Bona Dea - Titles, Names and Origins

Titles, Names and Origins

Bona Dea ("The Good Goddess") is both an honorific title and a respectful pseudonym; the goddess' true or cult name is unknown. Her other, less common pseudonyms include Feminea Dea ("The Women's Goddess"), Laudandae...Deae ("The Goddess...to be Praised")., and Sancta ("The Holy One"). She is a goddess of "no definable type", with several origins and a range of different characteristics and functions.

Based on what little they knew of her rites and attributes, Roman historians speculated her true name and identity. Festus describes her as identical with a "women's goddess" named Damia, which Georges Dumézil sees as an ancient misreading of Greek "Demeter". In the late Imperial era, the neoplatonist author Macrobius identifies her as a universal earth-goddess, an epithet of Maia, Terra, or Magna Mater, worshiped under the names of Ops, Fauna and Fatua. The Christian author Lactantius, claiming the late Republican polymath Varro as his source, describes her as Faunus' wife and sister, named Fenta Fauna, or Fenta Fatua (Fenta "the prophetess" or Fenta "the foolish").