Prev | Next | Contents


NOTES TO LECTURE III

[81] Westermarck, Origin etc. of Moral Ideas, ii. 584.

[82] Jevons, Introduction, p. 33.

[83] A useful summary of the whole subject, embodying the results and terminology of Tylor, Frazer, and other anthropologists, is Dr. Haddon's Magic and Fetishism, in Messrs. Constable's series, Religions Ancient and Modern. See also Marett, On the Threshold of Religion, passim.

[84] Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, p. 89 foll. For an example not mentioned in the text (devotio) see below, p. 206 foll. This may have been originally practised by the Latin kings. I may here draw attention to the almost dogmatic conclusions of the modern French sociological school of research; e.g. M. Huvelin, in L'Année sociologique for 1907, begins by asserting as a fundamental law, proved by MM. Hubert et Mauss, that magic is just as much a social fact as religion: "Les uns et les autres sont des produits de l'activité collective" (Magie et droit individuel, p. 1). But M. Huvelin's paper is to some extent a modification of this dogma. He seeks to explain the fact that magic is both secret and private, not public and social, in historical times; and in the domain of law, with which he is specially concerned, he concludes that "a magical rite is only a religious rite twisted from its proper social end, and employed to realise the will or belief of an individual" (p. 46). This is the only form in which we shall find magic at Rome, except in so far as a few of its forms survive in the ritual of religion with their meaning changed. In early Roman law, as a quasi-religious body of rules and practices, there are a few magical survivals which will be found mentioned by M. Huvelin in this article; but they are of no importance for our present subject.

[85] Primitive Culture, vol. i. ch. iv. See also Jevons, Introduction, p. 36 foll.

[86] See Schürer, Jewish People in the Time of Christ (Eng. trans.), Division II. vol. iii. p. 151 foll.

[87] Fowler, R.F. p. 232; Wissowa, R.K. p. 106. The most careful examination of the rite and the evidence for it is that of Aust in Mythological Lexicon, s.v. "Iuppiter," p. 656 foll. See also M.H. Morgan in vol. xxxii. of Transactions of the American Philological Association, p. 104.

[88] Tertullian, de Jejun. 16. Petronius, Sat. 44, adds that the matrons went in the procession with bare feet and streaming hair (cp. Pliny xvii. 266); but this seems rather Greek than Roman in character, and Petronius is plainly thinking of the town (colonia he calls it) in southern Italy where the scene of Trimalchio's supper is laid; probably a Greek city by origin, Croton or Cumae. A translation of this passage will be found in Dill's Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, p. 133. The most useful words in it for our purpose are "Jovem aquam exorabant."

[89] This suggestion was originally made by O. Gilbert, Röm. Topographie, ii. 184.

[90] p. 204 foll.

[91] p. 657. The story is mixed up with Greek fables, e.g. that of Proteus, as Wissowa has pointed out, R.K. p. 106, note 10.

[92] See Schanz, Gesch. der röm. Literatur, vol. i. (ed. 3) p. 270 foll.

[93] This fragment of Piso is preserved by Gellius, xi. 14. 1.

[94] See, e.g., Schanz, Gesch. der röm. Literatur, vol. ii. p. 106.

[95] Wissowa, l.c. Aust in Roscher's Lexicon, s.v. "Iuppiter," p. 657.

[96] Cumont, Religions Orientales dans le paganisme romain, ch. 5. I shall return to this subject in my second course of lectures.

[97] Müller-Deecke, Etrusker, ii. ch. vii., especially p. 176 foll.

[98] Cp. below, Lecture XV.

[99] Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 13: "Vestales nostras hodie credimus nondum egressa urbe mancipia fugitiva retinere in loco precationibus."

[100] Plutarch, Numa, 10. Virginity would increase the power of the spell; see Fehrle, Die kultische Keuschheit im Altertum, p. 54 foll.

[101] See, e.g., Frazer, G.B. i. 360 foll.

[102] See R.F. p. 320, notes 6 and 7.

[103] Within the last thirty years or so the Lupercalia has been discussed (apart from writers on classical subjects exclusively) by Mannhardt in his Mythologische Studien, p. 72 foll.; Robertson Smith, Semites, p. 459; Deubner in Archiv, 1910, p. 481 foll.; and at the moment of writing by E. S. Hartland, Primitive Paternity, i. ch. ii. R.F. p. 310 foll. See Appendix D.

[104] This view was originally stated in Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. "Argei." I endeavoured to confute it in the Classical Review, 1902, p. 115 foll., and Wissowa replied in Gesammelte Abhandlungen, p. 211 foll. Since then my conviction has become stronger that this great scholar is for once wrong. Ennius alluded to the Argei as an institution of Numa, i.e. as primitive (frag. 121, Vahlen, from Festus p. 355, and Varro, L.L. vii. 44), yet Ennius was a youth at the very time when Wissowa insists that the rite originated. Wissowa makes no attempt to explain this. See below, p. 321 foll.

[105] R.F. p. 111 foll.

[106] e.g. the October horse, which also occurred on the Ides; see R.F. p. 241 foll.; and the festival of Anna Perenna, also on Ides (March 15), R.F. p. 50 foll. It is just possible that all the three festivals were originally in the old calendar, and dropped out because the mark of the Ides had to be affixed to the day in the first place. See Wissowa, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, p. 164 foll.; R.F. p. 241.

