Tauroctony relief from Fleischmann Collection

TNMM 589

This relief was once the centerpiece of a Mithraeum, providing all of the expected iconographic elements for a small congregation devoted to this mystery cult. The scene represents the struggles between light and dark, good and evil, life and death, the cosmological victory of the sun over the moon and the astrological journey of the soul after enlightenment. All of the players in this scene have been interpreted as constellations, with the vault of the cave above representing the heavens: the raven, dog, snake and scorpion can be seen as corvus, canis minor, hydra and scorpio, and the bull as taurus. Cautes and Cautopates can be seen as dichotomies such as the equinoxes or the nodes. Together with Mithras at the center, they are the sun at dawn, noon and dusk.

The inclusion of the morning cock and the evening owl with Cautes and Cautopates are rarely found on Mithraic reliefs (for one with the cock only, in the Villa Doria Pamphili, see no. 178 in Vollkommer, ’Mithras’ in LIMC). The blood of sacrifice was thought to bring fertility to the earth, as evinced by the transformation of the bull’s tail into wheat.

Mithraea have been discovered in all corners of the Roman Empire, from Syria to Great Britain; the locations often following the dispersion of the Roman armies, as the mysteries appealed greatly to soldiers. Within the sacred space, the image of Mithras Tauroctonus was ubiquitous, and it would be expected that at least one such composition would have originally been found in each Mithraeum. Among the corpus of surviving Mithraic tauroctonies, the present relief is extraordinary for the state of preservation, quality and scale.

Condition Report

Repaired from several large fragments with some minor fill; including: in the zone above the bull and cautopates; one break across Mithras’ neck with some fill to his billowing drapery and the zone above, all to the right of the bird; some minor fill along the bull’s tail where it turns into wheat; to Mithras’ shin and the bull’s flank. An oval piece along Mithras’ right thigh reattached with some losses along the break. Losses to Mithras’ left arm. Some chips and scrathes to the surface. The surface worn with some surface incrustation throughout.