As you know, I left for my trip around the world a month ago. Right now I’m staying in Pompeii. It is so beautiful over here, I just love it. It is very religious in Pompeii. So many different gods to be able to worship in this town, its crazy! There are also foreign cults, some of them are Isis, the worship of the Thracian fertility god Sabazius who was equated with the Graeco-Roman god Dionysus, who was also known as Bacchus. When you walk through certain areas there are statues been placed on an altar, which had vases placed in front of them for offerings.
The first thing I noticed when I came here and now have a house I’m staying in with a local family it is actually really cool. I’ve noticed in the home I am in, there is a painting of a sort with 3 people in it. It was known as a household god. They worshipped gods within their homes, how cool is that! The family makes offerings of food to their household god, in the early morning and at night when they eat. The other day I went to the relatives houses, about four of them, and they also had the household gods, even within the tavern and the bakery, they have one to. Everybody in the town, has a household god, which protects their home, while the gods in the temples and the gods on the streets, were all worshipping for the people themselves, and for the gods to protect the city from any danger.
I went to the Temple of Isis last week! It is named after a goddess, named Isis and she promoted fertility, healed the sick and offered her followers immortality. It was situated on a high platform, with a stone staircase and four Corinthian columns out the front. The interior of the temple was decorated with white stucco, and there was a platform for the statues of Isis and another god named Osiris. Inside there were these amazing paintings and murals of all Egyptian landscapes. And out the front they had a room called the purgatorium which had water from the Nile in it! They also had an area for performances of sacred dramas, meetings and ritual banquets in the west of the courtyard, but I didn’t stay for any of the performances.
This is more exciting, because I know you love this type of stuff! There are tombs located just outside the city gates. Most of the burials are Roman but there is a little number of Samnite burials, which have been found. There are some funerary monuments but there mostly clustered together on the way to Nuceria. All the rich and poor tombs are fairly close together and you can tell if