Ataegina

Also Known As: also Ataecina, Adaecina, Adaegina, Attaegina; Portuguese Atégina
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Celtic Mythology, Portuguese Mythology, Spanish Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: She is a chthonic goddess of the western Iberian Peninsula, addressed on her altars as holy lady and identified by the Romans with Proserpina, and her one constant emblem is the goat.
Role in Mythos: She was the second most heavily worshipped indigenous deity of the Roman southwest after Endovelicus, receiving vows, healing, and the punishment of thieves at a hill sanctuary above running water.
Relation to Humans: People came to her with the ordinary business of a life: a debt of gratitude, a spring, a stolen bundle of clothes. Her worshippers were farmers, freedmen and provincial elites, and they addressed her not through myth but through small inscribed stones with a bronze goat seated on top.

High on the flank of the Sierra de la Centinela, in a fold of the Extremaduran hills where iron-tasting water runs down to the river Aljucén, there is a small church with an odd floor plan. It was built in the seventh century, and it was built out of a goddess. When excavators took the fabric of Santa Lucía del Trampal apart in the 1980s they pulled some fifty Roman stones out of the walls. Fifteen of them were altars raised to Ataegina.

They are not grand things. Grey granite, waist-high, mouldings cut with a workmanlike lack of fuss, the lettering shallow and uneven, most of them naming a person nobody has otherwise heard of who paid a vow and went home. What makes them strange is the top. Many of them have a small rectangular socket cut into the upper surface, and the socket is not a fire-hole. It is a seat. Little bronze goats, roughly thirty of which are known, come with a lug or a stub of a foot on the underside, shaped to drop into exactly such a hole. A worshipper brought the animal, set it on the stone, and left it standing there in the open air with the goddess’s name cut beneath its hooves.

That is the whole of her liturgy as it survives. A stone, a goat, a name.

The name is where the trouble starts. It is written Ataegina, Ataecina, Adaecina, Adaegina, sometimes with doubled letters, and it is very often not written out at all: the masons abbreviated her down to initials, so that a whole altar can read as little as d(eae) d(ominae) s(anctae) T(uribrigensi) A(taecinae). She is holy lady, dea domina sancta, a doubling of honorifics that is rare for anyone else in the region. The epithet attached to her almost every time points at a place, Turibriga or Turobriga, which Pliny lists among the towns of the Celtic Beturia. Nobody knows where Turibriga was. It has been hunted in Alcuéscar, in Talavera la Vieja, in half a dozen other places, and the argument has been running for well over a century without a town at the end of it.

Her etymology is no kinder. José Leite de Vasconcelos, working in 1905, split the name into a prefix of repetition and a root from Indo-European *genos, and read it as the reborn one, a goddess of spring and the returning green. It is a beautiful reading and it fits the Proserpina identification a little too neatly. Others hear Old Irish adaig, night, and make her a goddess of the dark and the world below, which fits the Proserpina identification just as neatly from the other side. Juan Manuel Abascal has pointed out the awkward fact that the Irish word is only attested from the eighth century, several hundred years after the last person carved her name. Blanca Prósper takes the whole thing back to a place name, Ataiko. Gabriel Sopeña, surveying the Celtiberian evidence, allows that she may have been an infernal deity and then notes drily that there is no certainty about the Celtic nature of the name at all. Four scholars, four goddesses.

What is not in dispute is that she is older than her spelling. At Cancho Roano in Badajoz, in a sanctuary abandoned centuries before any Latin was cut in Extremadura, excavators found the remains of a bronze goat more than half a metre long, and goat bones in quantity, the residue of eating. The goat was being given to something in that country long before anyone wrote the syllables Ataegina, and the likeliest story is that a very old and possibly nameless power of the southwest kept her animal, acquired a name when the Vettones and their neighbours settled the land, and acquired an alphabet when Rome arrived.

Rome also gave her a rival inside her own skin. Augusta Emerita, modern Mérida, was founded in 25 BC, and its heterogeneous population of Italians, veterans and locals took up the goddess of the nearby sacred grove and filed her under a name they already knew. On the marble altars of the colony she becomes Dea Ataecina Turibrigensis Proserpina, and the further she gets from the hills the more Roman she looks. Her worship travelled with her worshippers: a dedication turns up in Sardinia, which makes her the only deity of pre-Roman Iberia known to have been honoured outside the peninsula at all.

The best glimpse of what people actually wanted from her is not a hymn. It is a complaint. On a slab of marble at Mérida, someone who has been robbed writes to Dea Ataecina Turibrigensis Proserpina, and by her majesty asks, prays and begs that she avenge the theft: six tunics, two linen cloaks, an undergarment, gone. Whoever took them is to be dragged, in the wording of the thing, to the goddess herself. It is an entirely ordinary crime handed upward to an entirely serious power, and it tells you more about her reach than any of the vows. She was near enough to be asked about laundry, and terrible enough to be worth asking.

Her powers are the powers of a good local god, which are the ones people can name: she took the vow and kept the bargain, she held the water and the ferruginous spring on the hillside, she was owed the goat, and she had the dead. She could be trusted to hunt a thief through her own dark. Nothing in the record makes her the protagonist of a story. She has no wedding, no abduction, no descent, no rival, no child. She was worshipped for four centuries, from before Rome to the third century AD, by people who almost never drew a human figure, and so she has no face either; the stones give her goats and, now and then, a crescent moon. A headless enthroned goddess in the museum at Mérida, feet resting on carved flowers, two serpents rising beside the throne, may or may not be her, and the argument over that is as unresolved as everything else.

The limits were built into her strength. A goddess held in the hands of farmers, whose theology fits on a stone the size of a hearth loaf, survives exactly as long as the hands do. The Latin habit that finally wrote her down also began to dissolve her, first into Proserpina, then into initials, and Christianity finished the job by taking her sanctuary stones and stacking them into a church. Some think the cult of Santa Eulalia at Mérida is the shape she took afterwards, still holy, still a lady, no longer hers. Her name lasted anyway, cut into granite by people who could barely space their letters, which is a better afterlife than most gods of her size were given.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ataegina?

Ataegina is a goddess of the western Iberian Peninsula, worshipped in Roman Lusitania and Baetica, in what is now Extremadura and southern Portugal. She is known entirely from inscriptions, several dozen of them, on which she is addressed as a holy lady and linked to a lost place called Turibriga. The Romans identified her with Proserpina.

What is Ataegina the goddess of?

Ataegina is generally understood as a chthonic deity, connected with the underworld, the night, healing waters and the returning of the year, though scholars disagree sharply about which of those came first. Her identification with Proserpina points to both death and seasonal rebirth. She was also invoked to punish thieves.

Why is the goat associated with Ataegina?

The goat is Ataegina’s constant emblem. Around thirty small bronze goats have been found across her cult area, and many of her altars have a socket cut into the top into which such a figure could be seated. Goat offerings in the same region go back centuries before her name appears in writing, which suggests she inherited the animal from an older deity.

Where was Ataegina worshipped?

Her cult centred on the country between Mérida, Cáceres and Beja, with the largest known sanctuary at Santa Lucía del Trampal in Alcuéscar, where fifteen altars to her were found reused in a later church. Her epithet points to a town called Turibriga whose location has never been identified. A dedication to her in Sardinia makes her the only pre-Roman Iberian deity known to have been honoured beyond the peninsula.

What did Ataegina look like?

No source describes her. The people who worshipped her rarely represented the human figure at all, so her monuments carry goats and occasional crescent moons instead of a portrait. A headless seated goddess flanked by serpents, now in the museum at Mérida, has been proposed as an image of her, but the identification is disputed.