Roman Empire | Roman Religious Practices
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LECTURE VII - THE DEITIES OF THE EARLIEST RELIGION
In the last lecture we interrogated the calendar as to the deities whose
festivals are recorded in it, with the aid of what we know of the most
ancient priesthoods attached to particular cults. The result may be
stated thus: we found a number of impersonal numina, with names of
adjectival form, such as Saturnus, Vertumnus, and so on; others with
substantival names, Tellus, Robigus, Terminus; the former apparently
functional deities, concerned in the operations of nature or man, and
the latter spirits immanent in objects--Mother Earth herself, a stone,
the mildew, or (like Janus and Vesta) the entrance and the hearth-fire
of human dwellings or cities. Lastly, we found from the evidence,
chiefly of the priesthoods, that certain more important divinities stand
out from the crowd of spirits, Janus, Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus, and
Vesta; and we found some reason to think that these, and possibly a few
of the others, by becoming the objects of priestly cura and
caerimonia at particular spots in the city, were not unlikely to
become also in some sense personal deities, to acquire a quasi-human
personality, if they came by the chance. In the present lecture I must
go rather more closely into such evidence as we possess bearing on the
mental conception which these early Romans had formed of the divine
beings whom they had admitted within their city.
And, first, we must be quite clear that in those early ages there was
nothing in Rome which we can call a temple, as we understand the word;
nor was there any such representation of a deity as we can call an image
or eidolon. The deities were settled in particular spots of ground,
which were made loca sacra, i.e. handed over to the deity by the
process of consecratio authorised by the ius divinum.[291] It was
matter of no moment what might be erected on this bit of ground; there
might be a rude house like that of Vesta, round in shape like the oldest
Italian huts; there might be a gateway like that of Janus; or the spot
might be a grove, or a clearing within it (lucus), as in the case of
Robigus or the Dea Dia of the Arval Brethren. All such places might be
called by the general name fanum; and as a rule no doubt each fanum
contained a sacellum, i.e. a small enclosure without a roof,
containing a little altar (ara). These "altars" may at first have been
nothing more than temporary erections of turf and sods; permanent stone
altars were probably a later development. Servius tells us that in later
times it was the custom to place a sod (caespes) on the top of such a
stone altar, which must be one of the many survivals in cult of the
usages of a simpler age.[292]
With such spots as these we cannot associate anything in the nature of
an image of the deity established there; and we have every reason to
believe that no such thing was known at Rome until the Etruscan temple
of the Capitoline trias was built near the end of the regal period.
Varro expressly declared that the Romans remained for more than 170
years without any images of their gods, and added that those who first
introduced such images "civitatibus suis et metum dempsisse et errorem
addidisse."[293] What he had in his mind is clear; he had indeed no
direct knowledge of those early times, but he is thinking of a definite
traditional date in the kingly period--the last year of the reign of
Tarquinius Priscus, who, according to Varro's own account, built the
temple on the Capitol and placed in it a statue of Jupiter.[294] That
was the oldest image of which he knew anything; and, as Wissowa has
remarked, his belief is entirely corroborated by the fact that in every
single case in which the image of a god has any part in his cult, it is
always either this Capitoline Jupiter or some deity of later
introduction and non-Roman origin. It is also borne out by another
significant and interesting fact--that the next image to be introduced,
that of Diana in the temple on the Aventine, was a copy of the [Greek:
xoanon] of Artemis at Massilia, itself a copy of the famous one at
Ephesus.[295] Let us note that these two earliest statues were placed in
roofed temples which were the dwelling-places of gods in an entirely new
sense; so far no Roman deity of the city had been so housed, because he
could not be thought of in terms of human life, as visible in human form
and needing shelter. But this later and foreign notion of divinity so
completely took possession of the minds of the Romans of the
cosmopolitan city that Varro is the only writer who has preserved the
tradition of the older way of thinking. In the religion of the family
Ovid indeed has charmingly expressed it, perhaps on the authority of
some lost passage of Varro[296]:--
ante focos olim scamnis considere longis
mos erat, et mensae credere adesse deos.
Tibullus in one passage has mentioned what seems to be some rude attempt
to give outward shape and form to an ancient pastoral deity[297]:--
lacte madens illic suberat Pan ilicis umbrae
et facta agresti lignea falce Pales.
