Ceres- Roman GodDeity"Goddess of the Grain"

The Search for Proserpina

Proserpina was gathering flowers in a meadow near Enna in Sicily when the earth split and Pluto seized her. His chariot drove down into the dark, and the ground closed behind them.

Ceres heard her daughter's cry echoing across the water. She broke through forests and mountains, lighting her way with two pine torches kindled from the fires of Etna. She did not eat. She did not sleep. She wandered the earth until she learned the truth: Jupiter had given Proserpina to his brother.

Ceres stopped the grain from growing. Fields turned to dust. Humanity began to starve. Jupiter sent Mercury to the underworld to bring Proserpina back, but the girl had already eaten pomegranate seeds in Pluto's house. The bargain was set: she would spend part of the year below and part above. When she descended, Ceres grieved and the earth went cold. When she returned, the grain grew tall.

The Aventine Temple

In 496 BCE, famine struck Rome. The dictator Aulus Postumius vowed a temple to Ceres, Liber, and Libera. It rose on the Aventine Hill, outside the pomerium, and was dedicated in 493 BCE. Pliny records that the Greek artists Damophilus and Gorgasus decorated it with painted terracotta reliefs.

The temple became the center of plebeian life. The plebeian aediles worked from there, overseeing Rome's grain supply and markets. Fines they collected went to Ceres as offerings. Senatorial decrees were archived inside. When the plebeians withdrew from Rome in their struggles with the patricians, they went under Ceres's protection.

The Cerealia

Each April, from the twelfth to the nineteenth, Rome celebrated the Cerealia. The festival fell when winter wheat was ripening and Ceres's favor mattered most. There were circus games and theater in the days before the climax.

On the final night, foxes were released in the Circus Maximus with burning torches tied to their tails. Ovid, in the Fasti, explains the practice with a story: a farm boy near Carseoli caught a fox that had been raiding his fields, wrapped it in straw, and set the straw alight. The fox escaped into the standing grain and burned the entire crop. After that, foxes paid for the crime each year.

That same night, women carried torches through the streets. Ceres had done the same, once, searching for her daughter.

The Mundus

Three times each year, on August 24, October 5, and November 8, a ritual pit called the mundus Cereris was opened. On those days the boundary between the living and the dead dissolved. All public business stopped. No battles were fought, no marriages performed. The spirits walked, and Rome held still.

The Mysteries

In 249 BCE, during the First Punic War, Rome established a Greek-rite festival for Ceres. Priestesses were brought from southern Italy to conduct the rites in Greek. Only women were admitted. What happened inside remained secret.

In 191 BCE, the sacred rite was interrupted when a death occurred in a celebrant's family. The entire ceremony had to be repeated from the beginning. Ceres's rituals could not be left incomplete.

Before the Harvest

Before the first blade was cut, a farmer slaughtered the porca praecidanea, a pig offered to Ceres to sanctify the coming harvest. When a husband divorced his wife, he owed Ceres an offering, as though a broken marriage violated her order. Virgil called her Legifera: the law-bearer. She governed the soil and the obligations that grew from it.