Under Rome, in cellars and under barracks from Syria to the Wall, there are hundreds of them: a young man in a Phrygian cap kneeling on a bull, pulling its head back, driving a knife into its neck. A dog and a snake at the wound. A scorpion at the bull's genitals. A raven. Two torchbearers, one torch up, one down.
Almost nothing survives explaining what it meant. The cult left initiates, not scripture.
Bodri gives it two sentences of decoding and one sentence that is worth more than the rest of the chapter.
The decoding: Middle Eastern schools "used the symbolism of Mithras slaying Taurus the Bull to represent the regenerative powers of the yang chi once it's awakened."1
And then: "The point of the ancient Mithras cult was that you are in fact Mithras."2
The bull first, and it is the cluster's standard operation.
Fierce animals stand for the yang chi. Lions, tigers, stags, rams, boars — and bulls. See Animal Pelts as Insignia. Killing one is mastering the force; the Nemean lion is the same event in Greek. See The Nemean Lion Is Raw Yang Chi.
What Bodri specifies is the regenerative aspect — not the force arriving, but what it produces once awakened.1
He is silent on everything else in the image. The dog, the snake, the scorpion, the raven, the torchbearers, the cave, the ears of grain from the bull's tail. A tauroctony is a densely populated scene and the reading addresses one figure and one act.
That is worth noticing because the cluster's better readings — the skull cup, the tantric posture — work by accounting for more of an object rather than less. See The Empty Skull Cup. Here six or seven elements are left unassigned.
[SPECULATIVE], under the caveat at Iconography as Attainment Record.
Then the sentence that earns this page.
"The point of the ancient Mithras cult was that you are in fact Mithras. You are in fact repeating the First Labor of Hercules once you awaken your yang chi."2
Strip out the chi and there is still a structural claim underneath, and it is the most transferable thing in the book.
The figure in the icon is not a being you petition. It is a state you can occupy.
Read that way, a tauroctony is not a devotional image of a god performing a cosmic act. It is a picture of what an initiate does — and the initiate, having done it, is the figure in the picture.
This is the same operation Bodri performs on Hercules for three hundred and seventy pages. The hero is a stage; you are the hero when you reach the stage. It is why the book can be read as an instruction manual rather than as mythology. See The Twelve Labors as a Gong-Fu Sequence.
And it is not an eccentric claim about mystery religion. Whatever else the Mithraic grades were doing, an initiatory cult with seven ranks is a system for becoming something, and identification with the cult figure is the ordinary shape of such systems.
Bodri then explains why nobody knows any of this, and the explanation is a general mechanism rather than a complaint about Mithraism.
"because that symbolism is connected with star constellations and Spring time, people have lost sight of the cultivation connection."1
And the generalisation: "This is what happens to most true cultivation knowledge over time. It eventually becomes lost because so few people really cultivate or succeed on the spiritual path, which is why sages try to incorporate the knowledge in some lasting form for their culture."1
Two claims.
A symbol with two available readings drifts toward the one that needs no personal verification. Anyone can check a constellation. Almost nobody can check whether their yang chi has awakened. So the astronomical reading survives and the somatic one doesn't — not because it is better supported, but because it is auditable by people who have not done the work.
And the population of verifiers is tiny. If almost nobody reaches the states, then almost nobody can maintain the reading, and the meaning is carried by objects that outlive their readers. See Dictynna's Axes and Nets, where the same mechanism is described as a property of insider-legible symbols.
That is a genuinely good account of how technical content decays into decoration, and it does not depend on any of Bodri's anatomy being right.
What Bodri actually assigns to the tauroctony is narrower than the whole scene, and the narrowness is worth having.
His claim is not that the bull-killing depicts the first arousal. It depicts "the regenerative powers of the yang chi once it's awakened."1
Once it's awakened. So this is not the Nemean lion's event — the force arriving impure and being conquered. It is what the force does afterward: the productive phase, in which something already woken begins to remake the body.
That distinction is real in the corpus. The first Labor is a conquest; the transformations that follow are described as regenerative rather than combative, and Bodri's phrase for what begins once you stop clinging is that "the real regenerative forces of nature will start to arise and reassert themselves."5
The bull carries that better than the lion does, and for a reason available in the imagery. A lion is a predator and killing one removes a threat. A bull is livestock — killing one yields something. Blood, meat, and in the tauroctony's own iconography, ears of grain from the tail.
So the Mithraic scene, on this reading, marks the point where the force stops being a problem to be survived and starts being a source. See The Nemean Lion Is Raw Yang Chi.
