Bona Dea - Cult Themes in Modern Scholarship

Cult Themes in Modern Scholarship

Bona Dea's is the only known festival in which women could gather at night, drink strong, sacrificial-grade wine and perform a blood sacrifice. Although women were present at most public ceremonies and festivals, the religious authorities in Roman society were the male pontiffs and augurs, and women could not lawfully perform rites at night, unless "offered for the people in proper form". Women were allowed wine at these and other religious occasions. At other times, they might drink weak, sweetened, or diluted wine in moderation but Roman traditionalists believed that in the more distant and virtuous past, this was forbidden, "for fear that they might lapse into some disgraceful act. For it is only a step from the intemperance of Liber pater to the forbidden things of Venus". Some ancient sources infer that women were banned from offering blood-and-wine sacrifice in their own right; even banned from handling such materials; both claims are questionable. Nevertheless the strong, sacrificial grade wine used in the rites to Bona Dea was normally reserved for Roman gods, and Roman men.

The unusual permissions implicit at these rites probably derived from the religious authority of the Vestals. They were exceptional and revered persons; virgins, but not subject to their fathers' authority; and matrons, but independent of any husband. They held forms of privilege and authority otherwise associated only with Roman men, and were answerable only to the Senior Vestal and the Pontifex Maximus. Their ritual obligations and religious integrity were central to the well being of the Roman state and all its citizens.

The euphemistic use of wine at this festival has been variously described as a substitution for milk and honey, relatively late in the cult's development; as a theologically absurdity; and as an ingenious justification for behaviours that would be considered unacceptable outside this specific religious sphere. Fauna's myths illustrate the potential of wine as an agent of sexual transgression; wine was thought to be an invention of Liber-Dionysus, who was present as the male principle in certain "soft fruits", including semen and grapes; and ordinary wine was produced under the divine patronage of Venus, the goddess of love and sexual desire. Its aphrodisiac effects were well known.

For Staples, the euphemisms are agents of transformation. The designation of wine as "milk" conceives it as an entirely female product, dissociated from the sexually and morally complex realms of Venus and Liber. Likewise, the wine jar described as a "honey jar" refers to bees, which in Roman lore are sexually abstinent, virtuous females who will desert an adulterous household. Myrtle, as the sign of Venus, Faunus' lust and Fauna's unjust punishment, is simply banned; or as Versnel puts it, "Wine in, Myrtle out". The vine-leaf bowers and the profusion of plants – any and all but the forbidden myrtle – transform the sophisticated, urban banqueting hall into a "primitive" dwelling, evoking the innocence of an ancestral golden age in which women rule themselves, without reference to men or Venus, drinking "milk and honey", which are "markers par excellence of utopian golden times" – under the divine authority of Bona Dea.