It does not seem possible to discover the real meaning of the double festival. It has been suggested[[1293]] that the two days represent the so-called Roman and Sabine cities, like the two bodies of Salii and Luperci. This guess is hardly an impossible one, but it is only a guess, and has nothing to support it but a casual statement by Plutarch that the Carmentalia were instituted at the time of the synoikismos of Latin and Sabine cities[[1294]].
There is fortunately little doubt about the nature of Carmenta and the general meaning of the cult. In all the legends into which she was woven[[1295]] her most prominent characteristic is the gift of prophecy; she is the ‘vates fatidica,’ &c.,
Cecinit quae prima futuros
Aeneadas magnos et nobile Pallanteum.
So Ovid, at the end of his account of her:
At felix vates, ut dis gratissima vixit,
Possidet hunc Iani sic dea mense diem.
The power is expressed in her very name, for carmen signifies a spell, a charm, a prophecy, as well as a poem. Now there is clear evidence that either women alone had access to the temple at the Porta Carmentalis, or that they were the chief frequenters of it; and they are even said to have built a temple themselves[[1296]]. Where we find women worshipping a deity of prophecy we may be fairly sure that that deity also has some influence on childbirth. ‘The reason,’ writes the late Prof. Nettleship[[1297]], ‘why the Carmentes are worshipped by matrons is because they tell the fortunes of the children’—and also, surely, because they tell the fortunes of the women in childbirth[[1298]].
I am inclined to agree with my old tutor that the Carmentes may originally have been wise women whose skill and spells assisted the operation of birth. I do not think we can look for an explanation of the titles Porrima and Postverta elsewhere than in the two positions in which the child may issue from the womb, over each of which a Carmentis watched[[1299]]; and there is in fact no doubt that Carmenta was a birth-goddess[[1300]]. The argument then would be that the spiritual origin attributed to superior knowledge transforms the owner of the knowledge into a divine person. As Sir A. Lyall says[[1301]] (of the genesis of local deities in Berar), ‘The immediate motive (of deification) is nothing but a vague inference from great natural gifts or from strange fortunes to supernatural visitation, or from power during life to power prolonged beyond it.’
Of the cult of Carmenta we know hardly anything. She had a flamen of her own[[1302]], like other ancient goddesses, Palatua, Furrina, Flora. His sacrificial duties must have been confined to the preparing of cereal offerings, for there was a taboo in this cult excluding all skins of animals—all leather—from the temple.