One can speak with more certainty about the Legend or mythical history of Mithras which M. Cumont has contrived with rare acumen to reconstruct from the monuments found in his chapels. It is comprised in eleven or twelve scenes or tableaux which we will take in their order[842]. We first see the birth of the god, not from the head of his father Zeus like Athena, or from his thigh like Dionysos, but from a rock, which explains his epithet of “Petrogenes” or rock-born. The god is represented in this scene as struggling from the rock in which he is embedded below the waist, and always uplifts in one hand a broad knife of which we shall afterwards see him make use, and in the other a lighted torch[843]. He is here represented as a boy, and wears the Phrygian cap or so-called cap of liberty which is his distinctive attribute, while the torch is doubtless, as M. Cumont surmises, symbolical of the light which he is bringing into the world[844]. The rock is sometimes encircled by the folds of a large serpent, probably here as elsewhere a symbol of the earth, and is in the Mithraic chapel discovered at Housesteads in Northumberland represented in the form of an egg, the upper part remaining on the head of the nascent god like an egg-shell on that of a newly-hatched chicken[845]. This is probably due to some confusion or identification with the Orphic legend of the First-born or Phanes who sprang from the cosmic egg; but the central idea of the rock-birth seems to be that of the spark, hidden as it were in the stone and leaping forth when struck. In one or two examples of the scene, the miraculous birth is watched by a shepherd or shepherds, which leads M. Cumont to draw a parallel between this and the Adoration of the Shepherds at the Birth of Christ.