The United States has given the world much, including peace, democracy and an open internet, and much that is perhaps less attractive. But it has also given us a vast surge of cranks and lunatics. In certain fields of study there must be many an undergraduate tutor who finds that, every year, he must try to be patient, when some self-assured young man innocently trots out some terrible old canard once again.
One of these claims – that Mithras was “born of a virgin,” – has emerged again. Ali Babaei, an Iranian gentleman who came across it, emailed me a couple of days ago. Unlike many who write to me, he included a source for the claim and had tried to research it. He had found the claim on a website here:
An inscription on a Seleucid Temple in Iran dated to the 200s B.C. reads “Anahita, as the Immaculate Virgin Mother of the Lord Mithra.” While there is only one primary source for the “virgin birth” claim, and it has been shown to be very difficult to locate, the quote about Mithras being born of the virgin was published in 1983 by Mary Boyce, a British scholar on Iranian languages and Zoroastrianism who is so respected, the Royal Asiatic Society award for outstanding contributions to the study of religion is called the “Boyce Prize.”
Mithras was, in fact, born from a rock – petra genetrix, as it says on monuments. Amusingly the website even showed a picture of Mithras being born… from a rock. This is an unintelligent website pushing a fantasy, and deserves no consideration.
What concerned my correspondent was the claim on the website that this information came from Mary Boyce, the leading scholar of Zoroastrianism, published in an unspecified source in 1983.
The website gave a link, which is to a PDF written by a certain Frank Zindler, containing emails that he wrote, without response, at Dr Bart Ehrman. The latter must receive a great quantity of crank emails. Indeed Mr Z. appears to be part of the lunatic fringe of US atheism. In the PDF we find this:
There is a popular, English-language women’s Web-site called www.irandokht.com. On it I found an article by a certain Manouchehr Saadat Noury, PhD, titled “First Iranian goddess of productivity and values,” dealing with the ancient Iranian goddess Anahita. After showing a picture of the great Temple of Anahita at Kangavar, the article says that
“By the HELLENISTIC era (330—310 BC), if not before, Anahita’s cult came to be closely associated with that of MITHRA.
The ANAHITA TEMPLES have been built in many Iranian cities like Kangavar, Bishapur (an ancient city in south of present-day Faliyan) and other places during different eras. An inscription from 200 BC dedicates a SELEUCID temple in western Iran to “Anahita, as the Immaculate Virgin Mother of the Lord Mithra.” The ANAHITA TEMPLE at Kangavar city of Kermanshah (a western province in present-day Iran) is possibly the most important one. It is speculated that the architectural structure of this temple is a combination of the Greek and Persian styles and some researchers suggest that the temple is related to a girl named Anahita, the daughter of din Mehr, who enjoyed a very high status with the ancient Iranians.”
And also this:
“In the Bundahishn, the two halves of the name “Ardwisur Anahid” are occasionally treated independently of one another, that is, with Ardwisur as the representative of waters, and Anahid identified with the planet Venus.[20] In yet other chapters, the text equates the two, as in “Ardwisur who is Anahid, the father and mother of the Waters” (3.17).
“This legend of the river that descends from Mount Hara appears to have remained a part of living observance for many generations. A Greek inscription from Roman times found in Asia Minor reads ‘the great goddess Anaïtis of high Hara.'[21] On Greek coins of the imperial epoch, she is
spoken of as ‘Anaïtis of the sacred water.[20]”[20] Boyce 1983, p. 1004 [Boyce, Mary (1983), “Āban,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, Vol. I, New York: Routledge &
Kegan Paul]
[21] Boyce 1975a, p. 74 [Boyce, Mary (1975a), A History of Zoroastrianism, Vol. I, Leiden/Köln: Brill]
There is indeed an article on “Aban” by Mary Boyce in vol. 1 of the Encyclopedia Iranica – on page 58, in the 1985 edition – but it does not contain the quote made at all. But the reference in the Zindler PDF to Boyce reference is nothing to do with the “immaculate conception of Anahita”, but to this stuff about the waters. I have also searched her publications from this time – the History of Zoroastrianism in 3 volumes – and there is no reference to this supposed “immaculate conception of Anahita” inscription.
