Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

The Faravahar — the winged emblem of Zoroastrianism, representing the fravashi or divine spirit within each person. Long before Moses received the Ten Commandments, long before the Buddha sat beneath the Bodhi tree, long before Christ walked the shores of Galilee, a prophet arose on the windswept steppes of ancient Iran. His name was Zarathustra — known to the Greeks as Zoroaster — and the faith he proclaimed would shape the spiritual imagination of the entire Western world in ways that are only now becoming fully appreciated. Zoroastrianism is one of humanity's oldest living religions, and arguably the most consequential faith you have never fully studied. Its ideas about angels and demons, heaven and hell, a final judgment, the resurrection of the dead, and the ultimate triumph of good over evil passed quietly into Judaism during the Babylonian exile — and from there into Christianity and Islam. The apocalyptic visions of Daniel and Revelation, the hierarchy of angels in ...

Between approximately the 1st and 4th centuries CE, a mystery religion dedicated to the god Mithras spread through the Roman Empire with extraordinary speed — found in every province from Britain to Mesopotamia, concentrated particularly in military garrisons, port cities, and merchant communities. Its initiates met in underground temples (mithraea) built to resemble caves, in small groups of no more than forty, passing through seven grades of initiation named for the seven classical planets. They shared a sacred meal. They watched, and perhaps participated in, the re-enactment of Mithras's slaying of the primordial bull. They preserved their secrets so completely that virtually no Mithraic text survives — we know the Mysteries almost entirely through the material evidence of 400+ mithraea excavated across the empire. What we see in those remains is extraordinary. What it meant, we can only partially reconstruct. Mithras Tauroctony relief — the central image of ...