Mithras had no mythology that anyone has found. The god who attracted devotees across the Roman Empire for three centuries, whose cult spread particularly among soldiers and merchants, whose underground temples — mithraea — have been excavated from Britain to the Euphrates, left no sacred texts, no founding narrative, no theology explained in its own terms. What we know about the Mithraic mysteries we know from the material record, from hostile Christian commentary, and from scholarly inference — a body of evidence that has produced sustained academic disagreement and no consensus on the most basic questions. Where did the cult come from? What did the central image mean? What happened in the ceremonies? The answers remain genuinely uncertain.

Isis arrived in Rome over official objections. The Roman Senate banned her worship multiple times in the first century BC — in 58, 53, 50, and 48 BC, with varying degrees of enforcement — ordering her altars demolished and her images removed from the city. The bans failed because the cult’s appeal was stronger than the official resistance, and by the first century AD the goddess who had been repeatedly expelled was being worshipped in temples funded by emperors. Caligula built her a major temple in the Campus Martius. Vespasian and Titus celebrated their triumph over Judaea in her temple precinct. Commodus appeared in her processions in priestly dress. Whatever the Senate of the Republic had thought about Egyptian divinities, the Empire had reached different conclusions.