Do You Know the Connection Between Immolation and Salted Cakes?

On This Day in Ancient History - May 13:
Vestal Virgins worked on the mola salsa, the Romans' sacred salted cake. In her online article on mola salsa, author Caroline Tully cites Robin Lorsch Wildfang's book on Vestal Virgins to say that this was one of the days on which the Vestal Virgins gathered unripe spelt to use in the mola salsa. The grain would then be parched, ground, and stored prior to being made into the sacred salted cake or mola salsa.

What came next? In "The Jug and Lituus on Roman Republican Coin Types: Ritual Symbols and Political Power" (Phoenix, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Summer, 1997), pp. 170-189), author Roberta Stewart writes about the use of the salted cakes in the public immolations:

All public sacrifice required two sacred substances: mola salsa for the immolatio of the sacrificial victims and wine for the preliminary libation and the immolatio. The Vestal Virgins prepared, stored, and presumably distributed the mola salsa.... The harvest of unripe grapes parallels the harvest of as yet green spelt by the Vestals and may have guaranteed that the sacred substances be as near as possible to maturity without yet beginning to decay (die)....

Immolation, which now means to kill as a sacrificial victim, often by fire, comes from the sprinkling of the mola salsa upon the sacrificial victim at the public Roman sacrifices.

References:

• Mola Salsa: Sacred Flour from the Hearth of Rome's Vestal Virgins," by Caroline Tully.
• Robin Lorsch Wildfang's Rome's Vestal Virgins: A Study of Rome's Vestal Priestesses in the late Republic and early Empire (London. Routledge. 2006).

Related:

• Types of Roman Priests
• Functions
• Temples