Pomona – Goddess of the orchard fruits | Watercolor and Ink

Hello everyone and welcome back to my blog!

Today I want to share with you my personal interpretation of the roman Goddess Pomona. She was the Deity of the orchard fruits and a fertility Goddess.

For some scholar it could be that her cult was an earlier celebration for a “roman halloween”, since it was a celebration of the last haverst in the year. Infact some fruit is ripe in September, like apples, which is a very important symbol for the humankind and symbolic is maybe the most important fruit, and then we have to wait some times to let this fruit rape more.

The nearest full moon at the modern halloween day is also called the harvest moon, because it was, for pagans, the time to harvest the last grains and fruits.

Normally were celebrate harvest and earth Goddess, such the greek Demeter, the roman Ceres or the german God Freyr. Pomona was infact a minor Deity, but she was anyway celebrate and she has an entire wood dedicate to her near Rom, since minor Goddess were still important enough. Infact for the humankind was harvesting grains or vegetables more important than fruits.

There is another important fest that could be a real roman “samhain” (the old, original nordic and celtic word for halloween), the “Mundis Cereris” (“World of Ceres”) or “Mundus patet” (“The world is open”) ritual: it was a ritual for the harvest Goddess Ceres, who was also, in arcaic Rom and for other volks like Etruscan, as earth Goddess a Deity who could put in communication the world of the livings with that of the deads. In this days, where this “Mundus” was open, the deads were coming back to the surface. This ritual were celebrate three times a year near for the three harvest fests, and the last one was on 8-9 November, really near to 31.October, the modern Halloween.

As always, if you like it you can see the painting process in this video, on my youtube channel.

I hope you like my personal interpretation of this goddess, let me what do you think and if you like the idea to talk about old rituals and religions. If you are interested in the ritual of “Mundus patet” or other roman rituals, let me know, I could speak about that for hours 🙂