Mithras Tauroctonos (the Bull-Slayer)

Mithras is the tutelary god of the Roman Mithraic Mysteries, a graded initiatory cult of the imperial army and merchants attested by hundreds of underground mithraea from the 1st to 4th centuries CE. His iconography — rock-birth, bull-slaying, the banquet with Sol, the attendant torchbearers — is known almost entirely from monuments rather than texts.

Domains

• salvific bull sacrifice
• sun and cosmic order

Powers

• to slay the primal bull whose death brings forth life
• to be born from the living rock

Epithets

• Sol Invictus Mithras
• Tauroctonos

Relations

• companion: Sol Invictus (the Unconquered Sun)

Sources

• Manfred Clauss, The Roman Cult of Mithras: The God and his Mysteries, trans. Richard Gordon (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000).
• Roger Beck, The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).