So it looks very much as if the website author has just skimmed the Zindler PDF, and misread, and posted his misreading. He has assumed that the reference covered both claims. In fact Zindler references the “immaculate conception” claim is to an article online by somebody called “Manouchehr Saadat Noury, PhD”.
So the claim that this is by Mary Boyce is simply untrue.
Let’s see if we can go a bit further. Is there any evidence at all of such an inscription?
The ‘article by Manouchehr Saadat Noury, PhD, titled “First Iranian goddess of productivity and values,”‘ referred to by Zindler, seems today to be online at iranian.com here, making the same claims, but with no reference to Boyce at all. This gives the following references.
Frye, R. N. (1963): The Heritage of Persia: The pre-Islamic History of One of the World’s Great Civilizations, ed., The World Publishing Company, New York.
Frye, R. N. (1993): The Golden Age of Persia, ed., Weidenfeld, London.
Nazmi Afshar, M. S. (2005): Online Article on “Anahita, the Mother of Gods, Iran the cradle of the early gods”.
Saadat Noury, M. (2005): Various Articles on Persian Culture and the History of Iran.
Various Sources (2005): Notes & Articles on Anahita.
Wikipedia Encyclopedia (2005): Online Notes on Anahita (in English & Persian).
I have accessed the two Frye volumes, and I can confirm that neither contains this claim. The Afshar article is today here. This also says nothing about this supposed “immaculate conception” inscription in a Seleucid era temple.
There is a Persian-language Wikipedia article for Anahita here. As far as I can tell this does not include the claim either.
The other “references” are not references at all, and cannot be followed further.
In conclusion, this claim about an inscription in an unspecified temple in western Iran cannot be verified, and need not be attended to.
Update 19 Nov 2024: Note the extremely useful further investigation in the comments by STRT!
Update 9 Dec 2024: STRT summarises his very useful investigation for us:
At one time the Wikipedia page for Anahita did make a claim that there was an inscription. But in 2006 this was removed from the article, for lack of citation. Before that happened, a certain Dr Noury had already written an article, which repeating the claim from Wikipedia. Noury’s article was the source for all subsequent mentions.
The Wikipedia article did not give any source for this claim. But in fact appears to trace back to a high school paper, written in the 1990’s, that was put online. This paper, however, does not explicitly say there was an inscription, but rather that it was dedicated to ‘Anahita, the Immaculate Virgin Mother of the Lord Mithras’. (By the time this reached the Wikipedia page, the claim had become an explicit statement that there was an inscription saying this.)
In the paper, the phrase ‘Anahita, the Immaculate Virgin Mother of the Lord Mithras’ is presented in quotes, as if that is the full name of the temple. This came from a work named “Iran: A Glimpse of History” which on page 37 claims (without offering any evidence or source) that Anahita was the virgin mother of Mithra. The same work then claims that there was a temple “at Kangavar, named after Anahita, the Immaculate Virgin Mother of the Lord, situated near Kermanshah on the road to Hamedan.” This lacks any quotation marks around the phase, indicating that the author of this work was not saying that this was the full name of the temple (much less any inscription), but rather that it was named after Anahita, who according to the work was the virgin mother of the lord (Mithra). It is actually not even certain if this was a temple of Anahita in the first place, though perhaps doubts of such emerged after the book was written. In any event, when we trace it all the way back to the original source, that does not make any mention of an inscription whatsoever, and its claims about Anahita being the virgin mother of Mithra are stated without any evidence. Thus this claim about the inscription appears completely false.
I was curious and tried to look more into this, and I found out some more information. The Manouchehr Saadat Noury article cites (vaguely) the Wikipedia page. You note it’s not on the Wikipedia page. HOWEVER, it says it’s from 2005. One can pull up the edit history of the page to see it earlier. However, looking at the Edit history for it in English, the earliest version is 2006 (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anahita&oldid=85440755).
But there’s a whole lot in that initial version, which is normally a sign of a bunch of stuff from one page being transferred to another. So I looked at the edit history of the person who made that edit, figuring they probably had done some edits to whatever the original page was. In doing so, I found out that the earlier version of the article was Anāhitā (with the lines over some letters), and this does have 2005 versions. Here is the last one from 2005:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=An%C4%81hit%C4%81&oldid=33079572
We do indeed see the statement “An inscription from c. 200 BC dedicates a Seleucid temple in Western Iran to “Anahita, the Immaculate Virgin Mother of the Lord Mithras”. The Anahita Temple at Kangavar in western Iran is the most important Anahita temple.” (indeed, if one looks back to the very first version in 2004, it is also there)
So it seems this is the source for that statement in the Manouchehr Saadat Noury article. But where does the claim on the Wikipedia page come from? No source is explicitly cited for this; two external links are offered at the end (surprisingly, the websites linked to are still available!), but they say noting of this.
