FORDICIDIA. - A Roman magico-agrarian festival, dedicated to Tellure, celebrated on 15 April. In each of the thirty Curiae and on the Capitol (Ovidio, Fast., IV, 633-36), in the presence of the pontiffs and the Vestals, a pregnant cow (bos forde) was sacrificed; from it the servants of the Vestals extracted the fetus, which was burned, and its ashes were kept by the Vestals themselves for the rite of purification on 21 April, the festival of the Parilie, together with the blood of the horse sacrificed on the preceding Ides of October.
The magical significance of the rite is evident: vegetation must emerge from the bosom of Mother Earth, as the fetus from the womb of the sacrificed cow (Ovidio, loc. cit., 671-72). Tradition attributed the institution of this festival to Numa, at a time of difficulty for agriculture and pastoralism, thus interpreting the oracle of Fauno, which had decreed that Tellure must be appeased by sacrificing to her two lives in a single victim. Certainly, the rite originally had a magical value intended to bring about, by sympathy, the birth of the earth—that is, vegetation and livestock—through the sacrifice of an animal that was truly fertile. The sacrifice continued to be celebrated in the Curiae and on the Capitol even when a temple was dedicated to Tellure in the Carine in 271 B.C. Alongside the form F. there are also Fordicalia (Giovanni Lido, De mens., 4, 49), Hordicalia (Vocrone, De re rust., 2, 5, 6), and Hordicidia (Festo, Epit., p. 102).