Mushrooms, Myth and Mithras. Carl Ruck

      Mithras, Cautes, and Cautopates as capped heads in a pine tree (left). Detail, Kreis-und-Stadtmuseum, Dieburg. Mithras as capped head in a pine tree (center and right). Detail, Frankfurt-Heddernheim, Städtisches Museum, Wiesbaden.

      It should be obvious that the bull of the cult’s central myth of the tauroctony was no ordinary animal found here on earth but one with cosmic dimensions in which the god of the sacrificial offering was also himself the offering, as in the Christian Eucharist where the priest is defined as offerens oblatus, both “offering and offered,” identified as officiating over his own sacrifice. Similarly, the self-oblation in Mithraism ratifies a mediation between the celestial and human realms, a communion in which the worshipper is privileged to participate. Mithras, therefore, displays non-human characteristics of the prime botanical Host, traceable back to the warrior confraternities of the Aryan and Persian nobility. That is to say, he is an anthropomorphized mushroom, just as the Bull is a fungal zoomorphism, including the characteristic red and starry white dichotomy of the red-capped Amanita muscaria, its manifestation as a bodily effluent in the form of its metabolite in urine, its sudden explosive nativity from a rock, its anthropomorphism as a creature with a single operative leg or foot, and its association with a particular host tree as its fruit, such as a pinecone. Further aspects of this symbolism, as we examine in subsequent chapters, will associate Mithras and the Bull with a source of magical waters.