This sentence was actually removed in the very next update, from January 7 2006:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=An%C4%81hit%C4%81&direction=next&oldid=33079572
This edit does not offer an explanation for it, and the editor did not have a formal account, as only an IP address is offered. But I looked at the other edits this IP address made, and they made one other, to the talk page, which can still be viewed here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Anahita/Archive_1
Specifically, they added the following to the talk page:
“The reference to an inscription describing Anahita as ‘the Immaculate Virgin mother’ of Mithra is found on many websites. Unfortunately, its origin seems to be an online version of a kid’s High School essay and nothing scholarly. It is spread around the internet largely because it appeals to those who ty to argue that Christianity is simply repackaged paganism and that Jesus never existed. I’m an atheist myself, so I don’t care too much about whether Jesus existed or not, but unless someone can provide a better source for this supposed inscription than a child’s high school essay, it has no place in this article.”
Unfortunately, they do not specifically say where the online essay is found, and like most things on the Internet in 2005, it has most likely disappeared by now (I was unable to find it).
In my searching, I did find the following link, however:
https://evidenceforchristianity.org/do-you-know-the-primary-source-for-a-supposed-inscription-which-has-mithra-born-of-a-virgin/
In here, it is asserted:
“I believe the source of this claim is Payam Nabarz The Mysteries of Mithras: The Pagan Beliefs that Shaped the Christian World (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2005), 19. The inscription was supposedly found in the area of Lake Humum, Iran. Nabarz is not very careful about giving his sources and he is very selective in his use of the primary sources, so we should be cautious about accepting what he says.”
As the claim was found on the Wikipedia page back in 2004, Nabarz could not have been the originator, and must have taken it from somewhere else (either the Wikipedia page or wherever the editor of the Wikipedia page ultimately took it from).
The above link is not clear whether they have personally confirmed it being in the book or not. However, one can look at the book on Google Books:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Mysteries_of_Mithras/BlwoDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0
Unfortunately, it is difficult to find exactly where this is, because the pages are not numbered and if you do a search it tells you unhelpfully “No preview available for this page” and as is the case for when that happens, clicking on them does not bring you to the page in question (and due to the lack of page numbering, you cannot even look at the number and manually navigate there). That said, the chapter on Anahita is chapter 7, and looking at it, it says “According to some sources, Mithra’s partner and virgin mother is the angel-goddess Anahita.” No further information is given on this that I see in the chapter, but Google Books is also missing some portions of this chapter (the dreaded “Some pages are omitted from this book preview” appears just when it starts talking about temples!) and it might have been in one of the missing pages. One would need to be able to have a physical copy of the book to check on it to confirm this statement is in it and to see if any source is cited.
At any rate, it appears that the source for Manouchehr Saadat Noury’s claim was the 2005 version of the Wikipedia page, but the Wikipedia page itself offered no source. It is not in the present version of the page because it was removed in 2006 by someone, who said that it appears to go back to an online version of a high school paper, though this cannot be confirmed now.
Eep! Looking at the preview for my previous comment after I submitted it (currently under moderation), it seems like for some reason all of the blank spaces I put between paragraphs has disappeared, leaving it all as one giant blob of a paragraph. I have no idea why that happened. Perhaps that’s a temporary thing and when published it will fix itself up, but in case it does not, I thought I should let people know it’s not my fault! Hopefully it can still be deciphered if that is the case.
It came through just fine, as you can see!
Thank you so much! That is simply excellent further research. The Nabarz book I can locate, I think.
I will look further.
