Imagine you’re a five year old girl. You’re beautiful. You know this because you’re mother always strokes your hair and admires your eyes. Other people stare at you in the street, or stop to comment to your mother about your beauty while in the public baths.
One day, you turn six years old. Your mother dresses you in your finest clothes, and brushes your hair for a long time. Your father inspects you in careful detail, before nodding his approval. Then your father takes your hand and takes you into the centre of town, to a large and beautiful chapel.
In the chapel there are many many little girls. Thousands of them. They are all beautiful, and they all stand with their fathers, who look anxious and excited.
Men in robes come down the line of little girls, examining the face of each one in turn. Every now and then they nod at a father, and a little girl is taken away to a new line.
When they get to you, you are very nervous, although you don’t really know why. The men peer into your eyes, they open your mouth and examine your teeth. They stroke your hair, and make you spin and walk. Then they nod at your father. You are taken to a special line.
Over the next day you are inspected and admired, spoken to, and made to walk and move and sing and dance. Finally you come before the most beautiful woman you have ever seen. She looks like a goddess, and is dressed in fine robes. You have never seen a woman dressed so beautifully. She examines you, and speaks to you, and finally she nods, and says “Welcome little one. Welcome to the cult of the vestal virgins.”
Now you are taken from your family, and told you have a new family, of only women. For the next ten years, you are trained in becoming a priestess of the pagan gods. You live in a beautiful palace with only the other priestesses, trainees, and teachers. Your own teacher was once a priestess, but she is now retired, and her only job is to teach you. There are only 6 priestesses at any one time. You are continually told how great an honour it is for you to have been chosen.
You live a life of luxury and beauty. You may own land, rise horses, wear beautiful clothes and jewellery, have input into important decisions in Rome. Where you walk down a street and smile, condemned men are instantly freed. Men come to worship your beauty and purity.
The only thing you may not do? Is have carnal knowledge of any man. You have heard the stories of those very few priestesses who broke this rule. Each one was buried alive for 60 days. Only if they lived through this ordeal would it show that they had been wrongly condemned. None ever survived the ordeal.
But you are not tempted to stray from your cult. You are well trained, and you feel the power and responsibility of being a vessel for the Gods. Your knowledge and wisdom and purity is a beacon to all those who worship you, and you know that you are one of the most beautiful women in Rome, if not on earth. Your beauty is a symbol of your spiritual perfection and purity. The gods show the world your inner perfection through the beauty of your outer.
After you serve as a priestess for ten years, you must then choose your own successor from the line of little girls who come with their anxious fathers. You examine them carefully, and must find only the most beautiful, the most perfect, the girl with the most grace and poise and promise. You will then spend 10 years training her to perfection, so that she too will carry on the traditions of the Vestal Virgins. She too will be a pure vessel for the Gods you serve.
The cult of the Vestal Virgins has existed for over 1000 years, and you will see that this tradition continues on, before finally, you will retire, after ten years of training, ten years of service, and ten years of teaching. You have been one of the most beautiful and powerful women in a land where only men have power. You have been the exception to every rule, and have lived a life envied by all other women.
Now, it is time for you to retire, and perhaps briefly taste those things so long denied to you – men, children, a home. Or perhaps it is too late, you are old now, and it is not long til you find your grave, and whatever waits beyond.
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