It’s Alive…IT’S ALIVE!

How terrifying!

I don’t know if anyone still follows this blog. I’m not entirely sure why anyone would be, as it’s been -…

Seven years and some change since the last post that I made, before dropping off the face of the earth?

But to anyone still here. Anyone still reading. Anyone even stumbling across this blog for the first time (and by the gods am I sorry, because I looked at some of the things that I wrote back in the day and – just. Uffda.), well –

It’s alive, I suppose!

I’d like to start writing more. I’d like to begin again, on a more Etruscan and divinatory bent, as those two things go hand in hand like cookies and cream. It just feels…good, I guess, to work on picking up my practice again and re-learn things I’d forgotten.

I’d like to think that maybe it’ll help others, too, because let’s face it: there’s really not a whole lot of information out there pertaining to Etruscan practices, and what is out there can be difficult to get, difficult to grasp, and difficult to look at from a modern perspective.

I’m not sure if I’m moving blogs. I might be. I would like to keep this one up, because I think that even with the mountains of half-baked posts there is some good in there (list of resources and calendar, for two).

But I figure it’s been seven years. I’ve changed. The focus of this blog has changed (though get me started on a Roman rant and you won’t hear the end of it, and I’m sure there will be Roman posts now and again, too; how can there not be? it’s me!).

But…anyway…

Thank you, for reading.

And welcome.

-Iulla

PBP: C is for the Camenae

Well, it seems as though the “C” posts for this year’s PBP have a song and chant theme.  First it was on carmina, and, now, the Camenae.

The Camenae are a group of deities, four in number: they are Antevorta/Prorsa, Postvorta, Carmenta, and Egeria.  These are native Italic deities, but later Roman authors identified them with the Muses due to their function of inspiration and poetry.  They preside over childbirth, prophecy, and women, and are said to favor springs, rivers, wells, and fountains.

Antevorta/Prorsa is concerned with two things: aiding in the delivery of children born head-first, and she is also a goddess of the future.  She is quite possibly an epithet or a function of Carmenta, though in later times she became her own deity.

Postvorta is, like Antevorta, concerned with the position of the child in childbirth: though where Antevorta aids with children born head-first, Postvorta deals with children born feet-first.  She is also a goddess of the past.  And, like Antevorta, she is quite possibly an epithet or a function of Carmenta, though in later times she became her own deity.

Carmenta – sometimes called Carmentis – is a patroness of women, and her function is inspired speech – or prophecy.  To her also falls a function of childbirth.  She has her own festival, the Carmentalia, which takes place on the 11th and the 15th of January.  She is also called Nicostrate, the mother of Evander – Evander being an exile from Arcadia who founded the city of Pallantium, which was situated right on the future site of the city of Rome.

Egeria is possibly the most important of the Camenae.  She was a goddess of springs and childbirth, and was the lover of Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, and gave to him the laws and rituals that would form the basis for Roman religion.  After Numa’s death, she became distraught and inconsolable.  According to Ovid, she “went away from Rome and hid her sorrow in the dark forests of Aricia [a town in Latium] where she disturbed the cult of Diana with her moaning and lamentations.  Hippolytus, the son of Theseus, went to visit her and tried to console her by evoking his own misfortunes, which in her view were not comparable to hers – but it was in vain.  Lying sorrowfully at the foot of Mount Albanus, Egeria wept.  Finally, Diana, touched by the sight of her pious grief, turned the nymph into a spring that would never run dry.”

The Roman Pantheon: A Resource!

So, I’m not exactly happy about the complete lack of any accurate online resources on the Roman pantheon.  There’s GodChecker, but that’s a load of horseshit.  There’s the Encyclopedia Mythica, and that’s…not exactly my favorite either.  There’s Wikipedia, but other people can edit it and it isn’t as comprehensive as it could be.

So I decided to take things into my own hands.

I created another WordPress account that will serve as a sort of Wiki for the Roman pantheon (and possibly even religious practices and so on), that will be separate from this blog  – more of a database.

You can find it here, or at romanpantheon.wordpress.com

It’ll likely be a slow project, as I have other things going on right now that take priority, but rest assured that it will be accurate and a comprehensive read.