And Propertius hints at a like representation of Vertumnus, the garden
deity. But without some corroborative evidence it is hardly safe to take
these as genuine examples of early iconic worship.
Thus we may take it as certain that even the greater deities of the
calendar, Janus, Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus, and Vesta, were not thought of
as existing in any sense in human form, nor as personal beings having
any human characteristics. The early Romans were destitute of
mythological fancy, and as they had never had their deities presented to
them in visible form, could hardly have invented such stories about
them as sprang up in a most abundant crop when Greek literature and
Greek art had changed their mental view of divinity. Roman legends were
occupied with practical matters, with kings and the foundation of
cities; and even among these it is hardly possible to detect those which
may be really Roman, for they are hidden away, like rude ancient
frescoes, under the elaborate decorations of the Greek artists, who
seized upon everything that came to hand, including the old deities
themselves, to amuse themselves and win the admiration of their dull
pupils at Rome. He who would appreciate the difficulty of getting at the
original rude drawings must be well acquainted with the decorative
activity of the Alexandrian age.
Thus we might well presume a priori that the old Roman gods were not
conceived as married pairs, nor as having children; and this is indeed
the conclusion at which we have arrived after half a century or more of
most careful and conscientious investigation by a series of German
scholars. But quite recently in this country the contrary view has been
put forward by an author of no less weight than Dr. Frazer; and another
eminent Cambridge scholar, Mr. A. B. Cook, evidently inclines to the
same view. I should in any case be reluctant to engage in controversy
with two valued personal friends; but it is just possible that in what
follows I may be able to throw some faint light on the evolution of the
idea of marriage among divine beings; and on the strength of this I am
content for the moment to be controversial. Dr. Frazer's arguments, with
strictures on my opinions, will be found in an appendix to his book on
Adonis, Attis, Osiris, 2nd edition.
In pure animism the spirits are nameless; when their residence and
functions are more clearly recognised they acquire names, and these
names are naturally masculine or feminine among peoples whose language
is not genderless, as was the case with the Sumerians of
Babylonia.[298] This would seem to be the first step on the path to a
personal conception of divinity. But there are signs that the Romans had
not got very far on this path when we begin to know anything about their
religion. I have already alluded to the formula "Sive deus sive dea,"
which occurs in the ritual of the Fratres Arvales, in the formula given
by Cato for making a new clearing, and elsewhere;[299] and indeed there
seems to have been always some uncertainty about the sex of one or two
well-known deities, such as Pales and Pomonus or Pomona.[300] It is not,
therefore, a priori probable that the process of personalisation (if I
may coin the word) should have proceeded, at the period we are treating
of, so far as to ascribe to these named deities of both sexes the
characteristics of human beings in social life and intercourse. Yet
Varro, as Dr. Frazer points out, is quoted by St. Augustine as saying
that his ancestors (that is, as Augustine adds), "veteres Romanos,"
believed in the marriage of gods and in their procreative power.[301] If
Varro wrote "maiores meos," as he seems to have done, of whom was he
really thinking? Was Augustine's comment based on the rest of Varro's
text, or was he jumping to a conclusion which would naturally serve his
own purpose? Varro, of course, was not a Roman, but from Reate in the
Sabine country. But even if he were thinking of Rome, how far back would
his knowledge extend? The Romans had known Greek married gods for three
or four centuries before his time, and he may quite well be thinking of
these. Of the di indigetes of an earlier period he could hardly know
more than we do ourselves; his only sources of information were the
facts of the cult and the books of the pontifices. The facts of the
cult, so far as he and others have recorded them, suggest no pairing of
deities, no "sacred marriage."[302] The pontifical books, which
contained rules and formulae for the proper invocation of deities by
their right names, do indeed seem to have suggested a certain
conjunction of male and female divine names; and it is just possible
that this is what Varro had in his mind when he wrote the passage seized
upon by Augustine. I will proceed at once to examine this evidence, as
it is incidentally of great interest in the history of Italian religion;
and Dr. Frazer will probably allow that his conclusion must stand or
fall by it.
