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The following gods, certainly, Varro signalizes as select, devoting
one book to this subject: Janus, Jupiter, Saturn, Genius,
Mercury, Apollo, Mars, Vulcan, Neptune, Sol, Orcus, father
Liber, Tellus, Ceres, Juno, Luna, Diana, Minerva, Venus,
Vesta; of which twenty gods, twelve are males, and eight females.
Whether are these deities called select, because of their higher
spheres of administration in the world, or because they have become
better known to the people, and more worship has been expended on
them? If it be on account of the greater works which are performed by
them in the world, we ought not to have found them among that, as it
were, plebeian crowd of deities, which has assigned to it the charge
of minute and trifling things. For, first of all, at the conception
of a foetus, from which point all the works commence which have been
distributed in minute detail to many deities, Janus himself opens the
way for the reception of the seed; there also is Saturn, on account
of the seed itself; there is Liber, who liberates the male by the
effusion of the seed; there is Libera, whom they also would have to
be Venus, who confers this same benefit on the woman, namely, that
she also be liberated by the emission of the seed;, all these are of
the number of those who are called select. But there is also the
goddess Mena, who presides over the menses; though the daughter of
Jupiter, ignoble nevertheless. And this province of the menses the
same author, in his book on the select gods, assigns to Juno
herself, who is even queen among the select gods; and here, as Juno
Lucina, along with the same Mena, her stepdaughter, she presides
over the same blood. There also are two gods, exceedingly obscure,
Vitumnus and Sentinus, the one of whom imparts life to the foetus,
and the other sensation; and, of a truth, they bestow, most ignoble
though they be, far more than alI those noble and select gods bestow.
For, surely, without life and sensation, what is the whole foetus
which a woman carries in her womb, but a most vile and worthless
thing, no better than slime and dust?
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