Fordicidia

[1] On the Roman religious calendar, the month of April (Aprilis) was in general preoccupied with deities who were female or ambiguous in gender, opening with the Feast of Venus on the Kalends.

[9] As with other rituals in which public cult was mirrored by private, or vice versa, one sacrifice was conducted on behalf of the state, in this case at the Capitol, and one in each of the thirty curiae, the most ancient divisions of the city made by Romulus from the original three tribes.

This was the first of two festivals involving the curiae, the other being the Fornacalia on February 17, which differed in that there was no ritual of state corresponding to the local ceremonies[10] and its moveable date was fixed annually by the curio maximus.

Its ashes were preserved by the Vestals and used as one of the ingredients in the ritual substance suffimen, along with the dried blood of the October Horse from the previous year, and the stalks from which beans had been harvested.

[16] In the spirit of the Cambridge Ritualists and comparative mythologists, Fowler pointed to a Chinese spring festival witnessed in 1804 by the British ambassador to China, John Barrow.