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Ophiussa, also spelled Ophiusa, is the ancient name given by the ancient Greeks to what is now Portuguese territory near the mouth of the river Tagus. It means Land of Serpents.
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Ophiussa, also spelled Ophiusa, is the ancient name given by the ancient Greeks to what is now Portuguese territory near the mouth of the river Tagus. It means Land of Serpents.
The 4th century Roman poet Rufius Festus Avienius, writing on geographical subjects in Ora Maritima ("Seacoasts"), a document inspired by a Greek mariners' Periplus, related that the Oestriminis (Extreme West in Latin) was peopled by the Oestrimni, a people who had been living there for a long time; they had to flee their homeland after an invasion of serpents. These people could be linked to the Saephe (Saefs) or Ophis ("People of the Serpents") and the Dragani ("People of the Dragons"), who came to those lands and built the territorial entity the Greeks termed Ophiussa.
The expulsion of the Oestrimni, from Ora Maritima:
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The "serpent people" of the semi-mythical Ophiussa in the far west are noted in ancient Greek sources.
The Ophi people lived mainly in the inland mountains of Northern Portugal (and Galicia). Others say they lived mainly by the estuaries of the rivers Douro and Tagus. The Ophi worshiped serpents, hence Land of Serpents. There have surfaced a few archeological findings that could be related to this people or culture. Some believe that the dragon sometimes represented as a griffin, from the original Winged Serpent, or Wyvern (the traditional Portuguese Serpe Real), old crest of the crown of the Kings of Portugal and later of the Emperors of Brazil, is linked to local people or to the Celts who later invaded the area and could also have been influenced by the Ophi cult.
A legend relates that on the summer solstice a maiden-serpent, a chthonic goddess, reveals hidden treasures to people journeying through forests. This maiden would live in the city of Porto. Festivities related to this goddess occurred during the solstice. During the rest of the year, she would change into a snake living under or among rocks, and shepherds would set aside some milk from their flocks as an offering to her.
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Proserpina or Proserpine is an ancient Roman goddess whose cult, myths and mysteries were combined from those of Libera, an early Roman goddess of wine. In Greek she is known as Persephone and her mother is Demeter, goddesses of grain and agriculture. The originally Roman goddess Libera was daughter of the agricultural goddess Ceres and wife to Liber, god of wine and freedom. In 204 BCE, a new "Greek-style" cult to Ceres and Proserpina as "Mother and Maiden" was imported from southern Italy, along with Greek priestesses to serve it, and was installed in Libera and Ceres' temple on Rome's Aventine Hill. The new cult and its priesthood were actively promoted by Rome's religious authorities as morally desirable for respectable Roman women, and may have partly subsumed the temple's older, native cult to Ceres, Liber and Libera; but the new rites seem to have functioned alongside the old, rather than replaced them.
The serpent, or snake, is one of the oldest and most widespread mythological symbols. The word is derived from Latin serpens, a crawling animal or snake. Snakes have been associated with some of the oldest rituals known to mankind and represent dual expression of good and evil.
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Angitia was a goddess among the Marsi, the Paeligni and other Oscan-Umbrian peoples of central Italy. She was associated in antiquity with snake-charmers who claimed her as their ancestor. Roman interpretations probably obscure her Marsian significance.
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The European dragon is a legendary creature in folklore and mythology among the overlapping cultures of Europe.
Postumius Rufius Festus Avienius was a Latin writer of the 4th century AD. He was a native of Volsinii in Etruria, from the distinguished family of the Rufii Festi.
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Dragons play a significant role in Greek mythology. Though the Greek drakōn often differs from the modern Western conception of a dragon, it is both the etymological origin of the modern term and the source of many surviving Indo-European myths and legends about dragons.
The Thracian religion refers to the mythology, ritual practices and beliefs of the Thracians, a collection of closely related ancient Indo-European peoples who inhabited eastern and southeastern Europe and northwestern Anatolia throughout antiquity and who included the Thracians proper, the Getae, the Dacians, and the Bithynians. The Thracians themselves did not leave an extensive written corpus of their mythology and rituals, but information about their beliefs is nevertheless available through epigraphic and iconographic sources, as well as through ancient Greek writings.
Snake worship is devotion to serpent deities. The tradition is present in several ancient cultures, particularly in religion and mythology, where snakes were seen as the holders of knowledge, strength, and renewal.
The behaviour of snakes and their facial features seemed to imply that they were intelligent, that they lived by reason and not instinct, and yet their thought-processes were as alien to humans as their ways of movement.
The Bardili were a small, pre-Roman tribe of the Iberian Peninsula, and an offshoot of the widespread Turduli people, who lived in what is now southwestern Portugal in the 5th-1st centuries BC.
The Sefes sometimes also known as Cempsi were a people of ancient Iberia said to have lived on the coast of modern day Portugal and Galicia.
Mastia is the name of an ancient Iberian settlement, belonging to the Tartessian confederation, once located in southeastern Spain. It has traditionally been associated with the city of Cartagena (Spain). The association has been made principally from the analysis of classical sources in the early 20th century by Adolf Schulten. The first description of the city of Mastia appears in a poem entitled Ora Maritima by the Latin poet Rufius Festus Avienius from the 4th-century AD. The poem claims to contain borrowings from the mythic 6th-century BC Massiliote Periplus. The description of Avienus reads:
This section of the timeline of Iberian history concerns events from before the Carthaginian conquests.
The Ora is an Albanian mythological figure that every human possesses from birth, associated with human destiny and fate. Often depicted as three female deities, the Ora “maintain the order of the universe and enforce its laws” – “organising the appearance of humankind.”
