Public Lecture - Mithra, Mithras, Maitreya, Mher: The Most Human of the Gods, and the Liberator, Saviour, and Revolutionary

The Zoroastrian divinity Mithra (Mitra, in the Indian Vedas) watches the social bonds of mankind through the glowing eye of the Sun; artists imagined him as a handsome youth in a flowing cape, an ancient superhero, the most human of the supernatural beings. In modern Persian his name can mean, simply, Love.

Why and how did this figure of the Iranian religious imagination become the focus of a secret cult Roman soldiers practiced from the borders of Scotland to the deserts of Syria; or an embodiment of the longing for salvation among Central Asian Buddhists; or the freedom-fighter hero — a Promethean revolutionary — of an ancient oral epic rediscovered just over a century ago among the mountaineers of Armenia? God, says Maulana Jalal al-Din Rumi, is the treasure who in His grace created us to know Him. As we look for the face of God sometimes we re-create His image, in gods and heroes, in our continuing effort to become human. This point of intersection of faith and imagination is where our travels with Mithra begin.