"The Meditrinalia: A Feast to the Goddess of Healing" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "Roman Wicca: Practicing Witchcraft With Roman Traditions and Mythology"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
September 30
The Meditrinalia: A Feast to the Goddess of Healing
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Modern Pagan calendars list September
30th as the Meditrinalia, an ancient Roman festival honoring Meditrina, goddess of medicine,
healing, and arcane pharmacopeia. It's a lovely image for an occult column to
run with, a goddess of magical medicine getting her due on the cusp of autumn.
There are two problems with it, and they compound each other in an unusually
interesting way: the date is wrong, and the goddess herself likely never
existed until Romans needed one to explain a festival whose real meaning had
already been forgotten.
Every ancient source that actually
survives agrees on the date, and it isn't this one…
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Every ancient source that actually survives agrees on the date, and it isn't this one. The Meditrinalia fell on October 11th, five days before the Ides of October, according to the Roman religious calendar known as the fasti, and every scholarly account from H.H. Scullard’s standard reference Festivals and Ceremonies of the Roman Republic down to the entries in Brill’s New Pauly places it there without disagreement. This is the same pattern this column has now traced through several September dates in a row, an old, uncited Pagan calendar compilation attaching a real ancient festival to the wrong day, and it's worth saying plainly again: the festival is genuine; however, the date circulating for it is not.
The Meditrinalia marked the
tasting of that year's new wine, mustum, mixed with wine from the previous
vintage and offered as a libation to the gods for the first time each year. The
Roman antiquarian Varro, writing
in the first century BCE, preserves the actual words Romans spoke while
performing the rite, a formula worth rendering here since it's the closest
thing we have to a genuine ancient spoken charm: vetus novum vinum bibo,
novo veteri morbo medeor, “I drink new and old wine; I am cured of new
and old sickness.” That's not decoration. It's a piece of documented ritual
speech, functioning exactly the way an incantation functions in any magical
tradition this column covers, words spoken specifically to activate the healing
property believed to reside in the substance being consumed.
The goddess is where the story gets genuinely strange, and where the popular modern account has the causality backward: Varro derives the festival's name from the Latin mederi, “to heal,” a plausible and widely accepted etymology given how directly the ritual formula ties new wine to cure. But little to nothing in the earliest sources ties the festival to any named deity at all; the Fasti Amiternini, one of the surviving inscribed Roman religious calendars, associates the day with Jupiter instead. The earliest writer to name a goddess called Meditrina specifically is the second-century grammarian Sextus Pompeius Festus, working centuries after the festival's origins had already gone obscure even to Romans themselves. Modern classical scholarship treats Meditrina as what's sometimes called a sondergott, a specialized deity invented after the fact to give a name and a face to a ritual whose original meaning nobody could quite explain anymore, essentially the reverse of the usual pattern. Rather than a goddess inspiring a festival in her honor, a festival’s name seems to have inspired a goddess to go with it. A single Roman relief of Meditrina does survive, from Gaul in the second century CE, proof that some worshippers eventually did picture her as a distinct figure worth carving in stone, whatever her origins.
The Meditrinalia sat within a genuine
cluster of Roman viticultural festivals spanning the agricultural year, the Vinalia Rustica in August marking the grape harvest
itself, the Meditrinalia in October marking the new wine's first taste,
and the Vinalia Urbana the following spring celebrating wine from the
previous year now fully matured. Read together, they trace a complete ritual
calendar built around fermentation and patience, a culture that treated the
wait between harvest and drinkable wine as something worth marking with formal
libation and spoken cure rather than simply waiting it out. Whether Meditrina
herself started as a genuine early goddess whose worship simply left few
written traces, or was invented whole cloth by a culture that had forgotten why
it already poured wine and spoke of healing every October, the Romans who
performed this rite were doing something this magazine's readers will recognize
immediately: treating a specific substance, consumed with specific words at a
specific moment, as genuinely medicinal, magical, and worth repeating precisely
because their ancestors had always done it that way, whether or not anyone
still living could say exactly why.
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The wine-as-medicine framework behind the festival wasn't a one-day exception in Roman life either. Cato the Elder, writing in the second century BCE in his treatise De Agricultura, recorded numerous wine-based remedies for everything from digestive complaints to snakebite, part of a broader traditional Roman medicine that leaned heavily on ingredients drawn straight from field and vineyard well before Greek-trained physicians became fashionable in the city. Pliny the Elder, writing generations later, devoted an entire book of his Natural History to wine's medicinal applications, treating it as a genuinely serious pharmacological substance rather than mere refreshment. Against that backdrop, the Meditrinalia looks less like an isolated superstition and more like the single most formalized, calendared expression of a healing practice Romans engaged in constantly: reaching for wine, spoken word and specific intention attached, as a documented medical technology in its own right.
Modern Occultist is proud to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, we look at a hands-on instructional book on celebrating the Roman gods and goddesses of the past...
Roman
Wicca: Practicing Witchcraft With Roman Traditions and Mythology
By
Thomas Peters | Self-published, 2025
In Roman Wicca, Thomas Peters
reimagines the Wiccan framework through a specifically Roman lens, rebuilding
coven roles around the old priesthood, Flamen, Augur, Pontifex, Vestal, and
constructing a full “Wheel of the Year” adapted from authentic Roman festivals
rather than the more familiar Celtic-derived calendar most modern Pagan
practice defaults to. Readers of today's post will be glad to know the
Meditrinalia itself gets a place in that wheel, alongside the Vinalia
Rustica and Vinalia Urbana this column mentioned in passing, giving
practitioners a structured way to actually mark all three rather than treating
October's wine festival as an isolated curiosity.
The detail that sold us on this pick
specifically: the book includes step-by-step instructions for ritual foods,
among them libum, mola salsa, and, worth calling out directly, Roman spiced
wine, a modern devotional descendant of exactly the kind of libation this post
spent so many words tracing back to Varro's original formula. Peters also
covers the wider Roman pantheon and how to work with gods like Diana, Faunus,
Jupiter, and Juno, household spirits including the Lares and Penates, and a set
of ancient magical techniques, astrology, augury, and defixiones, curse
tablets, among them, giving the book real range well beyond the festival
calendar alone.
This is a contemporary reconstructionist devotional, not an academic history, and readers wanting the deeper scholarly grounding behind any of it should still pair it with something like Scullard's work on the Roman festival calendar. But for readers who finished today's post wanting an actual ritual to perform rather than only a corrected date to remember, Peters has done the work of turning the Meditrinalia into something you can put on your own altar this October.
(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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