CHAPTER II, THE 'ANTECEDENTS' OF ROMAN RELIGION
In every early religion there will of course be found, apart from
external influence, traces of its own internal development, of stages
by which it must have advanced from a mass of vague and primitive
belief and custom to the organised worship of a civilised community.
The religion of Rome is no exception to this rule; we can detect in
its later practice evidences of primitive notions and habits which it
had in common with other semi-barbarous peoples, and we shall see that
the leading idea in its theology is but a characteristically Roman
development of a marked feature in most early religions.
1. Magic.—Anthropology has taught us that in many primitive
societies religion—a sense of man's dependence on a power higher than
himself—is preceded by a stage of magic—a belief in man's own power
to influence by occult means the action of the world around him. That
the ancestors of the Roman community passed through this stage seems
clear, and in surviving religious practice we may discover evidence of
such magic in various forms. There is, for instance, what anthropology
describes as 'sympathetic magic'—the attempt to influence the powers
of nature by an imitation of the process which it is desired that they
should perform. Of this we have a characteristic example in the
ceremony of the aquaelicium, designed to produce rain after a long
drought. In classical times the ceremony consisted in a procession
headed by the pontifices, which bore the sacred rain-stone from its
resting-place by the Porta Capena to the Capitol, where offerings were
made to the sky-deity, Iuppiter, but[1] from the analogy of other
primitive cults and the sacred title of the stone (lapis manalis),
it is practically certain that the original ritual was the purely
imitative process of pouring water over the stone. A similar
rain-charm may possibly be seen in the curious ritual of the argeorum
sacra, when puppets of straw were thrown into the Tiber—a symbolic
wetting of the crops to which many parallels may be found among other
primitive peoples. A sympathetic charm of a rather different
character seems to survive in the ceremony of the augurium canarium,
at which a red dog was sacrificed for the prosperity of the crop—a
symbolic killing of the red mildew (robigo); and again the slaughter
of pregnant cows at the Fordicidia in the middle of April, before
the sprouting of the corn, has a clearly sympathetic connection with
the fertility of the earth. Another prominent survival—equally
characteristic of primitive peoples—is the sacredness which attaches
to the person of the priest-king, so that his every act or word may
have a magic significance or effect. This is reflected generally in
the Roman priesthood, but especially in the ceremonial surrounding the
flamen Dialis, the priest of Iuppiter. He must appear always in
festival garb, fire may never be taken from his hearth but for sacred
purposes, no other person may ever sleep in his bed, the cuttings of
his hair and nails must be preserved and buried beneath an arbor
felix—no doubt a magic charm for fertility—he must not eat or even
mention a goat or a bean, or other objects of an unlucky character.
2. Worship of Natural Objects.—A very common feature in the early
development of religious consciousness is the worship of natural
objects—in the first place of the objects themselves and no more,
but later of a spirit indwelling in them. The distinction is no doubt
in individual cases a difficult one to make, and we find that among
the Romans the earlier worship of the object tends to give way to the
cult of the inhabiting spirit, but examples may be found which seem to
belong to the earlier stage. We have, for instance, the sacred stone
(silex) which was preserved in the temple of Iuppiter on the
Capitol, and was brought out to play a prominent part in the ceremony
of treaty-making. The fetial, who on that occasion represented the
Roman people, at the solemn moment of the oath-taking, struck the
sacrificial pig with the silex, saying as he did so, 'Do thou,
Diespiter, strike the Roman people as I strike this pig here to-day,
and strike them the more, as thou art greater and stronger.' Here no
doubt the underlying notion is not merely symbolical, but in origin
the stone is itself the god, an idea which later religion expressed in
the cult-title specially used in this connection, Iuppiter Lapis. So
again, in all probability, the termini or boundary-stones between
properties are in origin the objects—though later only the site—of a
yearly ritual at the festival of the Terminalia on February the 23rd,
and they are, as it were, summed up in 'the god Terminus,' the great
sacred boundary-stone, which had its own shrine within the Capitoline
temple, because, according to the legend, 'the god' refused to budge
even to make room for Iuppiter. The same notion is most likely at the
root of the two great domestic cults of Vesta, 'the hearth,' and
Ianus, 'the door,' though a more spiritual idea was soon associated
with them; we may notice too in this connection the worship of
springs, summed up in the subsequent deity Fons, and of rivers, such
as Volturnus, the cult-name of the Tiber.