Actually, there may not be any need to get Nabarz’s book. I was perhaps a bit too excited to post my findings, and I didn’t look at some things as much as I could have. I found an article by Payam Nabarz which is stated to be based on the Anahita chapter from his book:
https://iranian.com/main/blog/nabarz/anahita-lady-persia.html
This does give the statement about the temple (which I was unable to view in the online book), as well as a citation. It tells us:
“Circa 200 BC sees the dedication of a Seleucid temple in western Iran to “Anahita, as the Immaculate Virgin Mother of the Lord Mithra”.5
5. First Iranian Goddess of productivity and values by Manouchehr Saadat Noury – Persian Journal, Jul 21, 2005. //www.iranian.ws/iran_news/publish/printer_8378.shtml”
This page is no longer available, but an archive is:
https://web.archive.org/web/20051013062532/www.iranian.ws/iran_news/publish/printer_8378.shtml
And yes indeed, this is the exact same article by Manouchehr Saadat Noury that you linked to, though unlike your link, this does not give the list of references at the end; perhaps this is a re-posting of an earlier “original” version of his article which did give the reference list, which was retained in the re-posting you provided but not in the above one.
At any rate, it seems we don’t need to look farther into Nabarz, because he was just taking his source from Noury, which (as previously established) appears to have taken the claim from the earlier version of the Wikipedia article, which did not give any sources and (if the statement of the anonymous edit who removed it is correct) seems to trace back to a high school paper.
This is excellent work. If only we could locate that original paper!
Just as an afterthought, I have now looked at the 2005 Nabarz book, but a search on “immaculate” does not find any such passage, and the chapter on Anahita does not contain it.
I’ve managed to uncover a little more, possibly, but since it’ll probably take a while before I can give any more updates on it, I figure I might as well share what I’ve found so far for the benefit of others who may wish to look into the matter.
In my research, I managed to find this “Mithraism & Christianity: A Comparison” essay:
https://www.cais-soas.com/CAIS/Religions/iranian/Mithraism/mithraism_and_christianity.htm
The organization that runs the website, the Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies, seems to be a fairly serious organization… but the there doesn’t seem to be much quality control when it comes to the essays they host, so them having this doesn’t mean it’s in any way reliable. Some of the essays are written by people who are highly qualified in the subject material (e.g. Roger Beck) but others seem to have absolutely no qualifications whatsoever. In terms of the “Mithraism and Christianity” essay, it confusingly claims it’s “By: Prof. Franz Cumont” despite the fact it’s clearly not; even ignoring the fact it refers to him in past tense in the first sentence, it makes references to works published after his death. On the larger list of essays, it gives no author for the above essay. So we don’t know who wrote it. I tried looking around to see if I could find information about where this came from; the farthest I was able to trace it was back to a (now defunct) web page from 2001 which didn’t say anything where it came from outside of it being “extracted and edited” by the person who made the page, but without saying where it was extracted from.
Regardless of who wrote it, though, let’s look at hte essay. There are a number of questionable claims made in the article (right at the start it lists “virgin birth” to be a parallel between Mithraism and Christianity despite he fact Mithras came out of a rock, as you noted). However, it makes the following claim later on, in the “The Persian Origins of Mithraism” section:
“The largest near-eastern Mithraeum was built in western Persia at Kangavar, dedicated to ‘Anahita, the Immaculate Virgin Mother of the Lord Mithras’.”
Is it possible this essay was the “high school paper” alluded to? Well, as noted I can’t find information about who made it. However, I do not think this is the source for the claim, as it lacks the statement that it was an inscription (it merely says it was dedicated to her) and does not say it is from 200 BC. Nevertheless, it at least makes the basic claim about the temple and Anahita being “the Immaculate Virgin Mother of the Lord Mithras”. No specific source is cited for this. However, a bibliography is offered at the end:
“Beny, Roloff. Iran: Elements of Destiny. McClelland and Stewart Ltd. London, 1978.
Cumont, Franz. Les Mystères de Mithra. Dover Publications, Inc.,New York, 1956.
Cumont, Franz. The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism. Dover Publications, Inc. New York, 1956.
Eliade, Mircea. Patterns in Comparative Religion. The World Publishing Company. Cleveland, 1958.
Hinnells, John R. Persian Mythology. Peter Bedrick Books. New York, 1985.”
So those books could be examined to see if any of them say anything about it.
I did find other other possible source; there was another page which repeated the claim, and said that the claim about the inscription is cited elsewhere as coming from page 37 of “Iran: A Glimpse of History” by Mohamad Moghdam and Roloff Beny (it does not seem like the person mentioning this verified it themselves, as they only said it was elsewhere cited as such, but did not specify where). This one would not be easy to get; WorldCat lists only one copy, though WorldCat also says that it was excerpted from Iran: Elements of Destiny which is listed above (and is easier to find), so perhaps one would only need to get a copy of that to look.
