Pompeii's secret women's cult revealed in newly opened rooms

A visit to Pompeii's newly accessible rooms has revealed a "cult" the author eagerly wishes to join: a secret women's society that celebrated with wine, music, and ritualistic dancing. The discovery, made in the House of Thiasus, features vibrant frescoes painted with cinnabar, a rare red pigment. These artworks depict the dramatic transition of a young woman into a maenad, a follower of Dionysus, culminating in a symbolic act of cutting an ox heart from its chest.

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I think I've finally found the cult I want to join.

The author contrasts this ancient scene with modern anxieties, noting the "breathtaking fools" making "ruinous choices" and the global reliance on AI. The intelligence and scholarship evident in preserving and uncovering these ancient sites, she argues, stand as the most important "artifacts" encountered. The vibrant colors and rich detail of the paintings are striking, but the preserved ordinariness and mysteries of the Roman port town also offer a profound connection to the past.

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The secret women's society I'm referring to involves copious amounts of wine, food and feverishly dancing around to wild music wearing diaphanous gowns; with initiation culminating in cutting the heart of an oxen out of its chest with a sword and your bare hands.

These frescoes form a "megalography," a cycle of nearly life-size figures, and are the second known painted example of female Dionysian initiation, following the Villa of the Mysteries discovery in 1909. The area was excavated between 2023 and 2025 due to ground instability. Remarkably, some parts of the site have been deliberately left unexcavated, intended for future archaeologists and scholars to discover, embodying a beautiful, forward-looking philosophy.

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Visiting this remarkable site earlier this year and seeing these rooms which are now open to the public was, without exaggeration, one of the highlights of my life.