The Roman festival of Floralia. What was it and is there any link with Mayday or Beltane? Stay tuned to find out.

Hello everyone I’m Dr Angela Puca and welcome to my Symposium. I’m a PhD and a University Lecturer and this is your online resource for the academic study of Magick, Paganism, Shamanism, and all things esoteric.

In today’s video, I will be exploring the Roman festival of Floralia, part of a talk that I gave for the Doreen Valiente Foundation in the UK. So I’d like to thank the Doreen Valiente Foundation and Julie for being an amazing organiser and for inviting me. It was really a pleasure. So hope you will enjoy this talk and let me know what you think in the comment section. On to the talk now.

So Today I will be talking to you about the Floralia also called the Ludi Florales which used to be and still is, as we will see, a Roman festival, a festival of the Roman religion.

So the things that I will be covering in this talk are, first of course, the Festival of Floralia in ancient Rome but also I will be mentioning the contemporary practice of this kind of festival and similar festivals, I’d say similar festivals, because the Floralia is not as celebrated by contemporary Pagans, in Italy, because there are, especially around Rome, in general in Italy you have Pagan reconstructivist movements and it is most common that in the south you will find Hellenistic reconstructivist movements or Etruscan reconstructivist movements whereas in Rome and in the Midlands you will find Roman ones and in the north, you will find more interest in the Celtic religions. Also, I will be mentioning the, which I find to be quite interesting and something that people usually don’t know there is actually a difference between the way Romans and Greeks used to perceive deities and build festivals around them and also I will be by the end of it we will see address possible parallels between May Day and the Beltane or Bealtaine and the Roman Festival of Floralia.

As for my methodology, I have used textual sources and the references would be at the end as the last slide but also, since I do anthropological research and I study contemporary Paganism, I couldn’t help but contact and reach out to those who are nowadays still performing these sort of Roman festivals and they are trying to celebrate these Roman festivals according to the sources that they find. And it is absolutely fascinating to see how they select the sources and how they try to find actual information but then, at the same time, they want to bring the Roman festivals and these traditions to the contemporary world. And so there is still a way of adapting to the contemporary world but at the same time trying to keep certain key elements true to their original context and meaning.

So yeah, part of the information that will be conveyed in this talk is also drawn from interviews with contemporary practitioners and a few notes here are that; whenever sources are unclear or disagree, I will favour the version provided by my interviewees and also I have favoured sources in Italian and Latin. I have to therefore thank a lot, May Rega who is Capa Tribus of the Communitas Populi Romani and there is one of these groups in Rome and the other person that I’d like to thank is Marzio Emanuele Viotti who belongs to another group called Ad Maiora Vertite.

One of the things that we need to clarify and highlight when it comes to Roman festivals and even the Roman religion, in general, is that there is a difference between private and public religious festivals. In fact, it may be even debated and debatable whether it was a religion, that, you know, the Roman traditions that were happening at the time, from the birth of Rome and from the time we have any record until the Christianisation of the Empire and that is the time span that even contemporary Pagans will use as the historical time where they can source material and text and information to draw the information for the festivals that they will celebrate. So it is also debatable whether it is a religion or rather a set of religious practices and you will have that, it is interesting because you will find both festivals that are private that are celebrated within the privacy of a home or with family and then you will have public festivals which were spectacular and also play the role in society. So they weren’t just religious but they were also integrated, in one way or another, into the social and societal fabric. So in some cases and as we will see that happens with The Floralia as well. They will also try to convey a certain moral or a certain message.

