Domain: Agriculture, grain, fertility, motherhood, harvest Symbol: Wheat, torch, cornucopia, poppies Greek Equivalent: Demeter
Overview
Ceres is the Roman goddess of agriculture, grain, fertility, and motherhood — the giver of grain to humankind and one of the deities most bound up with Rome's survival, since the bread of the city depended on her gift. She was credited with teaching mortals the arts of sowing, cultivating, and harvesting, and her name survives in the everyday word "cereal." Her mother's grief and her mother's law belong to her together: she is the great nurturing mother of the harvest and, in her sterner aspect as Ceres Legifera, "the Law-Giver," the goddess who bound settled agricultural life to law and order. She carries stalks of wheat, the cornucopia, poppies, a sickle, and a torch — the torch by which, in the inherited myth, she searched the world for her lost daughter Proserpina.
That myth she took over from the Greek Demeter: her daughter carried off by the lord of the dead, her wandering grief that laid the earth barren, and the compromise by which Proserpina returns for part of each year, so that the seasons turn between growth and dearth. Yet in Rome the story mattered less than the goddess's public function. Ceres was a civic and political deity above all, tightly woven into the life of the plebeian order.
Her worship makes this plain. The Cerealia, held from April 12th to 19th, was a week-long festival with games in the Circus Maximus and a curious rite in which foxes were released with burning torches tied to their tails — a ritual understood to ward blight and scorching heat from the ripening grain. With Liber and Libera she formed the Plebeian or Aventine Triad, whose temple on the Aventine Hill stood as the common people's counterpart to the patrician Capitoline Triad and became a rallying point of plebeian identity. The aediles who administered Rome's grain supply were attached to her cult, fusing her sacred authority with the practical, and politically explosive, business of feeding the city.
Against Demeter, then, Ceres leans away from the private drama of mother and daughter and toward the civic: a goddess of the plebs, of law, and of the grain dole. Her name endures not only in "cereal" but in the dwarf planet Ceres, the first and largest body discovered in the asteroid belt.
Related
- Demeter - Greek equivalent
- Proserpina - Daughter, carried off to the underworld
- The Empress - The Great Mother of the Major Arcana: grain, fertility, and harvest
- Roman Mythology Index