The psychoactive Psilocybe semilanceata (“half-spear” or pointed) mushroom is commonly called “liberty cap” because of its resemblance to the Phrygian cap and its association with the French revolutionaries. Its botanical description as “half-spear” probably derives from the same tradition since the Mithraic cap, atop the Sword of the Accord (a spear in this case), with its definite fungal connotations, was used in the illuminations of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme.59 It is common for easily available varieties with similarly psychoactive properties to be substituted for the original sacrament; thus the Psilocybe resembles the bonnet rouge, but obviously lacks its distinctive red color.
The Herdsmen Attendants
Not unlike the Christian nativity scene, shepherds witnessed the miraculous birth of Mithras, the enigmatic Cautes and Cautopates, who like him wear red caps. The caps alone sometimes represent them, like the twin Dioskouroi, with whom they sometimes are identified.
The Dioskouroi (Dioscuri) were the twin sons of Zeus from his affair with Leda. He seduced her while he was in the form of a swan, and the result was an egg from which they hatched, each maintaining half the shell as their distinctive Phrygian red caps.60 One was mortal and the other immortal, but they shared their fate, alternating between life and death on successive days.
Each of the attendants of Mithras usually carries at least one torch, and they indicate the two directions of the light, or the similar alternation of life and death expressed in the Dioskouroi. They are similar to the two thieves crucified with Christ, one destined for salvation, the other for descent into the underworld.61 In medieval tradition they become the wise and foolish virgins, the former holding their lamps upright, the others with lamps unlit and upside down.
Cautes, apparently representing the rising sun, points his torch upwards, sometimes with the cock that heralds the dawn, the bird in Greek called “Persian,” at his feet, while Cautopates inverts his torch for the setting of the sun; or perhaps they represent the solar equinoxal phases. The mushroom that ascends toward the Empyrean had its origin from the fall of light from the heavens. Cautes is associated with the head of the bull and stands in front of it, while Cautopates is its tail end and stands behind, often holding it in his hand.
Crossed Legs
Typically their pose is nonchalant: the twin “Capped-ones” never take part in the action. They seem unable to stand on two feet, but lean with their legs crossed like the Dioskouroi to make them appear like the anthropomorphized One-foots. This perhaps also suggests the entanglement of the fiery spirit encased in the wetness of the mushroom’s spongy matter, for they are also both associated with the thunderbolt, the celestial fire, that, like the mushroom, metaphorically bellows like a bull and was commonly considered its generative force.62 Agave, the mother of Pentheus, heard the same bellowing on Mount Kithairon at the onset of her maenadic rapture in Euripides’s Bacchae. It was also the sound that Perseus heard as he confronted the Gorgon Me dusa and harvested the sacred mushroom. According to the Persians, during famine manna “sometimes falls from the heaven.” Lightning and thunder are said to be indispensable for the growth of mushrooms, which are called banat-al-ra’d in Persian, meaning “daughters of the thunder.”63 In Greek mythology, it is the “One-Eyes” called Kylopes who make the thunderbolts of Zeus.64
The land roared with the bellowing of mushrooms.
—Aristias, Perseus65
Fiery-wet mushrooms sprouting from the lightning bolt is a perfect botanical analogue for the spiritual entanglement of fire in moist matter perhaps symbolized by the crossed-legged twins. Their names denote their essential role as Torchbearers (dadaphoroi or dadouchoi in Greek), a traditional function as escorts in Mystery initiations. Inevitably, such Torchbearers would have led the candidates into the subterranean Mithraeum for the ceremonies.
Cautes is named as the “burner,” and Cautopates is similarly named, but is his twin’s superior, with the additional termination of Old Persian pat, meaning “lord.”66 Hence “Fire” and “Lord Fire” both are different aspects of Mithras himself, and recalls the Vedic Varuna-Mitra-Agni triad, where Agni is the diety of fire commonly associated with Soma. As is appropriate to his name as the joiner, Mithras himself occupies the middle between his two attendants.
That the bull secretly represents a mushroom is also indicated by the fact that Mithras sometimes is born from the rock, as in the Dura-Europos fresco, holding not a dagger, but a pruning hook or harpe (a curved sword with a straight side barb),67 and this is the implement that he will employ for the tauroctony. The harpe is an agricultural tool used to prune wild plants into a productive cultivated state.
Torchbearer Cautopates with double axe. Detail of marble statue, Sidon Mithraeum.
An axe is a more appropriate implement for slaughtering a bull. A pair of marble statues from the Sidon Mithraeum depicts the two attendants, legs uncrossed. Cautopates, identified by his down-thrust torch, wields a double axe, whose blades juxtaposed to his Phrygian cap suggests its mushroom identity.68
The prominence of the dagger-harpe in Mithraic art is significant since ordinarily the sacrificial knife had no place in the symbolism of the ritual slaughter—the actual killings were performed by persons of low social status, usually slaves. The prominence of such an implement in Mithraic iconography indicates that Mithras is not slaughtering an animal, but plucking a sacramental plant.
Even Mithras, like his squires, is a One-foot on the relief from the Saint Aubin Mithraeum as he steps out of a pile of rocks, with one foot hidden, still left behind.69
Sometimes Mithras bursts from the rock, like Atlas holding the celestial orb in his hand. This is the rock from which light descends again back to earth, for the vault of heaven was like the vaulted chamber of the Mithraeum.
Fruit of the Pine Tree
The rock sometimes identified as a pinecone.70 A statue from the Carnutum Mithraeum shows Mithras rising out of a conical pile of rocks (as the cone is sometimes depicted) encircled by a serpent, with his hands uplifted into the foliage of the tree behind him.71 The botanical nature of the transition of the pinecone rock, with its coiling serpent, into the emerging god is seen in the statue from the Bingen Mithraeum, where the base of the naked torso is wreathed with four large flowers.72
The Amanita mushroom, like the pinecone, is actually a fruit of the tree—the same tree upon which they are mycorrhizally dependent. That is to say, the host tree supports the Amanita mycelium of which the mushrooms are the fruit; since the fruiting bodies do not appear without proximity to a host tree, it is easy to understand why preliterate and prescientific peoples would assume that the mushroom is, in fact, the fruit of the tree. The tree is most frequently a pine or birch, less commonly oak, and the mushrooms have also been reported on eucalyptus, olive, larch, and Asiatic cedars.73 The fly agaric’s dependence upon its host gives it the common folkloric epithet of the “tree-mushroom.”74 Similarly, the mushrooms often become the “apples” of a magical tree since the both fresh and dried muscaria closely resemble red apples in their corresponding stages.75 Thus sometimes the capped heads of Mithras either alone and sometimes with all three persons of the Trinity appear actually in the tree, an evergreen pine, hanging as its fruit.76
On a sandstone relief of the tauroctony episode, the pinecone is even blatantly revealed as an equivalent of the sheaf of grain and of the Bull as surrogates for the mushroom entheogen. Cautes, cross-legged and holding his upright torch, rests his left arm on a column and displays the pinecone beside the sheaves of grain sprouting from the dying Bull’s tail.77