Marble head of the goddess Feronia, from Punta di Leano, Terracina (Latium, Italy), dating to the II century B.C. and now in the National Archaeological Museum (Museo Archeologico Nazionale d’Abruzzo), Chieti, Italy.
Feronia was an ancient Italic goddess, who protected the woodlands and vegetation. Her main sanctuary was located near a sacred grove (Lucus Feroniae) in the Tiber valley, not far from the city of Capena, while a second centre of her worship was near Terracina. The goddess’s cult was later introduced in Rome, where a temple was dedicated to Feronia in the Campus Martius, the remains of which are still visible in the sacred area of Largo Torre Argentina. According to Dumézil, the goddess Feronia represented the yet wild powers of nature, which are however placed at the service of mankind, to guarantee abundance of food, health and fecundity: “custodian of immense stocks of life, she fecundates and heals”. The excavations of the sanctuary at Capena have brought to light several votive objects reproducing parts of the human body, infants in swaddling cloths, and working animals, confirming in this way the healing powers attributed to the goddess. Feronia received also the first fruits of the harvest, not as a specific deity of growth, like Ceres, but as an acknowledgment of her function in the transformation of waste grounds into cultivated fields. This wilderness aspect is revealed also by the name of the goddess, deriving from the term ferus, whose primary meaning is “uncultivated, undomesticated”. The sacred grove of Capena was located in the neighbourhood of Mount Soratte, where the devotees of the god Soranus (the Hirpi Sorani) dedicated themselves to an ecstatic ritual which implied probably the ceremonial transformation into wolves, so much so that Strabo (V, 2, 9) attributed to Feronia herself such a ritual (Dumézil 1974, p. 416-422).

[Image: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feronia]