  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 work we
propose to make a journey through the life of this image that, 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.
