The Mithras Liturgy: Ascent Through the Seven Spheres

A private ritual handbook buried in a jar in ancient Thebes contains what scholars have called the most complete first-person account of soul-ascent in all of antiquity. The text is known as the Mithras Liturgy, though it belongs to no single religion — it is a synthesis, the work of someone who gathered divine names from Egyptian, Greek, Iranian, and Jewish traditions and forged them into a single, terrifying technique for reaching the sun.

The practitioner begins at dawn. Standing on the ground in Egypt, he recites a sequence of vowels — AEEIOUO — addressed to the first origin of his own origin, calling on the fire and water and earth within his body as evidence of kinship with the divine fire above. He is claiming, before he has ascended, that he belongs there.

Then the ascent begins. The heavens open. Seven virgins with serpent faces appear — the Fates of Heaven, bearing golden wands. Eight bull-headed gods appear — the Pole Lords who turn the vault of the sky. Each must be greeted by name, with the correct formula. Without the formula, they do not pass you through. With it, they turn and return to their posts, and you move higher.

At the summit, a god descends toward you: young, beautiful, fiery-haired, wearing a scarlet cloak and a crown of flame. The solar deity. You place your right hand to your lips and declare: I am a star, wandering about with you, shining forth out of the deep. You are lifted up. You are, for a moment, in mid-air.

The text does not describe what happens next in detail. It does not need to. The moment of mutual recognition between the mortal and the god — the practitioner claiming stellar identity, the god acknowledging it — is the entire point. The technique is not about acquiring something new. It is about asserting what was always true.

The Mithras Liturgy is remarkable because it survives as a working document rather than a scripture. Someone used this. Someone stood in the Egyptian dawn and breathed these vowels and faced these guardians. The text is a record of that attempt, passed down in a magician's private library. That it survived at all is something close to a miracle.