"The Lucaria and the Burning of the Temple of Artemis" / "Celtic Tree Magic: Ogham Lore and Druid Mysteries"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
July 21
The Lucaria and the Burning of the Temple of Artemis
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In approximately 390 BCE, a defeated
Roman army fled a catastrophic battlefield loss to the Gauls and scattered into
a dense grove of trees between the Via Salaria and the Tiber, hiding among the
trunks until the danger passed.
Whatever they did or didn’t promise
the spirits of that grove in exchange for their lives, Rome kept commemorating
it for the next several centuries, on July 19 and again on July 21, in a
festival called the Lucaria. By the time of Julius Caesar, nobody left in the
city could say for certain what the festival was actually for. And on this same
date, centuries earlier and an ocean away in the Greek city of Ephesus, a man
burned down one of the Seven Wonders of the World for no reason except that he
wanted his name remembered forever.
Today, we visit two distinct events
within occult history: a city that forgot why it was still celebrating
something, and a man who was willing to destroy a temple to a goddess so that
he wouldn’t be forgotten at all.
A Festival of Mysterious Origin
The Lucaria takes its name
from lucus, the Latin word for a sacred grove, and it appears clearly on
Rome’s oldest surviving religious calendars, including the Fasti Amiterni from the reign of Tiberius. What makes it remarkable isn’t the ritual
itself—Romans thinning a grove would sacrifice a pig and recite a prayer,
preserved by Cato the Elder,
asking pardon from “whether thou be god or goddess to whom this grove is
dedicated.” What’s remarkable is that this deliberate anonymity wasn’t poetic
humility; it was actual uncertainty. The Roman antiquarian Varro, writing
in the first century BCE and normally exhaustive about cataloguing his own
culture’s festivals, simply left the Lucaria off his list entirely. He didn’t
know enough about it to include it. A festival old enough to be carved into
stone calendars had already outlived the memory of its own purpose by the time
of the men who were still required to celebrate it.
Later writers, uncomfortable with a
gap that large, did what people in every culture eventually do with an
unexplained holiday: they backfilled it with a story. The Augustan-era
grammarian Verrius Flaccus
connected the Lucaria directly to that Gallic disaster at the Battle of the Allia, fought on July 18, just one day before the festival’s first observance claiming
the grove between the Via Salaria and the Tiber was the very thicket the
survivors hid in. It’s a tidy story, and it may well be true. But scholars have
since noted it reads a lot like the explanation Romans gave for a similar
festival, the Poplifugia,
earlier that same month—which suggests both stories may be aetiology rather
than history: the kind of after-the-fact myth a culture builds to give a shape
to a ritual whose real origins were already lost to time.
A Man on the Wrong Side of History
On the other side of the
Mediterranean, and centuries earlier, July 21 marks a very different kind of
forgetting-in-reverse…
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In 356 BCE, the magnificent Temple of Artemis at Ephesus (funded in part by the fabulously wealthy King Croesus, designed by the architect Chersiphron, and celebrated as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World) burned to the ground. The arsonist, a man named Herostratus, made no attempt to flee. Under torture, he freely admitted his motive: he wanted his name to be remembered forever, and burning down one of the most famous buildings on earth seemed like a reliable way to guarantee it. The horrified Ephesians tried to make sure he got the opposite. They executed him and passed a formal decree—a damnatio memoriae—forbidding anyone from ever speaking or writing his name again, under penalty of death. (Whoops!)
The historian Theopompus recorded it anyway, not long after
the fact, and the name has survived in Strabo, Plutarch, Cicero, and Aulus
Gellius ever since—giving the world an actual term, “herostratic fame,” for
exactly the kind of notoriety Herostratus was chasing: fame purchased through
destruction rather than achievement.
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Ancient tradition adds one more flourish worth mentioning: Plutarch’s Life of Alexander records the belief that the temple burned on the very night Alexander the Great was born in Macedonia, with Artemis supposedly too occupied overseeing the birth to protect her own temple. It’s a wonderful piece of storytelling, and it was already being repeated in antiquity—but it’s exactly the kind of poetic coincidence ancient biographers loved to attach to great men after the fact, and no contemporary source ties the two events together with any real precision. The temple itself was rebuilt within Herostratus’s own lifetime, larger and more magnificent than before, and stood for nearly six more centuries until Gothic raiders finally destroyed it for good in 262 CE. (Today, it’s a swamp...)
With these two events, there lies a
real symmetry: Rome kept performing the Lucaria for centuries after it had
genuinely forgotten what the ritual meant—an entire culture continuing to honor
something it could no longer name, simply because forgetting felt worse than
continuing blindly. Herostratus did the opposite: he manufactured a permanent
name for himself specifically so he would never be allowed to be forgotten, and
the punishment designed to erase him instead preserved him better than almost
anything he could have built. Anonymity and infamy, it turns out, are two very
different strategies for surviving the passage of time. And on this one date in
the calendar, both of them happened to succeed.
OCCULT READS PRESENTS:
DAILY OCCULT REVIEW
Modern Occultist is proud to present today’s “Daily
Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult
Reads... In honor of the Lucaria, and every practitioner who has ever
felt a pull toward the grove rather than the temple...
Celtic Tree Magic: Ogham Lore and Druid Mysteries
By
Danu Forest | Llewellyn Worldwide
It's worth being upfront about the
leap this pairing makes: the Lucaria was a Roman festival, not a Celtic one,
and its unnamed grove-spirits have nothing genealogically to do with the Ogham
tradition this book explores. But the underlying impulse, that certain patches
of earth deserve their own rites, their own permissions, their own careful
handling, runs through both traditions independently, and it felt more honest
to follow that thread than to manufacture a false historical link where none
exists. Danu Forest, a practicing druid and Celtic shaman for over two decades,
walks readers through the twenty-five trees of the Ogham system with the same
attentiveness the old Roman formula “si deus, si dea” was reaching for:
the recognition that a grove might be inhabited by something worth asking
permission from, even if you can't name it.
The book covers ogham divination,
charm work, and the practical business of building a relationship with a
specific tree or wood rather than the concept of “nature” in the abstract,
which is precisely the kind of grounded, unglamorous groundwork the Lucaria
itself seems to have once required before Rome forgot why. Readers looking to
build their own relationship with a particular grove, whether or not they ever
learn its resident spirit's true name, will find a genuinely practical starting
point here rather than another survey of Celtic mythology. Our thanks to
Llewellyn Worldwide, now well into its second century of publishing this kind
of grounded, hands-on Pagan scholarship, for keeping work like this in print
and accessible to readers who want technique alongside the folklore.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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