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Temple of Mithras, Central London
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Rose Black decided to spend her Saturday afternoon outside the museum. She had done enough overtime, after all, especially considering it was unpaid.
She had plenty of time until her appointment, so she bought a coffee and went for a stroll through Kensington Gardens. The phone call from Elizabeth Morgan had piqued her interest like nothing else had in recent months. Rose had a feeling the discovery Morgan told her about might be quite important.
“What I could use right now is a professional archaeologist,” she said aloud as she looked at the photographs of the odd subterranean chamber. “A real Indiana Jones type.”
The Albert Memorial lay just ahead and she drifted in that direction. It was one of her favorites in London. Its tall, ornate canopy sheltered a gilded statue of Prince Albert. All around were works of art devoted to the arts, the sciences, industry, and to various parts of the world.
Near the Albert statue, a crowd had gathered around a tall man. Rose did a double-take. He was Native American, a rare sight in London. He was also tall, powerfully built, and ruggedly handsome.
As she continued to drift in that direction, the man got down on one knee in front of a blonde-haired woman. He was proposing! The sight brought a lump to Rose’s throat. She blinked away tears.
“Don’t be an idiot,” she whispered. “You’re so much better off.”
As she drew closer, she made out what the man was saying.
“...have made my life worth living. And I have never minded that you’re transgendered,” the man said. The woman’s jaw dropped, her eyes went wide.
That was a bit personal, but good on him for not caring, Rose thought. And then a couple of things caught her eye. There was a ghost of a smile on the man’s face. And another man, a blond fellow, was scaling the Albert statue. The proposal was fake—a diversion. Must be some kind of prank. She shook her head and hurried away.
“What a couple of absolute morons.”
From Kensington Garden, she caught an eastbound bus. After exhausting what research she could in the museum archives, Rose had been left with one clear route forward: Mithras.
Mithraism as a religion was, in itself, fascinating. One of the ancient mystery cults, details of its practices and worship were sketchy due to its nature as a secretive sect, but it predominantly involved the worship of the Persian god Mithras in caves. It flourished from the second through fourth centuries of the common era. Long before the IIluminati, the Masons, or the Templars had instituted their secret handshakes and mysterious brotherhoods, ancient Rome had its own secret societies. Romans worshipped Mithras as the god of the sun, along with a large pantheon of other deities. The male-only Cult of Mithras worshipped the god as a hero in a battle between good and evil. Garrisons all over the Roman empire had temples dedicated to Mithras, called Mithraeum. These were often underground, in reference to the legend of Mithras slaying a bull in a cave. All Mithraea featured a tauroctony, an image of the god Mithras slaying the sacred bull, as its centerpiece. This fit so neatly with the photographs of the mosaic Morgan had sent through that Rose couldn’t imagine it being anything else. Especially as Morgan had said the mosaic was discovered in a recently unearthed underground chamber.
The covert religion of Mithraism was once so widespread some historians considered it an early rival to Christianity, even a sister religion. But due to the secrecy of its practice, little could actually be known for certain. No reputable written accounts of the religion had been found, and all the facts and conjecture were based on physical artifacts and dedicatory inscriptions from archaeological finds, along with more than a thousand pieces of sculpture.
Rose needed more details than these superficial histories, and there was one place in London she hoped she could get it—the reconstructed Temple of Mithras. The Mithraeum in Londinium had been built in the late second century, but seemed to have fallen out of use by the early fourth, matching her research of the religion’s heyday. Built eighteen feet below street level to create a symbolic cave emulating the one where Mithras slew the bull, it was sealed up for centuries.
A statue of Mithras slaying the Astral Bull was found in 1889, but the temple itself was not unearthed until 1954, during the construction of a modern office development. Subsequent development in London’s financial district lead to the Mithraeum being disassembled and rebuilt on Queen Victoria Street. In 2009 the Temple was removed, with the intention of relocating it in the new Walbrook Square development, back where it had originally been found. Long legal wrangling had prevented this, but the Temple had recently been reassembled not far from the site it originally occupied.
Rose got off near the Lord Mayor’s mansion, and made her way on foot to the Mithraeum. From the outside it wasn’t much to look at. Once inside, Rose revised her assessment. Behind glass walls, the ancient walls and stones of the once underground chamber were laid out exactly as they had been almost two thousand years before. A central channel led between two slightly raised areas to a half-circle chamber at one end. In this space was an engraved glass representation of the god slaying the bull, which in its day in Roman times would likely have been a mosaic. Several people wandered around the large space, looking into the ruins, reading the plaques describing the religion, its history, the discovery and relocation of the Mithraeum. But Rose knew all that. She needed more.
