FORDICIDIA. - It is a Roman magical-agrarian festival, dedicated to Tellus, which was celebrated on April 15. In each of the thirty Curiae and on the Capitoline (Ovid, Fast., IV, 633-36), in the presence of the pontiffs and the Vestals, a pregnant cow (bos forda) was sacrificed, from which the servants of the Vestals extracted the fetus, which was burned, and the ashes were kept by the same Vestals as a rite of lustration on April 21, the festival of the Parilia, 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 womb of Mother Earth, as the fetus from the belly of the sacrificed cow (Ovid, loc. cit., 671-72). Tradition attributed the institution of this festival to Numa, in times difficult for agriculture and for pastoralism, thus interpreting the oracle of Faunus, who had decreed that Tellus 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 a truly fertile animal. The sacrifice continued to be celebrated in the Curiae and on the Capitoline even when a temple was dedicated to Tellus in the Carinae, in 271 B.C. Alongside the form F. there is also Fordicalia (John Lydus, De mens., 4, 49), Hordicalia (Varro, De re rust., 2, 5, 6) and Hordicidia (Festus, Epit., p. 102).
Bibliography
Alberto Galleti