Fluusa, goddess of flowering

Fluusa is the Oscan goddess of flowering, cognate with and equivalent to the Latin Flora; her name and that of the Roman goddess both descend from the Italic word for 'flower'. She is attested in Oscan votive epigraphy and was worshipped especially among the Oscan-speaking and Sabine peoples before Roman hegemony. Her festival, the Floralia, is woven into the cult calendar recorded on the Agnone Tablet, where the worshippers of Ceres were required to offer sacrifices in connection with Flora, marking Fluusa as the power of the blossoming that precedes the ripening of the crops and binding her into the agrarian circle of the grain goddess.

Domains

• flowers and blossoming

Powers

• to bring plants into flower and blossom

Relations

• ally: Kerres, the grain goddessThe Agnone Tablet of the Ceres cult ties its annual sacrifices to the festival of Flora, associating Fluusa with the grain goddess Kerres in the agrarian calendar.'Agnone Tablet', Encyclopaedia Britannica (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc.). (secondary)

Sources

• Fluusa is the Oscan goddess of flowering, the Sabellic equivalent of Flora, attested by votive inscription and connected through the Floralia to the Ceres cult of the Agnone Tablet.: Katherine McDonald, Oscan in Southern Italy and Sicily: Evaluating Language Contact in a Fragmentary Corpus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). (secondary); 'Agnone Tablet', Encyclopaedia Britannica (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc.). (secondary)