So interestingly, deities – we sometimes tend to think of the Roman deities as very anthropocentric, so they will resemble human beings in one way or another both because they are females or males or because they have certain characteristics that we associate with a human person. But actually, before the slow and steady Hellenisation of the Roman culture deities were seen more as forces in nature. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it was more animistic, although it may sound like it’s because for example Jupiter would have been seen more as the thunder and as this force in nature rather than as the person the deity, the god that was represented from a certain point onwards. And the anthropomorphism that was then attached to deities, so the Roman deities, comes from Greece and from the Greek culture and from the statues and the mythology that slowly but steadily penetrated the Roman culture and so that became also an aspect that reshaped, once again slowly. It wasn’t just something that suddenly happened but something that, over time and progressively, occurred. Also, festivals were seen and practised and engaged with as a way of marking the rhythm of the year and as an expression of religiosity.

Here we will refer mostly to one specific Roman calendar because there are quite a few and even if you look them up on the internet you will find different Roman calendars. But the calendar that even contemporary practitioners of the Roman religion will use is the one by Numa Pompilius and it is also called a lunisolar calendar because it is based both on the moon and the sun. More specifically months are lunar, related to the moon and years are solar, related to the sun. And you have three core moments in the month in the calendar, that is used by the calendar of Numa Pompilus and one that is used by contemporary Roman practitioners, more specifically, the ones that I mentioned earlier and the ones that I interviewed, they told me that they will base their festivities and their festivals on this lunisolar calendar. And so the Kalends will be the new moon the Nonnes will be the first quarters of each month and then you will have the Ides which will fall when the full moon happens. Contemporary practitioners, especially the Communitas Populi Romani, use the aforementioned calendar and Roman festivals up until the Christianisation of the Empire so there is a very wide-spanning history, we may say.

So as for the Floralia also called the Ludi Florales we see that the Ludi of the Great Mother both Ceres and Flora occupied almost two-thirds of the month of April. In fact, April was quite strongly dedicated to goddesses related to fertility, whereas we would see that March tends to be more dedicated to, we may say, male gods or related to war and warfare although it is also important to say that the fact that deities came to be anthropomorphised, they became seen as human beings, came later and under the influence of the Greek culture. And so when you have that as a premise and you see that the Roman understanding of deities was more that of forces in nature and forces, even in human people, forces in general, that are part of our experience and of our surrounding world.

Then even the gender of deities is something that is not quite the same as the gender of human beings, it is more related to certain symbolic elements that you would associate with female and male rather than them being actually female or male. In fact, there are certain Roman deities that will that you will find that over the course of history have moved from being female, from being represented as female to being male and vice versa or being both of them. It’s not that they had transgender deities at the time, it is just that the way they perceived the gender of deities was not the way that they would see the gender in people.

So yeah, the first occurrence that we find of the Floralia is in 241 or 238 BCE. The Ludi were competitions and circus performances that constituted the appendix of almost all the Roman celebrations in ancient times. So you would have the celebration and then at the end of it you will have this Ludi, these competitions and circus performances and when it comes to the Floralia one of its characteristics is that people could engage in explicit behaviour in public.

So, as we will see, the Floralia are very explicit as festivals. They were celebrated from the 28th of April until the 3^rd of May, of course, this depends on the calendar but using the Julian calendar and these would be the dates. The Florales, which is another name for this festivity, weren’t really ordinary games, they were rather a parody of circus games; instead of gladiators there were prostitutes and instead of fighting against beasts the latter fought against hares and goats. Instead of male athletes, prostitutes competed with each other in all kinds of competitions. In fact, Christian authors have often used the Florales to demonstrate the immorality of the pagan religion for example gains of the more devout are the viler, I translated from Italian here and went from Latin, and the brothel moved into the theatre.

So the month of April was seen as the female equivalent of the month of March, this is something that I also mentioned earlier, whose rituals address the natural virility of the militia as a cultural expression of virility. You find here compared the maternal function of females to the military function of males to which the April rites addressed the natural female sexuality thus transforming it into cultural.

So there is a way here too of addressing female sexuality in a way that is detached from maternity, in a way, from motherhood. Prostitutes meant natural female sexuality, sex for sex, as opposed to the matrons who represented the perfect cultural condition of the Roman woman. So the matrons would be the women that would dedicate themselves to marriage and having children whereas the prostitutes are those who just devote themselves to sex for sex, that’s how they would see that.