PBP: C is for Carmina

A carmen (carmina in plural) in ancient Roman religion can be anything from a hymn, to a verse, to a spell, to a prayer, or expiation.  They could be used for a variety of purposes, including harming another’s crops, imploring the gods to make one’s crops grow, for protection purposes…

They would typically be chanted instead of sung, and they each had a certain rhythm to them; parts of the carmen would be repeated, always three times.

The two carmina that survive today are the Carmen Saliare and the Carmen Arvale.  And, unfortunately, though I say “survive”, I don’t mean that they survive in their entirety.  Rather, what we have are fragments of a much larger picture, and sometimes what we do have isn’t even translatable.

Hell, they weren’t even translatable to the Romans of the mid-and-late Republic.

The Carmen Arvale

This carmen was chanted by the Fratres Arvales, or the Arval priests.  These were the priests of the Dea Dia, goddess of growth, and were primarily concerned with the growth of crops.  This carmen would be chanted during the Ambarvalia, a festival taking place on May 29th.  The opening words are very famous:

e nos, Lases, iuuate

e nos Lases, iuuate

e nos Lases, iuuate

 

neue lue rue Marmar sins incurrere in pleores

neue lue rue Marmar sins incurrere in pleores

neue lue rue Marmar sins incurrere in pleores

 

satur fu, fere Mars, limen stali, sta berber

satur fu, fere Mars, limen stali, sta berber

satur fu, fere Mars, limen stali, sta berber

 

semunis alternei aduo capit conctos

semunis alternei aduo capit conctos

semunis alternei aduo capit conctos

 

enos Marmor iuuato

enos Marmor iuuato

enos Marmor iuuato

 

triumpe triumpe triumpe triumpe triumpe

 

What that basically is, is a plea for the Lares (called Lases here, evidence of its archaic nature) and for Mars (called Marmar, Mars, and Marmor) to aid the chanters.  It is asking for mars to not let plagues or disasters destroy the crops, and is asking him to be satiated in dance.  “Semunis” are the Semones, possibly sowing deities.

The “limen stali, sta berber” is quite possibly a non-chanted portion, serving as directions for the priests to “jump over the barrier, stand!”

 

The Carmen Saliare

This carmen is far more fragmented and indecipherable than the Carmen Arvale.  It was chanted by the Salii, the “leaping priests” of Mars, and was performed at several times during March and October.

What we do have of the carmen is as follows, preserved by Varro in de Lingua Latina and Terentius Scaurus in de Orthographia:

 

divum empta cante, divum deo supplicate

cume tonas, Leucesie, prae tet tremonti

quot ibet etinei de is cum tonarem (or) quom tibi cunei decstumum tonaront

cozeulodorieso (?)

omnia vero adpatula coemisse

Ian cusianes duonus ceruses dunus Ianusve

vet pom melios eum recum.

 

It translates roughly to:

 

Sing of him, the father of the gods!  Appeal to the God of gods!

When you thunder, O God of Light, they tremble before you!

All gods beneath you have heard your thunder!

…?

But to have acquired all that is spread out

Now the good … of Ceres … or Ianus …

 

The weird cozeulodorieso has been proposed to be osculo dolori ero, meaning “I shall be as a kiss to grief”, but we really don’t know.

PBP: B is for Brontoscopy

In the ancient Roman world, there were several different methods of divination.  I know I’ve mentioned one of them before, in the post about haruspicy, and I may have touched on augury as well.

If not, that’s something for the future.  And it’s a term in the dictionary up top of the page.

Brontoscopy (what a fun word to spell, BTW) is a form of divination that was introduced to the Romans by the Etruscans.  It was, however, not originally a native Etruscan practice – in fact, it was introduced to the Etruscans by the people of Mesopotamia.   And the practice of brontoscopy was still going on in Constantinople in the 5th century CE, but was outlawed shortly after.

As its name might suggest, brontocoy brontscpy brontoscopy (OMG) is the use of examining thunder for divinatory purposes.  The Etruscans were said to be extremely skilled at this, and were employed for this practice for a good 1,000 years.

