Taurobolium
As taurobolium was in ancient Rome the ritual sacrifice of a bull in Kybelekult referred.
It was known since the 1st century AD. Originally it served to transfer the life force of the sacrificial animal . Then in the fourth century it became associated with ideas of consecration and rebirth .
The taurobolium is often depicted as an elaborate ceremony in which the bull was on a wooden lattice and the one to be consecrated in a pit below, so that it was soaked in the blood of the sacrificial animal during the sacrifice. This description is essentially based on a Christian martyr poem by Prudentius in Liber Peristephanon :
- The bloody dew runs through the thousand cracks in the wood into the pit. The consecrated one offers his head to all the bloody drops, he exposes his clothes and his whole body to which they defile. He bends back so that they meet his cheeks, his ears, his lips, his nose; he wets his eyes with the water, yes he doesn’t even go easy on his palate, but catches the black blood with his tongue and drinks it greedily.
Since the ritual appears here as a kind of perverted baptism, the reliability of this source must be assessed with caution.
An inscription on the Taurobolium altar in Lyon from 160 refers to a Mons Vaticanus , to whom the severed testicles of the bull were brought. Inscriptions of Taurobolia were also found on the Vatican under St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, and in an inscription from Mainz-Kastel, the ancient Mogontiacum , it is reported that in 236 the college of hastiferi ("spear-bearers") collapsed the Vatican mountain ( montem Vaticanum vetustate conlabsum ). It remains unclear what exactly these Vatican mountains, which are apparently linked to the Taurobolium or the cult of the Cybele , were about, ie whether they were artificial hills, grotto sanctuaries, buildings or a type of temple.
The analogous ritual, in which a ram is sacrificed instead of a bull , is called criobolium .
literature
- Robert Duthoy: The Taurobolium, its Evolution and Terminology. Études préliminaires aux religions orientales dans l'Empire romain vol. 10. Brill, Leiden 1969
- Neil McLynn: The Fourth-Century "taurobolium". In: Phoenix, Vol. 50, No. 3/4 (Herbst - Winter, 1996), pp. 312-330
- Clifford Herschel Moore: On the Origin of the Taurobolium. In: Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Vol. 17, (1906), pp. 43-48
- Vecihi Özkaya: The Shaft Monuments and the "Taurobolium" among the Phrygians. In: Anatolian Studies , Vol. 47, (1997), pp. 89-103
- Jeremy B. Rutter: The Three Phases of the Taurobolium. In: Phoenix 22 (1968), pp. 226-249.
- Dietrich Wachsmuth: Taurobolium. In: The Little Pauly (KlP). Volume 5, Stuttgart 1975, Col. 543 f.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Robert Duthoy: The taurobolium, its evolution and Terminology , Brill, Leiden 1969, after a review by Michel Meslin, in: Archives des sciences sociales des religions 32 (1971), S. 227th
- ^ A b Nicholas Temple: Baptism and sacrifice: cosmogony as private ontology , in: Architectural Research Quarterly 8 (2004), p. 47.
- ^ Martin P. Nilsson : History of the Greek Religion. Second volume: The Hellenistic and Roman Times , Beck, Munich 1950 (reprint 1988), p. 654.
- ↑ Dirk Steueragel : Cult and Everyday Life in Roman Port Cities: Social Processes in Archaeological Perspective , Steiner, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-515-08364-2 , p. 232.
- ↑ Prudentius Peristephanon X 1006-1050. Translation after F. Cumont: The oriental religions in Roman paganism. 2nd edition 1914, p. 79
- ^ Mary Beard : The Roman and the Foreign: The Cult of the "Great Mother" in Imperial Rome . In: Nicholas Thomas, Caroline Humphrey (Eds.): Shamanism, History, and the State (1996), pp. 172-173.
- ↑ Roland Gschlössl: In the melting pot of religions. Exchange of gods among Celts, Romans and Teutons. von Zabern, Mainz 2006, ISBN 978-3-8053-3655-0 , p. 59