Anyway, that’s all I have for now. I may be able to look into some of these works later to check, but will not be able to for at least a week. So I thought it might be good to post this here for now.
Well done! That is an extremely interesting thought. And I would certainly have understood those quotation marks to mean an inscription.
An-āhita literally means “undefiled” in Iranian, so “immaculate” is a fair translation. Louis Herbert Gray, “Foundations of the Iranian Religions” (per Frye’s “Heritage of Persia”) notes that in classical times she was associated with Ishtar and Artemis; Ishtar was occasionally virgin and Artemis consistently so.
Now, whether this unblemished goddess was ever a mother is something else again. That, I don’t know.
Okay, update time. Here’s the bibliography of the article again:
“Beny, Roloff. Iran: Elements of Destiny. McClelland and Stewart Ltd. London, 1978.
Cumont, Franz. Les Mystères de Mithra. Dover Publications, Inc.,New York, 1956.
Cumont, Franz. The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism. Dover Publications, Inc. New York, 1956.
Eliade, Mircea. Patterns in Comparative Religion. The World Publishing Company. Cleveland, 1958.
Hinnells, John R. Persian Mythology. Peter Bedrick Books. New York, 1985.
Perowne, Stewart. Roman Mythology. Hamlyn Publishing Group Ltd. London, 1969.”
(Note: In my previous comment, I left off Perowne. Oops!)
I do not know French so I cannot say anything about “Les Mystères de Mithra” (I tried searching through it for applicable French terms but didn’t find anything that seemed relefvant, though), but I did look at the rest. Looking up “Anahita” in the index of Cumont’s The oriental Religions in Roman Paganism, the things listed seem to say nothing relevant. Anahita does not show up in the Index for Eliade’s work. Hinnells’s Persian Mythology says nothing that I could see. Prowne’s Roman Mythology does not have Anahita in the index.
This leaves Iran: Elements of Destiny, which seems to be the source (in an earlier comment I noted someone claimed it was found in “Iran: A Glimpse of History”, but that work is according to WorldCat an abbreviated version of Elements of Destiny, so it seems unnecessary to check if we have Elements of Desiny). This work, which is mostly about present-day Iran (well, present-day when it was published), does have a section called “A Glimpse of History” on pages 30-66 which discusses its history. Mithra is discussed a little on it. On page 37 we see the following regarding Mithra:
“According to ancient prophecies and later traditions, Mithra was born from a virgin with the title of Anahita, or Immaculata, who conceived the Savior from the seed of Zoroaster that had been preserved in the waters of Lake Hamun in Sistan.”
This claim seems highly questionable; it has already been discussed on this blog that Mithra was born from a rock, not a virgin. To be fair, I’m not sure if we have verification that the Persian Mithra was born from a rock, or if we only know it about the Roman version. But even if the rock story was not part of the Persian Mithra mythos, I don’t think there’s any evidence that even the Persian Mithra was born of a virgin. The idea of someone being impregnated by Lake Hamun due to Zoroaster’s seed being preserved here, from what I can tell, was a Zoroastrian belief about what would happen in the future—and a belief that apparently developed in the post-Christian period (http://www.tektonics.org/copycat/zoroaster.php tells me this first shows up around the 9th century AD).
But let’s focus on the temple. It does go on later in the same page to make the claim about the temple… sort of. Here’s what it says:
“Mithraic temples sprang up in western Iran. The largest was at Kangavar, named after Anahita, the Immaculate Virgin Mother of the Lord, situated near Kermanshah on the road to Hamedan. The district itself was called Behestan, Bagestan after Bagh, or Lord, being the special title of the Lord Mithra. Excavations are under way in the terraces of the imposing and elegant ruins of this temple, once considered one of he wonders of the world.”
We notice a few things. There is not any quotation marks around “Anahita, the Immaculate Virgin Mother of the Lord”. This indicates that it is not saying it was specifically dedicated to or named “Anahita, the Immaculate Virgin Mother of the Lord.” It looks to me rather that this is simply saying that it was named after Anahita, and that Anahita was the Immaculate Virgin Mother of the Lord. For example, someone could say:
“The big obelisk in the National Mall is named after Washington, the first president of the United States.”