[107] Thus Messrs. Hubert et Mauss (Mélanges d'histoire des religions, Preface, p. xxiv.) maintain that there is no real antinomy between "les faits du système magique et les faits du système religieux." There is in every rite, they insist, a magical as well as a religious element. Yet on the same page we find that they exclude magic from all organised cult, because it is not obligatory, and cannot (if I understand them rightly) be laid down in a code, like religious practice. I think it would have been simpler to consider the magical element in religious rites as surviving, with its original meaning lost, from an earlier stage of thought. M. van Gennep, in his interesting work Les Rites de passage, p. 17, goes so far as to call all religious ceremonies magical, as distinguished from the theories (e.g. animism) which constitute religion. This seems to me apt to bring confusion into the discussion; for all rites are the outward expression of thought, and it is by the thought (or, as he calls it, theories) that we must trace the sociological development of mankind, the rites being used as indexes only. I cannot but think that (as indeed in these days is quite natural) this French school lays too much stress upon the outward acts, and that this tendency has led them to find real living magic where it is present only in a fossil state.

[108] e.g. Tylor, article "Magic" in Encycl. Brit., and Primitive Culture, 1. ch. iv.; Marett, Threshold of Religion, 83. See below, p. 180.

[109] Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 17 and 18. For the singing or murmuring of spells in many countries, see Jevons, Anthropology and the Classics, p. 93 foll.

[110] Bruns, Fontes Iuris Romani, note on this passage.

[111] Civ. Dei, viii. 19.

[112] See, e.g., Wordsworth, Fragments and Specimens of Early Latin, p. 446, for an account of simple land measurement which will suffice to illustrate the point made here.

[113] The carmina famosa sung at a triumph by the soldiers had the same origin, but were used to avert evil from the triumphator. The best exposition of this is in H. A. J. Munro's Elucidations of Catullus, p. 76 foll.

[114] Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 19. For the technical sense of defigere, defixio, see Jevons in Anthropology and the Classics, p. 108 foll.

[115] The most familiar examples are Virgil's eighth Eclogue, 95 foll.; Ovid, Met. vii. 167, and elsewhere; Fasti, iv. 551; Horace, Epode v. 72; cp. article "Magia" in Daremberg-Saglio; Falz, De poet. Rom. doctrina magica, Giessen, 1903. There is a collection of Roman magical spells in Appel's De Romanorum precationibus, p. 43 foll. Many modern Italian examples and survivals will be found in Leland's Etruscan Roman Remains in Popular Tradition, pt. ii.

[116] Cato, R.R. 160; Varro, R.R. i. 3.

[117] Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 21.

[118] Ib. xxviii. 20. The following sections of this book are the locus classicus for these popular superstitions.

[119] See, e.g., Italian Home Life, by Lina Duff Gordon, p. 230 foll.

[120] Juvenal v. 164. The idea probably arose, as a passage of Plutarch suggests (Rom. 25), from the fact that the triumphator, whose garb was no doubt of Etruscan origin, wore the bulla.

[121] Frazer, G.B. i. 345, note 2, where we learn that gold was taboo in some Greek worships, e.g. at the mysteries of Andania, which sufficiently proves that it possessed potency. Pliny, xxxiii. 84, mentions cases of such potency as medicine, and among them its application to children who have been poisoned.

[122] Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 39.

[123] See an article by the author on the original meaning of the toga praetexta in Classical Review, vol. x. (1896) p. 317.

[124] For the Compitalia, Macrob. i. 7. 34; Festus p. 238. For the Paganalia, Probus, ad Georg. ii. 385, assuming the feriae Sementinae there mentioned to be the Paganalia (see R.F. p. 294). For the feriae Latinae, Festus, s.v. "oscillantes."

[125] Wissowa, R.K. p. 193, with whose view I entirely agree. We learn of the imaginary goddess from Varro, L.L. ix. 61. Pais, I may remark in passing, is certain that Acca Larentia was the mater Larum; see his Lectures on Ancient Legends of Roman History, p. 60 foll.

[126] 46. Wissowa, R.K. p. 354, note 5.

[127] Georg. ii. 380 foll. It is not certain that Virgil is describing the festival generally known as Paganalia, which took place early in January; but it seems probable from line 382 that he is thinking of some festival of the pagus. The oscilla may have been used at more than one.

[128] Note that Virgil writes of masks used in rude play-acting, as well as of oscilla hung on trees, and conjoins the two as though they had something in common. The evidence of an engraved onyx cup in the Louvre, of which a cut is given in the article "Oscilla" in the Dict. of Antiquities, seems to make it probable that masks worn by rustics on these occasions were afterwards hung by them on trees as oscilla. Some of these masks on the cup are adorned with horns, which may explain an interesting passage of Apuleius (Florida, i. 1): "neque enim iustius religiosam moram viatori obiecerit aut ara floribus redimita ... aut quercus cornibus onerata, aut fagus pellibus coronata," etc. See also Gromatici veteres, ii. 241.

[129] See, however, Dr. Frazer's remarks in G.B. ii. p. 454. He thinks that the air might in this way be purged of vagrant spirits or baleful ghosts, as the Malay medicine man swings in front of the patient's house in order to chase away the disease. Cp. G.B. ii. 343, where a rather different explanation is attempted of the maniae and pilae.

[130] Magic in the old forms, or many of them, has survived not only into the old Roman religion, but to the present day, in many parts of Italy. "The peasants have recourse to the priests and the saints on great occasions, but they use magic all the time for everything," was said by a woman of the Romagna Toscana to the late C.G. Leland (Etruscan Roman Remains, Introduction, p. 9). This enterprising American's remarkable book, though dealing only with a small region of northern Italy, deserves more consideration than it has received. The author may have been uncritical, but beyond doubt he had the gift of extracting secrets from the peasantry. He claims to have proved that "la vecchia religione" contains much that has come down direct from pre-Christian times; and the appearance of Mr. Lawson's remarkable book on Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion may tempt some really qualified investigator to undertake a similar work in Italy before it is too late.





Prev | Next | Contents