Mother of the Lares

On another occasion, the Arvals offer sacrificial recompense to various deities for a necessary pollution of Dia's sacred grove; the Mater Larum is given two sheep.

Ovid, in his Fasti II, 571 ff poetically interprets what may be a variant of her rites at the fringes of the Feralia: an old woman squats among a circle of younger women and sews up a fish-head.

Macrobius applies it to the woolen figurines (maniae) hung at crossroad shrines during Compitalia, thought to be substitutions for ancient human sacrifice once held at the same festival and suppressed by Rome's first consul, L. Junius Brutus.

[6] The only known mythography attached to Mater Larum is little, late and poetic: again, the source is Ovid, [7] who identifies her as a once-loquacious nymph, Lara, her tongue cut out for betrayal of Jupiter's secret amours.

Lara thus becomes Muta (speechless) and is exiled from the daylight world to the underworld abode of the dead (ad Manes); a place of silence (Tacita).