[SPECULATIVE] and 🚩 SECONDARY WITHOUT PRIMARY. Bodri addresses one figure and one act; the dog, snake, scorpion, raven, torchbearers and cave go unassigned, and no Mithraic source is cited.
Nothing to practise, and one thing that is genuinely usable — the identification move, applied to yourself.
The usable version. When you meet a figure in a religious image, try asking what would I have to have done to be him? rather than what is he? If the answer is a practice, the image is instructional. If the answer is nothing — if he is a being of a different order and the gap is unbridgeable — the image is devotional.
That question sorts a lot of material quickly, and it costs nothing.
The hazard, which is severe. You are in fact Mithras is one letter away from I am Mithras, and a practitioner who arrives at the second has acquired an identity. Bodri's own account of what goes wrong in esoteric practice is that practitioners amplify attachment to form and to self.3 See The Wrathful Implements Are Tools.
The guard is in the grammar. You are repeating the First Labor is a statement about an event, not about a person. Bodri keeps it in that form. The moment it becomes a noun applied to yourself, it is the opposite of the practice.
And the standing correction. Whatever you are, on this account, you are early. The first Labor is the beginning. See The Five General Stages of the Spiritual Path.
Tomorrow morning. Sit.
The Mithras passage is where Bodri states his account of decay, and it is a claim about a population rather than about scholarship.
"This is what happens to most true cultivation knowledge over time. It eventually becomes lost because so few people really cultivate or succeed on the spiritual path, which is why sages try to incorporate the knowledge in some lasting form for their culture."1
Two mechanisms, and they work against each other.
The knowledge decays because the population of verifiers is tiny. Nobody can hold a reading alive who cannot check it, and on his own census almost nobody can.
So it is deliberately embedded in durable cultural forms — statues, stories, poems, myths — precisely so it survives the shortage of people who understand it.
That gives images a specific job: a storage medium that outlasts its readers. A relief can be copied faithfully for centuries by artisans who have no idea what it records, and become legible again to the next person who gets far enough.
And it explains the Mithraic case as he sees it. Once the tauroctony had a reading available that anyone could apply — constellations, the spring equinox — that reading could be taught, argued about and passed on by people with no attainment at all. The cultivation reading could not. "because that symbolism is connected with star constellations and Spring time, people have lost sight of the cultivation connection."1
His diagnosis for the present is blunt: "in today's culture spiritual cultivation knowledge is rare indeed, so hardly anyone knows how to cultivate anymore or what the universal spiritual path actually entails."1
[SPECULATIVE], and the Mithraic instance is the weakest support available for it — the cult left no explanatory texts, so nothing was displaced so much as lost entire. [CONTESTED].
The passage closes with the book's self-description, and it should be recorded as what it is.
"with an insider's knowledge of the Twelve Labors you can indeed recover the basic cultivation path and learn how to become a true peer of Hercules."1
Recover is the operative word, and it is a strong claim: not propose, not reconstruct, but retrieve something that was there.
Given the Mithraic case, recovery is exactly what cannot be demonstrated. There is no independent record of what was lost, so there is nothing against which a recovery could be checked. Any candidate reading of the tauroctony is a proposal, and a proposal that calls itself a recovery has claimed a warrant it does not have.
The honest form is available and Bodri uses it once, in the final chapter, about Cerberus: here is what I think, decide for yourself when you reach this stage.4 See The Three-Legged Toad and the Coin.
That framing would have cost him nothing and would have been true.
Evidence. [PRACTITIONER SOURCE], [SPECULATIVE]. No Mithraic source, inscription, relief or scholarly work is cited. The account of the astronomical reading as a displacing rival is [CONTESTED] and mistaken about the chronology. 🚩 SECONDARY WITHOUT PRIMARY, 🚩 CONSENSUS MISREPRESENTATION.
Tension — most of the image is unassigned. Dog, snake, scorpion, raven, torchbearers and cave are all untouched by a reading that claims to explain the scene.
Tension — extinction described as displacement. The cult died and left no explanation; nothing pushed a meaning out.
Tension — "recover" claims an unavailable warrant. With no independent record, recovery cannot be distinguished from invention.
Open question. If the identification move — you are the figure — is the point of mystery cults generally, that is a claim about a whole class of ancient religion and it is testable against the initiatory material that does survive: the Eleusinian evidence, the grade structures, the Orphic tablets. Bodri asserts it about one cult and never looks at any of them.