Early on in the first millennium BCE, some enterprising Etruscan found a Near Eastern brontoscopic calendar and decided “Hey, this is pretty cool.  I think I’ll tweak this a bit for use by my own people.”  He (or she!) wrote down what thunder occurring on specific days of the year might mean for the people.  Thus they created their own version of the calendar, and it has been passed down to us via the name “The Brontoscopic Calendar” and through translations into Latin, Greek, and then, for me, English.

So what, exactly, is brontoscopy?

Well, I said it before, but it is divination by thunder.  And not just the thunder that comes from lightning – no, any noise that is heard in the sky qualifies as “thunder”.  And it doesn’t even have to come from the sky, either: during the winter, the Etruscan god Satre has the ability to generate chthonic thunder – that is, thunder from deep in the ground.

No laughing, please, that was not a fart joke.

So, traditionally, if someone was out and about and they heard thunder, they would duly report it to the local fulguriator or, in Etruscan, the local trutnuth frontac.

God, I just love the Etruscan language.

Anyway.  The trutnuth frontac would consult his or her copy of the Brontoscopic Calendar to find out what the thunder meant.  If this happened on, say, February 3rd – the date of this post – it would be divined as “If it thunders, there will be civil unrest.”

Yikes.  That doesn’t bode well.

A lot of the time, there is talk of “If it thunders, there will be an abundance of fish”, or “if it thunders, there will be a scorching, drying wind”.

Along with thunder, the Etruscans also used lightning for divinatory purposes – but I’ll save that for a later post, because there’s actually a lot that goes into it.

If you guys are interested in learning more about the brontoscopic tradition, I’d recommend “Diving the Etruscan World: The Brontoscopic Calendar and Religious Practice” by Jean MacIntosh Turfa.  She is an outstanding scholar of the Etruscans, and this is a brand new book – it only came out last year!

PBP: B is for Bona Dea

This post is brought to you by the letter “B”.  -cue Sesame Street song-

Bona Dea is one of those deities of whom we know very little; this is because she was the major deity for a women-only mystery cult, and while people wrote down many speculations, we have no insider stories, as it were.

One of the things that we do not know is her true name.  That’s right – Bona Dea is not a name: it’s actually a title, meaning “The Good Goddess”.  Plenty of other Roman deities are known by titles instead of names, including Bonus Eventus (Good Fortune/Outcome), and Bonus/Bona is often used as an epithet for, well, pretty much all deities.

Anyway.  One of the more popular theories as to her identity is that she is Fauna, the wife (and daughter!) of the seer-deity Faunus.  Another couple of theories put out by ancient authors is that she is the wife and sister of Faunus, or that her name is not Fauna but instead Fenta Fatua, with Fatua for foretelling women their fates, as Faunus did for men.

In any case, it is speculated that her true name was forbidden for men to speak, and since the women of her cult didn’t write it down, we don’t know what it is.

We do, however, know some things about the cult and mysteries of Bona Dea.

It was apparently similar in nature to the Orphic Mysteries, thought what that means, exactly, I don’t know.

No myrtle was allowed in her cult areas, and there’s a little myth that goes along with the reason: taking the perspective that Bona Dea is Fauna, wife of Faunus.  Faunus found out that she had been drinking wine in secret – a huge taboo in ancient Roman society – and, in a rage, he beat her to death with sticks of myrtle.  This is also why wine, although used in rituals in her honor, was called “milk”.

It seems that wine or mead and cakes were the most popular offering to Bona Dea, and purple – unsurprisingly – was her sacred color.  We know that her sacred groves were decorated with purple ribbons and garlands, and apparently her priestesses wore purple ribbons in their hair.

Sacrifices in honor of Bona Dea were called damium, which comes from a Greek word meaning “public”.  Obviously, however, those sacrifices were private, so there’s an interesting use of word there.  Along with that, a priestess of Bona Dea was called a damiatrix.

Another myth of this goddess says that she is merely the daughter (not wife) of Faunus, and that she refused to be in the company of men due to her “great chastity”.  That, the myth says, is why men aren’t allowed to participate in her mysteries.

However.

Just because men didn’t participate in her mysteries, didn’t mean that they didn’t worship the goddess.