The evidence to which I allude is preserved in the 13th book of the
Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius (ch. xxiii.), and extracted from
"libri sacerdotum populi Romani," as "comprecationes deorum
immortalium"; these also occur, he says, in plerisque antiquis
orationibus, i.e. in the invocations to the gods made by the orator
at the beginning or end of his speech.[303] Among these Gellius found
the following conjunctions of divine names: Lua Saturni, Salacia
Neptuni, Hora Quirini, Virites Quirini, Maia Volcani, Herie Iunonis,
Moles Martis, and Neriene Martis, or Nerio Martis. Now among these
conjunctions there are three which obviously do not express pairs of
deities, married or other, viz. Virites Quirini, Moles Martis, and Herie
Iunonis; the first two of which plainly mean the strength or force of
Quirinus and Mars, and the third conjoins two female names. The question
is whether the others are to be understood as giving us the names of the
"wives" of Saturnus, Neptunus, Quirinus, Volcanus, and Mars. The fact
that these are associated with others which cannot mean anything of the
kind is itself against this conclusion; but I have carefully examined
each pair by the light of such stray information about them as we
possess, and have failed to find anything to suggest Dr. Frazer's
emphatic conclusion that these are married pairs. I should be tedious if
I were to go through the evidence in detail in a lecture like this; but
I will take the pair which Gellius himself discusses, and on which Dr.
Frazer chiefly relies, Neriene or Nerio Martis: it is the pair about
which we know most, and in every way is the most interesting of the
set.[304]
After giving the list of names, Gellius goes on to express his own
opinion that Nerio Martis means (like Moles Martis) the virtus
or
fortitudo of Mars, Nerio being a Sabine word meaning strength or
courage;[305] and a little further he sums up his view thus: "Nerio
igitur Martis vis et potentia et maiestas quaedam esse Martis
demonstratur." This seems to fit in very comfortably with what can be
guessed of the meaning of two of the other pairs, Virites Quirini and
Maia Volcani: Maia was explained by another Roman scholar as equivalent
to Maiestas.[306]
But Gellius goes on to quote three passages from old Latin authors in
which Nerio (or Neria) appears positively as the wife of Mars; and again
concludes that there was also a tradition that these two were
coniuges. Of these passages we luckily have the context of one, for it
occurs in the Truculentus of Plautus: turning this out (line 515) we
find that a rough soldier, arriving at Athens, salutes his sweetheart
with the words "Mars peregre adveniens salutat Nerienen uxorem
suam"--words which Plautus must have adapted from his Greek original in
such a way as to make them intelligible to a Roman audience. Gellius
says that he had often heard a learned friend blame Plautus for thus
putting a false notion about Mars (that he had a wife) into the mouth of
his soldier--"nimis comice"--merely to produce a comic effect. But, he
adds, there was some justification for it; for if you read the third
book of the annals of Gellius (a namesake who lived in the second
century B.C.) you will find that he puts into the mouth of Hersilia,
pleading for peace before Ti. Tatius, words which actually make Nerio
the wife of Mars: "De tui, inquit, coniugis consilio, Martem scilicet
significans." Little, I fear, can be said to the credit of this
Gellius;[307] he lived in an age when annalists were many and inventive,
and long after the Romans had grown accustomed to Greek ideas of the
gods; but we may take this passage as evidence of what may have been in
his day a popular idea of Mars and his consort. Lastly, Aulus Gellius
quotes a brace of lines from one Licinius Imbrex, an old comic writer of
the same century, who, in a fabula palliata called Neaera, wrote:--
nolo ego Neaeram te vocent, aut Nerienem,
cum quidem Marti es in connubium data.
The real question is whether these passages from comic writers and an
annalist of no reputation combine to prove that there was an ancient
popular idea of Mars as a married god; as to the priestly view of the
matter they can, of course, prove nothing. It seems to me that Dr.
