Prayer to Janus

Cato, On Agriculture 134: before the harvest a strues — a heap of small cakes — is offered to Janus, a fertum to Jupiter, wine to both, and to Ceres a sow killed in advance of the reaping (porca praecidanea). This is the oldest complete Roman prayer formula to reach us, and it reaches us in a manual of estate management, not in a sacred book.

The order matters more than the words: Janus comes first not by seniority but because he is the entrance, and every rite begins with him. The same logic is explained in Ovid (janus-008).

The core of the formula is uti sies volens propitius mihi liberisque meis domo familiaeque meae: that you be willing and favourable to me, my children, my house and my household. The list is legal, an inventory of holdings: domus is the building and the property, familia the people under authority. The prayer protects not a man but an entire establishment.

The same formula travels through this corpus: Cato himself suggests substituting other names into it, and the cards carmenta-002 and carmenta-006 rest on that.

The card's original was the wrong text. It formerly carried a single line, Pater Iane, te hoc ferto obmovendo …, which is not in Cato: the phrase te hoc ferto obmovendo belongs to the address to Jupiter, and in this chapter Janus receives not a fertum but a strues. Checked against the edition and replaced with the two genuine Janus formulae of chapter 134 — at the offering of the strues and at the libation of wine — which are what the card's English renders.