Hail Jupiter!
We recognise now the start of light’s decrease
And carry away today whatever negativities may be consequent upon it.
We celebrate the ascent of summertide’s heat and the joyous times to follow!
Let us begin our search for the numinous that will steadily replace the luminous in inner contemplation and carry us increasingly henceforth to the solar rebirth.
Lord of light and divine mystery, we are yours.
Salve Iuppiter!

 

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Apart from the new year’s day of the Matronalia on the first of March, the Poplifugia are the only feriae to fall before the Nones. This ‘flight of the people’ occurs the same distance after the solstice as the Ides of June do before it. And as all Ides are sacred to Jupiter, the Poplifugia carry the designation of feriae Iovi in the Fasti Amiternini. The balance of the July Poplifugia to the June Ides becomes clear.

We no longer have even the meagre bits of information concerning the Roman Festival Calendar that can be gleaned from Ovid’s Fasti. Consequently, we are now more dependent on speculation in understanding the Roman holidays. But whatever the sacrifice might have been for this day, we imagine that the people then left the city (whether the Capitol, the Palantine, the Roman Quadrata or Pomoerium) for the day as a collective act by which whatever supernatural pollution could conceivably threaten the lord of light and the community which he protects is carried beyond the centrum bounds. The days are now becoming shorter. Conceivably, the day is one for picnicking but short of wanton abandon as the Poplifugia constitute the midpoint of the tempus nefastum, a period of cleansing that is once again nominally connected to the solar ascent – now, however, as a concluding and balancing refrain.

As a festival to a male deity, the Poplifugia with their connection to the Nones that follow in two days commence an alternating male-female pattern that continues through the rest of the month.