From Greek and Roman Mythology & Heroic Legend, by Professor H. Steuding, Translated from the German and Edited by Lionel D. Barnett. The Temple Primers, London: J. M. Dent; 1901; pp. 120-121.
[120]Greek and Roman Mythology & Heroic Legend
MYTHOLOGY AND RELIGION OF THE ROMANS
IV. Deities of Death. § 213. In Rome the idea of a uniform realm of the dead did not become general, and hence there was no development of independent deities conceived 121 as its rulers. Only the approach of death was ascribed to the activity of a god of sometimes terrible and sometimes kindly power, who was styled Orcus; his figure however was not developed with any completeness. By his side appears under various names a motherly nurse of the departed, who seems to be properly Mother Earth herself1 (Tellus or Terra Mater), in so far as the latter receives the dead into her bosom. From the Manes and Lares she is also named Mania or Lara and Larunda, from the Larvae Avia Larvarum or ‘grandmother of the ghosts,’ and like the latter conceived in a hideous form. Finally she was called from the silence of the dead Dea Muta or Tacita, the mute goddess. Perhaps too Acca Larentia (‘mother of the Lares’ ?), to whom funeral offerings were brought at the festival of the Larentalia on the 23rd of December, belongs to the same connection, for she appears like Tellus herself to have also the character of a goddess of earth’s fertility.
FOOTNOTES
1 As a mother Tellus was especially worshipped by the Fordicidia, a sacrifice of pregnant cows.
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Mythology and Religion of the Romans :
V. Personifications.