‘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?’
‘Ah, Watkins, so much for you to dwell upon. That dark seam of masculine aggression, the spinal fluid of the Church. What might it represent? This insidious flaw in the very foundations of your poorly fabricated faith.’
‘I’m not talking about the Church, I’m talking about an individual practising a religion created in the days when he’d be expected to stroll through a village, torching dwellings and hacking the limbs off babies. Where would that level of aggression take him now? What kind of training would he need to control it?’
Down in the bowels of The Glades, a gong was banged.
‘Heavens,’ Miss White said. ‘Lunchtime already?’
Before the lift doors opened on the ground floor, she said, ‘Radical corruption of a religion… there’s always fall-out. It’s corrosive. A maxim worth remembering is if the worse can happen, the worst will.’
In the gilded opulence of Brinsop Church, they confronted the early-medieval sandstone tympanum. The mounted St George with his Roman soldier’s skirt, thrusting his spear between the dragon’s jaws.
‘More like a big snake than most dragons.’ Merrily stepped back. ‘But no way is it a bull.’
‘No, but…’ Lol pointed, with his good hand, to the frieze at the top of the slab ‘… that looks like a bull, doesn’t it?’ He bent, feeling the sandstone with both hands. ‘And these are definitely lions. Another of Athena’s degrees of Mithraism? Also the crow, raven…?’
‘Yes.’ There was also astrological symbolism here and there in the fabric of the church. ‘Are we suggesting there’s an element of Mithras embedded in this landscape?’
‘Maybe literally. It could be simply that the early-medieval artisans who made this slab copied images from Roman artwork that they’d found in the ground – in the remains of Magnis. Must’ve been quite a lot left in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.’
That made sense. Unfortunately, what also made sense was that if you wanted an aspect of Mithras acceptable to the Church, you might look no further than St George.