Death and New Birth In Mithraism

For Mithraism, soldiers were the best kind of missionaries. Mithra himself had been for long centuries the god of battles, and his cult was an exclusively masculine one. Soldiers, on the other hand, were pious to the point of being superstitious. The dangers to which they were constantly exposed caused them to seek the assurances of a religion that would guarantee safety for the present and salvation for the future. The oriental devotees of the militant god Mithra, who had found these assurances in his religion, were not in the least exclusive. They gladly welcomed and initiated their companions in arms as members of their cult brotherhoods. True to the camaraderie of soldier life, these neophytes in turn became missionaries for Mithra; and so the movement grew...