When I wrote my book Guided by the Moon, Wheel of the Year, Pagan Holy Days the Italian American Way, for the feast of August 2, known as Lammas or Lughnasadh to modern pagans, I chose to include the Festival of Ops.
Ops is the Sabine Goddess of Abundance who was celebrated widely in Rome and pre-Rome. The Sabines, the wolf clan, settled in the central Apennine mountains of what is now Italy in the 10th century BCE.
Goddess Ops
Her name is from Opis which is Latin for plenty. She is often correlated with the earth and fertility, fruitfulness, riches and prosperity. She is sometimes depicted with a crown on her head and called a Queen. The ritual I created for August 2 is one to celebrate abundance in all the ways it shows up in our lives. And to praise the Goddess of Abundance and offer gratitude in recognition of all her gifts. This correlated nicely with Lammas which celebrates the beginning of harvest.
In the background loomed her consort Consus who I mentioned only briefly, but who continued to nag at my consciousness since then. When I carried out the ritual for the festival of Ops the first time, I included a jar with seeds for Consus quite casually, but when I placed it on the altar and called him forth with Ops, I could feel his pounding presence, a deep underworld energy. I wanted to know more.
Now, as I carry out the Wheel of the Year celebrations again with a group of friends, is the perfect time to dig deeper into this mysterious and intriguing energy as I prepare for the upcoming Festival of Ops.
Consus and Ops are ancient agricultural Sabine deities.
Consus is a name derived from the Latin verb Condere (to store away). He is also called the god of grain storage. The word “Consus would be an archaic verbal noun denoting the action of storing grain” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consus).
In Rome Before Rome, Philip Matyszak tells the story of an ancient underground altar and temple to Consus unearthed by Romulus when he was looking for the place of he and his brother Remus’s birth. In searching for the cave where they were nursed by the she-wolf, he located Consus instead. At the time he discovered it he wasn’t sure whom the shrine was dedicated to but felt its power and did not wish to disturb it. Eventually Consus was identified and brought into the pantheon of Roman gods.
Rome had a lot of respect for the storer of grain as much of their power and dominance came from their ability to store and distribute huge amounts of it to their soldiers through long battles.
This underground temple to Consus remained hidden, wielding much power, under the Circus Maximus. It was only exposed for his feast days on July 7, August 21 and December 15.
On the feast days, working animals were given a day of rest, and offerings were made to Consus to protect the grain through the winter and safely store the seeds for the following year’s crop.
Ops is abundance and Consus honors the gift of overabundance and the power that comes with being able to preserve that reserve. When you have more than enough, you can store some away. Once humans figured this out, it changed the trajectory of their collective evolution.
RomanMythology.com calls Consus a key ancient deity native to Italy, the “divine overseer of what had already been saved and needed to remain safe.”
The “power held in reserve.”
Consus is not only conceived of as the protector of stored grain or the stored grain itself, he is the active act of storing away.
Consus is the storer. The one who stores. This brings to mind the ATP molecule in our cells that stores energy until they need it. This act of storing is something that carries through to many biological processes which helped create complex life forms.
Memory of all kinds, human and DNA chains are also forms of storing away. In this case, instead of energy, it is information that is stored. Libraries could be considered to be under the domain of Consus.
Saving something to regain later, to help with the future was a big jump in human consciousness as well as biological processes. The active act of storing away has profound consequences once established.
Seeds themselves are a prime illustration of this.
We all owe a debt of gratitude to Consus, the god of storing away. Lets be sure to add him to our Festival of Ops celebration this year on August 2.
©Theresa C. Dintino 2026
Featured image of Consus, from RomanMythology.com
