FIELD NOTES — 41.8844°N, 12.4797°E — Aventine Hill, Rome

Santa Sabina. Field visit.

Interior of Basilica di Santa Sabina, Aventine Hill
The basilica was built in the 5th century on top of a Temple of Juno Regina. Before that, a private Roman house. Before that, something older that nobody has a name for. Every layer is a different religion standing on the bones of the last one.
Twenty-four Corinthian columns line the nave. They are not Christian. They are from the original pagan temple. The builders took them because they were beautiful, or because they were already there, or because something about this ground demands columns and worship and no one has ever been able to say no.
The Lapis Diaboli. The Devil's Stone. A perfectly round black stone set into the floor near the entrance. The guides say the Devil threw it at St. Dominic and missed. The stone is basalt or something like it. Perfectly smooth. No one knows where it actually came from. No one can explain how it got here. It is older than the basilica. Older than the temple. It has always been here.
The old woman at the museum said the tent isn't a story. The stories are what we built around the tent so we could sleep.
The same words. Almost exactly. The woman in Kostroma said the same thing. Different continent. Different language. Same sentence. They are either repeating each other or they are both repeating something older.
Excavations beneath the basilica revealed layers: a Roman house from the 2nd century. A 3rd-century shrine. Evidence of Isis worship. Before Juno there was Isis. Before Isis there was something else. Multiple religions on the same ground. As if the ground itself requires devotion and does not care to whom.

Cybele. Magna Mater. The Great Mother. The priests of her cult recognized the tent. Not as a foreign threat. As something that disturbed their goddess. She was already in Rome when the tent appeared. Brought from Phrygia in 204 BCE. A black stone. They brought her to Rome as a black stone.

The Lapis Diaboli is a black stone. Cybele was brought to Rome as a black stone. The Aventine Hill was sacred to Juno and to the Great Mother both. This is the same ground. This has always been the same ground.

The woman on the throne. In Kostroma she is Snegurochka's shadow. In Anatolia she is Cybele carved into rock. In Rome she is the Magna Mater and the Senate issues decrees in her name. She is not a woman. She is a pattern that looks like a woman. And wherever she sits, the tent follows. Or wherever the tent goes, she is already seated.

I stood on the Lapis Diaboli for nine seconds before a guard told me to move. It was warm. Basalt should not be warm.

I keep coming back to the number nine. Nine citizens entered the tent. Nine lambs sacrificed. Nine chants in the Lemuralia ritual. The paterfamilias walks barefoot and throws black beans nine times. Nine is the number that holds the dead at bay. Or the number that invites them in.

She has always been here.
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