Frazer is entitled to argue that in the second century B.C. such a
popular idea existed,[308] which the Roman state religion did not
recognise, and which Aulus Gellius, as we have seen, could not agree
with. I do not, however, think him entitled to go farther, and to infer
that this was an idea of divinity native to Italy or of very old
standing. Is it not much simpler to suppose, with a cool-headed scholar
whom Dr. Frazer is willing to follow when it suits his turn, that pairs
or conjunctions of this kind, the true meaning of which I hope to
explain directly, were easily mistaken by the vulgar mind for married
god and goddess?[309] In those degenerate days of the Roman religion,
after the war with Hannibal, to which these writers belong--and all are
later than Ennius, the first to make mischief by ridiculing the
gods--nothing could be easier than to take advantage of what looked like
married life to invent comic passages to please a Roman audience, now
consisting largely of semi-educated men who had lost faith in their own
religion, and of a crowd of smaller people of mixed descent and
nationality. Such passages, in fact, cannot safely be used as evidence
of religious ideas, apart from the tendencies of the age in which they
were written. Had there really been religious beliefs, rooted in the old
Roman mind, about the wedded life of gods and goddesses, it would even
then have been dangerous to use them mockingly in comedy. And once more,
had there been such genuinely Roman ideas, why, in an age that made for
anthropomorphism, did they not find their way into the Roman
Pantheon,--why did they survive only in literary allusions, to the
bewilderment of scholars like Aulus Gellius?
The real explanation of these curious conjunctions of masculine and
feminine names is, I think, not very hard to come by. Let us remember,
in the first place, that they were found in the books of the priests,
and that they belonged to forms of prayer--comprecationes deorum
immortalium; in other words, they do not represent popular ideas of the
deities, but ritualistic forms of invocation. As such they may indeed no
doubt be regarded as expressing, or as growing out of, a popular way of
thinking of the Power manifesting itself in the universe; but they are
themselves none the less, like those strange lists of divine names
called Indigitamenta, with which I shall deal directly, the creations
of an active professional priesthood, working upon the principle that
every deity must be addressed in precisely the correct way and no other,
and accounting the name of the deity, as indicating his or her exact
function, the most vitally important thing in the whole invocation. I
have already pointed out how difficult the early Latin must have found
it to discover how to address the numina at work around him, and I
shall return to the subject in another lecture; at present all I want to
insist upon is that the priests of the City-state relieved him of this
anxiety, and indeed must have carried the work so far as to develop a
kind of science of divine nomenclature. Every one who has studied the
history of religions knows well how strong the tendency is, when once
invocation has become ritualised, for the names and titles of the
objects of worship to abound and multiply. The Roman Church of to-day
still shows this tendency in its elaborate invocation of the Virgin.
With the old Romans the common method of elaboration lay in the
invention of cult-titles, of which the different kinds have been
distinguished and explained by Dr. J. B. Carter in his treatise "de
Deorum Romanorum cognominibus."[310] Most of them are suggestive of
function or character, as, e.g., Janus Patulcius Clusivius, or Jupiter
Lucetius, Ops Opifera; sometimes they doubled the idea, as in Aius
Locutius, or Anna Perenna, or Fors Fortuna; and in one or two cases
they seem to have combined two deities together in rather puzzling
conjunctions, which usually, however, admit of some possible
explanation, as Janus Junonius, or Ops Consiva (i.e. Ops belonging to
Consus).[311] In the Iguvian ritual, which is the highly-elaborated work
of a priesthood as active as the Roman, we find combinations of not less
than four names:[312] Cerfe Martie, Praestita Cerfia Cerfi Martii, Tursa
Cerfia Cerfi Martii, which may perhaps be rendered "Spirit of Mars,
protecting (female) spirit of the (male) spirit of Mars, fear-inspiring
(female) spirit of the (male) spirit of Mars."
