Cardea

Modern scholarship has pointed out that this particular set of divinities belongs to rituals of marking out sacred space and fixing boundaries, religious developments hypothesized to have occurred during the transition from pastoralism to an agrarian society.

The cardo was also a principle in the layout of the Roman army's marching camp, the gates of which were aligned with the cardinal ( a word derived from Latin cardo/cardinis) points to the extent that the terrain permitted.

[13] Macrobius[14] (5th century) says that the name Carna was derived from caro, carnis, "flesh, meat, food" (compare English "carnal" and "carnivore"), and that she was the guardian of the heart and the vital parts of the human body.

The power to avert vampiric striges, which Ovid attributes to the conflated Cardea-Carna, probably belonged to Carna, while the charms fixed on doorposts are rightly Cardea's.

[17] William Warde Fowler took Carna to be an archaic goddess whose cult had not been revivified by religious innovation or reform and thus had lapsed into obscurity by the end of the Republic.

[19] Her elusive nature is indicated by the wildly divergent scholarly conjectures she has prompted: "she was considered a chthonic divinity by Wissowa, a lunar goddess by Pettazzoni, a bean-goddess by Latte, and a patroness of digestion by Dumézil".

She responded to his sweet-talk (verbis mollibus) by attempting the same ruse; however, as Ovid points out in a characteristic moment of comedy and cruelty colliding, the two faces of Janus allow him to see what goes on behind, and Cranaë was unable to elude him.

She was powerless (nil agis, "you can do nothing", the poet repeats twice); the god "occupies her with his embrace", and after overpowering her to achieve his goal, treats the encounter as contractual: "In exchange for our intercourse (pro concubitu), the right (ius) of the hinge will be yours; take that as payment for the virginity you deposited" (6.119–128).

They are given the name striges, singular strix, the word for an owl as a bird of evil omen and supposedly derived from the verb strideo, stridere, "shriek".