were real or artificial caves representing the cosmos. Until the 1970s most scholars followed Franz Cumont in identifying Mithras as a continuation of the Persian god Mithra. Cumont's continuity hypothesis led him to believe that the astrological component was a late and unimportant accretion. Cumont's views are no longer followed. Today, the cult and its beliefs are recognized as a synthesis of late-classical Greco-Roman thought, with an astrological component even more astrology-centric than Roman beliefs generally were during the early Roman Empire. The details remain debated. As far as axial precession is concerned, one scholar of Mithraism, David Ulansey, has interpreted Mithras as a personification of the force responsible for precession. He argues that the cult was a religious response to Hipparchus's discovery of precession, which – from the ancient geocentric perspective – amounted to the discovery that the entire cosmos (i.e., the outermost celestial sphere of the fixed stars) was moving in a previously unknown way. Ulansey's analysis is based on the so-called tauroctony: The image of Mithras killing a bull that was placed at the center of every Mithraic temple. In the standard tauroctony, Mithras and the bull are accompanied by a dog, a snake, a raven, a scorpion and two identical young men, with torches. According to Ulansey, the tauroctony is a schematic star chart. The bull is Taurus, a constellation of the zodiac. In the astrological age that preceded the time of Hipparchus, the vernal equinox had taken place when the Sun was in the constellation of Taurus, and during that previous epoch the constellations of Canis Minor (The Dog), Hydra (The Snake), Corvus (The Raven), and Scorpius (The Scorpion) – that is, the constellations that correspond to the animals depicted in the tauroctony – all lay on the celestial equator (the location of which is shifted by the precession) and thus had privileged positions in the sky during that epoch. Mithras himself represents the constellation Perseus, which is located directly above Taurus the Bull: The same location occupied by Mithras in the tauroctony image. Mithras' killing of the Bull, by this reasoning, represented the power possessed by this new god to shift the entire cosmic structure, turning the cosmic sphere so that the location of the spring equinox left the constellation of Taurus (a transition symbolized by the killing of the Bull), and the Dog, Snake, Raven, and Scorpion likewise lost their privileged positions on