The Seventh Sacrament

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Ludo Torchia, Toni LaMarca, Dino Abati, Sandro Vignola, Andrea Guerino, Elisabetta Giordano, Bernardo Giordano, and Raul Bellucci, students under Giorgio Bramante

Leo Falcone, a police sovrintendente

Arturo Messina, police commissario over Leo Falcone

Mithraism originated in Persia before the sixth century BC. From around AD 136 onwards, it was adopted as one of the most important cults among Roman and government officials. Subterranean Mithraic temples built by Imperial troops are common in all of the empire’s military frontiers, from the Middle East to England. Three have been identified along Hadrian’s Wall, in northern England; more than a dozen, out of a suspected hundred or more, have been discovered in Rome itself.

At the heart of Mithraism lay several features which seem to have appealed to the military and bureaucratic mind. The cult was highly organised, secretive, and confined to men. It demanded insistence on absolute hierarchical obedience, first to local, higher-ranking members of the cult, and ultimately to the emperor. It also used a series of different “sacraments” to mark the passage of followers from one of its seven ranks to the next. Indeed the very word “sacrament,” while religious in nature today, stems from the original Latin term used for the oath of allegiance sworn by soldiers on joining the army. What those sacraments were, we can only guess, but they appear to have involved a separate initiation ceremony, with a swearing of oaths and on occasion a sacrifice, for each of the specific ranks, from the most junior, Corax, to the leader, Pater.

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