Carna and The Bean-Kalends
Macrobius (5th century) says that the name Carna was derived from caro, carnis, "flesh, meat, food" (compare English "carnal" and "carnivore"), and that she was the guardian of the heart and the vital parts of the human body. The power to avert vampiric striges, which Ovid attributes to the conflated Cardea-Carna, probably belonged to Carna, while the charms fixed on doorposts are rightly Cardea's.
Carna's feast day was marked as nefastus on the calendar; that is, it was a public holiday when no assembly or court could convene. Mashed beans and lard — a dish perhaps to be compared to refried beans or hoppinjohn— were offered to her as res divinae, and thus the day was known as the Kalendae fabariae, the Bean-Kalends, since at this time the bean harvest matured. Beans had many magico-religious properties in ancient Greece and Rome in addition to their importance as a food crop.
William Warde Fowler took Carna to be an archaic goddess whose cult had not been revivified by religious innovation or reform and thus had lapsed into obscurity by the end of the Republic. Auguste Bouché-Leclercq considered Carna a goddess of health. Her elusive nature is indicated by the wildly divergent scholarly conjectures she has prompted: "she was considered a chthonic divinity by Wissowa, a lunar goddess by Pettazzoni, a bean-goddess by Latte, and a patroness of digestion by Dumézil."
Read more about this topic: Limentinus