Talk:Bona Dea

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Shouldn't there be some mention of the scandal involving Publius Clodius Pulcher here?

"desecration", surely, not "consecration"?

Given that Clodius entered an all-female ceremony, disguised as a woman, I would think that he desecrated, rather than consecrated, the ceremony. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 199.73.1.1 (talk) 16:03, 3 April 2007 (UTC).

Festival of the Bona Dea

While the article mentions the rites on December 4, it does not explains the festival of the Bona Dea taken place on May 1. Could someone expand that topic? Thanks in advance. Pichote (talk) 20:40, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Snakes indicate her "phallic nature"?

Seriously? Why should a virginal goddess be represented with phallic symbols? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.178.156.125 (talk) 09:04, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

Cultural References

One of Ulrich's lovers in the modernist masterpiece The Man Without Qualities (by Robert Musil), is called Bonadea.... —Preceding unsigned comment added by Alordslums (talk • contribs) 11:07, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

Overhaul

Should have placed this note some time ago. I've been sprucing up here, and just noticed the complete absence of Origins and Mythology sections. And whatnot. I plan to fix the worst of those deficits sometime today but please go ahead yerself, regardless, or feel free to nag me about it. Haploidavey (talk) 13:18, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

It's rewritten and rearranged. The section on priesthoods and devotees needs fleshing out. And a section on origins and attributes is needed - this proves surprisingly difficult to source. And the lede needs re-writing; important, and singularly troublesome. The obvious source would be Brouwer (see refs list); alas, only a chapter or so of his mighty tome is available on googlebooks. Haploidavey (talk) 01:22, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

Provincial cults - and they seem to be plentiful - raise some difficult questions. In Rome, the Vestals seem to run things; but what happens where there are no Vestals? Who runs the show outside of Rome, where the Vestals tread not? Who dedicates it, and on whose behalf? Which I guess brings into question the apparent gender-based taboos on blood-and-wine sacrifice, women drinking strong wine and whatnot outside of Rome. All very unsatisfactory. Perhaps Brouwer has answers, or at least suggestions. That male priest of the goddess is nagging at me. Input welcome. Haploidavey (talk) 20:48, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

Have ordered Brouwer. Meantime have re-written lede; it no longer accurately reflects current contents. It's more a sort-of predictive summary of what the content ought to be, imho. The content will have to catch piecemeal. Sorry, I know it's a rather peculiar way to do things. Haploidavey (talk) 15:47, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

Not at all. The lede usually has to be rewritten after the article's in place, but since the introductory section is supposed to summarize the contents, it can certainly serve as an abstract of what's to come. It's a pleasure to read. Two questions, however:

• What does "official divinity" mean? I may know, or not, but is there perhaps a section somewhere in either Religion in ancient Rome or Imperial cult (ancient Rome) that could be linked to elucidate precisely what's meant for those geeks of us who care?
• A possible error: I thought the rite was held at the house of the Pontifex Maximus, not the "senior annual magistrate" (meaning consul?), as J.C. wasn't consul the year Clodius crashed the rite at his house. (Uncle Jules wasn't consul till 59 BC). If I'm not mistaken, this will have to do with Livia and the Bona Dea later; the rite attaches to the wife of the Pontifex Maximus, not the senior annual magistrate, which was still nominally a consul, and not to the princeps per se — though to Augustus, in guise of Ponti-Maxi. Cynwolfe (talk) 16:57, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

Thankee, Cyn. Way to go yet. Thanks for your addits. Yes, I'll clarify the "official" business and do a link. On the Imperial biz, the Livia connection's admirably explored by Geraldine Herbert-Brown; crucial stuff but I've not started adding from that. On the pontifex matter, I think you're mistaken. In Caesar's case, yes; but Cicero hosted the rites either the year before or the year after; as praetor, I think, and not pont max. 'Course, I'll check it out more thoroughly. Haploidavey (talk) 17:38, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

Well, Brouwer is quite emphatic that the location has nothing to do with the pontificate, isn't he? So I must've been taken in by Cicero's rhetoric. Brennan is uncharacteristically unclear about why this should have fallen on a praetor, though it would seem to be slight additional evidence that the praetor, singular, originally outranked the consuls, dual. Cynwolfe (talk) 18:03, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

lede

Davey, I see you're still at active work on this. You didn't ask for opinions, unless that TMI? in your last edit summary can be taken as such, but I think the introductory section is too long and detailed in proportion to the article; intros need to be a "quick read," in my view. So here are my suggestions:

