From my diary
March 13th, 2013 by Roger Pearse
I have been collecting images of Mithraic monuments from the web and identifying them, and adding them to my Mithras site. It’s fun; and there are more to do.
I’ve also written a short section in the site on Mithras and the Taurobolium. Did the cultists of Mithras perform the taurobolium, a ceremony of being washed in bull’s blood? No, they didn’t. Or, if they did, no evidence records it. It’s a ritual of Cybele, not Mithras.
Jolly useful to find that I had a PDF of Duthoy’s monograph on the taurobolium on disk when I needed it!
I read your piece on the iconography of the tauroctony with great interest. One question occurs to me, and I would imagine that the answer would be No. Both Mithras and the torchbearers in the Tyrolean example illustrated wear similar tunics. I’m not an expert on ancient clothing, so I don’t know whether these tunics are intended to represent genuine Persian dress or are purely conventional. Presumably we have a range of examples of the tauroctony spanning two or three centuries. Do the clothes of Mithras and his attendants ever change, or are they a fixed element in the iconography?
They seem to be pretty fixed, but, in truth, I don’t know either.