Taurobolium

Originating in Asia Minor,[4] its earliest attested performance in Italy occurred in AD 134, at Puteoli, in honor of Venus Caelestis,[5] as documented by an inscription.

The addition of the taurobolium and the institution of an archigallus[broken anchor] were innovations in the cult of the Magna Mater made by Antoninus Pius on the occasion of his vicennalia, the twentieth year of his reign, in 158 and 159.

The best-known and most vivid description, though of the quite different taurobolium as it was revived in aristocratic pagan circles, is the notorious one that has coloured early scholarship, which was provided in an anti-pagan poem by the late 4th-century Christian Prudentius in Peristephanon:[9] the priest of the Great Mother, clad in a silk toga worn in the Gabinian cincture, with golden crown and fillets on his head, takes his place in a trench covered by a platform of planks pierced with fine holes, on which a bull, magnificent with flowers and gold, is slain.

[10] Prudentius does not explicitly mention the taurobolium, but the ceremony, in its new form, is unmistakable from other contemporaneous sources: "At Novaesium on the Rhine in Germania Inferior, a blood pit was found in what was probably a Metroon", Jeremy Rutter observes.

The taurobolium in the second and third centuries was usually performed as a measure for the welfare (salus) of the emperor, Empire, or community;[10] H. Oppermann[14] denies early reports that its date was frequently 24 March, the Dies Sanguinis ("Day of Blood") of the annual festival of the Great Mother Cybele and Attis; Oppermann reports that there were no taurobolia in late March.

In the late third and the fourth centuries its usual motive was the purification or regeneration of an individual, who was spoken of as renatus in aeternum, "reborn for eternity", in consequence of the ceremony.

[18] The classicist Grant Showerman, writing in the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition suggested: "The taurobolium was probably a sacred drama symbolizing the relations of the Mother and Attis (q.v.).