The Magna Mater’s Uncanny Ease in the Aeneid

The Magna Mater's Uncanny Ease in the Aeneid

Nothing comes easy in Virgil’s Aeneid. Yet there is one moment of shocking ease in which a threat is easily averted. That is the Magna Mater’s transformation of Aeneas’s ships into nymphs to prevent their destruction by fire. I argue that this episode is incongruous not just because of this startling metamorphosis, but also because the Magna Mater, unlike other deities in the poem, is unconcerned with Aeneas’s struggles or the foundation of Rome. While she was eventually summoned to Rome in 204 BCE, she disregards the nascent city in the Aeneid. Instead, she models an alternative path that opts out of the labor of founding a patriarchal and imperial dynasty to prioritize her own generative concerns.

I first focus on the transformation of the ships (9.77-122). Earlier scholarship on this episode has dealt with the poetic implications of the unprecedented transformation (Fantham) and the identity of the Magna Mater, a seemingly threatening and emasculating foreign deity (Wiseman; Nauta). I observe that in the Magna Mater’s speech to Jupiter (her only speech in the poem), she is not worried about the well-being of Aeneas. Rather, she fears for his ships, built from trees sacred to her, and aims to preserve them from the flames. The transformation itself is ambiguous: it does not explicitly help Aeneas (Hardie), and Turnus understands it as divine support for his own cause. While the transformed nymphs do appear to Aeneas (10.219-255), their message offers no concrete benefits and may actually lead to the death of Pallas (O’Hara).

Elsewhere, the Magna Mater neither impedes nor fosters Aeneas’ progress. His wife Creusa vanishes during the sack of Troy and claims she has been held back by the Magna Mater (2.788). Like the ships, she slips out of the destructive epic narrative into her own sacred world. Aeneas’s false identification of her as a maternal figure leads to a disastrous colonization attempt on Crete (3.84-191). Elsewhere, the Magna Mater appears in simile (6.783-787), prayer (7.137), and decoration (10.156-158), but not as an active agent. Indeed, her association with the Trojans is mobilized as an insult by the Latin Numanus Remulus (9.617-620).

While the Magna Mater is a symbol of fertility, as her name suggests, the poem does not link her with the generation of Roman heirs, nor does she interact with the poem’s obsessive anxiety over male lineages. Her priests are the self-castrated galli, who operate both within and outside of Roman society (Roller). When she intervenes in the Aeneid, it is not to agitate on behalf of Aeneas, like Venus, or to protect a favored city, like Juno. Instead, she fights for trees, the offspring of her eerily potent forest. Such a powerful force cannot be left unchecked, and the poem demonstrates her subordination to Jupiter, who must grant permission for the ships’ transformation. Still, in her unorthodox concerns and the uncanny ease with which she operates, she represents an alternative to the patriarchal narrative of necessary suffering and conquest.