FORDICIDIA. - This was a Roman magical-agricultural festival dedicated to Tellus, celebrated on April 15. In each of the thirty curiae and on the Capitoline Hill (Ovid, *Fasti*, IV, 633-36), in the presence of the pontiffs and the Vestal Virgins, a pregnant cow (*bos forda*) was sacrificed. The slaves of the Vestals then extracted the fetus, which was burned, and the ashes were preserved by the Vestals themselves as a lustration rite on April 21, the festival of the Parilia, together with the blood of the horse sacrificed at the previous Ides of October.
The magical significance of the rite is evident: vegetation must emerge from the womb of the Earth Mother, just as the fetus emerges from the belly of the sacrificed cow (Ovid, *loc. cit.*, 671-72). Tradition attributed the institution of this festival to Numa, during a time of hardship for agriculture and livestock, interpreting Faunus’ oracle which had decreed that Tellus should be appeased by sacrificing two lives in a single victim. Certainly, the rite originally had a magical purpose intended to sympathetically induce the birth of the earth—that is, vegetation and livestock—through the sacrifice of a truly fertile animal. The sacrifice continued to be celebrated in the curiae and on the Capitoline even after a temple dedicated to Tellus was built in the Carinae in 271 BC.
Alongside the form *F.*, the forms *Fordicalia* (John the Lydian, *De mens.*, 4, 49), *Hordicalia* (Varro, *De re rust.*, 2, 5, 6), and *Hordicidia* (Festus, *Epit.*, p. 102) are also attested.