We actually have a ton of evidence, mostly in the form of dedicated altars, that men were devotees of Bona Dea.  And they were men of different statuses, too, from freedmen to high-ranking Romans.

And speaking of men involved in some way with Bona Dea…

brings me to the great “Bona Dea Scandal” of 62 BCE.  There were a couple of festivals each year in honor of Bona Dea, but the one that concerns us here is the Winter rite.  The festival of this particular year was held by Pompeia, the wife of Julius Caesar.

As I’ve said before, but will re-emphasize here:  MEN WERE NOT ALLOWED TO PARTICIPATE IN THE MYSTERIES OF BONA DEA.  They weren’t even able to be in the same residence that a mystery festival was taking place in.  It was said that she would blind the man who looked upon her sacred rites.

But on this particular day, a young cad by the name of Publius Clodius Pulcher (Clodius the Beautiful, lol) dressed up as a woman and intruded upon the rites, fully intending to seduce Pompeia.

Needless to say, things didn’t end well.

Clodius was caught red-handed and charged with desecration of religious rites.  His sentence was execution, though a friend of his – Crassus – managed to bribe the jury into an acquittal.  Julius Caesar divorced Pompeia, famously remarking that “Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion”.

Now, moving on.

In iconography, Bona Dea is depicted as holding a cornucopia in her left hand and an offering dish in her right.  Oftentimes a snake accompanies her, and it is shown drinking out of the dish.

She is also associated with a good amount of other deities: Silvanus, Hercules, Sabazius, Caelestis, Vesta, Mercurius, Panthaeus, Diana, Juno, and Fortuna Conservatrix.

And, finally, I’ve compiled a list of common epithets of hers found on inscriptions.  I’ve attempted to translate them, but some proved more difficult than others and so are left untranslated:

• Ops: the Helper, because it is on her help that life depends
• Fatua: the Speaker, because she teaches speech
• Restituta: the Restorer, the Renewer
• Oclata: either goddess of ophthalmology; or, goddess who strikes men blind who behold her sacred rights
• Annianensis: something to do with time…or perhaps the Anio, a tributary of the Tiber
• Sanctissima: Most Holy
• Conpos: In Control
• Hygia: something to do with healing
• Lucifera: Light-bringer
• Nutrix: Nourisher
• Castrensis
• Agrestis Felicula
• Quietana:  She who calms
• Pia: Dutiful/Loyal
• Opifera:  Bringer of wealth
• Caelestis: Heavenly
• Sevina
• Arcensis Triumphalis
• Augusta: August/Holy
• Sepernas: possible local Etrurian epithet of Bona Dea
• Cereria: possibly used in conjunction with Ceres
• Pagana: Rural
• Obsequens: Gracious
• Domina Heia Augusta Triumphalis
• Dominatrix Terrae Marisque: Mistress of Land and Sea
• Conservatrix: the Protectress
• Potens Mentium Bonarum ac Remediorum: Mistress of wisdom and medicine
• Dea Bene Iudicanti: Goddess of right judgement
• Regina Caelestis: Heavenly Queen
• Valetudo Sancta
• Damia: the Private (really means Public, but taken to mean the opposite)
• Penelope

EDIT:  Oops!  I forgot to add the book that I got my info from.  It’s a fantastic book for anyone interested in the cult of Bona Dea, though, be warned, it is very much a scholarly work.  It’s got 577 pages, with 57 pages/plates of pictures, 5 maps, and long lists of inscriptions.

It’s called “Bona Dea: the sources and a description of the cult”, by H. H. J. Brouwer.  Published in 1989 in New York by Leiden publishers.

PBP: A is for Agricultural Deities

I’m sure you guys all know how many deities are in the Roman pantheon.  I’ve probably mentioned that a good few times.

And how there are a metric tonne of different groups, each overseeing different functions.  I’ve probably mentioned a couple of those, as well: The Big 12, the Hidden Deities, the Lares…etc.

This post is on deities associated with agriculture.

Agriculture was and still is incredibly important, and yet I don’t often appreciate those deities who preside over that field nearly as much as I should.  Hence this post as both a learning lesson and a sort of way for me to get closer.

So.  Prepare yourselves.  Names are coming.

