After the tauroctony, Mithras and Sol Invictus sealed their pact by sharing a sacred banquet over the slain bull's hide, then ascended together in Sol's chariot — a partnership depicted in nearly every mithraeum as the culmination of the cosmic drama.
Mithras captured and slew the Cosmic Bull in a torch-lit cave, plunging his dagger into its flank while a dog, a serpent, and a scorpion attended the wound — from the bull's dying body sprang grain, vine, and all living things, making the tauroctony the foundational act of Mithraic creation.
Roman Mithras descends from the Persian Mithra, carried westward along military and trade routes into the Roman world, where Cilician pirates and eastern legionaries transmitted his worship and his name took root in the underground temples of a new mystery cult.
⚠ The degree of continuity is debated: Cumont argued for direct Persian transmission, while Beck and Gordon hold that the Roman cult was largely a new creation borrowing the Iranian name and select motifs.
Cautes and Cautopates flank Mithras in every tauroctony relief, one holding his torch aloft and the other inverting his — the twin bearers of rising and setting light who frame the bull-slaying as a cosmic event turning between dawn and dusk.
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