With this statement, someone is not saying that its name is “Washington, the first president of the United States” but rather that it is named after Washington, who was the first president of the United States. That seems to be what the writer is doing here.
This seems confirmed by a Wikipedia article on the temple in question:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Anahita,_Kangavar
This notes that while it was originally thought to be a temple of Anahita, there are now some disagreements on whether that is the case. Wikipedia is of course always something to be used cautiously, but it’s probably more up to date than a brief mention in a book from 1978 and at any rate the fact there is dispute at all clearly means it doesn’t have any inscription saying “Anahita, the Immaculate Virgin Mother of the Lord” (or anything at all about Anahita) because if there was, there wouldn’t be any disagreement on whether it was a temple of Anahita!
So it seems the idea of there being a temple with an inscription saying Anahita was the Immaculate Virgin Mother of the Lord came about from a misunderstanding of what the work was saying about it.
This does bring up a new question: Is this description of her being the immaculate virgin mother of Mithra accurate? As noted, it cites no source, which makes some sense as this book is clearly intended to be made for more popular consumption. But it also means evidence is not provided.
Looking at the list of authors and editorial staff at the back of the book (there were quite a few), it looks like this section was written by Mohamad Moghdam, who is stated to be “Professor Emeritus and former Vice Chancellor, Tehran University. Former Deputy Minister of Science and Higher Education.” It is not clear to me how much of an authority this makes to him regarding Mithra, though.
There is this page that gives a writing of his supposedly from the Second International Congress of Mithraic Studies:
https://www.cais-soas.com/CAIS/Religions/iranian/Mithraism/mithra.htm
Given other experiences with this site discussed already (and in fact discussed later in this comment), one should be cautious trusting its claims of where the material comes from, so I must take its claim of it being in the Second International Congress of Mithraic Studies with a grain of salt.
It is fairly obvious that this article is written by the same person who contributed to that section of the Iran book, given they make some similar statements. Regardless, the fact their credentials are unclear means that one is going to need to offer actual proof of Anahita being the immaculate virgin mother of Mithra for it to be taken seriously. Indeed, even if he was a bona fide expert on Mithraism on the level of Roger Beck, I would STILL want evidence to take it seriously given no one else seems to have evidence of this.
Unfortunately, it was only after I did all of the above work that I happened to stumble across a page that had someone already figure out most of what I said above, namely this one:
http://www.tektonics.org/copycat/mithra.php
This article by James Patrick Holding (who I believe you know of) is about examining the supposed parallels between Jesus and Mithra. It is a mostly good source, but unfortunately it accepts as accurate Cumont’s idea Mithra was born on December 25 (which you in another blog post did a good job demonstrating was Cumont’s speculation) and the idea that Mithraists found Sunday particularly holy, which I believe also may have been a speculation by Cumont (at any rate, I haven’t found anyone offer evidence of it that doesn’t seem to just be repeating Cumont’s claim).
However, those aside, there’s a lot of good information in the article. Most pertinently, however, is the fact it addresses this entire thing about the temple! Yes, all this information was on that web page, and it’s been there since at least 2004. Here is the relevant portion:
“Finally, we are told of the “largest near-eastern Mithraeum [which] was built in western Persia at Kangavar, dedicated to ‘Anahita, the Immaculate Virgin Mother of the Lord Mithras’.” This is a very curious claim which is repeated around the Internet, but no source is given for it, and Acharya attributes it to a “writer” with no name or source.
I believe, however, that I have found the terminal source, and it is a paper written in 1993 by a then-high school student, David Fingrut, who made this claim without any documentation whatsoever himself. His paper is now posted on the Net as a text file.
That said, it is inaccurate to start with, since the building at Kanagvar is not a Mithraeum at all, but a temple to Anahita (dated 200 BC), and although I have found one source of untested value that affirms that Anahita was depicted as a virgin (in spite of being a fertility goddess!), she is regarded not at Mithra’s mother, but as his consort (though it does offer other contradictory info) — and it knows nothing of such an inscription as described; and the mere existence of the goddess Anahita before the Roman era proves nothing.