As she looked up and scanned the space for someone to talk to, a man caught her eye. He was wearing a neat shirt with a name badge, his gray hair slightly ruffled, balding on top. She guessed he was about sixty, with a slight rounding in the middle that made him jolly-looking with his wide smile and gentle eyes. He ruined the image entirely when he approached her and licked his lips.
“And what can I do for you, young lady?”
Rose’s first thought was simply, Ugh. But despite an urge to kick him in the nuts, she’d hit a dead end in her research, and he was no doubt the expert in Mithraism. His name badge read Mark Doncaster.
“Mr. Doncaster, I wondered if I could ask some questions.”
“Only if you promise to call me Mark.” He actually winked at her.
She forced herself to laugh off her discomfort. “If you insist.”
“And what’s your name?”
“I’m Rose.”
Doncaster looked her up and down, then gave his slimy smile again. “A very English name for a woman with a touch of the Orient in her blood?”
Rose drew a deep breath. “My mother is Chinese, my father is English.” She didn’t owe this man any explanations of her personal story, but if she could move past this awful interaction as quickly as possible, she could learn what she needed and get out.
“Well,” he said. “Isn’t that wonderful.”
Time to move on, Rose thought. “I wondered if I could ask you a little about the religious practices of Mithraism?”
“Certainly.”
She told him that she knew about the general history of the sect. She was convinced the old mosaic and the odd chamber Morgan had described were connected to Mithraism, but she was reluctant to give anything away about the discovery. At least, not yet. She asked if he could elaborate.
Doncaster slipped into his lecturer role and gave her some background on the Mithras Cult and the temple. It wasn’t anything new to her, but she let him talk a little while. Then she asked, “But what did they actually do during their worship?”
Doncaster smiled. “You mean the ritual slaughter?”
There were two words that made Rose distinctly uncomfortable. “Sure,” she said anyway.
“The taurobolium,” Donacaster said. “The sacrifice of the bull, in deference to Mithras slaying the sacred bull. Some cosmologies suggest it was a slaying of the actual zodiac of Taurus, but that’s been largely debunked. Mithraism was originally thought of as a ‘star cult’, with strong ties to astrology and astrotheology. But according to Ulansey, Mithras is actually Perseus, the Greek hero, and is hidden in a realm beyond the cosmos. Another thinker on the subject, Michael Speidel, suggest he’s actually Orion. Roger Beck argues that we shouldn’t read the tauroctony as a star map, as there probably isn’t a constellation to match Mithras. Then there’s Abolala Soudavar, one of the few minds to believe Mithraism actually has Persian roots. Regardless, most modern historians and archaeologists agree we’re really no closer to revealing the cult’s secrets with absolute finality than the Romans were millennia ago when they dubbed the cult the ‘Mithraic Mysteries.’ So, anything is entirely guesswork.” Doncaster grinned like this was all a huge joke, then he raised one finger when Rose drew breath to talk. “But!” he said. “We believe they bathed in the blood of the sacrificed bull, hence the trench there through the center, you see? The worshippers would stand in the trench, the bull would be led to the edge of the trench and its throat cut. In some cases, a strong grating was built over the trench so worshippers could stand directly underneath the bull as it was slaughtered.”
Rose grimaced at the thought, but it was some powerful imagery all the same. “It sounds similar to Christianity, in a way,” she said. “All that being ‘bathed in the blood of the lamb.’ Only a bull and rather more literal.”
“It’s a fairly common part of many ancient religions,” Doncaster said with a nod. “Christianity started out as a works-based faith, but as it grew in popularity among the Romans, the beliefs and symbolism of ancient religions were absorbed into religious writings and practices. Change was constant. It’s only really in recent centuries that these religions have become so dogmatic.”
“Which is why, in the older gospels, Jesus sounds like a simple Hebrew teacher who wants people to take care of one another,” Rose said. “Yet by the time the Gospel of John was written, he’s talking like a Greek philosopher.”
Doncaster laughed, but nodded again. “You’re well-educated, young Rose. As you read the later writings of the New Testament, the influence of Paul and other Romans is clear. The baptism imagery, the tenet that asking for forgiveness is paramount–”
Sensing a lecture coming, along entirely tangential lines, Rose said, “I have something to show you.” Doncaster paused, mouth still half open. He waggled his eyebrows but Rose chose to ignore that. She showed him some photos of the chamber that Morgan had sent to her earlier. “Could this be a taurobolium?”
Doncaster’s eyes went wide. He looked around, as if suddenly expecting spies or enemies to be descending on them. “Where is this place?”
Rose made a wry face. “I’m not at liberty to say.”
His expression hardened, so she quickly resorted to charm. Though she couldn’t stand the creep, she needed to keep him on side. She had clearly caused him some discomfort with the image. “At least,” she said, with a coy smile, “not where prying ears can hear.”