3. Worship of Trees.—But most conspicuous among the cults of
natural objects, as in so many primitive religions, is the worship of
trees. Here, though doubtless at first the tree was itself the object
of veneration, surviving instances seem rather to belong to the later
period when it was regarded as the abode of the spirit. We may
recognise a case of this sort in the ficus Ruminalis, once the
recipient of worship, though later legend, which preferred to find an
historical or mythical explanation of cults, looked upon it as sacred
because it was the scene of the suckling of Romulus and Remus by the
wolf. Another fig-tree with a similar history is the caprificus of
the Campus Martius, subsequently the site of the worship of Iuno Caprotina. A more significant case is the sacred oak of Iuppiter
Feretrius on the Capitol, on which the spolia opima were hung after
the triumph—probably in early times a dedication of the booty to the
spirit inhabiting the tree. Outside Rome, showing the same ideas at
work among neighbouring peoples, was the 'golden bough' in the grove
of Diana at Aricia. Nor was it only special trees which were thus
regarded as the home of a deity; the tree in general is sacred, and
any one may chance to be inhabited by a spirit. The feeling of the
country population on this point comes out clearly in the prayer which
Cato recommends his farmer to use before making a clearing in a wood:
'Be thou god or goddess, to whom this grove is sacred, be it granted
to us to make propitiatory sacrifice to thee with a pig for the
clearing of this sacred spot'; here we have a clear instance of the
tree regarded as the dwelling of the sacred power, and it is
interesting to compare the many similar examples which[2] Dr. Frazer
has collected from different parts of the world.
4. Worship of Animals.—Of the worship of animals we have
comparatively little evidence in Roman religion, though we may perhaps
detect it in a portion of the mysterious ritual of the Lupercalia,
where the Luperci dressed themselves in the skins of the sacrificed
goats and smeared their faces with the blood, thus symbolically trying
to bring themselves into communion with the sacred animal. We may
recognise it too in the association of particular animals with
divinities, such as the sacred wolf and woodpecker of Mars, but on the
whole we may doubt whether the worship of animals ever played so
prominent a part in Roman religion as the cult of other natural
objects.
5. Animism.—Such are some of the survivals of very early stages of
religious custom which still kept their place in the developed
religion of Rome, but by far the most important element in it, which
might indeed be described as its 'immediate antecedent,' is the state
of religious feeling to which anthropologists have given the name of
'Animism.' As far as we can follow the development of early religions,
this attitude of mind seems to be the direct outcome of the failure of
magic. Primitive man begins to see that neither he nor his magicians
really possess that occult control over the forces of nature which was
the supposed basis of magic: the charm fails, the spell does not
produce the rain and when he looks for the cause, he can only argue
that these things must be in the hands of some power higher than his
own. The world then and its various familiar objects become for him
peopled with spirits, like in character to men, but more powerful, and
his success in life and its various operations depends on the degree
in which he is able to propitiate these spirits and secure their
co-operation. If he desires rain, he must win the favour of the spirit
who controls it, if he would fell a tree and suffer no harm, he must
by suitable offerings entice the indwelling spirit to leave it. His
'theology' in this stage is the knowledge of the various spirits and
their dwellings, his ritual the due performance of sacrifice for
purposes of propitiation and expiation. It was in this state of
religious feeling that the ancestors of Rome must have lived before
they founded their agricultural settlement on the Palatine: we must
try now to see how far it had retained this character and what
developments it had undergone when it had crystallised into the
'Religion of Numa.'
FOOTNOTES:
|
