Mithra among Iranians, Indo-Aryans and Romans and parallels with the cult of Christ

A god named Mithra belonged to the Iranians, the Indo-Aryans and the Hellenes. Historians have reached no consensus on whether this is one deity or several. The Roman Mithras was seen at the beginning of our era as a serious rival to Jesus, with the worship of whom Mithraism shows certain points of intersection. Mithras, known throughout the Roman Empire, was rock-born and came from a cave; Christ, too, was born in a cave. The cave is a universal symbol, from the most ancient times signifying the entrance to the other world, where a man might be bound after death, or from which forefathers or gods might come, who were themselves sometimes identified with one another. Plutarch points to the intermediary function of Mithra, which is also universal: many supernatural beings were originally endowed with the ability to pass between the worlds of the living and the dead, and were linked with some form of mediation between good and evil, life and death, day and night, or light and darkness. Among the Indo-Aryans and Iranians Mithra is directly called a mediator, while among the Romans he becomes the patron of the bargain and later of victory in battle, which is why he would be so popular among the legionaries. In Avestan, Mithra means friendship. The Iranian Mithra occupies a position between Ormazd, the god of all that exists, and Ahriman, the god of darkness, whose battle is depicted as a struggle with a bull. The subject of the tauroctony would come to be firmly associated with the Roman Mithras too, who is invariably shown slaying a bull; this extended to rituals of feasting on the flesh and blood of the bull, perhaps as a symbol of the food of immortality. The mysteries of Mithras in Rome are closely tied to the offering of bread and a cup of water, blood or some other drink, which may be connected with the Christian communion.