The gate of the year

View of the temple of Vesta in Rome, dating to about the II century B.C.
Vesta was one of the greatest and oldest divinities in the Roman world, later identified with the Greek Hestia. The names of both goddesses are etymologically related, because they derive from the same root, meaning “to burn”: both Vesta and Hestia personified the fire burning into the hearth. The sanctuary of Vesta, unlike all the other temples of quadrangular shape, was circular: such characteristic was not due to the identification of the goddess wsith the earth, as some authors had sustained since Antiquity, but because her temple represented the “hearth of the city” (Schilling-Guittard 2005c).
To the service of the goddess were devoted the six Vestal Virgins, the only full-titled priestesses in ancient Rome. They had as their main duty that of preserving the fire which burned continually in Vesta’s sanctuary, being careful that it should never be extinguished. Such fire was extinguished only on March 1, to be rekindled as a “new fire” at the beginning of a new year. The goddess, who during every invocation was invoked at the end, was a divine figure who escaped the anthropomorphism of the other gods, and she was represented exclusively by her fire (ignis Vestae).

[Image: http://library.artstor.org/library/]




Seasonal Cycles

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Vesta's Fire View of the temple of Vesta in Rome, dating to about the II century B.C. Vesta was one of the greatest and oldest divinities in the Roman world, later identified with the Greek Hestia. The names of both goddesses are etymologically related, because they derive from the same root, meaning “to burn”: both Vesta and Hestia personified the fire burning into the hearth. The sanctuary of Vesta, unlike all the other temples of quadrangular shape, was circular: such characteristic was not due to the identification of the goddess wsith the earth, as some authors had sustained since Antiquity, but because her temple represented the “hearth of the city” (Schilling-Guittard 2005c). To the service of the goddess were devoted the six Vestal Virgins, the only full-titled priestesses in ancient Rome. They had as their main duty that of preserving the fire which burned continually in Vesta’s sanctuary, being careful that it should never be extinguished. Such fire was extinguished only on March 1, to be rekindled as a “new fire” at the beginning of a new year. The goddess, who during every invocation was invoked at the end, was a divine figure who escaped the anthropomorphism of the other gods, and she was represented exclusively by her fire (ignis Vestae). [Image: http://library.artstor.org/library/]