Phil Rickman - The Secrets of Pain

‘How widely did it spread in Britain?’

‘It’s not ubiquitous, but far from invisible. A very good example of a mithraeum – one of their temples – was found in London. Also a famous one at Hadrian’s Wall in Northumbria.’

‘What about this area?’

‘That’s what I was…’ Miss White lifted an old brown book, The Mithraic World ‘… attempting to discover. I don’t think so, actually. I think the nearest evidence of Mithraic worship is at Caerleon – which was linked to Hereford by a Roman road. But there’s probably a tremendous amount of Roman archaeology as yet undiscovered in the Credenhill area.’

‘So it wouldn’t be surprising if there was?’

‘It wouldn’t surprise me. The Romans often built shrines and temples in the shadow of Iron Age hill forts.’

With a pile of books accumulating at the side of her wheelchair, Miss White talked for some time of what little was known of Mithraic theology and a concept of the afterlife.

‘Nothing quite comparable to the risible Islamic promise of an unlimited supply of virgins for chaps martyred in the cause – that’s the stuff of men’s magazines. And yet there are similarities in the way it must have been used by the Romans. Those who died in battle were expected to have an untroubled afterlife, as a result of the rituals they’d practised and the degree of attainment.’

‘And the rituals were…?’

‘Well… following a baptism, you would have a series of grades or degrees. Spiritual ranks – raven, lion, soldier, and so on, each with an appropriate face-mask. Each an initiation to a higher level, through tests involving danger and suffering. We read of the “twelve tortures of Mithraism” – ordeals which might bring the candidate to the very brink of death. From which, obviously, they would emerge much strengthened. A universal concept. If you consider your chap’s forty days and forty nights in the wilderness, constantly exposed to psychic attack…’

‘Bit different, really…’

‘Not so different from the ordeals where recruits were made to sleep on frozen ground or in snow, or were branded and buried alive. Though I suppose the less savoury ones – like being compelled to eat animals which are still alive…’

Merrily was immediately reminded of one of the more repellent anecdotes in the late Frank Collins’s book. Where Collins, in North Africa or somewhere, was urged by a senior officer to carry out an ethnic custom involving biting the heads off live poisonous snakes and eating the still-threshing remains.

‘And they would be taken to the very edge of extinction,’ Miss White said gleefully, ‘in the sure belief that they are going to die. Pushed to the absolute limits of human endurance.’

Very SAS. It was all starting to make sense – how Byron Jones married Mithraic ritual to his own experiences in the Regiment. But how far had he practised it for real, in a ritual context?

Miss White was talking about haoma, a herbal drink, ingredients unknown, named after a pre-Mithraic Persian god but probably also adopted by the Romans because it stimulated the senses and induced an unstoppable aggression. A drug of war.

‘Athena…’ Lol had his OS map opened out on the Aztec bedcover. ‘Where might we be looking for a temple of Mithras?’ Tapping the putative ley lines issuing from Brinsop Church. ‘Have any been found under churches, in the same way you sometimes find a crypt built around a Neolithic burial chamber?’

‘Not unknown, Robinson, according to this book. The odd mithraeum has been found under a church – one in Rome, for example – but, again, I’m not aware of any inside British churches. But, you see, one could be anywhere. This whole area has been a military playground for two millennia. Interesting how it continues to attract the army and the MoD to this day. A landscape quietly dedicated to war.’

Miss White was pointing to a spot a few miles south of Brinsop, where it said Satellite Earth Station.

‘Satellite dishes collecting intelligence surveillance from all over the world and feeding it to GCHQ at Cheltenham – where, as it happens, I worked for a period in my civil-service years. Bloody place leaked like a sieve.’

‘ Athena – you were a spook?’

‘Don’t be cheap, Robinson. And what did you do to your wrist?’

‘It got entangled in the barbed wire around a private military playground.’

‘Not sure I like the sound of that.’

Merrily sat back and thought about some implications.

‘What does a mithraeum look like?’

‘Like a public toilet,’ Miss White said. ‘Rectangular. Fairly basic and utilitarian, apart from a few astrological symbols and a representation of Mithras himself. And, of course, partly or entirely underground, to simulate a cave. Certainly no windows. And a channel down the middle, for the sacrificial blood.’

‘Oh.’

‘What did you expect?’

‘Are we talking about human sacrifice, or-?’

‘Bulls,’ Miss White said. ‘All the pictures of Mithras show him slitting the throat of a bull.’

Leaning across, a knee in the bull’s back, a hand hauling back its head, fingers in its nostrils – or so it seemed. Carnage where the sword or long knife went in.

The act performed dismissively. The perpetrator gazing away. Directly, as it were, into camera.

It was known as the Tauroctony. Athena White displayed a double-page illustration, sitting the big brown book on the blue blanket across her knees. ‘In all the sculptures and carvings and bas-reliefs, Mithras always looks away. In much the same way as the Greek hero Perseus, as he prepares to cut off the head of the Gorgon, averts his gaze.’

Merrily would rather have averted hers but kept on looking, frozen, registering all the detail, hearing Arthur Baxter at his kitchen table.

Unlikely to’ve been nicked for breeding purposes.

Lol was the first to find his voice.

‘They still do this? The modern followers of Mithras.’

‘If they do, it’s hardly mainstream. All a psychological exercise now. In the Roman myth, the slaying of the bull in the cave is seen as a creative act, releasing all manner of good things, positive energy, along with the blood. To the modern Mithraist, the bull tends to represent the ego which must be overcome – the beast within us. Cut him down – sacrifice that side of your essence – and don’t look back.’

‘But the Romans did it for real.’

‘Their temples clearly were designed for it. The bull might have been sedated before being butchered, torn apart, so that the initiate would be covered from head to foot with the blood.’

‘So it would be like an abattoir.’

Lol, sitting on a corner of the bed, looked unhappy. Unlike Miss White, who seemed stimulated by thoughts of blood-spatter.

‘One wonders precisely when blood sacrifice – that staple of the Old Testament – was brushed under the Christian carpet. For a while, certainly, Christianity and Mithraism were rivals, and then Christ appeared to have triumphed while Mithras simply disappeared – up the arse of Christianity. So who really triumphed? Did they take it this far at your college, Watkins?’

Merrily looked into Lol’s eyes. The room was awash with bland spring sunlight, bringing up the richness in the Afghan rugs.

‘So this is the summit,’ she said. ‘The final act. The last step to attain the highest grade, when the initiate takes on the persona of the god.’

Miss White put her hands together as if in prayer, although you never liked to think what she might be praying to.

‘What might it do to a person now, Athena? We have a man hardened up by lying in the snow, made braver by coming close to death. Where does he go next?’