Probably the most recognizable of the Roman agricultural deities are Ceres and Tellus.  Ceres is also a deity said to have given mankind laws, and is quite possibly a kind of psychopomp, but that’s another story.  Tellus I wrote an earlier PBP post on, which you can find here: she’s essentially the Mother Earth figure, quite literally seen in her later Latin name Terra Mater.

According to someone – I think it was Augustine, though who exactly is escaping my mind at the moment – attributed a group of…well, functional deities as “helper deities” to Ceres.  These deities are a group who oversee the basic functions of agricultural planting and harvesting:

• Vervactor, the plougher;
• Reparator, who prepares the earth;
• Imporcitor, who ploughs with a wide furrow;
• Insitor, who plants seeds;
• Obarator, who traces the first plowing;
• Occator, who harrows;
• Serritor, who digs;
• Subruncinator, who weeds;
• Messor, who reaps;
• Convector, who carries the grain;
• Conditor, who stores the grain;
• Promitor, who distributes the grain

Along with these deities are  whole other bunch who don’t accompany Ceres.  There is Rusina, a goddess who protects fields; Rusor and Altor, gods who nourish plants and make them grow; Sator, a sower god invoked in the Carmen Saliare; Seia, a goddess who protects sown seeds; Segesta, who makes those seeds grow; Messia, the female equivalent of Messor; Noduterensis, god of threshing; and more.

Uffda.

Other fairly-well known deities include Flora, goddess of flowers, and Venus, goddess of, not love, but fertility and the growth of fruit.

There is also Sterculinus, god of manure.  Poor guy; what a job.

EDIT:

GAH.  A couple other deities keep coming up, saying “HEY IULLA, don’t forget about me 😦 ”

So I am being obliging and putting in a mention of Pomona and Vortumnus.  This couple is amazing, and Vortumnus is hilarious.  There is a myth centering around the two of them which I’ll have to write up someday – it’s one of my favorites.  Pomona is the goddess of gardens and fruit trees, Vortumnus the god of seasons, change, plant growth, and gardens and fruit trees.

I’m probably – no, I am missing several other deities.  Sorry, guys 😥

PBP: A is for Anna Perenna

IO PBP 2013!

Heh.

I’m kind of excited to start this round of the Pagan Blog Project, which will, for me, be starting along with the actual schedule.  I’m not going to re-use or re-post anything that I used for 2012’s sporadic PBP; instead, you guys can expect a completely new set of alphabetic entries.  WOO.

So this post is…a little different from the first post that I had planned.  I was planning on writing about agricultural deities, but then I remembered the goddess Anna Perenna, and I thought, “Oh, a goddess concerned with the start of a new year…how fitting!”

Thus, the agricultural-centered post will be next week.

…Unless I think of another topic in the meantime.

Anyway, moving on.  Anna Perenna is, as I somewhat said before, a deity entirely concerned with the start of a new year and making sure that that new year is a healthy, productive one.  People would, according to the ancient author Macrobius, give her offerings and pray “ut annare perennareque commode liceat“, which, roughly translated, means “so that it is possible that the circle of the year be happily completed.”  Sounds like a nice way to start the year.

Her festival on which people would ask this, however, was not on January 1st.  Hell, it wasn’t even in the month of January.  Instead, it took place on March 15.  Which is an odd date for this sort of thing if you aren’t familiar with the archaic Roman calendar.

For the early, early Romans, January was not the first month of the new year: that title fell instead to the month of, you guessed it, March.  Or, rather, what we call March today.  The reason for this is that the Romans, a warmongering bunch of agriculturalists, put warring and farming together: March was the month in which the first war campaigning and crop planting would have taken place, so they put great importance on it and made it the first month of the year.

Furthermore, the festival was held on the first full moon, or the Ides, of March – an important date in any month.

So, with all that down, who exactly is Anna Perenna?

The answer to that is, like with so many things Roman, “We don’t know.”

