Bacax

Bacax is a native Berber deity of caves and vegetation whose cult is unusually well documented by epigraphy. His sanctuary was the Ghar el Djemaa, a large cavern in Djebel Taya above the Roman town of Thibilis (Announa, Algeria). Each spring the two annually elected magistri of Thibilis made a pilgrimage to the grotto and engraved a dated dedication to 'Bacax Augustus'; the surviving series runs from roughly 210 to 284 CE, with celebrations falling around 31 March or 1 May, tied to the growth season of cereals and pasture. Although the Latinized name resembles Bacchus, scholars regard the god as thoroughly indigenous, a local numen of the sacred mountain and its life-renewing spring.

Domains

• sacred caves
• spring vegetation

Powers

• to preside over the sacred grotto and the return of spring growth

Epithets

• Bacax AugustusCorpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, vol. VIII, nos. 5504-5519 and 18828-18857 (dedications from the grotto of Djebel Taya, Thibilis). (primary)

Sources

• Bacax is an indigenous Berber cave-god of the territory of Thibilis in Numidia, worshipped through an annual springtime pilgrimage and sacrifice led by the town's two chief magistrates during the Roman period.: Gabriel Camps, s.v. 'Bacax,' Encyclopedie berbere, vol. 9 (Aix-en-Provence: Edisud, 1991). (secondary); Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, vol. VIII, nos. 5504-5519 and 18828-18857 (dedications from the grotto of Djebel Taya, Thibilis). (primary)