I wonder if I might contribute here?
I'm afraid that these Wikipedia pages are quite unreliable now. As you know, anyone can edit Wikipedia, and unfortunately some people abuse that privilege. I myself used to be the main contributor to these pages over a period of a couple of years, and I did most of the research for them. In the process I acquired a pretty deep familiarity with the scholarship, and with what looked scholarly but was in fact merely derivative from old and unreliable research. Unfortunately back in January 2011 a troll turned up at the article and, under two different false names, fought an edit war for months on end to seize control of them. He harassed all the real Mithras buffs off the article, and in cahoots with a corrupt administrator blocked those whom he could not intimidate. Of course he wasn't interested in Mithras -- as if! -- but he was quite sure that Mithras predated Jesus, and that Christianity borrowed from the cult of Mithras. So he edited them accordingly. To do so, he faked up extracts from old, inaccurate, or obsolete material found on the web into the format used for reliable material, deleted some of the latter and interlarded the articles with his rubbish. So ... a normal person just can't tell what's good and what isn't.
Let me offer a couple of comments, then.
Your source has suggested that Persian Mithra is or might be the same as Roman Mithras. Modern specialists don't believe this. The Romans did believe that the worship of Mithras was of Persian origin, but the archaeology is against it. Opinions changed among scholars after 1971, you see. The change was because the Roman cult of Mithras doesn't appear in the archaeology before around AD 100, nor in the literary sources before 80 AD (although it must have existed before, I suspect), and the archaeology all shows a cult fanning out from Rome. In the unknown genesis of the cult, it is of course entirely possible that the unknown inventor borrowed names for some of his deities from Greek texts which mentioned Zoroastrianism; but only the unwary suppose that two things called by the same (or similar) words are necessarily the same.
I think the translation printed by Betz was actually made by Marvin Meyer and reprinted by Betz when he organised the translation of further portions of the Great Magical Papyrus in which it is found.
I'm afraid that nothing in the so-called Mithras liturgy -- whose dubious connection with Mithras you rightly identify -- justifies this last bit. Meyer is no Mithras scholar, and some of his statements about Mithras reflect obsolete or non-scholarly opinion. The text is a magical text, and these tend to be studded with names of gods as "power words". Indeed some of the material in the same papyrus used the name of the Jewish God in just this way, and even Jesus; but the texts are neither Jewish nor Christian. There is speculation that some of what appears in the Mithras liturgy might relate to some literary references; but the identity is far from certain.
These claims would all need to be referenced against primary sources. Are you sure that a soul travelling into a different realm can be legitimately described by the word "epiphany", by the way?
We need to remember how little is known about Mithras. The content of the mysteries of Mithras are just that today -- a mystery -- and whatever the cult taught its initiates today has to be inferred from very scanty remains indeed. The handbooks to which Porphyry refers have perished.
The idea of "orthodox Mithraism" sounds strange ... pagan cults did not do "orthodoxy". They weren't based on that kind of approach to religion, you know.
Erm, I wondered which ancient source records that the secret teachings of the Roman cult of Mithras were based on stoicism?
I don't know who this Shastry was, but he was not a Mithras scholar.
Do be aware that there is a great deal of misinformation around on the web, and indeed even in books written by scholars whose specialism is not Mithras. This occurs because the founder of Mithraic Studies, the great Franz Cumont, was misled by the literary sources to suppose the identity of Mitra and Mithras, and filled up the gaps in his theory of how the Mithras cult was with imagination. This was pardonable in the work he was doing, because he was trying to create the whole field by synthesising the data. But his work was popularised in a bad English translation stripped of most of his scholarly content, and it has given rise to a great deal of hearsay, which is not based on any actual evidence. Always ask to see the primary source for these sorts of claims. It's so bad that I no longer take any claim not so referenced seriously, and nor should you.
All the best,
Roger Pearse