• I'd just say "her festivals were held in May and December and were open only to women"; this would reduce paragraphs two and three to approximately one sentence, and you already have a section on festivals and rituals.
• Definitely no "Italic antecedents" in the intro. This belongs to the "Background and origins" section, which is about the same length. (And currently is melded with iconography? Why? There may be a reason my ignorance of the topic keeps me from seeing.)
• As an interesting hook, I'd keep one sentence in the intro on the Clodius affair, something along the lines of: "Her rites attracted unwanted attention in 62 BC, when Clodius Pulcher intruded on them supposedly for the sake of seducing Julius Caesar's wife, occasioning the famous declaration "Caesar's wife must be above suspicion." This reduces the fourth paragraph to one or two sentences; later developments can be discussed in due course, though Livia casting herself as the Bona Dea might also be worth keeping for its "hookiness." Clodius's intrusion in this revision would thus immediately follow "her festivals were held in May and December and were open only to women."
• Fifth paragraph could probably be reduced to a couple of sentences. "Her primary attributes are … " and "Her cult is widely attested in the provinces."

Anyway, I just feel that if the intro provides TMI the article can start to feel redundant or repetitive. Or maybe I feel this way because in working on Pluto (mythology) it started to seem recursive and so far I've lacked the will to fix it. Cynwolfe (talk) 15:19, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

Oh yes, recursive is as recursive does; just one of the problems that arise when writing articles backasswards - starting with the lead, that is, just to get an overall grasp on the topic (see somewhere above). The lede's a mini-article, and I've been playing catch-up beneath it. At the moment, it's better than the article. In fact it should be the article, because it's more robustly structured than the article itself; I can add to it. If you'd like to dash off a precis thereof, and call it... um, a lede, I'd be perfectly happy. Not that I expect it; your Pluto is truly splendid, by the way. Also btw, Brouwer arrived, and in four days flat. Haploidavey (talk) 16:07, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

I was just coming back to say that of course all the info belongs in the article, just organized under the headers. I did have that sense it was a "mini-article," which is not a bad thing to keep, then, if you feel the rest is still under construction. I tend to overlook the obvious, which is to recognize first all the good stuff you've provided, so forgive me. Cynwolfe (talk) 16:11, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

Nothing to forgive, Dea. Everything you've said is helpful, and I hadn't even noticed that awful misplacement in the subheading. Why, in the name of all that's bona, did I do that? Haploidavey (talk) 16:20, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

Bona Dea and Fauna

Fauna (goddess) redirects to this article, as of... I can't figure out when, but fairly recently. Fauna now has no article of her own. Poor Fauna. We can't imply that she is Bona Dea (or vice versa). They should not be synthesised. I don't know how to undo the redirect and restore the original article, stub or whatever it was, 'cuz I'm inept. Can anyone oblige? Haploidavey (talk) 22:04, 5 February 2011 (UTC)

OK, am in the process of fixing this and adding a bit of info to make your point clear within the article space of Fauna (goddess). Give me a hour or so. Cynwolfe (talk) 23:09, 5 February 2011 (UTC)

Bless you. She seems to be dealt with only in the context of Bona Dea scholarship. Hope I'm wrong there. I'll see if Brouwer has any leads or suggestions. Haploidavey (talk) 23:15, 5 February 2011 (UTC)

Mostly, yes; but see Varro's quote now in the article. At any rate, it seems to me to lighten the load here at Bona Dea if Fauna is dealt with independently; otherwise, there'd be a long digression and sputtering about whether she is or is not the Bona Dea (also, you should review the brief description of the B.D. at Fauna's article, which is as it was before I did anything). "Fauna" is hard to research, for obvious reasons. Passing remark in Lipka and Roman and European Mythologies (the latter rather amusing), but I didn't take time to try to add them. Arnobius may be the source for Fauna Fatua as a single deity. Cynwolfe (talk) 00:51, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

Damia and Magna Mater

At the risk of being boring: Macrobius does not state that. If you spend a minute reading the poor guy you shall discover many important things, namely:

1. Macrobius speaks of B. D. in the the context of his exposition on the etymomlogy of the months. (All of cahpter XII).

2. He starts speaking of May at paragraph 16.

3. He gives various etymologies : a. Fulvius Nobilior's that Maius is from the division of the Romans made by Romulus between elder and younger. b. that the name came from the people of Tusculum who call Iuppiter Maius because of his majesty. c. Cingius's view that the name stems from Maia wife of Vulcanus on the grounds of the sacrifice made by the flamen Vulcanalis on the kalendae of May. Piso though says she is Maiestas. d. other say Maia is the mother of Mercury (cf. the feriae of Mercury). e.Cornelius Labeo and other say that this Maia to whom sacrifice is held on the (kal.) of May is the earth named Mater Magna because of her greatness. Which is conforted by the sacrifice of a pregnant saw. Mercury is added because earth gives the voice to the newborn.

