Weapons from Les Bolards

TNMM 678 ↔ CIMRM 925

Metal objects ("lancettes, pincettes, instruments it trois branches, boulet de fer") which must have belonged to the ritual objects, used for sacrifices or initiations. The coins mostly date from the end of the third and from the fourth centuries; the earliest known is of Commodus.

Excavated in 1948 and again in the 1970s, the Bolards Mithraeum yielded several monuments, a large number of ceramics and metal objects such as spear and arrowheads. In recent decades, more and more weapons have been discovered in a Mithraic context, such as in the Mithraeum II in Güglingen, where two swords were found near the altar, or in the Mithraeum in Künzing, where a fragmentary but oversized blade, a knife and an arrowhead were found, again at the foot of the altar. In several cases, despite corrosion, the edges of the blades had been flattened to remove their cutting power.

It is therefore very likely that non-functional swords, or even swords specially reworked to dramatise the mors voluntaria of the neophyte during initiation, were part of the liturgical equipment of most, if not all, mithraea.