Juno Covella is Juno in Her aspect as Goddess of the waxing Moon, through Her identity as a pregnancy and birth Goddess. The first day of every month, known as the kalends, was sacred to Her.

In early times, the Romans followed a lunar calendar, beginning the month with the new Moon. These days, the ‘new Moon’ is the point exactly opposite the full Moon, in other words, the dark of the Moon; but to the ancients, the new Moon was when the first crescent could be sighted just after sunset, when the Moon appeared ‘reborn’ and began its waxing cycle anew, putting it a day or two after the modern new Moon.

The Moon cycle isn’t a neat twenty-nine or thirty days, so the ancients had to account for this in their lunar calendars. Some calendars (like the Greeks’) used months of alternating twenty-nine days (‘hollow’ months) or thirty days (‘full’ months) in a repeating cycle; for the Romans, they kept track by direct, physical observation of the new crescent Moon. They were a practical people, the Romans, and apparently trusted their eyes more than the math (though to be fair, calculating an accurate lunisolar calendar can get crazy complicated).

Being Romans, there were of course proper rituals to be followed. The pontifex minor, a priestly official who had clerical duties, would make the official sighting of the new Moon’s crescent from the proper location of the Curia Calabra on the Capitoline Hill. We’re not exactly sure where the Curia Calabra was, or even what, exactly it was—a hut? a temple? a sacred enclosure?—but it must have been on the western side of the Capitoline in order to get a good view of the sunset. Once the new Moon was sighted, the pontifex minor, with the rex sacrorum, performed a sacrifice to Juno Covella in the Curia Calabra, as well as one to Janus, the double-faced God of beginnings (and endings, and yes, January is still named for Him).

The rex sacrorum was a priest whose duties were to perform what had been the religious roles of the King; the regina sacrorum, his wife, was a priestess who took over the corresponding duties of the old Queen. Even though the Romans had abolished the monarchy in favor of a Republic, the old King had had important ritual duties that the Romans did not want forgotten. Perhaps it was the move to a more secular government that in part made the Romans so conservative in their religious rules—or maybe, I wonder, if it was that they knew the foundation of their (to be) great city was really quite shaky, established as it was on murder (Romulus, after whom Rome was named, murdered his brother Remus in a dispute over control of the early city) and on rape (the abduction and forced marriage/rape of the women of the Sabines). At any rate, the Romans wanted to make sure they did everything exactly ritually correctly, and had plenty of rules to make sure they did.

The Roman month had three main days, originally corresponding to phases of the Moon—the kalends, which again marked the new Moon, the nones, roughly equating to the first quarter, and the ides, in the old calendar the full Moon. Depending on the length of the month, the ides could be set on either the thirteenth or the fifteenth, with the nones nine days before that (counting inclusively, as the Romans did; we’d call it eight days before). After sighting the crescent of the new Moon, the pontifex minor would then publicly announce the date of the nones from the Curia Calabra (whether they would be on the fifth or the seventh of that month), while ritually invoking Juno Covella.

This is, incidentally, what gave the kalends their name—the word comes from ‘calare’, to call out. And you probably recognize the word as the base of our ‘calendar’, too; as the kalends were also when debts were traditionally squared up, the accounting books recording the dates of the transactions (calendaria) gave their name to calendars.

The regina sacrorum had her duties on the kalends as well: she sacrificed a white sow, or a ewe lamb, to Juno Covella down in the Regia, the ancient site in the Forum that had been the home of the original Kings. The sow was likely white both to emphasize its ritual holiness or cleanliness, and to evoke the light of the Moon; and the symbolic fecundity of pigs, with their large litters, may have been a way to guarantee the growth of the Moon’s crescent, and by extension, the growth, fertility, and material wealth of the Roman state and its people. The ewe lamb in its turn was perhaps an expression of the newness or youth of the Moon at that time.

Juno’s epithet of Covella may stem from the Latin noun covus, an early variant of cavus, meaning ‘hollowed out or concave’, referring to the shape of the crescent Moon (though this word was generally used of the waning Moon, not the waxing one). Juno, though not really a Moon Goddess, was associated with the Moon through Her assimilation with the Sabine Moon and birth Goddess Lucina. Birth and light are connected through the Moon; as Lucina brings the child into the world and out into the light, so Covella helps rebirth the Moon back to its light. Juno is also a Goddess of pregnancy, as well as birth, and the Moon waxes round and full, much like the belly of a pregnant woman.

Juno Covella then can be seen as the Goddess of new beginnings, of that first seed of light that promises to grow bright and beautiful if nourished. She might also be considered a Goddess of the cycles of time and the ordered calendar, with the first day of the month still holy to Her. Perhaps She is also a Goddess of conception, of babies or new inspiration, as a Goddess of potential and promise.

She was also called Kalendaris Iuno, i.e. ‘Juno of the kalends’, in Laurentum, a city on the western coast of Italy, about fifteen miles south-east from Ostia, the port of Rome on the Tiber.