Lord, being born again I pass away; being exalted, and having been exalted I die; born from a life-giving birth, and dissolved into un-birth, I go my way, as you founded, as you ordained and made the mystery. I am pheroura miouri.'

This is the sentence the entire Mithras Liturgy exists to say, and it is built on a paradox stated without blinking: palingenómenos apogígnomai — 'being born again, I pass away.' Rebirth and death in three words, because the only way to be reborn as a god is for the mortal self to die. The initiate narrates his own dissolution as the very shape of his renewal: exalted then dead, born from a 'life-giving birth' (génesis zōogónos) and then analytheìs, 'dissolved,' into apogenesía, an 'un-birth' the Greek had to coin against génesis to name at all. He does not fear the crossing; he recites it. Palingenesía, rebirth, is one of the great words of the age — the Stoics used it for the cosmos remade, the mystery cults for the initiate reborn, and early Christianity for baptism and the world to come. Here is one of its clearest pagan performances: a living person speaking his own death-and-resurrection aloud at the pole of heaven, and grounding it not in his own power but in the god's — 'as you founded, as you ordained and made the mystery.' Even the man's unmaking is obedience to a cosmic law the god laid down. And he seals it, as everything in this book is sealed, with a name he now bears: 'I am pheroura miouri.' Having died and been reborn, he is no longer only himself; he has a name in the other language, the one the gods answer to.