Mater Matuta- Roman GodDeity"White Goddess"
Also known as: Leucothea
Description
Mad with Juno's curse, she clutched her son Melicertes and leaped from the cliff into the sea. The waves swallowed the mortal and returned a goddess: Leucothea, the white divinity of the deep, who once nursed the infant Bacchus in secret.
Mythology & Lore
Nurse of Bacchus
Ino was a daughter of Cadmus, founder of Thebes, and the goddess Harmonia. When her sister Semele perished at the sight of Jupiter's undisguised glory, the infant Bacchus needed a mortal guardian. Ino and her husband Athamas took the child in secret, raising the twice-born god alongside their own sons Learchus and Melicertes. Ovid recounts in the Metamorphoses (4.416-542) that Juno's hatred for anything connected to Jupiter's affair with Semele extended to all who sheltered the child. The queen of the gods descended to the underworld and enlisted the Fury Tisiphone to drive Athamas and Ino to madness.
The madness struck Athamas first. Seeing his wife and children as a lioness with cubs, he seized Learchus and dashed the boy against a stone. Ino, mad herself, snatched up Melicertes and fled to the cliffs above the sea. She leaped from the height into the waves with her surviving son in her arms.
The White Goddess
The sea received them both and transformed them. Ino became Leucothea, a sea goddess whose name means "the white goddess," and Melicertes became Palaemon, a protector of harbors. In the Metamorphoses, Neptune strips away their mortal parts at Venus's request, and the Nereids carry mother and son to their stations in the deep.
In Rome, she was Mater Matuta. Ovid makes the identification in the Fasti (6.485-550) and ties it to the Matralia, her festival on June 11. Each year, freeborn matrons entered her temple in the Forum Boarium and prayed not for their own children but for their sisters'. Slaves were driven from the precinct with blows. The matrons brought offerings of testuacia, cakes baked in earthenware jars, and placed them in the goddess's hands.