There are three myths ascribed to this goddess that come to us from Ovid, all of which can be found in book 3 of his Fasti:

First, he says that Anna Perenna is the same Anna who appears in the Aeneid: Anna, the sister of Dido queen of Carthage.  After Dido’s death, Carthage was attacked by the Numidians, and Anna escaped the city and fled away by ship.  In a cruel twist of fate, the ship was driven by the winds right to Lavinium, the settlement which Aeneas had founded in Italy.  Aeneas, ever a stranger to common sense, invited Anna to stay with him: Lavinia, Aeneas’ wife, didn’t like that too much.

Anna had a dream in which she was visited by her sister Dido and warned that Lavinia was planning to get rid of Anna – and not in a good way.  Anna took heed of her sister’s warning and, for the second time in this story, fled: but, unfortunately, she fell into the river Numicus and drowned.

Aeneas and some of his men tracked Anna’s trail to the Numicus, where her ghostly form appeared to them and told them that she was now a river nymph dwelling in the “perennial stream” of the Numicus, and that her name was now Anna Perenna.

The second story that Ovid gives is his own belief that during the first secession of the plebeians (in which the plebs went on strike and left the city of Rome en masse), those plebeians who had left the city ended up on the Mons Sacer (Sacred Mountain).  There they ran short of food: but Anna Perenna, an old woman from the suburb of Bovillae, baked cakes and brought them to the plebeians every morning.

When the strike ended, they set up an image and instituted a cult for the woman who had helped them.

The third and final story is also my favorite of the three.

Ovid writes that not long after Anna Perenna became a goddess, Mars Gradivus attempted to get her to persuade Minerva to become his consort.  The wily old woman agrees, and goes off to do so.

However.  She didn’t really try to persuade Minerva.  Nope.

Instead, she pretended to be Minerva, all the way up to the wedding and into bed with Mars.  When it came time for Mars to lift her wedding veil, SURPRISE-

it was not the face of Minerva that he saw, but the old, wrinkled face of Anna Perenna.  Mars was pretty pissed off, and Anna laughed at him with crude jokes and songs.

And that, Ovid says, is why, on Anna Perenna’s festival day, people sang coarse and rowdy songs and told crude jokes.

Poor Mars.

A Trip to the Art Museum

Several months ago I went to an art museum.  It was for a project – I had to write a lengthy art history essay on one of the pieces of art there.  I hated every excruciating second of that essay, too: I’m very sure that I never want to take another art history class again.

Anyway, I took lots of pictures.  And as usual, I am just posting this now.

ARGH.

So, I hope you all enjoy these fine works of art.  These are all Greek and Roman (and are my favorites from that particular exhibit), but I took a lot more: the Greek and Roman exhibit was the smallest in the museum.  Oy.  Maybe I’ll post some of those later, because those are cool, too.

Also, please excuse the horrible yellow color of the photos – the lighting in the museum sucked.

Doryphoros (Spear-Bearer) by Polykleitos, 120-50 BCE

Statue of an Old Woman, 60-70 AD, Roman

Syrian Mosaic, late 4th/mid 5th century AD

DAT FACE.

Ptolemaic Ruler in the Guise of Heracles, Graeco-Egyptian, 2nd century BC

Lar Familiaris, from Pompeii, 1st century

Dionysos on a Donkey, Roman, 2nd century AD

Caduceus, Roman, 2nd century
(with myself in the reflection lol)

Corinthian Helmet, 540 BC

Athenian Grave Stele of Philomelos and Plathane, 5th century BC

Funerary Mask of a Young Woman, Egyptian, Roman Period

Pagan Blog Project Update

Alright, so.  I’ve kind of given up on the Pagan Blog Project for the rest of the year.  It’s nearing the end of the alphabet (today’s was a Y post), and I can not think of anything to write for the final few.  I’m also so far behind (I’ve still got tons of letters to write) that I think it’s best to stop for now.

😦

BUT.

The PBP is scheduled to start again, for a second time, in January.  And with it, I’ll restart the PBP for this blog.  I’ll finally have the chance to start at the beginning as the project itself is beginning, and HOPEFULLY go all the way through.

There won’t be any repeat posts, either – everything will be on a different topic than this year’s PBP.  And I’ll probably end up writing some posts ahead of time, so I’ve got them on hand for each Friday.

In the meantime, the previous posts will still be up here for your enjoyment, and I’ll be posting non-PBP stuff as well.