Mystical systems
Tauroctony
Direct answer
Tauroctony: The tauroctony is the image of the god Mithras killing a bull, the central cult scene found at the far end of every Mithraic temple in the Roman Empire.
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At a glance
- Also called
- mithras slaying the bull, mithras bull, bull slaying scene
- Found in
- Mystical Systems
- Related
- Mithraic Mysteries, Sol Invictus, Precession of the Equinoxes, Taurus
The tauroctony is the image of the god Mithras killing a bull, the central cult scene found at the far end of every Mithraic temple in the Roman Empire.
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What does tauroctony mean?
The word is a modern scholarly coinage from the Greek for bull slaying. The scene hardly varies. Mithras, in a soft pointed cap and a flying cloak, kneels on the back of a bull, pulls its head up by the nostrils and drives a dagger into its neck while looking away. A dog and a snake reach for the blood, a scorpion grips the bull's genitals, a raven perches near, and ears of wheat sprout from the tail. Two torchbearers stand by, one with torch raised and one with torch lowered, and the Sun and Moon look on from the upper corners.
No Mithraic text survives to say what it means. The worshippers plainly held it to be the god's great deed, and a line painted in a temple at Rome appears to speak of salvation by shed blood. Beyond that the meaning has to be read from the image, which is why it has drawn so many theories.
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What sets Tauroctony apart
The scene is fixed to a degree unusual in ancient religion: from Britain to Syria the same figures recur in the same places, as if copied from one pattern. It is also oddly joyless for a triumph, since the god turns his face from the blow. And it was built into the furniture of worship, set at the end of a cave-like room above the benches where members ate together, sometimes on a pivot with a second scene of the banquet of Mithras and the Sun carved on the back.
- Word: modern coinage from Greek tauroktonos, bull slaying
- Where found: the end wall of every mithraeum, as relief, statue or painting
- Animals: dog, snake, scorpion and raven, with wheat at the tail
- Torchbearers: Cautes with torch raised, Cautopates with torch lowered
- Persian reading: Franz Cumont, 1896 to 1899
- Precession reading: David Ulansey, The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries, 1989
Often mistaken for something else: A taurobolium was a real sacrifice of a bull in the cult of the Great Mother; the tauroctony is an image of a mythical killing, and Mithraic temples were too small to sacrifice bulls.
The story behind Tauroctony
Franz Cumont, who gathered the monuments in the 1890s, took the scene for a Roman form of a Persian myth in which the killing of a first bull gives rise to life. No Persian text shows Mithra doing this, and from the 1970s scholars turned to the sky: the bull, dog, snake, raven and scorpion all share their names with constellations. David Ulansey argued in 1989 that the scene shows the end of the Age of Taurus, with Mithras as the power that shifts the heavens. Roger Beck read it as a map of the soul's passage. Neither reading commands agreement.
Why Tauroctony matters
Tauroctony is the main evidence for what Mithraists believed, since the cult left hundreds of images and almost no words.
How to read Tauroctony
Archaeologists apply the term to the cult relief or painting itself; astral readers point to the scene as a case of myth drawn from the constellations.
Tauroctony in practice: an example
A visitor to a museum's Roman gallery who finds a relief of a caped figure stabbing a bull, flanked by two torchbearers, is looking at a tauroctony.
Where readings of Tauroctony go wrong
Every interpretation is a reconstruction from pictures, and the precession reading in particular remains a minority view.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Mystical Systems
- Aliases
- tauroctony meaning, mithras slaying the bull, mithras bull, bull slaying scene, mithraic tauroctony
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
What does tauroctony mean?
Bull slaying. It is the name modern scholars give to the scene of Mithras killing a bull. The ancient worshippers' own name for the image, if they had one, is not recorded.
What is shown in the tauroctony?
Mithras stabbing a bull, with a dog, a snake, a scorpion and a raven around it, wheat growing from the bull's tail, two torchbearers named Cautes and Cautopates, and busts of the Sun and Moon above.
Is the tauroctony a star map?
Possibly in part. Its animals match constellations that lay along one band of the sky, and many scholars accept some astral meaning. The stronger claim, that it encodes the precession of the equinoxes, is disputed.
