On a recent trip to Italy, I visited Monteleone Sabino northeast of Rome. As we turned off the autostrada, driving west from Pescara onto the smaller highway to take us north toward Rieti, I instantly felt the presence of Janarra, the pre-Roman Witches of the Wild Ways. There was something about the earth there: verdant, alive and magical.
We had traveled for two weeks through the Abruzzo, over the mountains of the Maiella Massif, rich in ancestral heritage and hermitages of solitude. The mountains stand as powerful embodiments of goddesses and gods. Their potent stone bodies penetrated my body, filling my dreams with memories and information of the land and the legacy. The landscape was steep and rocky, full of grazing sheep, goats and cows.
We visited the Centro Visita del Lupo in Popoli dedicated to restoring the wild wolves to the Apennines. We made pilgrimage to the Goddess Angizia in her home at Luco dei Marsi and Lake Nemi, ancient home of Diana. But there, at our last stop outside of Rome, I felt most palpably the Janarra.
The name tipped me off: Monteleone Sabino. I suspected it was a home of the Sabines, sister tribe and, many think, precursor to the Samnites, who are the ancient ancestors of my Italian lineage, predecessors to the Streghe— Oscan speaking Samnites.
The Sabines settled in the Apennines in the 10th century BCE and, as it turned out, Trebula Mutuesco, a Sabine village was once there where the modern village of Monteleone Sabino now stands.
The Janarra or Witches of the Wild Ways are the medicine peoples of tribes who populated areas of what is now Italy before the Romans, practicing a pagan worldview and polydaimonism. The Janarra are practitioners specifically of the worship of the wild. More accurately stated: the Janarra are one with the wild.
The Janarra worldview consists of shape shifting into wolves, deer, owl, woodpecker, holding counsel with the trees and the forest, and living in deep communion with the moon, calling her Luna or Selene.
Precise rows of olive trees line the sloping green hills surrounding the villa we rented in Monteleone Sabino. Mature olive trees populate the land it sits upon. In this place, beneath the olive trees, I was able to sit and do a divination on the land. In this place the ancestors spoke to my daughter and I, offering loving care and confirmation. The last night I was there, I made an offering of water I had collected at Lake Nemi to that land and the full moon.
From Monteleone Sabino we traveled village to village, ascending high elevations with vast views of the landscape. The dammed river Turano creates the turquoise waters of Lago del Turano, offering even more beauty to these Sabine hills.
Then I learned the name of a Goddess I had not before heard of. A Goddess of the Sabines. A Goddess of the wild. A Goddess of the feral. A Goddess named Feronia. We were definitely in the realm of Janarra.
In this place, along with the ancient village of Trebula Mutuesco, a sanctuary dating to the 4th century BCE dedicated to the Goddess Feronia was found. It predates the Roman level, dated to 290 BCE.
In the 4th century BCE and before, a village of huts most probably surrounded the depression where the sanctuary was located in a valley between three hills. Here many dedications to Feronia were found.
Feronia’s name is derived from “feral” meaning “not cultivated or domesticated. Wild.” but also interestingly, “having escaped from domestication and returned to the wild”(Mirriam Webster). Feronia oversees seeds and the potentiality present in the life force or “the original and generative tissue of the cosmos”* from which all life arises always.
To the Sabines, Feronia was also the Wolf-mother, one of their main Goddesses. The Sabines were very important in the founding of Rome. Their influence is easily found, most especially in the myth of the twins Romulus and Remus, famed founders of Rome, said to have been raised by a Sabine She-wolf, most probably meaning a Sabine Priestess of the Wolf.
Walker’s, Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets entry for Feronia informs that:
“The Feronia festival in honor of the Wolf-mother was faithfully kept each year in Rome. The rites were in the charge of a certain very ancient clan, members of which performed specific miraculous feats passed on from one generation to the next, such as walking on burning coals with bare feet”(307).
The Goddess Feronia of Trebula Mutuesco was also said to have prophetic qualities.
Feronia’s cult was widespread through the central Italic regions. Its nature changed through time. In Roman times Feronia is associated with freed slaves and her sacred groves often held a meeting space for peoples of all tribes to come together safely. Her sanctuaries were removed from towns and out in the wild.
Now available! Print edition of Oscan Oracle Book and printed Card Deck. check it out here.For this post I will stay with the pre-Roman layer and interpretations of the wild and Feronia as present in that time.
In The Oscan Oracle, the book and Oracle Deck from the ancient Janarra of the moon, Rauri Tor defines the wild in this way.
“I, like many, used to think I was talking about nature when I was talking about wild. And while the two can exist in the same physical space, they are not the same thing. Allow me to clarify what and who wild is:
- You do not need certain clothing to access wild and you do not need to be in a certain place.
- Wild is not for only some people and wild does not exist solely with the animal creatures of this world.
- Wild is alive. It is a force. It is a being.
- Wild is the authentic self, the greater good, the transpermeable consciousness (read more about transpermeable consciousness here).
- Wild is knowing you are the deer, the fox, the owl—and the deer, fox, and owl knowing they are you.
The ancient Janarra knew wild well. In fact, wild was merged with them as a two-spirit communion. This was necessary to keep the heartbeat of Earth regulated, to keep life-giving energy nourished and nourishing, and to bring death as the balancing force for our delicate world.
Janarra could work with wild in many ways and wild came to them in many iterations. Wild has a voice, and it does speak. The Janarra can hear the voice of the wild. The Janarra can see with the eyes of the wild and run with the spirits of the wild. Janarra are truly shamans in every sense of the word—in their ability to inhabit animal beings, in their ability to communicate and get needed information for our realm, and in their ability to heal pain in person and place”(The Oscan Oracle 6-7).
The early sanctuary of the Sabines to the Goddess Feronia in Trebula Mutuesco was most likely a grove of trees. A lucus. A lucus is a sacred grove created to honor, interact with and absorb a designated deity. This consecrated place within a forest, often contains a shrine or temple.
Luci were important places in the indigenous land that is now Italy. Villages often formed around them.
In the divination I did on the land in Monteleone Sabino I was taught that, “As much as transpermeable consciousness means reaching toward and merging your consciousness with other beings and lifeforms, other beings are simultaneously permeating you when you are in the wild.”
I was then shown the oracular Janarra sitting in the groves listening, receiving. “They would sit and let the ecosystem permeate their being. They listened absorbed and became it.”
The lucus or ancient grove to Feronia in Trebula Mutuesco may or may not have had a hut like building in it which was a temple to this power. The power of the wild, the Goddess of the Wild: Feronia. I see the Janarra dancing in the grove under the full moon, howling and taking flight with the one wild cosmos within and without.
© Theresa C. Dintino 2024
featured image by Mark Frost from Pixabay
*I borrow this language from David Hinton’s Wild Mind, Wild Earth.
