Liber - Festivals, Cults and Priesthoods

Festivals, Cults and Priesthoods

Liber was closely, often interchangeably identified with Bacchus, Dionysius and their mythology but was not entirely subsumed by them; in the late Republican era, Cicero could insist on the "non-identity of Liber and Dionysus" and describe Liber and Libera as children of Ceres. Liber, like his Aventine companions, carried various aspects of his older cults into official Roman religion. He protected various aspects of agriculture and fertility, including the vine and the "soft seed" of its grapes, wine and wine vessels, and male fertility and virility. As his divine power was incarnate in the vine, grape and wine, he was offered the first, sacred pressing of the grape-harvest, known as sacrima.

The wine produced under Liber's patronage was his gift to humankind, and therefore fit for profane (non-religious) use: it could be mixed with old wine for the purposes of fermentation, and otherwise adulterated and diluted according to taste and circumstance. For religious purposes, it was ritually "impure" (vinum spurcum). Roman religious law required that the libations offered to the gods in their official cults should be vinum inferium, a strong wine of pure vintage, also known as temetum. It was made from the best of the crop, selected and pressed under the patronage of Rome's sovereign deity Jupiter and ritually purified by his flamen (senior priest). Liber's role in viniculture and wine-making was thus both complementary and subservient to Jupiter's.

Liber also personified male procreative power, which was ejaculated as the "soft seed" of human and animal semen. His temples held the image of a phallus; in Lavinium, this was the principal focus for his month-long festival, when according to St. Augustine, the "dishonourable member" was placed "on a little trolley" and taken in procession around the local crossroad shrines, then to the local forum for its crowning by an honourable matron. The rites ensured the growth of seeds and repelled any malicious enchantment (fascinatus) from fields.

Liber's festivals are timed to the springtime awakening and renewal of fertility in the agricultural cycle. In Rome, his annual Liberalia public festival was held on March 17. A portable shrine was carried through Rome's neighbourhoods (vici); Liber's aged, ivy-crowned priestesses offered honey cakes for sale, and offered sacrifice on behalf of those who bought them – the discovery of honey was credited to Liber-Bacchus. Embedded within Liberalia, more or less at a ritualistic level, were the various freedoms and rights attached to Roman ideas of virility as a divine and natural force. Young men celebrated their coming of age; they cut off and dedicated their first beards to their household Lares and if citizens, wore their first toga virilis, the "manly" toga – which Ovid, perhaps by way of poetic etymology, calls a toga libera (Liber's toga or "toga of freedom"). These new citizens registered their citizenship at the forum and were then free to vote, to leave their father's domus (household), choose a marriage partner and, thanks to Liber's endowment of virility, father their own children. Ovid also emphasises the less formal freedoms and rights of Liberalia; Liber was, after all, a god of wine. From his later place of exile, where he was sent for an unnamed offense against Augustus having to do with free speech,Ovid lamented the lost companionship of his fellow poets, who apparently saw the Liberalia as an opportunity for uninhibited talking.