CIMRM Supplement - Relief of Mithras and Sol with rosettes. Lopodunum/Ladenburg, Germany.

See also CIMRM 1275, another monument from Ladenburg / Lopodonum.

The Lobdengau-Museum, Ladenburg (a suburb of Heidelberg), in Germany, contains a number of Mithraic items not listed in CIMRM. I have been unable to find any useful information about these finds, or where they come from, or when.

Carole Radatto has photographed those on this page and describes the main relief and the plate thus:

Mithraic banquet scene (with traces of polychromy) featuring Mithras and the Sun god banqueting on the hide of the slaughtered bull, dating to 130 AD, Lobdengau-Museum, Ladenburg, Germany. Sandstone Mithraic plate decorated with a fish and six loaves of bread, Lobdengau-Museum, Ladenburg, Germany

Roger Beck writes, in Mithraism since Franz Cumont, p.2038:

The monuments of Germany have been covered in the EPRO volume on the oriental cults in that country by E. SCHWERTHEIM (1974). ... A number of important discoveries, made since CIMRM, appear in these volumes: ... at Ladenburg, a fine relief of the banquet on the hide of the slain bull (Pl. III), in which the stool with the meal in the foreground is made from the bull's hooves (S. 144: note also the solar disk on a [?] pillar behind the raised right hand and drinking horn of Sol, and the large rosettes in the upper corners of the relief);

Manfred Clauss writes, in The Roman cult of Mithras, p.110-111:

On a relief from Lopodunum in Germania Superior (Ladenburg, now a suburb of Heidelberg) the couch on which Mithras and Sol are reclining is covered by the bull's hide, and each has a drinking-horn (rhyton) in his hand (fig. 70).118 A bunch of grapes and two striated rolls are lying on the table. The scene takes place inside a cave, an image for the mithraeum and the kosmos alike. 118. E. Schwertheim, Die Denkmaler orientalischer Gottheiten im romischen Deutschland, EPRO 40 (Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1974), 188-9, no. 144. Fig. 70. Lopodunum/Ladenburg by Heidelberg: relief with feast-scene. The odd detail that the table's legs are constructed of the bull's lower legs may refer to a narrative detail in the cult myth: that is how the first common table was made. The disk on a stand behind Sol's raised hand was presumably painted to resemble the solar-crown

Bibliography.

• E. Schwertheim, Die Denkmaler orientalischer Gottheiten im römischen Deutschland, mit Ausnahme der ägyptischen Gottheiten. EPRO 40. Leiden. 1974.