The Tale of Porrima and Postverta

At a Glance

Central figures: Porrima and Postverta, twin goddess-attendants of Carmenta, the prophetic mother of Evander; Carmenta herself, seer and inventor of the Latin alphabet.
Setting: The Carmentalia festival in Rome, celebrated on the eleventh and fifteenth of January at the Porta Carmentalis, the gate at the foot of the Capitoline Hill near the Forum Boarium.
The turn: Roman women, angered by a Senate decree stripping them of the right to ride in carriages, refused to bear children - and the priests, alarmed, restored the women’s privilege and expanded the Carmentalia to honor Porrima and Postverta on a second feast day.
The outcome: The festival gained its second date, the fifteenth of January, and both attendants of Carmenta received formal cult recognition as goddesses of childbirth - Porrima governing head-first births, Postverta governing breech births.
The legacy: The double observance of the Carmentalia on January 11 and January 15, and the invocation of Porrima and Postverta by Roman midwives at every delivery.

Carmenta had two attendants, and they shared her gift of sight - but they looked in opposite directions. Porrima faced forward. Postverta faced back. Between them, nothing in time went unwitnessed.

They were not great goddesses. They had no temples of their own, no priests wearing the apex cap, no processions winding through the Via Sacra. They lived in the shadow of their mistress, who was old even by divine reckoning - Carmenta, the Arcadian prophetess who had come to Latium with her son Evander before Troy fell, before Aeneas landed, before Rome was anything but mud flats and a river. Carmenta had a gate named for her, the Porta Carmentalis at the base of the Capitoline, and a flamen who tended her rites. Porrima and Postverta had only their functions, their names, and the prayers of women in labor.

Carmenta at the Gate

The Porta Carmentalis stood where the ground sloped from the Capitoline down toward the cattle market and the Tiber. It was an old gate, older than the Servian Wall that later absorbed it, and it carried a superstition: no one walked through it on the way to war, because the three hundred and six Fabii had marched through it to the Cremera and none came back. But in January the gate belonged not to soldiers but to women. On the eleventh day of the month, matrons gathered there to offer spelt cakes to Carmenta and to ask for safe deliveries in the year ahead.

Carmenta’s gift was prophecy. Varro recorded that her name came from carmen - a chant, an incantation, a verse. She had prophesied the greatness of the place where Evander built his settlement on the Palatine, long before Romulus drew his furrow. She had devised the letters of the Latin alphabet, adapting them from the Greek script she brought with her from Arcadia. The Romans honored her as a mother of knowledge, but the women who came to her gate in January honored her for a more immediate reason. She knew what was coming. She could see the child in the womb and how it lay.

The Two Who Attend

This was where Porrima and Postverta entered. Macrobius and Varro both name them, though they disagree on the details - Macrobius calling them aspects of Carmenta’s prophetic power, Varro treating them as distinct beings. The priests at the Porta Carmentalis seem to have split the difference. They invoked Porrima when a child presented head-first - porro, forward, the natural way, the way that meant the birth would likely go well. They invoked Postverta when a child presented feet-first or buttocks-first - post, behind, turned around, the breech position that made midwives grip their instruments tighter and mothers scream longer.

A Roman midwife, the obstetrix, would call on both names during labor regardless of presentation, because no one knew for certain which way the child would come until it came. The invocation was practical, not ornamental. Porrima, let this child face the right way. Postverta, if it does not, let it live. The prayer acknowledged that birth was a threshold - and thresholds, in Roman religion, always had guardians. Janus watched the door. Limentinus watched the threshold stone. Cardea watched the hinges. Porrima and Postverta watched the passage between the womb and the world, and the direction the child faced as it crossed.

The Women’s Strike

The second feast day - the fifteenth of January - came later, and it came from a political crisis that had nothing obvious to do with prophecy or childbirth. Ovid tells part of it in the Fasti. The Senate, at some point in the middle Republic, passed a decree forbidding women from riding in carpenta - two-wheeled carriages - through the streets of Rome. The carriages had been a privilege of rank, and the matrons of Rome took the prohibition as an insult.

They responded with the one weapon no law could counter. They refused to conceive. They refused to carry children. They turned away from their husbands, and the birth rate in Rome dropped until the Senate, alarmed at the prospect of a generation unmade, reversed the decree and restored the carriage privilege.

The priests, recognizing that the crisis had centered on women’s bodies and women’s will, added a second day to the Carmentalia. The eleventh of January remained Carmenta’s own. The fifteenth was given to her two attendants, Porrima and Postverta, the goddesses who governed the act of birth itself. It was an acknowledgment - rare in Roman public religion - that the state depended on what happened in the birthing room, and that the powers who presided there deserved their own day in the calendar.

At the Birthing Chair

The sella obstetrica, the Roman birthing chair, was a heavy wooden seat with a crescent-shaped opening. The laboring woman sat upright in it, gripping the armrests, while the obstetrix knelt before her. Behind the mother stood her attendants - female relatives, slave women, sometimes a second midwife. No men were present. The room smelled of olive oil and the herbs burned to ease pain: pennyroyal, artemisia, dittany.

In this room, Porrima and Postverta mattered more than Jupiter. A woman calling out in the hardest hour of labor did not think of the Capitoline triad or the grandeur of the res publica. She thought of the child turning inside her, and whether it faced the right way, and whether both of them would survive the next hour. The midwife’s hands and the goddesses’ favor were the only things that counted.

The prayers were simple. Ovid does not record their exact words, and neither does Varro. But the structure of Roman prayer was formulaic - the deity’s name, the deity’s function, the specific request, the specific offering promised in return. Porrima, you who govern the child that comes forward, let this child come forward. Postverta, you who govern the child that comes turned, let this child live if it comes turned. I will bring spelt cakes to your altar on the fifteenth of January.

The Gate in January

On the fifteenth, the women returned to the Porta Carmentalis. The offerings were the same as on the eleventh - spelt cakes, no animal sacrifice, because Carmenta’s cult was among the oldest in Rome and predated the adoption of blood offerings from Etruscan practice. The gate stood open. The matrons passed through it without the superstition that haunted soldiers, because they were not marching to war. They were marking the other end of the bargain the state had made with them: that their bodies and their choices held the future of Rome, and that two small goddesses - one looking forward, one looking back - stood watch at the passage no army could guard.