Tamfana

Tamfana (also Tanfana) is a goddess of the Marsi, a West Germanic tribe of the lower Rhine. She is securely attested only in Tacitus, Annals 1.51, which reports that in autumn 14 CE the legions of Germanicus surprised the Marsi during a night of festival and levelled 'the temple, as they called it, of Tamfana, the most celebrated centre of worship of those tribes' (celeberrimum illis gentibus templum). Nothing of her character beyond this survives; an inscription Tamfanae sacrum reported from Terni in Italy is a known Renaissance forgery, and the 'Zamfana' of the spurious Old High German lullaby cannot be used as evidence. Scholars have variously read her name as that of a local or tribal mother-goddess and set it within the broader phenomenon of the Germanic Matronae cult.

Domains

• tribal cult and festival

Powers

• to gather the surrounding peoples to a seasonal festival at her sanctuary

Sources

• Tacitus, Annals 1.51, ed. and trans. J. Jackson, Loeb Classical Library 249 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931).
• Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology, trans. Angela Hall (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993), s.v. 'Tamfana', pp. 308–309.
• Jan de Vries, Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1956–1957), vol. 2, § 318.