Taurobolium

TAUROBOLIUM. - A ceremony originating in Asia Minor, where it was connected with the cult of the great female deity, and which from Phrygia (whose testimonies go back only to the 2nd century A.D.), together with the cult of Cybele, spread to Rome and Italy in general, whence it passed into Gaul, Spain and the Roman provinces of North Africa.

Almost nothing is known from Eastern sources about the course of the rite; the Greek term shows that the bull to be sacrificed had to be captured in the hunt, by the throwing (βάλλω) of a missile weapon, according to an archaic custom also widespread throughout the East. This hunt eventually became a circus game, a bullfight, performed independently of the religious sacrifice, which survived alone, without hunt or running: such, in fact, does the t. appear to us at the time of the Antonines.

The fullest accounts of the t. come from a late Roman source: Prudentius (Peristeph., X, 1011-71), where the t. of the high priest of Cybele is described with many details; he lowered himself into a pit, whose upper opening was then closed by a poorly joined wooden platform, purposely pierced with holes. Above this the priests led in procession, with music of timpani and cymbals (as the iconography of the ex-voto altars shows), a bull crowned with flowers and garlands, which was slaughtered with a hooked harpoon (venubulum, a survival of the archaic hunting rite?) and in such a way that the blood flowed, through the platform, into the pit and completely flooded the body and the garment of the high priest, who indeed turns his mouth upward and places his ears beneath and thrusts out his lips and nostrils and even his eyes he soils with that dripping filth. And he does not spare his palate and his tongue is soaked until he is wholly imbued with the black blood (Prudentius, loc. cit., trans. Marchesi). After such a repugnant sprinkling the celebrant, having come out of the pit, offered himself to the adoration of the crowd of the initiated. The testicles (vires) of the animal also had importance in the rite, in that they were collected in the χέρνος, cernus (cf. CIL, VI, 508; a kind of dish that had a high function also in the mysteries of Eleusis), consecrated to Demeter and then buried (vires excepti, transtulit, condidit: CIL, XIII, 1751); a ceremony which, in all probability, was intended to replace that (more ancient and barbarous) of the self-emasculation of the initiate and the offering to the goddess of his own genitals.

From these accounts it is seen how the t. was essentially an effusion and a bathing in blood, linked to the primitive concept that drinking and pouring upon oneself the blood of the beast just killed means transfusing into one's own person the vigor of that beast; while the descent into the pit is like the access to Hades from which the initiate is drawn, precisely for the revivification through blood, as in the Homeric episode of Ulysses who evokes the soul of Tiresias (Odyssey, XII). Moreover, one must not overlook the singular fact that the taurobolite, having to stand beneath the bull to receive its blood, in a certain way came to constitute himself the altar of the sacrifice.

Anyone could be initiated into the t., which, in order truly to confer the new life (cf. St. Augustine, De civ. Dei, VII, 24-26), had to be repeated, it seems, a second time after 20 years (CIL, 6, 502: Taurobolio criobolioque repetito [the criobolium was a ceremony analogous to the t. but performed with a ram]). It was celebrated in every season of the year (and lasted several days) for one's own benefit or that of others (e.g. pro salute imperii, CIL, XIV, 40), and at Rome (celebrated in the Phrygianum, on the Vatican hill) it had, perhaps from the time of Antoninus, the official character of a State cult, sometimes under the authority of the XV viri sacris faciundis.

The emperor Julian the Apostate attributed so much efficacy to the bloody taurobolic rite that he wished to submit to it with the intention of canceling the washing he had once received in Christian baptism (cf. Greg. Naz., Or., IV, 52; PG 35, 576).

Cesare D'Onofrio