Vestal Virgin

Caesar was there, eighteen years old, hiding in the countryside, stripped of his priesthood, his wife's dowry, his inheritance.

It took the Vestal Virgins and two consular relatives to talk Sulla into sparing Caesar.

He watched his father-in-law Cinna's system be replaced by Sulla's system.

He learned the same lesson Sulla had taught.

This distinction would persist in their respective language branches, Indo-European and Indo-Iranian.

Per the author, in western Indo-European branches, the spirit of the domestic hearth was female, like Hestia or the Vestal Virgins, while in Indo-Iranian it was male, like the fire god Agni.

Western Indo-European mythologies also included strong female deities, like Queen Mob and the Valkyries, whereas in Indo-Iranian, the Furies of War were the male Maruts.

In the East, elite graves were mainly male, though some held females dressed for battle, while in the West, women and men were equally represented.

Now when I think of Virgo, I think of a few images.

I think of the Vestal Virgin.

Those are the young virgins who tend the fire and the community hearth at the temples and the sites of great prayer and initiation from ancient Greece and Rome.

And the Vestal Virgin is this image of the divine feminine who has been unsullied.

And when I say unsullied, I mean unspoiled from responsibility, from other people's needs, right? She is a open vessel of maiden goddess energy, and she is able to openly move the spirit through her.

And so these young women were thought to have especially great powers when it came to tending sacred sites.

No matter if we, you know, go through three marriages or, you know, if we If we never marry, it's not about the literalness of marriage or sex, right? It's about something deeper than that and a magic that comes from that.

Now you look at other interesting intimations of Virgo archetypally, like the Vestal Virgins, an interesting Virgo archetype, the...

the the sort of sexual wholeness or fidelity that's connected to the magical power of an empire that's a crazy story that's like that's if you've ever learned about the vestal virgin so really interesting i mean apart from the literal historical analysis as an archetypal phenomenon that the magical power of the Vestal Virgins keeping the hearth fire of Rome alive was like, that that even existed.

It's pretty wild.

I mean, can you imagine if that was a thing right now? So anyway, when we're thinking about Virgo, so much of what we're thinking about is about that wholeness, that purity, that magic, something almost like it's like angelic it's in we all become human but we all have something that is otherworldly and like we're all like little cherubim cherubim yeah okay all right we've labored that long enough so let's get into my list of five things to watch for given this sort of magical theme of wholesome childlike magic Number one is initiation.

So where Hestia for the Greeks still retained a sense of this privacy, of this focus on the individual home, even though there was that connection with the city hearth, to the Romans, this cult of Vesta became huge.

There were always six Vestal Virgins who tended Vesta's sacred flame in this main sacred temple, this hearth.

And Vesta herself was represented as the flame.

The flame itself was Vesta.

And so that flame represented the continuity and well-being of Rome.

These priestesses of Vesta, who came to be known as the Vestal Virgins, would be chosen as children around the age of six or 10, and then they would serve for 30 years.

And in that time, they could never marry.

They had to remain celibate.

It's during this time on the road, quite possibly, that Caesar starts to rethink his legacy, and most likely goes about redrawing his will.

On his return, the scroll is lodged in the sacred temple of Vesta and its guardians, the Vestal Virgins.

They are Rome's state archivists, keepers of all important documentation.

The will is dated September 45 BC, six months before Caesar's death.