Now here is the most relevant passage: "Cornelius L. says that an aedes was dedicated to Maia, id est earth, on the kalendae of May under the name of Bona Dea. And confirms one can be taught that in the more occult rite this Bona Dea was one and the same with the earth. The same Bona Dea is invoked as Bona Fauna Op(i)s and Fatua in the pontifical books. Bona because she gives us all the wealth of food; Fauna because she benefits everything to the living beings; Opis since life is grounded in her support; fatua a fando because the newborn do not emit voice til they touch her." Note: Vettius Praetextatus is speaking here, Macrobius would not put in the mouth of the most renowned expert of pontifical law and hierofans silly statements.

Now where is it said that Bona Dea is a Greek deity, a Damia imported from Tarentum? If one reads the texts with no prejudice it is clear that she is an entity of earliest Roman religion as an alter ego of Maia, at least at the formation of the calendar. That the earliest Roman religion may have been influenced by Greek religious lore is admissible, even Dea Dia and the ritual of the Arvals that predates Rome perhaps was. But that is another issue.Aldrasto11 (talk) 12:35, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

But Davey is not and should not be giving his own reading of the text; he is simply reporting the scholarship on this point. Your interpretation of the ancient sources, Aldrasto, may or may not be sound — I have no reason to doubt it, but it can't be accounted for in the article unless you have citations from modern scholars who interpret it in the same way. Cynwolfe (talk) 14:22, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

Thank you both. Aldrasto, your knowledge always impresses me; but I can do nothing with it here. If you find errors in what's been written, and can cite reliable secondary sources to support an alternative, you're more than welcome to change the text. As Cynwolfe says (and I must thank her for stepping in here), I'm reporting the scholarship. I've done so as simply and precisely as I can; hopefully without over-simplification or misrepresentation. That's my agenda as an editor. It's about all I can cope with at the moment. Haploidavey (talk) 23:58, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

Mr A. is quite right. Utter misrepresentation. Bona Dea as "Damia" is in Festus. I'd managed, somehow or other, to completely mangle the sequence and content of the theonyms, titles and inline references. So, thanks for pointing it out. I've patched it up. Still incomplete, but it'll have do do for now. Haploidavey (talk) 00:54, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Sorry for the insistence, I wish just to complete my former post, I forgot the conclusion. What in my view matters in Macrobius 's passage is the clear precedence of Maia in the relationship between Maia and Bona Dea. She might well have been introduced at later times i.e. from the passage itself she could be an interpretation or even a conflation of 2 entities, one of whom Greek, However Macrobius does not say this explicitly and it is speculative that he may have implied it. The passage shows that the underlying calendarial structure is undoubtedly preformed and it is as Maia, i.e. because of Maia's own characters themselves that she can absorbe Bona Dea, whoever the last is. I thank you for the Festus citation, I wondered whence Dumezil had got this idea of the Damia.Aldrasto11 (talk) 12:00, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Despite my now full access to Brouwer (whose work on the topic seems generally regarded as definitive, if somewhat conservative in approach) much of this seems rather cloudy. The Damia business seems to go back a very long way: an "origin by default or association" (or mis-association, who knows?) that still appears in modern-ish print. In this respect, as in others, Richardson's revisions of Platner and Ashby's 1926 entries on Bona Dea and Bona Dea Subsaxana are... very, very out of date. Note the supposedly three extant incriptions, vs Brouwer's 150 or so. The thorough, methodical Brouwer barely mentions Damia, and doesn't refer to a possible Tarentine origin - not even as speculation. Festus might be confused, wrong, or guessing. Why not? After all, he's a man; I mean that in the nicest possible way, speaking as one excluded by gender from many mystes feminae. Anyhow, if we accept Staples' summary (p. 14 [1]), Dumezil takes Festus on board, dismissing Bona Dea as a very minor branch of imported cult to Demeter. And all seem to agree that she's have remained a minor footnote were it not for Clodius, or rather - and this is Brouwer, plus a little of my own invective - Cicero's well-publicised anti-Clodian rants (probably well-informed in some respects, but still speculative in part and certainly driven by politics plus personal emnity) we'd probably know next to zilch.

The May 1 - Maia - Mater Magna business seems pretty well self-evident, but Brouwer's very cagey even on this; as you rightly say, the sequence, if sequence there is, remains unclear. Bona Dea is, like Magna Mater, title rather than name, and is broadly applied. As for Macrobius, yes, very thorough, very sure of himself; he gives some sources, but he's surely a sort of primary-secondary-tertiary source. The secrecy of the cult, its containment, its exclusion of the male (and presumably the male priestly sphere) might well preclude anything other than Varronian "association and identity by function". We can't forget that this, officially if not always in practise, is exclusively female cult. And doesn't Varro take almost everything back to Maia? And while I don't doubt the essential connections between Maia, May 1 and the Aventine, I wonder just whose connections they were. I suspect that these guys were as much in the dark as we - though probably much less than I. Still, I trust Mr Brouwer will clarify what he can, in time. His tome is a whopper, and very dense. Bear with me for the next month or two - yes, it's that big. Haploidavey (talk) 16:10, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

