Terra sigillata bowl depicting the Mithraic cult meal from Trier

TNMM 303 ↔ CIMRM 988

Terra-sigillata cup (H. 0.45 diam. 0.175), found in the Roman cimetery of St. Mathias in 1905. Treves, Provo Mus., Inv. No. 05.228.

WsdZ XXV, 464f and PI. XIV, 12; Lehner in BJ 1924, 52; Loeschcke in Tr. H., 322f and fig. 12; Koepp, Germ. Rom., IV, 60 and fig. XXXVII, 1; Saxl, 22 and fig. 61 ; Cumont in RA 1946, 189 and fig. 3. See fig. 238.

Scene of Sol in radiate crown and of Mithras in Eastern attire at the repast. On the table a plate in front of them, on which probably a fish and three loaves. A servant, having a cloth in his l.h., hands with the r.h. another loaf. Sol drinks with his upraised rhyton Mithras’ health, who takes another rhyton from a second servant. Both servants are in Eastern attire. In front of this scene a big lion to the left. Furthermore a serpent, entwining a krater, out of which it is about to drink. On its l. side a cock, on its r. the raven.

[A] representation of the first cult meal is found on a specially made terra sigillata bowl from Trier, which was found in a grave from the third century. What is interesting here is the depiction of an obvious symbolism in that the dadophores are shown twice, once in the flesh, so to speak, and once as a cock (= cautes) or nightingale (cautopates). Particularly striking, however, is the massive presence of a reclining lion in the midst of the action of the First Cult Feast, placed between this scene and the serpent crater, thus completing the lion-crater-serpent triad that is usually part of the bull-killing scene in Germania and elsewhere. Due to the use of a special type of crater in the Mithras cult, the serpent vessel, it is usually assumed in research that the wine drunk at the cult meal symbolises the blood of the bull killed by Mithras and thus the eternal cycle between death and life. In this case, the consumption of wine would also have an eschatological aspect, which is indicated by the triad lion-crater-snake. In a sense, eschatology would then have been a constant theme not only in the representations of the cult meal, but also in the cult dishes and thus in ritual practice.

The representations of the First Cult Meal undoubtedly served as an expression of the regular cultic practice in the mithraeum. In this important sense, the places of worship were at the same time spaces of memory and sensation. The overall composition of the picture, the arrangement of the main actors and the cupbearers, the rhyta filled with wine, the three-legged dining table (the legs of which, in the case of the well-known Ladenburg relief, are composed of three bull’s knuckles) - they all evoke the basic type of the Eastern Greek funerary meal relief, as it is frequently found, for example, in Cyzicus, but also in other places. The Eastern Greek scheme was transferred relatively early to a large group of urban Roman funerary reliefs, funerary altars and ash urns, and in Flavian times also to grave stelae in Germania (especially Germania Inferior), in the latter case probably from the northern Greek region.