Tauroctony of Mithras at the British Museum London

Detail of above showing dog and serpent drinking bull's blood

Detail of above showing scorpion attacking bull's testicles

A Roman bas-relief of the tauroctony in the Louvre, 2nd or 3rd century conforming to the standard Mithraic depiction: in the upper corners are Helios with the raven, and Luna

A statue, rather than the more common fresco, of the tauroctony in the Vatican Museum. The British Museum is a Museum of human history and culture in London. The Louvre Museum (Musée du Louvre located in Paris is the world's most visited art museum a historic monument and a national museum of France In Greek mythology the Sun was personified as Helios (ˈhiliˌɑs ( Ἥλιος Latinized as Helius) In Greek mythology, Selene (Σελήνη " Moon " English sɛˈliːniː was an archaic Lunar deity and the daughter of the Titans The Vatican Museums (Musei Vaticani in Viale Vaticano in Rome, inside the Vatican City, are one of the greatest museums in the world since they display works Note that Mithras is looking toward the bull instead of away, which is unusual in a tauroctony. This is because the head is a reconstruction.

A tauroctony is an artistic depiction of the mythic hero and ancient religious savior Mithras engaged in the ritual slaying of a bull. The Mithraic Mysteries or Mysteries of Mithras (also Mithraism) was a Roman mystery religion which became popular among the military in the late The literal act of sacrifice is known as taurobolium. In the Roman empire of the second to fourth centuries taurobolium referred to practices involving the sacrifice of a bull, which after mid-second A tauroctony was found, its representation essentially unchanging, at the center of every mithraeum. Mithraeum is a place of worship for the followers of the Mystery religion of Mithraism.

The highly formulaic scene was developed in the school of sculptors active in Pergamum circa 200BCE, possibly adapting the formulaic representation of Alexander (Untersteiner 1946, et al. Alexander the Great ( or, Mégas Aléxandros; July 20 356 BC June 10 or June 11 323 BC also known as Alexander III of Macedon (el Ἀλέξανδρος Γ' ) In the depiction, Mithras, wearing a Phrygian cap and pants, slays the bull, kneeling on its back with his left knee while looking away. The Phrygian cap is a soft red conical cap with the top pulled forward worn in antiquity by the inhabitants of Phrygia, a region of central Anatolia His cape billows behind him showing its inner side. A serpent and dog seem to drink from the bull's open wound (which often spills blood but occasionally grain), and a scorpion attacks the bull's testicles. Serpent is a word of Latin origin (from serpens serpentis "something that creeps snake" that is commonly used in a specifically mythic or Typically, a raven or crow is also present, and sometimes also a goblet and small lion. Cautes and Cautopates, the celestial twins of light and darkness, are torch-bearers, standing on either side with their legs crossed, Cautes with his brand pointing up and Cautopates with his turned down. Cautes and Cautopates are the two attendants of Mithras in the ancient Roman cult of Mithraism. Above Mithras, the symbols for Sol and Luna are present in the starry night sky. See the very similar Enkidu tauroctony seal. First Tablet Enkidu is the quintessential savage person in the beginning of the epic The whole of his body was hairy and his (uncut locks were like a woman's or the hair of

The modern consensus is that the scene seems to be astrological in nature. ^[1] It has been proposed by David Ulansey that the tauroctony, rather than an originally Iranian animal sacrifice scene with Iranian precedents, as Franz Cumont deciphered it,^[2] embodies a symbolic representation of the constellations, and, more speculatively, that it depicts Mithra's control of the precession of the equinoxes, a phenomenon that was discovered by Hipparchus (Ulansey, 1991). For a topic outline on this subject see List of basic Iran topics. Franz-Valéry-Marie Cumont ( Aalst Belgium, January 3 1868 – Brussels, August 25 1947) was a Belgian archaeologist In Astronomy, Precession refers to the movement of the rotational axis of a body such as a planet with respect to Inertial space. Hipparchus ( Greek; ca 190 BC &ndash ca 120 BC was a Greek Astronomer, Geographer, and Mathematician of the Hellenistic The identification of some constellations is clear enough: the bull is Taurus, the serpent Hydra, the dog Canis Major or Minor, the crow or raven Corvus, the goblet Crater, the lion Leo, and, more speculatively, the wheat-blood the star Spica. Taurus (it looks like a bull (ˈtɔrəs bull, symbol, Unicode ♉ is one of the Constellations of the Zodiac. In Greek mythology, the Lernaean Hydra ( Greek: ( was an ancient nameless serpent -like Chthonic water beast that possessed numerous Canis Major ( greater Dog) is one of the 88 modern Constellations and was also in Ptolemy 's list of 48 constellations Canis Minor (ˌkeɪnɨs ˈmaɪnɚ smaller Dog) is one of the 88 modern Constellations and was also in Ptolemy 's list of 48 constellations Corvus (ˈkɔrvəs Raven or Crow) is a small southern Constellation with only 11 stars visible to the naked eye (brighter than magnitude 5 Crater (ˈkreɪtɚ cup) is one of the 88 modern Constellations and was also one of the 48 listed by Ptolemy. Leo (ˈliːoʊ Lion, symbol, Unicode ♌ is a Constellation of the Zodiac. Spica (ˈspaɪkə (also known as α Vir / α Virginis / Alpha Virginis is the brightest star in the Constellation Virgo, and the 15th brightest star The torch-bearers may represent the two equinoxes, the points where the zodiac crosses the celestial equator, although this is less clear. An equinox is the event of the Sun passing over the Earth's equator in its annual cycle Zodiac denotes an annual cycle of twelve stations along the Ecliptic, the apparent path of the sun across the heavens through the Constellations that divide the ecliptic The celestial equator is a Great circle on the imaginary Celestial sphere, in the same plane as the Earth 's Equator. Mithras himself could also be associated with Perseus, whose constellation is above that of the bull. Perseus, Perseos, or Perseas ( Greek: Περσεύς, Περσέως, Περσέας) the Legendary founder

The tauroctony and other well-known Hellenistic sculptures helped to inspire Neoclassicism. This article focuses on the cultural aspects of the Hellenistic age for the historical aspects see Hellenistic period. Neoclassicism (sometimes rendered as Neo-Classicism or Neo-classicism) is the name given to quite distinct movements in the decorative and The image was adapted for a Prix de Rome sculpture of The Madness of Orestes by Raymond Bathélmy (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" [1]. This article concerns the French government prize For similarly named prizes aimed at other countries' nationals see Prix de Rome (disambiguation. The École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts (ENSB-A is the distinguished National School of Fine Arts in Paris, France.

See also

• Taurobolium
• Mithraism
• Taurus

Notes

External links

• Mithra References Page
• The Mithraic Mysteries by David Ulansey Scientific American, December 1989 (vol. 261, #6), pp. 130-135.
• Mario Untersteiner, 1946. La fisiologia del mita ("The Physiology of Myth") (Milan: Bocca). Quoted in Joseph Campbell, 1964. Joseph John Campbell ( March 26, 1904 – October 30, 1987) was an American Mythology Professor, Writer Occidental Mythology: the Masks of God p 257.
• Christ and the Taurobolium - Lord Mithras in the genesis of Christianity , D. K. Malloch, Lochan Press, 2006, ISBN: 978-0-9540786-1-4.