Hail to Juno of the wild fig-tree!
Hail too to Pales or the Pales!
And hail to Consus!
We turn now from the celestial divine to our fertile earth.
We thank for our bounty and the increasing harvest.
As we have sought to cleanse our community, may we now be purified as well!
Salve Iuno Caprotina!
Salve Pales!
Salve Conse!

 

* * * * *

 

On the Nones of July, the people who carried off the threatening pollutions on the Poplifugia two days earlier are themselves lustrated in an act of ritual purification. Once again, the ceremonial cleansing is in keeping with the essential nature of the tempus nefastum. We do not know who would be the lustrating agent but can guess it to be the rex sacrorum, the ancillae or handmaidens, or possibly the women of the community circling the men and vice versa. The women sacrificed to Juno in the Campus Martius beneath a caprificus. The Nonae Caprotinae are an early harvest celebration.

Consequently, the day is also connected to the harvest-god Consus who possessed an underground altar in the Circus Maximus – this being one of the three days in which Consus’ altar was uncovered so that offerings could be made. We may conjecture that Consus is one of the Pales – Consus being the underworld/underground twin of the upperworld Mars. The Fasti Antiates Maiores, the only Republican era calendar we have, indicates through additamentai that the Nones of July are also dedicated to the two Pales. Here again we have an instance of the divine twins – usually male, possibly a male and a female, although Dumézil considered both twins to be female.

The dedication to the two Pales on the Nonae Caprotinae possibly suggest a shift in focus from Jupiter who has reached his fullest stature to the twins Mars and Quirinus and their connection to the fecundity of the earth. Nominally, however, the Nonae Caprotinae emphasise the female figure of Juno who, when paired as a feminine equivalent of Jupiter who has been honoured on the preceding Poplifugia, establishes an alternating male-female pattern that can be conjectured for the remaining feriae of the month. In the palimpsest reflection of the festivals of June, the Nonae Caprotinae of July, in honour of Juno who most likely and seminally is a goddess of the morning’s first light, echo the Matralia to the Mater Matuta, the dawn-goddess.