Tauroctony

[5][6][7][8][9][10] Although there are numerous minor variations, the basic features of the central tauroctony scene is highly uniform: Mithras half-straddles a bull that has been forced to the ground.

With his left hand, Mithras pulls back the head of the bull by the nostrils or the muzzle (never by the horns,[11] which – if at all represented – are short).

Mithras is usually dressed in a knee-length long-sleeved tunic (tunica manicata), closed boots and breeches (anaxyrides, bracae).

This dorsal band or blanket placed on the back of the animal is an adoption from the then-contemporary images of public sacrifice, and identifies the bull as a sacrificial beast.

"The model for the Mithraic bull-killing scene was probably the type of winged Nike (Victory) killing the bull, which became a fashionable image once again in the reign of Trajan.

The signs of the twelve zodiacal constellations[b] and allusions to seven classical planets[c] are common in the tauroctony reliefs and frescoes.

The tauroctony reliefs (but not the statuary) almost always include busts of Sol and Luna, i.e. respectively the god of the Sun and the goddess of the Moon, which appear in respectively the left and right top corners of the scene.

The more ambitious cult images include the Sun's horse-drawn quadriga mounting upwards on the left, while Luna's oxen-driven biga descends on the right.

[23] As first identified by Karl Bernhard Stark in 1879 but unexplored until the dismantling of the Cumontian transfer scenario in the 1970s, all the other elements of the tauroctony scene except Mithras himself have obvious astral correlations too.

The constellations of Taurus (bull) and Scorpius (scorpion)[g] are on opposite points of the zodiac, and between them lies a narrow band of the sky in which the constellations of the canine (Canis Major/Minor or Lupus), snake (Hydra, but not Serpens or Draco), the twins (Gemini), raven (Corvus), cup (Crater), lion (Leo), and the star of the 'wheat ear' (Spica, Alpha Virginis) appeared in the summers of the late first century.

[24] Simultaneously, as Porphyry's description of the mysteries states, "the Moon is also known as a bull and Taurus is its 'exaltation'"[25] Beginning with Cumont, who held the astral symbolism (and all the other Greco-Roman elements in the mysteries) to be merely a late, superficial and adventitious accretion,[26] "most Mithraic scholars"[27] have treated the correspondences between elements of the tauroctony and the constellations as coincidental or trivial.

"[30] Within the framework of the Cumontian supposition that the Mithraic mysteries was the "Roman form of Mazdaism", the traditional view held that the tauroctony represented Zoroastrianism's cosmological myth of the killing of a primordial bovine.

Recently, the iconographic reliefs of a bird and a bull, which are found in Iran, have been compared to the tauroctony by Iranian scholars.

This recognition is not new; "[s]ince the time of Celsus (around 178), author of Alēthēs Logos, it has been known [via Origen's Contra Celsum] that the Mithraic mysteries relate to fixed stars and planets.

"[35] In the post-Cumontian period, this recognition was first revived by Stanley Insler (second congress, 1975), who pointed out that the tauroctony could be interpreted solely in terms of the Greco-Roman understanding of astronomical phenomena.

"[42] Accordingly, since the 1970s, the zodiacal symbolism in the scene has provoked much speculation that the cult relief represents some sort of "star-map" code that poses a riddle of Mithras' identity.

Beck (2006) summarizes them as follows: Additionally, Stanley Insler (1978) and Bruno Jacobs (1999) identify the entire bull-killing scene with the heliacal setting of Taurus.

The image was adapted for a Prix de Rome sculpture of The Madness of Orestes by Raymond Barthélemy (1860); the prize-winning plaster model remains in the collection of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, where it was included in the 2004 travelling exhibition Dieux et Mortels.