"The Roman Festival of Ludi Romani" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "Modern Witchcraft with the Greek Gods: A Witch's 21st-Century Guide to Making Magick with the Greek Gods"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
September 5
The Roman Festival of Ludi Romani
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Each
September, ancient Rome shut down for its biggest annual event: the Ludi
Romani, the Roman Games, a sprawling public festival of chariot racing,
theater, and religious procession held in honor of Jupiter Optimus Maximus,
king of the gods. It's often described as running a tidy nine days, roughly
September 5th through the 13th. That description isn't wrong so much as it's a
snapshot of one specific moment in a festival that spent centuries quietly
growing, and whose actual founding the Romans themselves couldn't fully agree
on.
Even ancient historians, writing with access to sources long lost to us, gave two entirely different accounts of how these games began…
The Ludi Romani did not begin in as a fully formed festival. According to Livy, the games began as a modest one-day event under Tarquinius Priscus, Rome's semi-legendary fifth king, featuring little more than boxing and horse racing, staged in a “Circus Maximus” Tarquin himself was said to have laid out using plunder from a captured Latin town. By the late Republic, the festival had grown to roughly ten days. By Julius Caesar's era, it stretched to fifteen or sixteen. After Caesar's assassination, the Senate added a further day in his honor at the very start of the festival, September 4th, fixing the games at their final, familiar span of September 4th through 19th, a shape that held for the rest of the imperial period.
The
specific “September 5th” starting point sometimes cited today reflects a real,
if narrower, slice of that longer history: under Augustus, nine additional days of Ludi
Scaenici, theatrical games, were folded into the festival, and that
particular expansion is recorded as pushing the dramatic portion's start to
September 5th. It's an accurate detail about one stage of the festival's
growth, not a description of the Ludi Romani in its final, best-documented
form. A festival this old rarely holds still long enough for a single date
range to describe all of it.
The
deeper myth-check concerns why the games existed at all, and here the ancient
sources themselves see to disagree. Livy and the grammarian Festus both credit
Tarquinius Priscus with founding the games following his conquest of the Latin
town of Apiolae, sometime in the late seventh or early sixth century BCE. But Dionysius
of Halicarnassus and Cicero,
writing with access to different traditions, instead trace the games' origin to
a considerably later event: the Roman victory over the Latin
League at the Battle of Lake Regillus, traditionally dated to around
496 BCE, during the early Republic rather than the semi-legendary regal period.
That's a gap of well over a century between the two competing origin stories,
and modern historians generally treat Rome's earliest kings, Tarquin included,
with real caution, since the regal period survives mostly through later,
patriotic reconstruction rather than contemporary record. Neither ancient claim
can be fully verified, and Rome's own historians never fully resolved which
victory the games were actually meant to commemorate.
Whichever
origin is closer to true, the mature festival's structure is well documented.
Each celebration opened with the pompa circensis, a formal religious
procession from the Capitoline Temple of Jupiter
down into the Circus Maximus, where magistrates, priests, and images of the
gods paraded before the assembled crowd ahead of the actual games. September
13th held particular weight within the festival: it marked both the anniversary
of the Capitoline Temple's original dedication and the occasion for the Epulum
Jovis, a formal ritual feast laid out in Jupiter's honor, briefly pausing the
athletic spectacle for a moment of direct religious observance before the games
continued.
None
of this diminishes the Ludi Romani's genuine importance as Rome's oldest and
most prestigious public festival, one that shaped centuries of civic identity
and, not incidentally, introduced formal drama to Roman culture in the first
place. It simply means the festival deserves to be described the way it
actually existed: not as a fixed nine-day block with a single tidy founding
story, but as an institution that kept expanding for half a millennium, built
on a foundational legend the Romans' own best historians never managed to agree
upon…
Modern Occultist is proud
to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the
newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, in honor of the king of the
gods these games were built to honor, we're recommending a modern
practitioner's guide to his closest mythological counterpart.
Modern Witchcraft with the Greek Gods: A Witch's 21st-Century Guide to Making Magick with the Greek Gods
By
Jason Mankey and Astrea Taylor | Llewellyn Worldwide
Jupiter and Zeus share enough mythological DNA, sky father, wielder of thunder, king of a divine pantheon, that Mankey and Taylor's guide to working with the Greek gods offers genuinely useful context for readers curious about the Roman deity the Ludi Romani were built to honor. The book profiles more than sixty deities and mythological figures, moving well beyond the twelve Olympians to include Titans and primordial forces, and grounds each entry in both historical worship practice and the authors' own experience working with these figures in contemporary practice. The book's real strength, per its own reviewers, is refusing to flatten these gods into single-note archetypes; Mankey and Taylor draw on documented ancient cult practice alongside genuine modern devotional experience, giving readers both the historical texture and a practical entry point for actually building a relationship with a given deity, exactly the kind of double grounding today's post has tried to model.
This
is a book about the Greek pantheon specifically rather than the Roman gods the
Ludi Romani actually honored, and readers wanting Jupiter's own distinct Roman
cult, the Capitoline Triad, his specific state-religion role, will want a
dedicated Roman religion text alongside it. But for readers of this magazine
curious how a modern practitioner might build genuine devotional practice
around a sky-father figure like the one Rome spent half a millennium throwing
games for, this is an excellent place to start.
(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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