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Bona Dea

A Roman divinity, who is described as the sister, wife, or daughter of Faunus, and was herself called Fauna, Fatua, or Oma.

She was worshipped at Rome from the earliest times as a chaste and prophetic divinity; and her worship was so exclusively confined to women, that men were not even allowed to know her name. Faunus himself had not been able to overcome her aversion to men, except by changing her into a serpent. (Cicero; Varr. ap. Lactant. i. 22; Servius l. c.)

She revealed her oracles only to females, as Faunus did only to males. Her sanctuary was a grotto in the Aventine, which had been consecrated to her by Claudia, a pure maiden. (Macrobus l. Fasti By Ovid, etc.) In the time of Cicero, however, she had also a sanctuary between Aricia and Bovillae. Her festival, which was celebrated every year on the 1st of May, was held in the house of the consul or praetor, as the sacrifices on that occasion were offered on behalf of the whole Roman people. The solemnities were conducted by the Vestals, and only women, usually of the higher orders, were allowed to take part in them.

During the solemnity, no male person was allowed to be in the house, and portraits of men were tolerated only when they were covered over. It is a wellknown fact, that Publius Clodius Pulcher profaned the sacred ceremonies on such an occasion by entering the house of Caesar in the disguise of a woman. (Roman Questions by Plutarch, Juvenal vi.)

The women who celebrated the festival of Fauna had to prepare themselves for it by abstaining from various things, especially from intercourse with men. The house of the consul or praetor was decorated by the Vestals as a temple, with flowers and foliage of every kind except myrtle, on account of its symbolic meaning. The head of the goddess's statue was adorned with a garland of vine-leaves, and a serpent surrounded its feet. The women were decorated in a similar manner. Although no one was allowed to bring wine with her, a vessel filled with wine, stood in the room, and from it the women made their libations and drank. This wine, however, was called milk, and the vessel containing it mellarium, so that the name of wine was avoided altogether.

The solemnity commenced with a sacrifice called damium (the priestess who performed bore the name damiatrix, and the goddess damia; Fest. s. v. Damium, who however gives an absurd account of these names). One might suppose that the sacrifice consisted of a chamois (dama) or some kind of substitute for a chamois; but Pliny (H. N. x. 77) seems to suggest, that the sacrifice consisted of liens of various colours, except black ones. After this sacrifice, the women began to perform Bacchic dances, and to drink of the wine prepared for them. (Juv. vi. 314.)

The goddess herself was believed to have set the example for this; for, while yet on earth, she was said to have intoxicated herself by emptying a large vessel of wine, whereupon Faunus killed her with a myrtle staff, but afterwards raised her to the rank of a goddess. (Varr. ap. Lactant. l. c.; Arnob. adv. Gent. v. 18; Plut. Quaest. Rom. 20.) This whole ceremony took place at night, whence it is usually called sacrum opertum, or sucra opertanea.

Fauna was also regarded as a goddess possessed of healing powers, as might be inferred from the serpents being part of her worship; but we know that various kinds of medicinal herbs were sold in her temple, and bought largely by the poorer classes. (Macrob., Plut., Arnob. ll. cc.) Greek writers, in their usual way, identify the Bona Dea with some Greek divinity, such as Semele, Medeia, Hecate, or Persephone. The Angitia of the Marsians seems to have been the same goddess with them as the Bona Dea with the Romans.

From Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology

From Ars Amatoria By Ovid

If you’re hair’s appalling, set a guard at your threshold, or always have it done at Bona Dea’s fertile temple.

From The History of Rome by Theodor Mommsen

The worship of Hercules was from an early date among the most widely diffused; he was, to use the words of an ancient author, adored in every hamlet of Italy, and altars were everywhere erected to him in the streets of the cities and along the country roads. The gods also of the mariner, Castor and Polydeukes or, in Roman form, Pollux, the god of traffic Hermes--the Roman Mercurius--and the god of healing, Asklapios or Aesculapius, became early known to the Romans, although their public worship only began at a later period. The name of the festival of the "good goddess" (-bona dea-) -damium-, corresponding to the Greek --damion-- or --deimion--, may likewise reach back as far as this epoch.