Such strange multiple combinations as these suggest that expressions
like Moles Martis or Virites Quirini are only another form of the usual
cult-title, expressing adoration of the power of the deity addressed;
and it is only reasonable to explain the others of the same group on the
same principle. As we have seen, Roman scholars themselves explained
Nerio Martis as equivalent to Virtus Martis; Herie Iunonis probably
means something of the same kind; the others are not so easily
explained, and guesswork about them is unprofitable. But I hope I have
said enough to show that there is absolutely no good ground for
supposing that these combinations of names in nominative and genitive
indicate a relationship of any kind except a qualitative one. Abstract
qualities, let us note, are usually feminine in Latin, and I think it is
not improbable that abstractions such as Fides and Salus, which were
deified at a very early period at Rome, may have reached divinity by
attachment to some god from whom they subsequently became again
separated.[313] And lastly, we can trace the same tendency to combine
names and ideas together far down the course of Roman history; witness
the combination of Genius with cities, legions, gods, etc., as well as
with the individual man, and again such expressions as Pietas Legionis,
by analogy with which von Domaszewski, wrongly as I think, would explain
those we have been discussing.[314]
Before leaving this complicated and cloudy system of divine
nomenclature, it is as well to ask the question once more, even if we
cannot answer it, whether if left to itself it might have developed into
a polytheistic system of personal deities. I will give my own opinion
for what it is worth. I do not think that such a result could have been
reached without the magic touch of the Greek poet and artist, or the
arrival of Greek deities and their images in Latium. Professor Sayce, in
his Gifford lectures on the religion of Babylonia, has shown how the
non-Semitic Sumerians knew only of spirits and demons until the Semite
arrived in the Persian Gulf with his personal gods of both sexes;[315]
and I gather that he does not suppose that without such immigration the
Sumerian ideas of divinity could have become personalised. The question
is not exactly the same at Rome; for there the spirit world had passed
into the hands of an organised priesthood occupied with ritual, and
especially with its terminological aspect; and the chance of
personalisation, if it were there at all, lay in the importance of the
functional name. But the question is after all beside the mark; we shall
see what happened when the Greeks arrived. We may be content at present
to note the fact that they found the functional terminology sufficiently
advanced to take advantage of it, and to revolutionise the whole Roman
conception of the divine.
Dr. Frazer gives me an opportunity of adverting to another point bearing
on the question we are discussing,--the way in which the old Roman
thought of his deities. "It is difficult," he says,[316] "to deny that
the epithets Pater and Mater, which the Romans bestow on so many of
their gods, do really imply paternity and maternity; if this implication
be admitted, the inference appears to be inevitable that these divine
beings were supposed to exercise sexual functions, etc." In a footnote
he adds a number of formidable-looking references, meant, I suppose, to
prove this point. I have closely examined these passages; what they do
prove is simply that many deities were called Pater and Mater. Not one
even suggests that paternity and maternity were in such cases to be
understood literally and, so to speak, physically. The two that come
nearest to what he is looking for are those from Varro and Lactantius.
Varro says[317] that Ops was called Mater because she was identical with
Terra, who was, of course, Terra Mater: "Haec enim--
'terris gentes omnes peperit et resumit denuo,
quae dat cibaria,' ut ait Ennius."[318] It is clear, then, that neither
Varro nor Ennius understood this title of Ops and Terra in Dr. Frazer's
sense of the word. The quotation from the early Christian father
Lactantius, which contains three well-known lines of Lucilius, might
possibly deceive those who neglect to turn it out and read the context;
there we find at once that not even Lactantius could attribute to these
epithets the meaning which Dr. Frazer wishes to put on them. He would
have been as glad to do so as Dr. Frazer himself, though for a very
different reason; but what he actually wrote is this:--
"Omnem Deum qui ab homine colitur, necesse est inter solennes ritus et
precationes patrem nuncupari, non tantum honoris gratia, verum etiam
rationis; quod et antiquior est homine, et quod vitam, salutem, victum
praestat, ut pater. Itaque ut Iuppiter a precantibus pater vocatur,
etc."[319]
Dr. Frazer's quotation begins with this last sentence; it is a pity that
he did not read the context. If he had read it, his candour would have
compelled him to confess that not even a Christian father, with a keen
sense of what was ridiculous or degrading in the pagan religion,
understood the fatherhood of the gods as he wishes to understand it.