Doncaster softened again. He smiled. “Come this way.” He led her to his office, a small but immaculately neat space with a dark wood desk and a bookshelf in one corner. Two chairs sat facing the desk, which he indicated.
As Rose said, Doncaster turned to the shelves and took down an old-looking book. He sat at his desk and flipped through the book for a moment, then turned it to face her. A photograph showed an excavated chamber very much like the one in the photo from Elizabeth Morgan. There was a similar deep, narrow trench running through the center of the chamber, but this one hadn’t been filled with earth like the one Morgan had told her about.
“You think the one in my photo has been filled in with dirt and debris before the chamber was closed up?”
Doncaster nodded, closing the book again. “It seems likely, though I don’t know why. Closed up, you say? So, the one in your photo is a recent discovery?”
Rose was annoyed she’d let that detail slip. “I can’t really say right now.”
Doncaster came around the desk and leaned against it right in front of her chair, much too close for comfort. “I thought you promised to tell me the location of the chamber, here in private?”
“One more question,” she said, biting down her distaste. She showed him the photo of the mosaic. “Can you identify this?”
His eyes went even wider than before, then he said, “No, I’ve never seen anything quite like that one.”
Rose knew he was lying, but had no idea why. What was she uncovering here? Despite the bile rising in her throat, she turned on more charm. She stood and ran his tie between her fingers. “I can tell you know something, Mark. What’s the big secret?”
He trembled and Rose wondered how long it might have been since a woman flirted back with him, if ever. “You must tell me where this was found,” Doncaster said, a little breathlessly. “It’s critical.”
She figured she had to give him something if she was to learn anything else. “A village in Suffolk. It was discovered accidentally by a boy from a local school there. I’m afraid that’s all I know.” She ran a finger over his tie again. “But you must know a little more about this, surely?”
Doncaster swallowed, but a frown creased his brow. “That mosaic, it was the symbol of a tiny sect of Mithraism called Tauro Solis. It was believed to have died out long before the Romans reached England. I have to say, if this is authentic, it’s quite a find.” His demeanor had changed. His ogling eyes were troubled and he shifted away from her personal space, suddenly business. “What village in Suffolk?” he pressed. “You must tell me all the details you have.”
“I already told you all I know. I’m researching on behalf of someone else, called Elizabeth. I don’t recall her surname,” Rose lied. “I have her number, but it’s back at my office.”
“Can you please tell me? I’d really like to visit this place.”
Rose almost preferred the flirtatious creep to this neediness. She felt a strong urge to leave. “I’ll call you with it as soon as I get back to my office.”
“What about you write it down and let me know over dinner?”
“Hmm, I don’t think so.” At his angry expression, she added, “I have a boyfriend.” It galled her that men wouldn’t respect a woman’s boundaries unless she was the ‘property’ of another man, but she really needed him to back off.
His expression tightened, probably realizing she’d been playing with him. He brought it on himself, after all. He forced a smile. “Can’t blame a man for trying. I didn’t catch your surname, Rose. Or where your office is?”
Rose backed to the door and pulled it open. “I’ll call you with that number,” she said, stepping back out into the open space of the reconstructed temple.
“You’ll need my number,” Doncaster said, opening a drawer.
Rose didn’t wait for his business card or whatever else he might retrieve from his desk. She quickly closed his office door behind her and hurried out onto the street.
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Doncaster stared at the closed door, grinding his teeth. He had admired her curves as she turned away, but he was annoyed she’d teased that bit of information out of him. He took a deep breath, then blew it out in exasperation. He was not looking forward to this.
“He’s going to blame me. That’s just how he is. Somehow, it will be my fault.”
Trembling hands reached beneath his desk and stumbled for the tiny cylinder lock. Damn! The thing was bloody hard to work. He supposed it needed to be that way, else it would be hard to keep it a secret.
Secrets! He barked a rueful laugh.
“Oh, the secrets we keep,” he whispered. He tried to force bravado into his words, but his voice quavered. He paused, closed his eyes and took two deep breaths.
“It’s nothing he can’t deal with. You’re doing him a favor by forewarning him.” A sudden sense of warmth filled him. Of course this could be buried. Probably literally!
He finally managed to enter his code and opened the hidden compartment built into his desk. He took out a small leatherbound journal, flipped to the back page and found, the phone number he needed.
He took another breath, let it out in a huff, and stood. He checked the number again then dialed it up on his desk phone. His heart raced as he listened to it ring. He half hoped it would go to voice mail. But after a moment, the call was answered.
“Yes?” came the curt reply on the other end.
“It’s Mark Doncaster from the temple.” Doncaster took another breath, then said, “I think we have a problem.”