Tiago Pires

The Tauroctony

In the mystery religion of Roman Mithraism, the central image — carved into the wall of every temple, from Britain to Syria — is the tauroctony: the god slaying a bull. From the bull’s body flows blood, and from the blood springs grain, and around the scene stand initiates in Phrygian caps, sharing a handshake and a meal. Scholars still argue about what the cult believed. I am less interested in what it believed than in what the image encodes, because I keep watching the same sequence play out in the history of computing, stage by stage, in order.

Here is the cycle, stated plainly.

  1. The Bull — a monopolistic entity hoarding a sacred substance: code, knowledge, compute, spectrum.
  2. The Temple — the institution that houses and guards it.
  3. The Sacred Script — the substance itself, trapped inside the bull’s body.
  4. The Slaying — the liberation event: antitrust action, reverse engineering, a leak.
  5. The Blood — the substance flowing out, suddenly accessible.
  6. The Bathing — initiates consuming and internalising it.
  7. The Handshake — the covenants formed among the initiated: licenses, pacts, agreements.
  8. The Phrygian Cap — the liberty symbol the initiated wear. The liberty cap. The red hat.
  9. The Jacobin Corruption — the counter-attack: the old priesthood infiltrating the new order it could not prevent.
  10. The Remnant — the initiates who carry the blood through the corruption, seeding the next cycle.

First cycle: Unix, 1984

The Bull was the AT&T monopoly. The Temple was Bell Labs. The Sacred Script was Unix source code, legendary and locked away. The Slaying was the antitrust breakup. The Blood was source flowing into universities and hacker basements; the Bathing was BSD hackers compiling it and a man named Stallman deciding to rewrite all of it rather than accept the terms. The Handshake was the GPL and the BSD licenses — pacts, handshakes under the vault. The Phrygian Cap was worn literally: a company named itself Red Hat, and its community successor took the name of the cap itself, Fedora.

And then the Jacobin phase, which almost nobody recognised as part of the pattern because everyone believed the revolution was permanent: the codes of conduct with enforcement machinery attached, the foundation capture, the maintainer trials, the slow replacement of merit covenants with ideological ones. I have written elsewhere about what that machinery does to the people who decline it. The point here is structural: the counter-attack is not a betrayal of the FOSS timeline. It is Act III. It comes every time. The old priesthood never gets its bull back; instead it joins the new temple and rewrites the liturgy from inside.

Which leaves the Remnant — the ones who keep the original covenant through the corruption. They are not the losers of the story. They are its seed stock.

Second cycle: AI and sovereign compute, 2026

Run the same grid on the present.

The Bull is the closed-source AI stack fused to a silicon duopoly. The Temple is a shortlist you can recite: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, NVIDIA. The Sacred Script is model weights, training corpora, ISA specifications. The Slaying is already underway and, as in 1984, it is not one clean stroke: open-weight releases, DeepSeek, RISC-V silicon actually being fabbed. The Blood is open weights on torrents and an open instruction set anyone may implement. The Bathing is a teenager running a capable model on a cheap board from Shenzhen that no intelligence agency can turn off with a phone call. The Handshake is forming in repos and covenant communities. The Phrygian Cap is the sovereign stack itself — the liberty cap returning.

And the Jacobin phase is arriving on schedule: regulation written by the temples it pretends to constrain, guardrail regimes that lobotomise models in the name of enterprise readiness, epistemic gatekeeping dressed as safety. If the first cycle teaches anything, it is that this phase was always coming, that it will claim the revolution’s own vocabulary, and that it will be administered largely by sincere people.

Why bother with the myth

Because the pattern is a prediction engine, and predictions tell you where to stand.

If you know the Jacobin phase is Act III, you stop being demoralised by it — it stops reading as the death of the movement and starts reading as the part of the movement where the Remnant is selected. If you know the Remnant seeds the next cycle, you know what your actual job is during the corruption: keep the blood. Keep the covenants that predate the capture. Keep local weights, open ISAs, your own archives, your own build. Not as nostalgia — as germplasm.

The Mithraists put the whole cycle on the wall of the temple so that every initiate, at every stage, could see where in the story they stood. That is all this essay is. The bull has been slain twice in my lifetime. The blood is on the floor right now. The men in borrowed caps are already at the door.

Know your act. Keep the blood.