But I am wasting time in pressing this point. Dr. Frazer would hardly
have used such an argument if he had not been hard put to it. The
figurative use of human relationships is surely a common practice, when
addressing their deities, of all peoples who have reached the stage of
family life. As another distinguished anthropologist says: "The very
want of an object tends to supply an object through the imagination; and
this will be either the vital energy inherent in things, or the reflex
of the human father, who once satisfied his needs (i.e. of the
worshipper). So, in Aryan religions, the supreme god is father, [Greek:
Zeus patêr], Diespiter, Marspiter. Ahura-Mazda is a father.... Another
analogy shows the relationship of brother and friend, as in the case of
Mithra."[320] The Romans themselves were familiar from the first with
such figurative use of relationship, as was natural to a people in whom
the family instinct was so strong; we have but to think of the pater
patratus of the Fetiales,[321] of the Fratres Arvales, or the Fratres
Attiedii of Iguvium. What exactly they understood by Pater and Mater
when applied to deities is not so easy to determine: we have not the
necessary data. They were never applied, I believe, to imported deities,
di novensiles; always to di indigetes, those on whom the original
Roman stock looked as their fellow-citizens and guardians. And we shall
not be far wrong if we conclude that in general they imply the
dependence of the human citizen upon his divine protector, and thus
bring the usage into line with that of other Aryan peoples. Behind this
feeling of dependence there may have been the idea, handed down from
remote ages, that Father Sky and Mother Earth were in a sense the
parents of all living things; but there is nothing in the Roman religion
to suggest that the two were thought of as personally uniting in
marriage or a sexual act.
I will sum up this part of the discussion by translating an admirable
passage in Aust's book on the Roman religion, with which I am in cordial
agreement[322]:--
"The deities of Rome were deities of the cult only. They had no human
form; they had not the human heart with its virtues and vices. They had
no intercourse with each other, and no common or permanent residence;
they enjoyed no nectar and ambrosia ... they had no children, no
parental relation. They were indeed both male and female, and a male and
female deity are often in close relations with each other; but this is
not a relation of marriage, and rests only on a similarity in the sphere
of their operations.... These deities never become independent
existences; they remain cold, colourless conceptions, numina as the
Romans called them, that is, supernatural beings whose existence only
betrays itself in the exercise of certain powers."
They were, indeed, cold and colourless conceptions as compared with the
Greek gods of Olympus, whose warmth and colour is really that of human
life, of human passions; but the one remarkable and interesting thing
about these Roman and Italian numina is the life and force for good or
evil which is the very essence of their being. The puzzling combinations
we have just been studying are quite enough to illustrate this
character. Moles, Virites, Nerio, and perhaps others too, seem to mean
the strength or force inherent in the numen; Cerfius, or Cerus, as the
Latins called it, Liber, Genius, all are best interpreted as meaning a
functional or creative force. Jupiter is the sky or heaven itself, with
all its manifestations of activity; Tellus is Mother Earth, full of
active productive power. At the bottom of these cold and colourless
conceptions there is thus a real idea of power, not supernatural but
rather natural power, which may both hurt and benefit man, and which he
must attempt to enlist on his side. This enlistment was the task of the
Roman priesthood and the Roman government, and so effectually was it
carried out that the divine beings lost their vitality in the process.
We shall be better able to follow out this curious fate of the Roman
deities in later lectures; here I wish to note one other aspect of the
Roman idea of divinity, which will help to explain what I have just been
saying about the life and force inherent in these numina.
In most cursory accounts of the Roman religion it has been the practice
to lay particular stress upon an immense number of "gods," as they used
to be called, each of which is supposed to have presided over some
particular act or suffering of the Roman from the cradle to the
grave--from Cunina, the "goddess" of his cradle, to Libitina who looked
after his interment. I have as yet said nothing about all these. I will
now briefly explain why I have not done so, and why I hesitate to
include them, at any rate in the uncompromising form in which they are
usually presented, among the genuine religious conceptions of the
earliest period. Later on I shall have further opportunity of discussing
them; at the end of this lecture I can only sum up the results of recent
research into this curious cloud of so-called deities.
We know of them mainly, but not entirely, from Tertullian, and the de
Civitate Dei of St. Augustine.[323] These scholarly theologians,
wishing to show up the absurdity of the heathen religions, found a mine
of material in the great work of Varro on the Roman religious
antiquities; and though they found him by no means so elegant a writer
as Cicero, they studied him with pains, and have incidentally added
immensely to our knowledge both of Varro himself and of the Roman
religion. St. Augustine tells us that it was in the last three books of
his work that Varro treated of the Roman deities, and that he divided
them under the heads of di certi, di incerti, and di selecti.