Sit with you are in fact Mithras and it is enormously flattering. The god in the relief is you, or will be. A hundred underground shrines across an empire were built around a scene you can occupy.
Then take the corpus's own measure of where that occupation sits. The tauroctony marks the regenerative phase of yang chi — which on the five-stage frame is inside stage two, sub-phase one, before anything the book would call awakening. Everything in this volume sits there.9 See The Five General Stages of the Spiritual Path.
So the identification is true and the thing identified is early. You are Mithras, and Mithras is at the beginning.
That is the pattern across the whole marker vocabulary and it is worth stating once plainly: these figures are not depictions of arrival. The lion is the starting gun. The horns are a mid-sequence opening. The circuit is felt at the lowest stages. The one image that marks the endpoint — an empty upturned skull — depicts an absence and has nothing in it to want.
The convergence with the rest of the corpus: whatever grandeur the imagery carries, it is being used to make an early and unglamorous process recognisable, not to describe the summit. And the corpus is consistent that the summit has no iconography at all, because by then there is nothing left to feel or to draw.
What converges with the corpus is the deflationary instinct. Mithras is not a god who acts on you; he is a description of something you do. Grace is earned merit. Membership buys nothing. The doorkeepers have no attainment. Across every domain Bodri touches, the same move: take the external agency out and put the operation back in the practitioner. See You Cannot Buy the Path.
The iconographic readings may not survive scrutiny. That instinct is the spine of the book and it survives all of them.
The Hero as Self Archetype — psychology.
The depth-psychological reading of the hero makes exactly Bodri's move and lands it somewhere else. The hero in a myth is not a person who lived; he is a figure of the Self, and the reader's relation to him is identification rather than admiration. Slaying the monster is an internal event. You are the hero is the whole point, and the myth is a map of a psyche.
Bodri says you are in fact Mithras and means the yang chi awakened in a channel body. Depth psychology says the same sentence and means an individuation process in a psyche.
The insight neither field produces alone: the internalising move is shared and the destination is not, and nothing in the icon adjudicates between the destinations. Both readings take the god out of the sky and put him inside a person. Both are non-devotional, both are anti-literal, and both explain why the imagery is violent, staged, and repetitive. Neither can be preferred on the evidence of the image, because the image is compatible with any internalisation.
Which has a sharp consequence for this whole cluster. Bodri's readings compete not with the devotional reading — he wins that one easily — but with a psychological reading that makes the same move at the same cost and requires no chi, no channels, and no claim about physiology. Every place he decodes an image as an anatomical record, the depth-psychological reading is available and cheaper: it needs one fewer entity.
And it predicts the same things. Why does the imagery recur across unconnected cultures? Shared psyche, on one account; shared physiology, on the other. Why is it violent? Ego death, or friction against obstruction. Why do practitioners recognise it only after arriving? Individuation, or attainment.
The discriminating evidence would have to be somatic and specific — a location, a duration, an ordering, a sensation with a physical signature that a psychological account has no reason to predict. Bodri has exactly this kind of material: the heel that pulses, the eighth-of-an-inch coating, the fixed opening order. See The Baptismal Gong-Fu.
He spends it on horns and bulls, where it does no work, and never notices that his iconography cannot distinguish his thesis from the nearest rival.
The open question is how far the identification move actually goes, because you are in fact Mithras has a limit the corpus never draws.
Applied to a stage, it is straightforward and it is what Bodri means: the figure in the icon marks a condition, and you occupy the condition when you reach it. "You are in fact repeating the First Labor of Hercules once you awaken your yang chi."2 Nothing metaphysical is being claimed.
But the same move applied to a being produces something else entirely, and the corpus is populated with beings — devas, dakinis, Buddhas, protectors — that it treats as real and as separate from the practitioner. Bodri says heaven genuinely helps those who tread the path sincerely.6 Mantras are described as connections to specific enlightened beings.7
So Mithras is a stage you occupy, and a bodhisattva is somebody who might assist you. Those cannot both be what an iconographic figure is.
The corpus has an answer available and never applies it here: the beautified forms are emanations projected as teaching, and enlightened beings do not actually look like that.8 Which would make a tauroctony an emanation rather than a portrait — and would then leave open whether the emanation depicts a stage the viewer can occupy or a being who is projecting it.
The practical stake is real. If the figure is a stage, the correct relation to it is recognition. If it is a being, the correct relation is something closer to petition — and the corpus is otherwise emphatic that petition purchases nothing. See You Cannot Buy the Path.
Mithras is the one place the identification is stated outright, and it is stated about a cult whose beings are otherwise absent from the book.