So the Ludi Florales had these prostitutes engaged in martial arts and showing that the possibility that even female sexuality, like virility, could be addressed in comparison to the militia, but in fact, they expressed it to deny it. So it was like they were trying to, they had much dedication to the military forces and to the male virility. And then they would have April, especially the latter part of April dedicated more to female sexuality but female sexuality in and of itself which was represented by the prostitutes. But it was also vilified, in a way, because they were trying to say, oh, see men are actually fighting, whereas they are not fighting they are just trying to, you know, catch goats but not even managing to do that. So it was a way of vilifying the roles of prostitutes in a way.

So the idea here is that most women can fight against hares and goats and in circus competitions, they do not show masculine strength but lasciviousness. What we find here in this kind of festivity is an ambiguity that is found in the Roman culture of the time with regard to prostitution in general. Because yeah, in the way in which they took note of prostitution in the Roman state because Romans controlled it without repressing it and once a year it reduced prostitution to a game rather than an object of indignation or lust. And also, once a year they used prostitutes for a parody show. So the idea here is that they saw the prostitutes as not quite as the counterpart of the male militaries but rather as a way of saying, so you have refused your role as a female and so the other kind of people that refuse that role, to dedicate themselves to motherhood and being a matron, are men but men do so because they go out and fight. So can you fight, are you able to fight anything and so it was a way of displaying that they couldn’t really and so that they were just about having sex and it was just sex for the sake of it.

The celebration saw a combination of various elements then. So you have the dialectic between the matron and the prostitute which is operating in the archaic festive cycle of the month of April. And then you have the character of the month of the Ludi that April took on after the plebeian appropriation of the Cerealia or C(h)erealia which is the festivities for the Goddess Ceres which is connected to the grain. And then you have the establishment of builders and builders are those who assist the festivity of Floralia, to begin with, and so it is interesting because you do find the Goddess Flora before the establishment, before the first occurrence of the festival of Floralia but, as we will see, the Goddess Flora was perceived in a very different way. And then, as we saw, later on, you will have these builders who are connected to, who are part of the common people, the commoners, we could say. And they established this festivity because at that time in Roman history the builders also became magistrates and so there was this connection between the two because since the builders, at that time, also became magistrates they also had to deal with both prostitutes and the games and so it was like the two were collated in a way show a display of sexuality but at the same time having this underlying condemnation of it or, yeah, showing the fact that it was just sexuality for the sake of it.

So Sabbatini claims that Flora was ‘invented’ together with the Florales, just to give those games a divine title according to the polytheistic usage. This impression would be also corroborated by the fact that the temple of the Goddess, who stood near the Circus Maximus, was erected on the initiative of the same two Publicii who had organized the first execution of the Floralis. Also, we see that in Ovid, in Ovid’s Fasti which is another book that is used as a key, a core reference for those who still practice today the Roman Pagan religion always, in order to give Flora some consistency as a deity because you don’t find really as many myths on Flora and her role as a Goddess in the Roman pantheon.

Ovid had to propose, as it appeared that Flora was not really a Goddess that came from Rome but from outside, Ovid proposed that Flora came from a Greek myth in which the Goddess is a protagonist. So for Ovid, the name Flora is a Latin derivation of the Greek name Chloris, recurring in various myths but never to indicate a real Goddess. Flora-Chloris i.e. ‘the green’ cultivates prodigious herbs and especially those that have a magical power and can create magical philtres and they are under the realm of the Goddess Venus, which is also quite interesting because there is a connection with fertility and procreation. But as we will see with Flora it is not procreation through mating or coupling but procreation in a very different way. Juno goes to Flora asking for a herb that makes her have a child without mating. She wants to do that to make the match for Jupiter because Jupiter did the same without coupling he created Athena, he created Minerva and she sprang out of his head without him having to procreate with another, with Juno or Hera because it’s a Greek myth and according to this Greek myth, you have the Goddess Flora in the Roman religious culture.