Another fraudulent attempt to validate this claim has been made by connecting it to a “Professor, M. Moghdam” who allegedly wrote a paper that was supposedly part of the Second International Congress of Mithraic Studies. It wasn’t, as a check of the contents showed. This professor is also alleged to have edited a book entitled Iran: Elements of Destiny, which does relate this claim, but as far as can be determined, this is an entirely different person and not a genuine Mithraic scholar. The book itself is written by a photographer and makes the claim with no documentation or illustration. Finally, other sources that make this claim add such qualifications as, “Anahita was said to have conceived the Saviour [Mithra] from the seed of Zarathustra preserved in the waters of Lake Hamun in the Persian province of Sistan.” Virginal conception? Please.”
Now, the above tells us the high school paper information, and even gives us a name of the author. With that, I was able to find out more information. Put in the name and you quickly find this:
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Periods/Roman/Topics/Religion/Mithraism/David_Fingrut**.html
This one has some footnotes added by someone else who mentions the virgin mother claim seems to not be true. Here is the interesting thing. Remember the article I linked earlier at https://www.cais-soas.com/CAIS/Religions/iranian/Mithraism/mithraism_and_christianity.htm? Most of it is just Fingrut’s essay, though it does add some things at the start, but after the heading “Mithraism – A Historical Introduction” it seems a match, including the bibliography (although this website incorrectly attributes the whole thing to Cumont). However, it did include a bibliography; Holding’s statement above that Fingrut made the assertion “without any documentation whatsoever” indicates either the page Holding was looking at did not contain the bibliography or perhaps he meant there was no specific source given for that particular claim.
Iran: Elements of Destiny is noted as giving the claim, both about the temple and the whole virgin mother thing. Holding, as noted above, says “Another fraudulent attempt to validate this claim has been made by connecting it to a “Professor, M. Moghdam” who allegedly wrote a paper that was supposedly part of the Second International Congress of Mithraic Studies. It wasn’t, as a check of the contents showed.” Unfortunately, it is not quite clear what he means by a check of its contents. Perhaps he means a list of the essays a the congress, but I don’t know where to find a list; the work “Études Mithriaques” (Acta Iranica 17) lists some of the essays (this one is not listed), but not all, as explained at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bulletin-of-the-school-of-oriental-and-african-studies/article/abs/etudes-mithriaques-acta-iranica-17-premiere-serie-actes-de-congres-vol-iv-vi-565-pp-34-plates-teheran-liege-bibliotheque-pahlavi-1978-distributed-by-e-j-brill-leiden-guilders-80/3FE4BDA454A3A5B236C9252C3E9839EA. And I did find another source (someone’s blog, written in Persian!) claiming that the work of Moghdam was a speech, so perhaps it would not have been included in any contents.
Unfortunately, trying to puzzle out questions about Moghdam is tricky because most information about him would be in Persian or Arabic rather than English (due to him living in Iran), and due to inconsistencies in how we even render Arabic names, it’s hard to really try to search up information about him.
So maybe it wasn’t necessarily fraudulent. At any rate, the speech (or whatever it actually is) and the book are clearly by the same Moghdam, given they relate the same information. So I don’t think it’s an “entirely different person” as Holding thinks is the case, but of course he wrote all of the above something like two decades ago when there was possibly less information available. Good for him for figuring out as much as he did!
But let’s suppose for the sake of argument that Moghdam is a Mithraic scholar. If this claim about Anahita being Mithra’s virgin mother is true, I would say simply his say-so is insufficient given that other Mithraic scholars seem to know nothing about it. Indeed, the fact that people try to hold up this supposed inscription (which at this point has been proven wrong) as evidence of her being a virgin mother of Mithra is perhaps the clearest indication there is no actual evidence, for if there was people would be pointing to that rather than this mythical inscription. Thus his claim of Anahita being a virgin mother of Mitra cannot be accepted without actual evidence being provided for it.
And what is certainly NOT evidence for it is the claim of the temple inscription saying so, because as we have seen, Moghdam’s own work does not claim that.
Well, that was a whole lot of writing.
