Home › In Egypt and the East › In Egypt and the East: Mithra
In Egypt and the East: Mithra
The Persian sun god, Mithra, symbolizing the creative force in nature, is sometimes represented accompanied by bees; in some instances a bee is seen issuing from his mouth; and honey is used in the mysteries of Mithra by the priests of all degrees. The hands of novices are washed in honey mingled with water, by which they are purified, and the hands of those in the highest degree of the order are washed in pure honey. The bull and the lion, so often occurring in the solar myths of Mithra and the bee, give a hint of the wide-spread belief of the origin of the bees from the body of a slain bull.
In spite of the neglect suffered by the bee in Persian literature, we know that even to this day honey is valued in Persia, and that few of the villages are without their basket hives which yield a delicate and delicious honey.
Concerning the habit imputed to Persia of embalming her dead in the products of the bee, Herodotus tells us : "The Persians cover a body with wax and then place it in the ground;" and Strabo says their mode of burial is to smear the bodies over with wax, and then to inter them. Again he says of the Assyrians, in reference to their having many rites in common with the Persians, that they put their dead in honey, after having smeared them with wax. "That the ancient Persians embalmed the bodies of their great men is believed by competent judges, and a Persian writer says that the substance called artificial mummy is found in those stone vessels in which the bodies of great men were preserved by means of honey."
China, like Persia, ignores the bees, not only in her lovesongs, but in her literature generally, although she is the "flowery kingdom" and all her literature is abloom with her cherry blossoms, her plums, and her beautiful gardens, which to this day are the admiration of all who visit her. But she has not the Hindu love for the murmuring bees with their " ecstatic songs" and their nectar-inebriated happiness.