Mithra / Cronus Connection

 

From, GRS Meads, "Thrice Greatest Hermes vol. 1"

THE “MITHRIAC ÆON”

The whole of this Orphic lore (in other words, the Chaldæan wisdom-teaching) seems to me to be summed up in one division of the symbolism of the Mithra-cult, as may be seen by an inspection of the monuments reproduced by Cumont, and especially those of the mysterious figure which he calls “la divinité léontocéphale,” and the birth of the God from the Rock; this seems to point, as we might very well suspect, to a strong Chaldæan element in the Mithriac tradition.
Cumont 1 tells us that although some scholars have rejected the name of “Mithriac Æon,” which was
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given by Zoëga to this awe-inspiring mystic figure, 1 in his opinion (and he knows more of the subject than any other authority) it may very well have been actually called Æon in the sacred books of the mysteries.
If, however, this was the case, the mystic meaning, says Cumont, was of such a nature that it was concealed from the profane.
Our classical authorities inform us that the Magi expressed the name of the Supreme God, which was in reality ineffable, by various substitutes. The general name for the Mystery Deity was Cronus, and Cronus in the sense of Time.
“The Mithriac Cronus is a personification of Time, and this fact, which is now fairly established, permits us immediately to determine the identity of this pseudonymous God.
“There is only one Persian divinity which he can possibly represent, and that is Zervan Akarana, Infinite Time, whom, from the time of the Achemenides, a sect of the Magi placed at the origin of things, and from whom they would have both Ormuzd and Ahriman to have been born.
“It was this God that the adepts of the mysteries placed at the head of the celestial hierarchy, and considered as the first principle; or, to put it differently, it was the Zervanist system that the Mazdæans of Asia Minor taught to the Western followers of the Iranian religion.”
This all seems to me to point not to a Persian origin
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of the Æon, as Cumont supposes, but to a Chaldæan element dominating the Mithriac form of the Magian tradition. 1