Hail Jupiter!
Hail Mars!
Today we honour the lord of light and the lord of the earth’s fertility as ultimately one.
We seek the most ancient roots of our ancestors’ understanding of the divine.
We ritually enact the dynamic of competition to exalt the excellent.
May our sacred hearth be impregnated by sanguine essence
And victory proclaimed from appropriate heights!
Yet keep us mindful of humility and the cleansing of pollution in the name of our gods!
Salve Iuppiter!
Salve Marte!

 

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Along with the feriae Iovi, the Ides of October include the rite of the equus October. Originally, the horse race of this ritual took place in the Campus Martius, the ‘Field of Mars’. The equine sacrifice is an ancient Indo-European rite. In Rome, it came to consist of the killing of the right-hand horse of the winning pair with the spear of Mars – presumably at the ara Martis. The severed tail of the horse was allowed to drip blood onto the focus of the Regia. This blood may have subsequently been collected and used in the Vestals’ februa casta. The head of the slain horse was decorated with cakes and then fought over by the residents of the Velia (Via Sacra) and the Subura, the city-wards of the Palatine-Esquiline community. If the former won, the horse’s head was fixed to the wall of the Regia; if the latter won, it was hung on the turris Mamilia. We do not understand the significance of this contest. The Regia was the royal house. The castle-tower of the Subura belonged to the Turrini branch of the gens Mamilii which may have originally ranked second in importance to the royal house.

The day itself is the central point in the festival novemdiale sacrum that embraces the Meditrinalia and Armilustrium. The use of the horse’s blood with the ashes of the unborn calves of the Fordicidia link Mars with the earth-goddess Tellus. Both are essentially terrestrial figures. The October equiria connect the equus October rite with the horse-races of the Equirria of February and March. The implication behind the celebrations suggests the October Ides as a ritual counterpoint to the new year’s period of the Roman sacral year. The association of both Jupiter and Mars to this day may be a Numan indication of the ultimate identity between the two deities. In fact, the calendar sequence of the month from the Meditrinalia (to Jupiter) to the Fontinalia (to Fons as an indigitation of Janus, the bipolar deity) and then to the equus October of the Ides (to Mars) is a fuller calendrical formalisation of the same deific identity suggested by the Ides themselves. In the Iguvium inscription to Jovis, the deity has the same epithet that is otherwise associated with Mars, namely, Grabovius or Gradivus – perhaps originally derived from the verb grandiri (‘to become big; to grow’) and suggests the deity as the ‘oak-god’. The relation of Mars to Jupiter may be that of the active thunder and weather god to the deity of celestial light – paralleled by that of the Nordic Thor to Tyr / Germanic Donar to Tiwaz, Vedic Indra to Dyaus and Lithuanian Perkunas to Dievas. According to Mannhardt, the equus October rites concern the vegetation-spirit that, following the harvest, is to be ceremonially confined to the underworld with the conclusion of the growing season.

With the October ‘Equirria’, the Salii or priests of Mars (and Quirinus) may have once again begun their leaping processions with the sacred ancilia or shields of Mars – a rite that concluded then with the Armilustrium on the 19th of the month.