Mithraic meal from Proložac, Croatia

TNMM 304

On one side of the relief, we found the scene of the sacred meal between Mithras and Sol. The most important episode besides the killing of the bull […] is the joint meal of Mithras and Helios/Sol, who lie together on the skin of the bull and, as was customary in antiquity, eat the brewed innards and drink wine with it. In order to appropriately emphasise the centrality of this cult meal, a special form of the main relief was developed, the central part of which could be rotated around its own axis at a certain moment of the ritual in order to vividly demonstrate to the cult participants the theological connection between the act of killing the bull and the first cult meal.

There is no doubt that the representations of the First Cult Meal served as an expression of the regular ritual practice in the mithraeum. In this important sense, the places of worship were both spaces of memory and sensation. The composition of the picture as a whole, the disposition 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 of the bull's hocks) - they all evoke the basic type of the Eastern Greek funerary meal relief, as it is frequently found, for example, in Cyzicus but also at 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 during the Flavian period also to grave stelae in Germania (especially Germania Inferior), in the latter case probably from the northern Greek region.

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Back of the relief from the cemetery of the church of St. Michael from Proložac, Croatia. H. 0.58 × w. 0.53 m. Museum of Croatian Archaeological Monuments, Split, Croatia.