Mithras and the bull: the tauroctony in the mysteries of Rome

In hundreds of sanctuaries scattered between Rome, the Rhine and the Danube the same scene is repeated: a young god in a Phrygian cap kneeling on the back of a bull, turning his head away as he plunges a dagger into its neck. This is the tauroctony, the central image of the cult of Mithras, a mystery religion that spread through the Roman Empire between the first and fourth centuries AD, and of which almost no internal texts survive.

An ancient name, a new cult

The god's name is much older than the Roman cult. A Mitra appears in the Vedic hymns of India alongside Varuṇa, and the pair is also invoked in a fourteenth-century BC treaty between the Hittite king Šuppiluliuma I and the kingdom of Mitanni. In Zoroastrian Iran Mithra is the guarantor of contracts and of light, celebrated in a hymn of the Avesta, the Mihr Yasht.

The Belgian scholar Franz Cumont, at the end of the nineteenth century, saw Roman Mithraism as a direct continuation of Iranian religion. Today most scholars are more cautious: Iranian sources know nothing of Mithra killing a bull, and the Roman cult appears rather as a new creation, probably born in military and merchant circles, which used an eastern name to give itself prestige.

Reading the tauroctony

The scene follows an almost fixed pattern. A dog and a snake stretch towards the blood flowing from the wound, a scorpion seizes the bull's genitals, a raven watches from close by; at the sides stand two torchbearers, Cautes with his torch raised and Cautopates with his torch lowered. Above, the Sun and the Moon often appear, and in some reliefs the bull's tail ends in ears of wheat.

The precise meaning is still debated. The ears of wheat suggest a sacrifice from which life is born, while the presence of animals corresponding to constellations has led some scholars to interpret the whole scene as a map of the sky. The two readings are not mutually exclusive, and the ancients themselves, as the philosopher Porphyry suggests in his treatise On the Cave of the Nymphs, regarded the Mithraic cave as an image of the cosmos.

Seven grades in a cave

Mithraea were small rooms, often underground, built to imitate a cave, with two side benches for the ritual meal and the tauroctony on the back wall. The initiates, men only, rose through seven grades: Raven, Bridegroom, Soldier, Lion, Persian, Sun-Runner and Father. The mosaic in the Mithraeum of Felicissimus at Ostia depicts the symbols of each grade, associated with the seven planets then known.

Rome preserves numerous mithraea, such as those beneath the basilica of San Clemente, at Santa Prisca on the Aventine and beside the Circus Maximus, while the one at Capua retains its original frescoes. Mithraism is often confused with the taurobolium, the rite in which the blood of a bull drenched the worshipper: that ceremony, however, belongs to the cult of Cybele and not to that of Mithras.

With the rise of Christianity in the fourth century the mithraea were abandoned, destroyed or buried beneath new churches. This very fate allowed them to survive: beneath San Clemente visitors still descend today, through the medieval basilica and the early Christian one, to the room where the stone bull has waited for centuries for the god's blow.