Taurobolium

As taurobolium the ritual sacrifice of a bull was referred Kybelekult in ancient Rome.

It was from the 1st century AD known. Originally it was used to transfer the life force of the sacrificial animal. In the fourth century it became associated with ideas of consecration and rebirth.

The taurobolium is often portrayed as an elaborate ceremony in which the bull was on a wooden lattice and among them in a pit so that he was drenched while the sacrifice of the blood of the sacrificial animal to consecrating. This description is based primarily on a Christian martyr poem of Prudentius in Liber Peristephanon:

Since the ritual appears as a kind of perverted baptism here, the reliability of this source is to be evaluated with caution.

In an inscription on the taurobolium Altar of Lyon in the year 160, reference is made to a Mons Vaticanus, to which the severed testicles of the bull were taken. Also on the Vatican at St. Peter's in Rome inscriptions were found by Taurobolien, and in an inscription from Mainz -Kastel, the ancient Mogontiacum, it is reported that in the year 236, the College of hastiferi ( " spearman " ) a sunken Vatican Mountain ( montem Vatican vetustate conlabsum ) have recovered. It remains unclear what exactly it has apparently traded in these with the taurobolium or the cult of Cybele linked Vatican mountains, ie whether it has acted to artificial hill, cave shrines, monuments, or a kind of temple.

The analog ritual in which instead of a bull, a ram is sacrificed is called Kriobolium.