Suffimes

As Suffimen a ritual cleansing agent is referred to, which was of ancient Rome used in religious cult.

In a general sense, suffimen means something like "incense".

Specifically, the term refers to a detergent used at the Roman festival of Parilia on April 21st. The main source for this is Ovid , Fasti IV, 731-734:

i, pete virginea, populus, suffimen ab ara; Vesta dabit, Vestae munere purus eris. sanguis equi suffimen erit vitulique favilla, tertia res durae culmen inane fabae.

Go, people, get suffimen from the virgin altar; the goddess Vesta will give it, through Vesta's gift you will be pure. The suffimen will be horse blood and ashes from the calf, the third component: empty stalk of hard bean.

The exact preparation, composition and use of the suffimen is unclear in many respects. According to Fasti IV, 640, the ashes of the calves came from the unborn calves of the thirty pregnant cows that were sacrificed six days earlier on the feast of Fordicidia (April 15) to Tellus , the goddess of the nourishing earth. The unborn calves were burned by the oldest vestal virgin.

With regard to horse blood, the majority of research assumes that it is the blood of the October horse sacrificed on October 15 of the previous year . However, this conclusion is not mandatory.

The least clear is the use of the suffimen . The assumption that a mixture of blood, ashes and bean straw was used for smoking has already been rejected by Mannhardt, who, like later authors, assumes that the mixture of blood and ash was thrown on piles of burning bean straws to generate smoke.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ z. B. Lactantius , De ave phoenice 84: "suffimen acanthi"
2. ^ "Rien ne prouve que le suffimen des Parilia contenait quelque résidu du précieux sang." Robert Turcan in: Revue de l 'histoire des religions 191 (1977), p. 97 . In the essay Zu Properz 4, 1, 17 ff. (In: Rheinisches Museum vol. 112 (1969), pp. 37-48 ) Udo W. Scholz put forward the thesis of horse castration in connection with the Magna Mater cult.
3. ↑ “How the sufficient was administered is not clear”, Jonathan Kirkpatrick: Purity and Pollution ( Memento of the original from February 17, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (2003; RTF ; 109 kB). 
4. ^ Wilhelm Mannhardt: Forest and field cults. Vol. II: Ancient forest and field cults from northern European tradition explained , 1877, p. 313
5. ^ W. Warde Fowler: The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic , Macmillan, London / New York 1899, p. 83; EE Burriss: Taboo, Magic, Spirits: A Study of Primitive Elements in Roman Religion , Macmillan, New York 1931, chap. IV.