The Roman festival of the Lupercalia is one of the most discussed issues in the field of pre-Christian Roman religion. Hardly a year goes by without an article on the subject appearing in a major Classics journal. But the festival presents a range of issues that individual articles cannot address. This thesis is an attempt to present a modern analysis of the phenomenon of the Lupercalia as a whole, including literary, archaeological and historical evidence on the subject. The first section presents the ancient sources on the Lupercalia, and is divided into five chapters, each analysing a particular aspect of the festival: fertility, purification, the importance of the wolf and the foundation myth, the mythology of Arcadian origins, and Caesar's involvement with the Lupercalia of 44 BC. The second section places the Lupercalia in a wider context, discussing the festival's topography and the course of the running Luperci, its relationship to other lustration rituals, and its position in the Roman calendar, ending with an appraisal of the changes it underwent in late Antiquity. The third section employs methods from linguistics, anthropology and comparative religion to show that the Lupercalia involved a ritual of initiation, which was also reflected in the Roman foundation myth. The central chapter of this section discusses the methodology used in comparative Indo-European mythology, and offers a case study that parallels the god of the festival (Faunus) with Rudra of Vedic Hinduism. The last chapter considers other parallels with Indian religion, especially the relationship between flamen and brahmin. The thesis challenges a number of established theories on the subject and offers new evidence to show that the festival has Indo-European origins, but also that it played an important role throughout Roman history.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T19:59:18Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Alexandre Goncalves Pereira.pdf: 920270 bytes, checksum: b74d5a26245b74e2ce72895710738b72 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009-08-11 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / The research investigates Guimarães Rosa s mythical speech through the construction of the mythical character, according to Campbell s model of the monomyth. The corpus adopted is the short story A Hora e Vez de Augusto Matraga. It also focuses the sources of the literary creation in which the author got his inspiration to conceive a character that although he symbolizes a man from Brazilian backlands, transcends the documental record, the ascension to the condition of mythical hero through the adventures and the search of the salvation of his soul. We started from the hypothesis of that the construction of the mythical character, according to the diagram of the monomyth, besides being an indelible features of identification of the myth in Rosa s fiction, also clarifies the importance of the metaphysical religious worries of the author about the conception of his work, because the hero of the monomyth shows, during his trajectory, features of rituals of initiation. The aspect of initiation of the trajectory of the mythological hero reveals the holy meaning of the myth of the hero: this one symbolizes the divine potential in human being who only can be developed due to a project of ascetic life and of a heroic ethos. Identifying the archetype of the mythological hero in creation of the character Augusto Matraga, according to the key of reading of the monomyth, we identify the meeting among myth, religion and literature in the work of an author who transcended the documental regionalism, as a result of the creation of the myth of the spiritual asceticism of a character in the heart of the backlands of the North of Minas Gerais / A pesquisa investiga a realização do discurso mítico rosiano por meio da construção da personagem mítica, segundo o modelo campbelliano do monomito. O corpus adotado é o conto A Hora e Vez de Augusto Matraga. Enfoca, também, as fontes da criação literária em que o autor se inspirou para conceber uma personagem que, a despeito de representar um homem do sertão brasileiro, transcende ao registro documental, ao ascender à condição de herói mítico por meio das peripécias, da trajetória de aventuras e pela busca da salvação de sua alma. Partimos da hipótese de que a construção da personagem mítica, de acordo com o diagrama do monomito, além de ser um traço indelével de identificação do mito na ficção rosiana, também esclarece a importância das preocupações metafísico-religiosas do autor para a concepção de sua obra, pois o herói do monomito apresenta, em sua trajetória, traços de rituais de iniciação. O caráter iniciático da trajetória do herói mitológico revela o sentido sagrado do mito do herói: este emblematiza o potencial divino no ser humano que só pode ser desenvolvido em razão de um projeto de vida ascética e de um ethos heróico. Identificando o modelo arquetípico do herói mitológico na criação da personagem Augusto Matraga, segundo a chave de leitura do monomito, identifica-se o encontro entre mito, religião e literatura na obra de um autor que transcendeu o regionalismo documental, em virtude da criação do mito da ascese espiritual de uma personagem no âmago do sertão norte-mineiro