In
the first of these he dealt chiefly with those with which we are now
concerned: they were certi because their names expressed their
supposed activity quite clearly.[324] We know for certain that Varro
found these names in the books of the pontifices, and that they were
there called Indigitamenta:[325] a word which has been variously
interpreted, and has been the subject of much learned disputation. I
believe with Wissowa that it means "forms of invocation," i.e. the
correct names by which gods should be addressed.
Thus these lists of names come down to us at third hand: Varro took them
from the pontifical books, and the Christian fathers took them from
Varro. It is obvious that this being the case they need very careful
critical examination; and till recently they were accepted in full
without hesitation, and without reflection on such questions as, e.g.,
whether they are psychologically probable, or whether they can be
paralleled from the religious experience of other peoples. Some
preliminary critical attempts were made about fifty years ago in this
direction,[326] but the first thoroughgoing examination of the subject
was published by R. Peter in the article "Indigitamenta" in Roscher's
Mythological Lexicon. This most industrious scholar, though his
interpretation of the word Indigitamenta is probably erroneous,[327] was
the first to reach the definite conclusion that the lists are not really
primitive, and do not, as we have them, represent primitive religious
thought. It was after a very careful study of this article, which is
long enough to fill a small volume, that I wrote in my Roman Festivals
of the Indigitamenta as "based on"--not actually representing, I might
have added--"old ideas of divine agency, now systematised by something
like scientific terminology and ordered classification by skilled legal
theologians"; and as "an artificial priestly exaggeration of a primitive
tendency to see a world of nameless spirits surrounding and influencing
all human life."[328]
I was not then specially concerned with the Indigitamenta, and only
alluded to them in passing. But before my book was published there had
already appeared a most interesting work on the names of deities
(Götternamen) by H. Usener, a brilliant investigator, which drew fresh
attention to the subject. Usener found in mediaeval records of the
religion of the heathen Lithuanians what seemed to be a remarkable
parallel with this old Roman theology, and he also compared these
records with certain facts in what we may call the pre-Olympian
religious ideas of the Greeks. "The conclusion which he draws," writes
Dr. Farnell[329]--and I cannot state it better--"is that the
Indo-Germanic peoples, on the way to the higher polytheism, passed
through an earlier stage when the objects of cult were beings whom he
designated by the newly-coined words 'Augenblickgötter' and
'Sondergötter'" (gods of momentary or limited function). He went further
than this, and claimed that the anthropomorphic gods of Greece and
Italy, of the Indo-Iranians, Persians, and Slavs, were developed out of
these spirits presiding over special functions and particular moments of
human life; but with this latter part of his theory I am not now
concerned. What we want to know now is whether in writing thus of the
Roman Indigitamenta Usener was using a record which really represents an
early stage of religious thought in Italy; and I may add that we should
be glad to know whether his Lithuanian records are also to be
unhesitatingly relied on.[330] As regards Greece, Dr. Farnell has
criticised his theories with considerable effect.
The most recent contribution to the discussion of the Roman part of the
subject is that of Wissowa, who in 1904 published a paper on "True and
False Sondergötter at Rome";[331] this is a piece of most valuable and
weighty criticism, but extremely difficult to follow and digest. I here
give only the main results of it. Wissowa takes two genuine examples of
Sondergötter which have come down to us from other sources, and more
directly than those mentioned above: the first from Fabius Pictor, the
oldest Roman historian,[332] and the other from the Acta Fratrum
Arvalium.[333] Fabius said that the flamen (Cerealis?), when sacrificing
to Tellus and Ceres, also invoked the following deities: Vervactor, for
the first ploughing, as Wissowa interprets it; Redarator, for the second
ploughing; Imporcitor, for the harrowing; Insitor, for the sowing;
Oberator, for the top-dressing; Occator, Sarritor, Subrincator, Messor,
Convector, Conditor, Promitor, for subsequent operations up to the
harvest and actual distribution of the corn for food. Secondly, in the
Acta of the Arval Brethren we find, on the occasion of a piaculum
caused by the growth of a fig-tree on the roof of the temple of Dea Dia,
at the end of a long list of deities invoked, and before the names of
the divi of the Imperial families, the names of three Sondergötter,
Adolenda Commolenda Deferunda, and on another occasion, Adolenda and
Coinquenda; these seem beyond doubt to refer to the process of getting
the obnoxious tree down from the roof, of breaking it up, and burning
it.
