October 2nd marks the beginning of Mithrá festival culminating on October 8th. It is a festival of love, red wine and pomegranates.
Avestan Mithrá-, Vedic Mitrá- comes from reconstructed Indo European root *meit- and is cognate with Latin mūtō, Gothic maidjan, Latvian mietot.
Mithrá is what is genuinely given/felt in return, our soul contract. It appears in the poetic gathas, Yasna 46.5, 2nd rhymed verse line in the form of mithrö.ibyö in the sense of “reciprocal friendship/love.”
Mithrá is reciprocating the Immortals favor by fulfilling our faith/destiny, by fulfilling our calling.
The highest God in Zoroastrianism is not a despot and Zoroastrian religiosity is not slavery. Zoroastrian religiosity is the reciprocal friendship/love between mortal men and Immortal god-powers/forces. It is a mutual community between Immortal God beings and mortal men with a profound sense of mutual obligations and duties.
The poetic gathas teach that mortals, as noble genus “hû-zéñtûš,” possess something immortal or divine, and as such could claim to approximate to immortal or divine stature — the “Godlike Ahü.”
In the nature of mortal men, just as the god-powers will, lie possibilities, divine in origin, thus it is mortals destiny to reclaim the best and the ideal in their nature and ascend their limitations.
Although there is an attempt in many circles to talk of a pre-Zoroastrian Mithraic religion but there is NO single proof or evidence for such hypothesis whatsoever. The term “Mithraism” is a modern coinage and a fairly recent academic invention.
In Roman Empire the so-called mithraic religion was known as “the mysteries of the Invincible Mithrás (Sol Invictus Mithras)” or “the Persian religion.”
The ancient Roman followers of Mithrás themselves were convinced that their wisdom was founded by the ancient Aryan seer/Prophet Zarathúshtrá.
Cumont correctly argues that Roman worship of Mithrá in the West was Romanized Mazdáism and was still at its core a Zoroastrian Persian religion, though one that had undergone extensive metamorphoses in its passage (see Cumont 1931, Beck 1995).