January 24: The Festival of Sementivae

January 24 is the festival of Sementivae, which is a planting festival that honors Ceres and Tellus. Ceres, of course, is the Roman grain goddess, and Tellus is the earth itself. This festival was held in two parts — the first part was held from January 24 to January 26, honoring Tellus, and was a season of sowing the fields. The second part, which began a week later on February 2, honored Ceres as the goddess of agriculture. Ceres is the Roman variant of Demeter, who is strongly tied with the changing of the seasons.

This whole celebration centered around praying for a good harvest in the coming seasons — after all, if you were planting in the spring, you wanted to make sure crops were going to be abundant later in the year. Normal business was put on hold for a day while everyone prayed, rituals were held, and most Romans went out of their way to make sure that Ceres was pleased and would bless the community with a bountiful grain harvest.

Remember, in ancient Rome, much of life was tied to the agricultural cycles. If you didn’t have grain, you didn’t have bread, and that meant hundreds of thousands of people were at risk for starvation. In fact, during a particularly heinous famine around 496 b.c.e., priests figured out that Ceres should probably have a temple, so one was built on the Aventine, and it became a hub of religious activity. The discovery of wheat, or spelt, was attributed to Ceres, but she also got credit for a number of other agricultural discoveries, including the idea that oxen could be yoked to a plough to make sowing a lot more efficient. She was known to have the power of fertility — both for crops and for livestock — and so each year at her festival, she was presented with offerings of spelt and a pregnant sow. Ceres also had another festival, later in the spring, called the Cerealia, which involved games, theatricals, and a ton of religious observations.

Thanks to Ceres and her gifts of edible, delicious grains, we now have the word cereal in our vocabulary.