Crossword-Solution: VESTALIA 8 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 11

The Vestalia was a festival held in honour of Vesta on the 9th of June, and was celebrated exclusively by women, who walked barefooted in procession to the temple of the goddess.

Sorrow appears also in other agricultural seasons, as in the Roman Vestalia (in June) and the Greek Thesmophoria (in the autumn), in which cases more likely it is connected with the fear of evil influences.[424] So the great tribal purification of the Creeks, at the beginning of a new year, naturally coincides with the gathering of the new crop.

The real estate business in Vestalia was never brilliant, and several weeks' profits might easily have been expended in one friendly smoke.

This blessing the house, the food, the penates, the tools, the effigies of ancestors is the Little Ambervalia Pater describes so deliciously in Marius, the Epicurean; there is, too, an echo in it of the Vestalia, the festival in honor of Vesta, held at the house of the Vestal Virgins on the 9th of June, “after which the temple was closed for five days for ceremonial cleansing!” At home, in God’s own country, the ceremony survives under the name of spring cleaning.

But we must postpone further consideration of the Vestals and their duties till we come to the Vestalia in June.