In both these examples, which have come down to us more directly than
the lists in the Fathers, Wissowa sees assistant or subordinate deities
(if such they can be called) grouped around a central idea, that of the
main object of sacrifice in each case;[334] these are the result of the
cura and caerimonia supervised and over-elaborated by pontifical law
and ritual. It is, I may add on my own account, most unlikely, and
psychologically almost impossible, that any individual farmer should
have troubled himself to remember and enumerate by name twelve deities
representing the various stages of an agricultural process; and Cato, in
fact, says nothing of such ritual. It was the flamen of the City-state,
who, when sacrificing to Tellus and Ceres before harvest,[335] pictured,
or recalled to mind, the various processes of a year of what we may call
high farming rather than primitive, under the names of deities plainly
invented out of the words which express those processes--words which
themselves are certainly not all antique. And in the second example,
which dates from the second century A.D., we see that the process of
destroying the intruding fig-tree is represented in ritual in exactly
the same curious way: the names of the deities, Deferunda and the rest,
being invented for the occasion out of the words which express the
several acts of the process of destruction. These Arval Brethren of the
second century inherited the traditions of their predecessors of an
earlier age, and carried out the work of amplification in their
invocations by pedantically imitating the pontifices of five or six
centuries earlier. They held, in a way which to us is ludicrous, to the
old notion that you should try and cover as much ground as possible in
worship, and to cover it in detail, so that no chance might be missed
of securing the object for which you were taking so much trouble.
Now to return to Varro and his lists of names. What is Dr. Wissowa's
conclusion about these, after examining the two examples of Sondergötter
which have not come down to us through so much book-learning as the
rest?
Varro's di certi, he says[336]--and I think there is no doubt that he
is right--included the name of every deity, great or small, of which he
could feel sure that he knew something, as he found it in the books of
the pontifices; and the part of those books in which he found these
names, known as Indigitamenta, probably contained formulae of
invocation, precationum carmina,[337] of the same kind as the
comprecationes deorum immortalium from which Gellius quoted the pairs
of male and female deities which we discussed above. Varro arranged all
these names in groups of principal and subordinate or assistant deities,
the latter amplifying in detail the meaning and scope of the former, as
we have just seen; and of this grouping some traces are still visible in
the accounts of Augustine and Tertullian. But the good Fathers tumbled
the whole collection about sadly in their search for material for their
mockery, having no historical or scientific object in view; with the
result that it now resembles the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope, and
can no longer be re-arranged on the original Varronian plan. The
difficulty is increased by the etymologies and explanations which they
offer of the divine names, which, as a rule, are even more absurd than
the divinities themselves.[338]
But, in the last place, the question must be asked whether these
Sondergötter of the real kind, such, for example, as those twelve
agricultural ones invoked by the flamen at the Cereale sacrum, had their
origin in any sense in popular usage or belief. At the end of his paper
Wissowa emphatically says that he does not believe it. For myself, I
would only modify this conclusion so far as this: they must, I think,
have been the theological, or perhaps rather the ritualistic outcome,
of a psychological tendency rooted in the popular mind. I have already
noticed that curious bit of folklore in which three spirits of
cultivation were invoked with a kind of acted parable at the birth of a
child;[339] and I cannot regard this custom as a piece of pontifical
ritualism, though the names may have been invented by the priests to
suit the practice. The old Roman seems to have had a tendency to ascribe
what for want of a better word we may call divinity, not only to animate
and inanimate objects, but to actions and abstractions; this, I take it,
is an advanced stage of animism, peculiar, it would seem, to a highly
practical agricultural people, and it is this stage which is reflected
in the ritualistic work of the priests. They turned dim and nameless
powers into definite and prehensible deities with names, and arranged
them in groups so as to fall in with the life of the city as well as the
farm. What was the result of all this ingenuity, or whether it had any
popular result at all, is a question hardly admitting of solution. What
is really interesting in the matter, if my view is the right one, is the
curious way in which the early Roman seems to have looked upon all life
and force and action, human or other, as in some sense associated with,
and the result of, divine or spiritual agency.
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