The Myth Cumont Needed and Could Not Find

Franz Cumont's reading dominated Mithraic studies for the better part of a century because it had exactly the kind of evidence historians of religion prefer, a documented parent tradition. Cumont argued that Roman Mithraism descended from Zoroastrian Iranian religion, and read the tauroctony as a Roman rendering of an Iranian myth in which a bull's sacrifice generates the created world, a genealogy that let the scene be explained by appeal to attested Iranian texts rather than by guesswork about a cult that left none of its own scripture.

The reading came apart once specialists went back to the Iranian sources Cumont had relied on and found no version of a Mithra figure killing a bull in anything like the tauroctony's configuration, the cap, the averted gaze, the dog and serpent reaching for the wound, the scorpion at the flank. The parent myth Cumont's theory required to explain the Roman scene simply was not there in the form the theory needed. What replaced it, from the 1970s onward, are astronomical readings that treat the tauroctony as a star map, the bull as Taurus, the scorpion, dog and snake as neighboring constellations, readings that account for the image's remarkable consistency across the empire better than Cumont's did, but which themselves disagree on which specific astronomical event the scene is meant to record, so the image's full meaning remains open rather than settled by its own replacement theory.