Part 18

"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."

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 pater], Diespiter, Marspiter. Ahura-Mazda is a father.... Another analogy shows the relationship of brother and friend, as in the case of Mithra." 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, 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:—

"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. 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. We know for certain that Varro found these names in the books of the pontifices, and that they were there called Indigitamenta: 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, 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, 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."

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 (Goetternamen) 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—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 'Augenblickgoetter' and 'Sondergoetter'" (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. 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 Sondergoetter at Rome"; 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 Sondergoetter 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, and the other from the Acta Fratrum Arvalium. 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 Sondergoetter, 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; 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, 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 Sondergoetter which have not come down to us through so much book-learning as the rest?

Varro's di certi, he says—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, 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.

But, in the last place, the question must be asked whether these Sondergoetter 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; 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.

NOTES TO LECTURE VII

For loca sacra and consecratio see Marquardt, p. 148 foll.; Wissowa, R.K. p. 400.

Serv. ad Aen. xii. 119, "Romani moris fuerat cespitem arae super imponere, et ita sacrificare." Cp. some valuable remarks of Henzen, Acta Fratr. Arv. p. 23. The altar of the Fratres was in front of their grove; they used also a movable one (foculus) of silver, but cespiti ornatus (ib. p. 21): this was for the preliminary offering of wine and incense (Wissowa, R.K. p. 351).

In Aug. Civ. Dei, iv. 31; Agahd's edition of the fragments of Varro's Ant. rer. div. p. 164.

Aug. Civ. Dei, iv. 23; Agahd, p. 159. See Wissowa, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, p. 280 foll.

Strabo iv. 180.

Fasti, vi. 305.

Tibull. ii. 5. 27. The lines of Propertius are iv. (v.) 2. 59, "Stipes acernus eram, properanti falce dolatus, Ante Numam grata pauper in urbe deus." The question is whether these are genuine examples of the natural evolution of a "stock or stone" into something in the nature of an anthropomorphic image of a deity, or whether they are the result of the introduction of Greek statues acting on the popular mind in rustic parts of Italy. The passages, so far as I know, stand alone, and we have no means of deciding whether the anthropomorphic tendency was native or foreign. Vortumnus was, however, undoubtedly of Etruscan origin; Wissowa, R.K. p. 233. The subject of iconic development of this kind is well summarised in E. Gardner's little volume on Religion and Art in Ancient Greece, ch. i.

See Sayce, Gifford Lectures on the Religions of Egypt and Babylonia, p. 302. An interesting paper on the evolution of dei at Rome out of functional numina will be found in von Domaszewski's Abhandlungen zur roem. Religion, p. 155 foll., based on Usener's theory of Sondergoetter. It is ingenious and imaginative, but in my view does not square with the facts as far as we know them. His stages are: (1) momentary function of numina, e.g. lightning; (2) elevation of this into a permanent power or function; (3) consequent limitation of the numen to a special well-marked function; (4) elevation of the numen to a deus, conceived in the likeness of man, and male or female, because man cannot think of power otherwise than on the analogy of male or female creative energy. Lastly, when the deus is complete, the functions of the former numen become attributes or qualities, traces of which we find in the pairs of deities in Gellius, xiii. 23, which are discussed later on in this lecture. Some of these, of course, eventually became separate deities—Salacia, Maia, Lua. As I cannot accept the view that the earliest Roman idea of the supernatural is to be found in comprecationes of a comparatively late period, i.e. in the so-called Indigitamenta, this charmingly symmetrical account has no charm for me beyond its symmetry.

Henzen, Acta Fratr. Arv. pp. 144, 146; Cato, R.R. 139; C.I.L. vi. 110 and 111. Other references are given by Wissowa, R.K. p. 33, note 2.

For Pales, R.F. p. 80 note; for Pomona, Wissowa, R.K. p. 165.

The passage runs thus (Aug. C.D. iv. 32): "Dicit enim (Varro) de generationibus deorum magis ad poetas quam ad physicos fuisse populos inclinatos, et ideo et sexum et generationes deorum maiores suos (id est veteres credidisse Romanos) et eorum constituisse coniugia." There is an amusing passage in Lactantius, i. 17 (de Falsa Religione), which Dr. Frazer might read with advantage. It begins, "Si duo sunt sexus deorum, sequitur concubitus." Then he goes on mockingly to argue that the gods must have houses, cities, lands which they plough and sow, which proves them mortal. Finally he takes the whole series of inferences backwards, finishing with "si domibus carent, ergo et concubitu. Si concubitus ab his abest, et sexus igitur foemineus," etc. All this, he means, can be inferred from the fact that gods are of both sexes; but that they have concubitus can no more be inferred from his argument than that they plough and sow.