Before the marble temples of imported Greek deities dominated the Roman skyline, the farmers and shepherds of archaic Latium revered the ancient woodland spirits who guarded their flocks, springs, and forest clearings. At the heart of that rustic Italian pantheon stood the horned prophetic woodland god Faunus (whom the Romans later equated with the Greek god Pan) and his mysterious, deeply venerated female counterpart: Fauna. Worshiped simultaneously as a wild spirit of prophetic healing and as the ultimate model of female chastity under her secret sacred title Bona Dea (“The Good Goddess”), Fauna presided over one of the most strictly guarded, women-only religious mysteries in the history of ancient Rome.
Etymology of “The Kind One” and Dual Identity With Bona Dea
In Latin philology, both the names Faunus and Fauna derive from the verb favere, meaning “to favor, befriend, bless, or nurture” (or alternately from fari, “to speak/prophesy,” because their voices echoed through lonely forest groves to warn travelers and predict harvests). Just as the botanical world took its scientific name Flora from the Roman goddess of blooming flowers, the eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus borrowed the name of the Roman woodland goddess Fauna in his 1745 treatise Fauna Suecica to coin our modern biological term for the entire animal kingdom (fauna).
In Roman mythography—recorded by Varro, Macrobius, Lactantius, and Plutarch—Fauna occupied a fluid genealogical relationship to King Faunus of Latium, described variously as his sister, his wife, or his daughter:
- Fenta Fauna and Fatua: In her prophetic aspect, she was called Fatua (from fari, to speak fate). While her husband or brother Faunus delivered divine oracles exclusively to men inside sacred groves, Fauna delivered prophecies and healing cures exclusively to women.
- Why Her True Name Was Taboo to Men: According to Roman religious custom, Fauna was so fiercely modest during her earthly life in the royal palace that she never once stepped outside the women’s quarters, never looked upon the face of any man other than her husband, and never allowed any strange man to hear her name spoken aloud. Because of this extreme modesty, Roman worshippers considered it taboo to pronounce her personal name Fauna in public—calling her instead by the reverent euphemism Bona Dea (“The Good Goddess”).
The Tragic Myth of the Myrtle Rod and the Jug of Wine
Why were both wine and myrtle branches strictly banned from Fauna’s altars unless disguised under secret code words? Roman writers preserved a poignant, dark domestic myth to explain the ritual.
In archaic Rome, women were strictly forbidden by patriarchal custom from drinking unmixed fermented wine. One day inside the palace, Fauna secretly found a full clay amphora of pure wine and drank it down until she became intoxicated. When her husband Faunus discovered what she had done, he flew into a blind rage and beat her with rods cut from a myrtle bush until she died from the blows. Immediately overcome with horror and grief at having killed his virtuous wife—or in a parallel variant, after Faunus tried to force himself upon Fauna by plying her with wine and beating her with myrtle when she resisted, only to transform himself into a snake—a remorseful Faunus deified Fauna as an immortal goddess of the earth and women’s health.
To honor her memory forever at her sacred ceremonies:
- Banning Myrtle: Although every other sweet-smelling flower and green bough in Italy was used to garland her sanctuary, bringing a single twig of myrtle inside her temple was strictly forbidden because it had been the instrument of her suffering.
- Calling Wine “Milk” and the Jug a “Honey-Pot”: When the priestesses brought a covered vessel of sacrificial wine into her sanctuary for the goddess, they were forbidden to use the word “wine”—covering the vessel with a cloth and calling the liquid lac (“milk”) and the wine-jar a mellarium (“honey-pot”)!
The Temple on the Aventine and the December Women-Only Rites
Fauna (as Bona Dea) was worshiped at two major festivals in the Roman calendar. The first took place on May first at her state sanctuary at the foot of the rocky Aventine Hill, which stood right beside a sacred medicinal pharmacy garden where tame, non-venomous snakes slithered freely across the marble floors and priestesses dispensed herbal healing remedies to sick citizens of both sexes.
Her most famous ritual, however, occurred on the night of December fourth inside the home of Rome’s highest magistrate (the Consul or Praetor), hosted by the magistrate’s wife alongside the Vestal Virgins. On that night, every single male had to vacate the house: not only the Consul himself and his male servants, but even male pet dogs and male mice were carried outside, and cloths were draped over every male portrait statue and painting on the walls! Only once in Roman history was that sacred boundary violated—in December 62 BC, when the reckless young patrician Publius Clodius Pulcher dressed himself in a woman’s yellow saffron robe and harpist’s wig to sneak into Julius Caesar’s house during the Bona Dea rites to seduce Caesar’s wife Pompeia, getting caught when a servant maid asked him a question and heard his deep male voice, triggering the greatest religious and political trial of the late Roman Republic.
