Abandoned Pantheons
Ash over the Altar
You step into the cave, and the air goes out.
Here, darkness is not just the absence of light — it lives, breathes, listens.
The ceiling hangs low, as if the earth itself leaned down to see if you deserve to enter.
Once, a fire burned here, and men in identical cloaks bowed over it.
They whispered oaths to a brotherhood that would outlive Rome, kings, and even the memory of those very oaths.
Now there is dust, silence, and the strange feeling that something in the dark is staring back.
Temple in Ruins
Cappadocia is the perfect place for secret gods.
Caves, lava tubes, underground corridors — all ready-made mithraea, needing only to be cleared and given a hearth.
Mithraism came here with soldiers sent to the empire’s eastern frontier, to a land where the enemy was always just beyond the next hill.
They built small shrines — long, narrow halls where only the initiated could gather.
On the walls they carved scenes: the god Mithras, in his red Phrygian cap, slays the bull.
This scene is not about blood. It is about the cosmos: the bull is chaos, and from its body are born stars, rivers, plants.
Here, in the heart of Anatolia, where once ruled Hittites and later Persians, the cult of Mithras was not an import but a fusion.
It became a bridge between Persepolis and Rome, between fire temples and legionary camps.
Faces of Oblivion
Mithras is a strangely double-faced god.
On one side — a soldier-commander, demanding discipline, obedience, trials.
On the other — a solar hero, a liberator who brings order to chaos.
His path has seven grades of initiation — from Raven to Father.
Somewhere here, in the cave, new recruits went through their trials: a symbolic death and rebirth.
The rock still holds the prints of their hands, the sockets for torches, the niches for sacrificial vessels.
Mithras no longer speaks, but his pose on the reliefs is still the same: blade at the bull’s throat, gaze turned aside, as if he is not looking at the victim — but at us.
Shadows at the Edge of Mind
Why does this still work?
Why, standing in an abandoned mithraeum, do you feel a strange warmth — as if the brotherhood is still here, just in the next room?
Mithraism died with pagan Rome, but the idea did not die: the idea that the world rests on your personal oath, that there are those who are “in” and those who are “outside.”
Christianity inherited much of this pattern — the sacrament, the community, the hierarchy of initiation.
And in Cappadocia, this fusion is especially visible: from the mithraic caves we step directly into Byzantine crypts.
The god has changed his name but has never stopped demanding a sacrifice.
How We Got Here
If you want to see this for yourself — look not in museums, but on the edges of the roads.
Around Kayseri, Nevşehir, in valleys where tourists do not go, there are strange caves with no frescoes but with low stone benches along the walls.
These are the mithraea.
Do not leave trash, do not carve on the walls — you are in someone else’s temple, even if its keepers are long gone.
Better take a candle and keep silent: the caves here are listening.
Echo in the Void
I stood in the dark, and it felt like someone nearby was slowly drawing breath through their teeth.
The world suddenly shrank to a small chamber where only you remain — and the one who once cut the bull’s throat so the universe could be born again.
You realize you are not afraid.
On the contrary — it feels as though you remembered something very old, something that had always been with you.
Mithras promises nothing. He simply watches, testing whether you can endure his gaze.
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