In Ancient Rome They Had Some A**Weird Customs
There were some macabre and f’ed-up customs, some of which will no doubt be mentioned by fellow learned Quorans, but I’ll go with a merely quirky one: The October Horse Race.
Each year, on October 15th, there would be a sacrifice to Mars, to mark the end of both the campaigning and the agricultural seasons. Your typical “par-tay before we hunker down for winter” type festival.
In our society, mischievous artists like giggling schoolboys leave crude drawings of a phallus on walls to shock and titillate. They are usually scrubbed off or painted over as such images are deemed taboo and offensive. In ancient Rome, the image of the phallus was depicted on door knockers, lamps, wind chimes, and charms as well as drawn and sculpted on walls and depicted in mosaics and other decorative surfaces. The sexual energy of these images was believed to protect people by invoking the power of the god Fascinus.
The Lupercalia.
When and why?
Celebrated on February 15, this fascinating festival was used to avert evil spirits, purify the city, as well as ensure health and fertility. As this month was usually near the end of winter (during which time the earth seemed to wither and die), this was the rebirth of life to the ancient Romans.
What was it?
The predecessor to modern-day Valentines Day, this Roman festival of the wolf (as in lupine, resembling a wolf) seems to be looking at weird in the rear view mirror.
Roman February was filled with rites of washing and purification, as the name of the month comes from the Latin word februa, the traditional purification instruments (viz. whips that you see in the far right of the above picture). To the Romans, purification also included whipping. The rest of this strange sight will be explained later.
What happened at the festival?
The priests of the festival, the Luperci, would journey to a special cave near the Palatine, according to legend, the founder Romulus and his lesser-known twin had been suckled by a she-wolf.
See the statue below.Right next to the Lupercal cave, there was the sanctuary of Rumina, the goddess of breastfeeding, as well as a fig tree (the famous ficus ruminalis), from which baby Romulus and Remus might have also fed.
The priests, born from aristocratic families, would consume wine in copious quantities, and then bring out the knives. They would sacrifice a goat or two as well as a dog (since wolves are notoriously difficult to capture, a dog stood in its place), all supervised by the head priest of Jupiter, the flamen dials.
After that, they would make a sacrifice of salted cakes prepared by the Vestal Virgins. The flamen dialis would anoint the foreheads of the priests with blood from the sacrificial knife, then he would wipe the blade clean with wool soaked in milk (that’s why I mentioned Rumina above.) The priests were expected to laugh or smile.
Then things shift into high weird.
The inebriated priests would then skin the goats, and construct some makeshift undies from them (to honor Faunus, or Pan, who had founded a similar festival in Greece called the Lykaia). Then these drunken priests, foreheads slathered with animal blood, wearing goatskin thongs, and wielding the februa, or whips made from the remnants of the goat’s skin, the priests would run around the Palatine hill, where women who wanted to become pregnant would gather, hoping to be smacked by the bloody goat flesh whip. This would mean an end to her barrenness or would mean less pain in childbirth.
The priest with the conical hat is the flamen dialis.
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