So in summary, here is the full circuitous route it seemed this idea took to manifest in its present form. First, Iran: Elements of Destiny is published in 1978, which claims that Anahita was the immaculate virgin mother of Mithra, and describes a temple as being named after Anahita, the Immaculate Virgin Mother of the Lord. However, it seems to not be saying that the Temple was named after the full phrase “Anahita, the Immaculate Virgin Mother of the Lord”, but rather that it was named after Anahita and which the book describes as “the Immaculate Virgin Mother of the Lord” (no citation or evidence is offered for this claim she was Mithra’s mother, let alone a virgin mother). Later on in the 1990’s, this book is used as a source for a high school paper on Mithraism, which repeats this claim, BUT the author apparently misunderstands what the book was saying and interprets it as saying that the temple was actually dedicated to the full name and title of “Anahita, the Immaculate Virgin Mother of the Lord.” This high school paper gets put online. This claim, fueled by the paper, is later put into the Wikipedia article on Anahita (along the way gaining the additional claims that the temple was from around 200 BC (true) and that it was an inscription that said this (not true)). This is removed from Wikipedia for lack of a source, but prior to its removal, Manouchehr Saadat Noury takes this information from Wikipedia and uses it in an article published in 2005. Zindler then repeats Noury’s claim in his work. And then the website you originally found the claim on takes it from Zindler, but gets mixed up in Zindler’s citations and misattributes it to Mary Boyce rather than Manouchehr Saadat Noury.
And that seems to be the sum of it. There never was any such inscription in the temple. One source makes some claims without citation (but without even mentioning an inscription), and through a telephone game of misunderstandings ends up turning into a claim that there is an actual inscription in a temple stating this.
This is magnificent – thank you! That seems to be that, then. And how interesting to document how the claim changes as it is repeated online from source to source! The pure stuff of urban legend.
It’s good to see that J. P. Holding’s work is still useful on these old hoaxes. His verbatim quote meant that I find that the David Fingrut essay is indeed still online, and can be found here: https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Periods/Roman/Topics/Religion/Mithraism/David_Fingrut**.html
Well done!
One final update: I was unable to get a hold of “Iran: A Glimpse of History”. I attempted to put request it through my library, but they said there were no libraries willing to lend it. However, the WorldCat entry for it says it is just excerpts from “Iran: Elements of Destiny”, which has already been checked, so it is unlikely it would offer anything else anyway.
One thing I might suggest is that while your blog post suggests looking at my statements in the comments section, unfortunately I wrote so much that it would perhaps be overwhelming to a reader. Thus it might be good to put in an abbreviated summary at the end of the blog post instead. Something like this might be good:
“Update: In the comments for this post, STRT appears to have uncovered more. To summarize: The Wikipedia page for Anahita did make this claim of there being an inscription, but in 2006 was removed from the article for lack of citation. However, by that point Noury had already written the article repeating the claim from Wikipedia. The Wikipedia article did not give a source, but it appears to trace back to a high school paper written in the 1990’s that was put online. This paper, however, does not explicitly say there was an inscription, but rather that it was dedicated to ‘Anahita, the Immaculate Virgin Mother of the Lord Mithras’; by the time it made it to the Wikipedia page, this had been changed to an explicit statement there was an inscription. In the paper, the phrase ‘Anahita, the Immaculate Virgin Mother of the Lord Mithras’ is presented in quotes, as if that is the full name of the temple. This paper took this from a work named “Iran: A Glimpse of History” which on page 37 claims (without offering any evidence or source) that Anahita was the virgin mother of Mithra. It then claims that there was a temple “at Kangavar, named after Anahita, the Immaculate Virgin Mother of the Lord, situated near Kermanshah on the road to Hamedan.” This lacks any quotation marks around the phase, indicating that the author of this work was not saying that this was the full name of the temple (much less any inscription), but rather that it was named after Anahita, who according to the work was the virgin mother of the lord (Mithra). It is actually not even certain if this was a temple of Anahita in the first place, though perhaps doubts of such emerged after the book was written. In any event, when we trace it all the way back to the source, it does not make any mention of an inscription whatsoever, and its claims about Anahita being the virgin mother of Mithra are stated without any evidence. Thus this claim about the inscription appears completely false.”
Feel free to edit that if you want it to read better; it’s your blog post! I just wrote that as an example.
Thank you – I will add that. I’m very busy right now so I appreciate the summary!
Done. Thank you very much for all this hard work! I think we can conclusively say that no inscription ever existed. The claim that an inscription existed was created by a random Wikipedian misreading a high-school paper.