Domiduca is a Roman Goddess concerned with making sure people get home safely, particularly children and brides. Her name means ‘She Who Leads Home’, and She was invoked with a partner called Domiducus. As the Goddess in charge of watching over children’s journeys home, She is similar to Adiona, Who protects children as they learn to walk; but Domiduca seems to be a Goddess of older children, i.e. ones who are old enough to journey from (and back to) their homes.

Domiduca is also an epithet of Juno, Who protects the bride on the journey to her new home (i.e. the home of her husband). She was invoked by the bridal party (along with Jupiter Domiducus) for good luck and safety in that journey. Once there, the bride anointed the door posts of her new home, and was then carried over the threshold, a tradition still held in modern times (for the Romans, it was to avoid the bad luck that might be had if the bride stumbled on the threshold). The ancient Romans had many customs around marriage, perhaps because it was recognized that marriage was a liminal time for the bride, for during the process she was no longer a girl, but not yet a woman. Liminal (literally ‘of or pertaining to a threshold’) spaces or times have been long understood as precarious, even dangerous—they represent times of transition, where the old order is gone, but the new is not yet achieved. The Romans, apparently, wanted to make damned sure nothing bad happened during such times, and threw everything they had at it to protect the bride during her marriage rites.

Of course the Roman state had an interest in marriage, and the (assumed) subsequent children, as a measure of a healthy, populous, and prosperous state; and perhaps this is also a part of why they had so many Deities overseeing the different parts of the rituals of marriage (though such Deities could, in large part, be boiled down to aspects of Juno and Jupiter as the primal divine married couple blessing the process).

Domiduca was also paired with a Goddess called Interduca (or Iterduca), also sometimes considered an aspect of Juno. Juno Interduca was in charge of leading the bride away from home, meaning her original home before marriage; and it is easy to imagine these two Goddesses overlapping as a sort of extra safety precaution—for the bride’s journey away from her old home is also the same journey that takes her to her new one.