So Flora-Chloris gives the right herb to Juno who gives birth to Mars or Ares and Mars compensates Flora by assuring her a place in the city of Rome. There is a very ancient altar of Flora whose erection was even traced back to Titus Tatius the Sabine who would have reigned together with Romulus. There is also another myth reported in Sabbatini, this Historian, Anthropologist that I was mentioning earlier, according to which when Romulus founded Rome he gave the city three names; one secret or initiatory, one sacral or liturgical, and one political.

And the sacral name or sacred name of Rome would be Flora. So the institution of the Floralia marked the birth of a renewed Goddess connected to giving birth without mating and so that may have been a link to the idea of prostitution. Perhaps, I may add, that it could be also connected to the fertility of the earth in springtime, since we see that, you know, the abundance that we see and the plenty that we see in springtime is not really connected to a male and female mating but you still see creation and birth around you and rebirth in a way. So it may be also connected to that. And also Flora is connected to the birth of Rome which occurred on the 21st of April.

Now to answer our question, are there connections between the festival of Floralia and Mayday or Beltane? Perhaps there may be more parallels than there are links or connections. Especially because there is a lack of sources that would connect, would strongly connect these festivities and also because we are talking about a very wide historical span. There is, as I was mentioning, no sound historical evidence, to my knowledge, of a direct link between Beltane and Floralia. So it is more likely that there was an influence and some of the Roman traditions were combined with those existing in Britain at the time. That is the most likely case which I have found studies on that but it always tends to be quite vague. So the idea is that around that time, around springtime, you do have across different cultures, rites and festivals related to rebirth and birth and procreation and fertility and they translate differently and they have different ritualisms but that kind of underlying tone is more or less the same. But there isn’t really a strong connection in terms of ritualism between Floralia and Beltane or Mayday.

There are two Roman festivals that might have played an influence in you know in the establishment of the festival of Mayday and the Pagan festival of Beltane and these two are the Lupercalia and the Parilia. The Lupercalia occur in mid-February and they have, perhaps, a stronger link with sexuality, especially the sexuality that we tend to associate with Beltane which is sexuality, you know, where there is an interplay of two individuals or more individuals and during the Lupercalia, people were masked and dressed as goats and whipped for purification and to propitiate fertility and it was probably a rite of passage from childhood to adolescence. There are people now who associate the Lupercalia with Valentine’s Day but according to the sources and according to my interviewees as well, they find it to be more connected to Beltane rather than Valentine’s Day. And also we have the Parilia that used to occur on the 21st of April and still occurs for those who celebrate it. And here there was the practice, also present in Beltane, of jumping on the fire to bless and purify the animals and the pastoral products as well. So it was a way of purifying and blessing.

And this is it for the talk. I welcome your questions and these are some references.

So this is it for today’s video. Hope you liked it. If you did SMASH the like button, subscribe to the channel, activate the notification bell so that you will never miss a new upload from me and as always, stay tuned for all the Academic Fun.

Bye for now.

REFERENCES

Brandt, J. R. and Iddeng, J. W. (eds.) (2012) Greek and Roman Festivals: Content, Meaning, and Practice, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Corrias, G. M. (2015) Dei e religione dell’antica Roma, Cagliari, Arkadia.

Ovid (2013) Fasti (trans. A. Wiseman & P. Wiseman), Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rupke, J. (ed.) (2011) A Companion to Roman Religion, 1st edition., Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell.

Sabbatucci, D. (1999) La religione di Roma antica, Roma, Il Saggiatore.

Sanctis, G. D. (2012) La religione a Roma. Luoghi, culti, sacerdoti, dèi, Roma, Carocci.

First uploaded 21 Apr 2021