August 13^th marks the beginning of the Nemoralia (August 13^th – August 15^th), a festival originally concerned with the Arician expression of Diana Nemorensis (Diana of Nemi). In fact there is a confluence of holy observances in the Roman system on August 13^th, of which the observance of Nemoralia is but one. Diana is a notable figure within Roman theology in that She was a common deity to all Latin peoples (Fowler writes that She was second only to Jupiter Latiaris, Jupiter of the Latins, in uniting communities together, see W. Warde Fowler Festivals, pg 198) and represented the myriad groups, even before Her Hellenization and conflation with Artemis. Accordingly, She (in either the Arician emanation or whichever other expression or representative localization scholars wish to argue) did not undergo evocatio into the Roman state religion and was not ritualistically invited or transposed into it. As a result, Diana’s temple was erected outside the pomerium on the Aventine hill, effectively a universal Latin deity that was considered foreign to the Roman system, and representing the commons (and slaves alike).

Initially observed solely at Nemi (“The Mirror of Diana”) from the Bronze Age (~6^th C. BCE – 3^rd C. BCE, see C.M.C Green’s Roman Religion and the Cult of Diana at Aricia for more) until its wider adoption in the Roman religious system throughout Italy after the 1^st century BCE. In its original form the observance of the Nemoralia was hyper-localized and ultimately a pilgrimatic one, where individual supplicants would make their way to the cultic site for religious observances. Those observances are well documented elsewhere, with historic authors like Statius, Ovid and Propertius all adding their voices to the history of the celebration. Diana’s religious sanctuary at Nemi was originally a sacred grove, with the later temple being built built “in a particularly archaic Etruscan style” around 300 BCE (Vitruvius, Architecture, 4.8.4-4.8.5) and served as the seat of the goddess until the Christian period when it was gradually abandoned.

The Nemoralia can be seen as a historic example of an initially specific, localized cult attaining a regional character, perhaps fitting to the character of Diana as representative-of-the-people, a historical incidence which should be observed by practitioners of contemporary Western polytheistic religion. Discussion of “localization” within polytheistic discourse has come about over the years, with an emphasis on tailoring religious observances to one’s local cultural and bio-regional character’s in order to intrinsically link worship to the day-to-day of each individual practitioner. Crudely, this is done in order for modernist practitioners to re-engage in a traditionally immanent expression of divinity and to re-enchant their worldviews along the lines of these pre-Christian religious beliefs that inform them.

It is common to discuss the transmission and adoption of deities and Their associated cults among geographic (local, regional) or cultural (social, political) lines within both historic and – increasingly as it applies to the individual – within contemporary polytheism. The role which acculturation, syncretism and cultural transmission played in the pre-Christian world, either through trade or through aggression / subsequent conquest and settlement, is well articulated. However, in the polytheist community, there is a seeming reticence among polytheists to discuss exportation or adoption of a religious observance which appears to be intrinsically tied to identified cultic spaces. In those discussions it is typical for such actions to be portrayed as logistically inappropriate or even nonsensical – after all, if one cannot travel to a sanctuary which hosts the observance and is the cultic site of a deity in question (as a superficial glance of Nemoralia would appear to fulfill), then such actions are improper.

This can ostensibly been seen and reinforced through understandings of the apparent inflexibility of sacred space in various religious systems, without necessarily realizing that spatial allocations to divinity were an inconsistent and fluid semiotic environment (Lipka, Roman Gods, pg. 11). Within discussion of the concept of “cult place”, “place” dominates (Cf. Estienne ‘Statues’, pg. 96), and this gets transposed on to popular views on the importance of religious sites and their iconography, perhaps unknowingly influencing contemporary polytheistic thinking.

A key takeaway from studying the history of traditional polytheisms (or even contemporary world religions which are polytheistic or otherwise decentralized) is that “and yet..”, the concept of exception, will invariably arise and make any concrete declaration or “rule of tradition” conditional or impractical. These systems are fluid, as the incidence of the popularity of Nemoralia shows, given that the observance was transported away from the sacred sanctuary of Diana to other temples to Her around Italy.

To take a step away from historicity, can it be said for certain that (for the purposes of contemporary polytheists) these observances on this day around the region are celebrating specifically the Nemoralia as envisioned and enacted at Nemi, as opposed to a wider religious ritual emphasizing Diana Herself? Perhaps to a point (irrespective of the tradition of Rex Nemorensis, at least). If one were to indulge in a bit of cosmological mechanical inquest to make the defense: it is well known that various scholars of religion position ritual engagements as, particularly, the suspension of so-called “profane time” in order to enter a state of ritual and religious or temporal purity and, also, to draw two cosmological points together in transposition. The engagement of the ritual act manifests the sacred, results in a “break in the homogeneity of space” and the engagement of the First Time whence the action initially occurred, where it reproduces the work of the Gods (Eliade, Space, pg. 21). Simply put, it can be argued that engaging in a ritual for Nemoralia can and will superimpose temporal religious qualities and bring the ritualistic participants together.

Suffice, the expansion of the Nemoralia from its original cultic environs represents the incidence of a transposition of both Deity and of ritual observance and a metamorphosis of intention that does not diminish the initial spirit of the observance. Contemporary polytheists, so long divorced from the source-material which they are indebted in their (re)constructions, habitually apply a “top-down” approach to understanding religious expression, painting with wide brushes and speaking to macro-level changes (that magistrates or the “elite” or “state” were exclusively responsible for the nature of local cults and sanctuaries and the lived religious experience of a reason, corollary to Haeussler, “Religious Individualisation”, pg. 26) which ignores incidences of diversification of thought or enactment.

Where the sanctuary of Diana Nemorensis sat on the crossroads south of Rome on the Via Appia, giving the cult and its rituals the means to spread throughout a growing Republic, modern polytheistic thought sits upon an infinitely more complex thoroughfare of instantaneous electronic communications, which has enabled the sphere of modern religious awareness to expand further than previously possible. Contemporary polytheists ought not to write off historical observances for fear of not being able to access the cultic sites (many of which no longer exist in any meaningful capacity for use).

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References:

Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Williard Trask. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1987.

Estienne, Sylvia. ‘Statues de dieux “isolées” et lieux de culte: l’exemple de Rome’, CCG 8 (1997)

Fowler, Warde W. Roman Festivals of the Republic: An Introduction to the Study of the Religion of the Romans, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1899.

Green, C.M.C. Roman Religion and the Cult of Diana at Aricia, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Haeussler, Ralph and Anthony King. Religious Individualisation: Archaeological, Iconographic and Epigraphic Case studies from the Roman World, Philadelphia: Oxbow Books, 2023.

Lipka, Michael. Roman Gods: A Conceptual Approach, Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2009.

Vitruvius, De Architectura, trans: Joseph Gwilt.