloud by someone who themselves heard them, back through an unbroken succession of people. Not an unbroken succession of manuscripts.
People. You cannot download it.
You cannot buy the book and skip ahead. First the preliminaries, then the pointing out, and the pointing out comes from someone who was pointed to.
I used to think that was an obstacle. I thought the gate was institutional. The Mithras Liturgy is what changed my mind.
The Mithras Liturgy is what the other option looks like after seventeen hundred years. Everything preserved. Nothing transmitted.
A complete set of instructions, and not one living person who knows what they meant. The Mithras Liturgy survived because someone broke the rule. The practice died because a manual was never the thing that was alive.
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