On tauroctonies and stars: Mithras and the life of an image

Abstract

A hero or a god, wearing an oriental garb and a Phrygian cap, presses his body on that of a bull to subdue it. With his flexed knee he presses the back of the animal and holds its head with his left hand, while with his right hand he stabs a dagger into the neck of the beast. Referring to this representation of the sacrifice of the bull, or tauroctony, Fritz Saxl once wrote that he could not imagine another case in which the birth of an image could be observed with such precision. Although the complete iconography of the Mithras cult varies substantially from one sanctuary to another, the tauroctony, an element always present in all temples, is considered key to its ideology. This image was not neglected by Aby Warburg and was reproduced in abundance in Panel 8 on the Ascension towards the Sun in his Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. In this paper we propose to make a journey through the life of this image, which, very early on, was related to the constellations, to the great circles of the celestial sphere and to certain singular moments of the seasonal cycle. We will conclude with a critical analysis of recent speculations that bring into play subtle aspects of the movement of the sky, driven by a powerful god who resided beyond the stars, and relate them to the symbolic death of the bull.