04 Jun Melinda Reidinger
Melinda Reidinger
LECTURE
Wolves, Whores, and Other-Mothers: Mysteries of Acca Larentia
Acca Larentia’s stories always circle back to a few themes: wolves and women, kings and whores, nature and nurture, and the beloved dead. While she is best known as the foster mother who raised Romulus and Remus after they were discovered with the she-wolf, this is only one of her mythic personae. Some Roman legends say she was the wife of a shepherd, while others name her as a prostitute who donated her riches to the city. Intriguingly, Acca Larentia is also Lupa, the she-wolf, in a deified form, and the mother of ancestral guardian spirits called the Lares. Her name is also similar to Laurus, bay laurel, the tree of necromancy, divination, and prophecy.
The evolution of Acca Larentia’s tales illustrates the symbolic muting of female powers that stood behind family lineages, and it shows how family cults were replaced with civic pride. Still, both feminine self-determination and a wild element that never submits to domestication are always present in Acca Larentia’s aspects of the prostitute and the she-wolf, and these would erupt in both solemn and raucous celebrations.
Bio
Melinda Reidinger, Ph.D. is an American author who resides in the Czech Republic. Her academic background is in art history, literary studies, and cultural anthropology.
In her Substack blog, In the Groves of Symbols, readers will find ~500 pages of illustrated essays, which draw from art history, anthropology, linguistics, botany and zoology, ecology, occult lore, and other disciplines. Like her book The White Deer: Ecospirituality and the Mythic (released by RITONA Press in 2023), and her fictional tales, these essays look through the frames of past practices and artifacts showing us ways to draw closer to the land, and live with dignity, verve, and imagination. They are free for readers to access.
Melinda resides in a log cabin in a tiny village in the Central Bohemian countryside. When she isn’t writing or teaching, she can usually be found haunting the riverine hills and forests, flanked by two unusually large wolfdogs.