From Roman Questions by Plutarch

20 Why is it that the women, when they adorn in their houses a shrine to the women's goddess, whom they call Bona Dea,33 bring in no myrtle, although they are very eager to make use of all manner of growing and blooming plants?

Was this goddess, as the mythologists relate, the wife of the seer Faunus; and was she secretly addicted to wine,34 ebut did not escape detection and was beaten by her husband with myrtle rods, and is this the reason why they do not bring in myrtle and, when they make libations of wine to her, call it milk? Or is it because they remain pure from many things, particularly from venery, when they perform this holy service? For they not only exclude their husbands, but they also drive everything male out of the house35 whenever they conduct the customary ceremonies in honour of the goddess. So, because the myrtle is sacred to Venus, they religiously exclude it. For she whom they now call Venus Murcia, in ancient days, it seems, they styled Myrtia.

From The Religion of Numa, by Jesse Benedict Carter

But this passion for identifying Greek gods with Roman ones did not confine itself to finding a parallel for the greater gods of Greece; and less known deities were introduced into Rome in the same way. The old Roman god, Faunus, in whose honour the ancient festival of the Lupercalia was yearly celebrated, had as his associate a goddess, Fauna, who was better known as the "good goddess" (Bona Dea). Eventually this new title Bona Dea crowded out the old title Fauna, so that it was almost entirely forgotten. Bona Dea was a goddess of women, and the most characteristic feature of her worship was the exclusion of men from taking part in it. Now there was a Greek goddess, called Damia, also a goddess of women, from whose cult also men were excluded, and her cult spread from Greece to the Greek colonies of Southern Italy, especially Tarentum, and so eventually to Rome. But by the time she arrived in Rome the connexion of Fauna and Bona Dea had been entirely forgotten. Damia was surely a Bona Dea, yes she was the Bona Dea, for was not the proof at hand in the fact that men were excluded from both cults? So a temple was built for her, probably shortly after the Second Punic War, and from the time no one ever thought of poor Fauna again, except scholars and poets, who amused themselves, as was their wont, by putting her in various genealogical relationships to Faunus, as sister, wife, or daughter, while Damia lived and prospered under the stolen title of the Bona Dea.

It was the ceremonial of the cult however which most often offered the best means of identification, as we have seen above in the case of Bona Dea-Damia, where the exclusion of men from the rites was the main point of similarity. In a similar way the old Roman god of the harvest, Consus, was identified with the Greek ocean-god Poseidon because horse-races were a characteristic feature of the festivals of each; and the old Roman goddess of women and of childbirth was given as her Greek parallel the Greek goddess Leukothea, the helper of those in peril at sea, because in both cases slaves were forbidden to take part in the cult.

Folkways, by William Graham Sumner

523. The term "incest" was applied at Rome to the case of a man present at the purification of women, on the feast of the Bona Dea, May 1. The sense of the word is, then, nearly equal to "profane." The emperor Claudius married his niece Agrippina and made such marriages lawful. Gaius restricted this precedent to its exact form, marriage of a brother's daughter, not sister's daughter, and further restricted it, if the brother's daughter was in any forbidden degree of affinity.

From A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome, London: Oxford University Press, 1929.

Bona Dea Subsaxana, aedes: a temple of Bona Dea at the north end of the eastern part of the Aventine, directly south of the east end of the circus Maximus. It lay just below that section of the hill called Saxum now occupied by the church of S. Balbina, and hence was named Subsaxana. The early Roman goddess Bona Dea Fauna had apparently been merged in the Greek goddess Damia, whose cult had perhaps been introduced into Rome after the capture of Tarentum, or a little later.

To this period the founding of the temple is probably to be assigned. It was restored by Livia, the wife of Augustus, and by Hadrian, and was standing in the fourth century, but has left no traces. The statement of Ovid that this temple was dedicated by a Vestal, Claudia, is based on an erroneous identification of this aedes with an aedicula which a Vestal, Licinia, dedicated in 123 B.C., and which evidently was not allowed to stand. Bona Dea (Damia) was a goddess of healing and her temple a centre of healing, as is shown by the fact that in this temple snakes moved about unharmed and innocuous, and there was a store within it of herbs of every sort.