Bullae, Lunulae, and Glossopetrae

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AmyOfRome
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Bullae, Lunulae, and Glossopetrae

Post by AmyOfRome »

Working on some texts/videos in Latin about these but some stuff I've gathered in the meantime, unfinished. Note that the images are my recreated versions but you can google for originals, original bullae (for richer kids) often were round and gold and filled with trinkets. This is some stuff I will eventually put on my website for info and how to make replicas and I was handing out an edited version of this info at a festival recently in hopes of either finding people already interested in Latin and ancient Rome, or getting people interested.

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I got the Roman soldier necklace on Amazon. The real bullae wouldn't be hinged but it would be a locket, so the gold thing is a modern good-enough imitation in my opinion.

Bulla, pl. bullae. Bullae were pendants given to freeborn children shortly after birth (on their birthday or one week later) as amulets or good luck charms. They were thought to protect the child from evil. There were a wide variety of designs, wealthy children had gold lockets containing amulets, and poorer children had bullae made of a cloth or a leather pouch containing one or more amulets, which was worn on a string as a necklace. The amulets may have featured images of gods, heroic figures, portraits, leaves, phallic symbols, or other inscriptions or art. During the time of the Roman Republic, many bullae were fairly plain, large, round capsules.

Two plates, somewhat convex, were soldered together, or small triangular tabs could be cut around one of the plates and then folded over the other side to hold the locket together. The loops for hanging on a cord were sometimes plain, sometimes decorative with ribs. Gold bullae were more likely to be decorated. These often contained small items that would’ve been hard to wear alone as jewelry. Plant parts were sometimes found inside of them. Some contained a coin or a plate with an inscription.
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Some crescent moon pendants I bought to imitate lunulae for girls.

It is usually noted that only boys wore the bulla, and girls worn a lunula, but some sources also mention girls wearing bullae. This may have differed according to the region or time period, or some sources may have been calling the lunulae amulets “bullae” instead, since they were used in very similar ways. Lunulae were pendants worn by girls, shaped like a moon, or with moon designs on them. In Plautus’ play Rudens, a character explicitly mentions her father giving her a golden bulla when she was born.

If the bulla didn’t do its job of protecting the child, namely, if the child died prematurely, then the bulla was probably passed on to the next child born to the family, rather than being buried with the child who had died.

Since child mortality was very high due to the lack of modern medicine, a child reaching adulthood was an important rite of passage. When a boy came of age, he would take off his bulla along with the first shavings of his beard to signify his passage into adulthood. He would also stop wearing the toga praetexta, which was worn by children, regardless of gender, and put on the toga virilis, the toga of manhood. The bulla may have still been worn on some special occasions, however. There was a private ceremony at home for this as well as another public ceremony in the Forum.

Likewise, girls would have a special rite of passage in which they removed their lunulae or bullae when they passed into adulthood. Along with childhood toys, it would be dedicated to the goddess Venus when she was about to get married. This may have been around 14 or 15 years of age.

There are many ways to make your own replica bulla. When I was taking Latin in 6th and 7th grade, our teacher gave all of us wooden pendants and a cord for hanging. While you may not believe the pendant is protecting you from evil spirits, it’s still important to personalize it in some way to make it seem more meaningful. We used paint or markers to draw on and decorate the wooden bulla and wrote our Latinized name on it (mine was “Amata Sufragia”), as well. Girls and boys were both given the same type of pendant to decorate (much easier for a classroom situation that way!).

Another way to make a bulla is to buy or make a pendant. Plain gold or silver colored lockets can be found for sale online, either solid or with ornate lattice-type patterns for use with aromatherapy oils. The ones with the solid outside are probably truer to the real bullae, but you can adapt things to suit your preferences! Be sure to put something meaningful inside, a paper with a saying on it, perhaps, or beads or other trinkets or charms.

Otherwise, a pouch made of leather or cloth can be used. Likewise, you should put some personal items inside. Coins, trinkets, inscriptions on paper or beads. There are many videos online telling you how to do this with leather or felt, usually by cutting a circle of felt, punching holes around the perimeter, and lacing your cord through the holds to gather it into a pouch. A vegan option would be to use imitation leather. I think these are less aesthetically pleasing, but I understand they'd be cheaper options for classroom settings.

Metal stamping blanks can also be used to imitate the general look of the gold pendants, though less accurate.
I will be making and uploading videos on different kinds of ways to make bullae replicas of your own in the near future.
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Shark Teeth, Glossopetrae, and Neils Stensen

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Sharks keep growing teeth throughout their life, they are polyphyodonts, so shark teeth aren't all that rare, but fossilized teeth have been collected by humans and worn as pendants for thousands of years. Pliny the Elder apparently thought they were “stone tongues” that fell from the sky during an eclipse, glossopetrae, and had magical properties, but I'm still looking for the original source text for this. They allegedly counteracted poisons and toxins. Just hold them against your skin or drop one in your glass of wine to suck up the poisons! Unfortunately, there is no reason to believe they absorb venom from snake bites or remove poisons from wine, but they still look cool! People would wear them around their neck or keep them in their pocket. I had one as a kid.

And in more modern times: Neils Stensen (1638-1686)/ aka Nicolaus Steno, a Danish scientist, theologian, and Catholic bishop, beatified in 1988, figured out what these objects really were. They weren't stone tongues, they were fossilized shark teeth. He dissected a great white shark's head and noted that the teeth looked very similar to glossopetrae! He realized that if something becomes embedded in sediment, sometimes it can become fossilized, and he wrote about this in a book in 1669. He has been considered the father of modern geology and paleontology.

He was a sickly child without many friends. He attended college to become a physician. He read Paracelsus, Descartes, Galileo, and Kepler, and became skilled in the study of anatomy. He dissected horse eyes and a sheep's head, and discovered the parotid gland duct, through which saliva flows. He explained the nature of the human heart as a muscle, rather than a heat generating organ, through careful dissection.

He understood the way that crystals form and was interested in rocks, leading him to try to explain the geology around Tuscany. Some of his ideas are still accepted today: old rock underlies new rock, that rock layers can show a sequence of time.; that sediments are deposited as liquid horizontally, irregular at the bottom, and having a smooth top surface, and that layers of sediment are continuous, unless there is a barrier preventing this, or unless they are broken up at a later time. The mineral stenonite is named for him.

Sources:
http://www.elasmo-research.org/educatio ... petrae.htm
https://www.strangescience.net/stensen.htm
Ecce Romani I & II
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunula_(amulet)
Last edited by AmyOfRome on Tue Sep 06, 2022 1:46 am, edited 2 times in total.

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