My current thinking on these kinds of intricate theological debates is not to get lost in them. There's a reason WP has the {{technical}} tag. My feeling (perhaps boneheaded) is that if you find a chorus of scholarly voices all singing different songs on a point, you say "Scholars differ on yadda yadda; some say she's X, some say she's Y, and Dumézil says something nobody agrees with these days." (That's a joke, Aldrasto.) And then you don't rehearse all their detailed arguments. That's what footnotes are for — not to rehearse the arguments, but to allow anybody who's that interested to go read it. It's an encyclopedia article, not the first chapter of a doctoral dissertation. Anyway, I think you've produced a highly readable article that avoids the "he said, she said" trap.

I have a quibble here: "Married women were under the control of their husbands." This is true only in the early period when the manus form of marriage was practiced. It's not true from probably the 2nd century BC onward. Husbands had no legal power over their wives, and the property the wife brought to the marriage was hers and went with her if they divorced. A woman remained first and foremost part of her birth family in legal relation to her father. So I question what this has to do with the celebration of the Bona Dea rites, and boldly deleted it. There's also the usual chronological issue in dealing with Roman society, of applying mores from the earlier Republic (from which little documentation conveniently survives) to later times. Obviously, women at the time of Julius Caesar were not barred from drinking wine; the literature is full of women attending parties and such. As your long footnote explains, Romans were (contra the Hollywood perception) repulsed by drunkenness in general; Mark Antony's "drinking problem" was a PR issue. Because of body mass differences, women will usually get drunker than men on the same amount of wine, so if they're served equally at a party, what's the natural consequence? Also, Roman men didn't drink wine straight; they drank it mixed with water, sweetened (mulsum), etc., and it was a stereotype of the Celts that they drank unmixed wine. So really what you end up saying is that neither men nor women were supposed to get drunk, but young men sowing their wild oats were more likely to get a pass — a double standard that existed until 30 or 40 years ago and still lingers. Just thinking out loud. The issue seems to be the use of wine as a ritual substance; it was not considered appropriate for some deities, and (although I haven't looked at his) these are the kind of deities that make it surprising at the Bona Dea's rites. One approach would be to establish the ritual precedents first, and then show how the unusual circumstances of the Bona Dea rites occasioned the male snark and prurience. Cynwolfe (talk) 15:30, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Cupra

I'm sure matters remain outstanding in the posts above but I'm here to explain my deletion of a passage (cited to a minor museum guidebook) that linked an Umbrian goddess, Capra/Cupra (sv) to Bona Dea. Our unreferenced article on Cupra has an external link to the Thalia.com website; this makes the same connection. A reading of Antonaccio and Neils, 1995, p. 270 [2] suggests that this stems from the late 19th cent. scholar Roscher, who perhaps made overmuch of Varro's derivation of Cyprius/Ciprius from Ciprus, which he (Varro) explains as bonus (in Lingua Latina, 5.159). A few (a very few) modern scholarly sources at least mention the argument, but I can find none to confirm its conclusions. The case for any connection seems vanishingly slight, thus the deletion. Haploidavey (talk) 20:03, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

Lazily, I shall ask a question without looking anything up. So this identification just boiled down to Varro throwing bonus around? Cynwolfe (talk) 20:17, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

Your Capra link is a dab, did you know? Cynwolfe (talk) 20:19, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

Oh bugger; 'twas Cupra after all. Anyhow, on Varro's casual flinging; yes, so it would seem. How cool is that, huh? (eeew... sorry, I've just had fun in a short-lived Marvel-world, over at Apollo, an' it rubbed off on me). Haploidavey (talk) 20:23, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

Macrobius, Cornelius Labeo and the pontifical books

Now the article attributes to Macrobius the series of epithets which connects Maia and Bona Dea. It should be stated clearly that the epithets were indigitamenta from the books of the pontiffs, divulged by the noted scholar Cornelius Labeo ("auctor est C. L. ....").Aldrasto11 (talk) 14:38, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

Yes, it comes via Macrobius, who credits Labeo as his source. I think this is an issue for footnotes rather than the main body of text, the relevant epithets being Bona, Fauna and Fatua as indigitamenta of Terra in the Libri Pontificum. Haploidavey (talk) 16:31, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

Needs updating

Brouwer's 1989 book apparently overlooks some essential matters. The French publication whose author points this out is linked overleaf & gives details of cult around the Adriatic, especially in Aquillea. Haploidavey (talk) 10:01, 1 November 2021 (UTC)