Part 5

Turning to inanimate objects, which are supposed by primitive man to be dangerous or taboo, we are met by a fact which will astonish anthropologists, and which I cannot satisfactorily explain. Blood is everywhere in the savage world regarded with suspicion and anxiety; there is something mysterious about it as containing (so they thought) the life, and its colour and smell are also uncanny; horses cannot endure it, and there are still strong men who faint at the sight of it. Yet at Rome, so far as I can discover, there was in historical times hardly a trace left of this anxiety in its original form of taboo; the religious law had effectually eliminated the various chances that might arouse it. No student of Roman religious antiquities seems to have noticed this singular fact. No anthropologist, as far as I know, has observed that among the many taboos to which the Flamen Dialis was subject, blood does not appear. The reason no doubt is that anthropologists are not as a rule Roman historians; their curiosity is not excited by a fact which must have some explanation in Roman religious history. From a single passage of Festus (p. 117) we learn that soldiers following the triumphal car carried laurel "ut quasi purgati a caede humana intrarent urbem"; and this is the only distinct relic of the idea that I can find. Pliny's Natural History, that wonderful thesaurus of odds and ends, affords no help; the mystic qualities of blood are hardly alluded to there, and the same can be said of Servius' commentary on the Aeneid. The word blood is not to be found in the index to Wissowa's great work, of which the supreme value is its accurate record of the religious law and all the ceremonies of the State. I am constrained to believe that the priests or priest-kings who developed the ius divinum of the Roman City-state deliberately suppressed the superstition, for reasons which it is impossible to conjecture with certainty. And this guess, which I put forward with hesitation, is indeed in keeping with certain other facts of Roman life. It is doubtful whether human sacrifice ever existed among this people; it is certain that the execution of citizens in civil life by beheading was abandoned at a very early period. The shedding of blood, except when a victim was sacrificed under the rules of sacred law, was carefully avoided; thus the horror of blood had a social and ethical result of value, instead of remaining a mere religio (taboo). It is true that in one or two rites, such as that of the October horse, the blood of a sacrifice seems to have been thought to possess peculiar powers; but it is at the same time noticeable that this rite is not included in the old calendar, a fact of which a wholly satisfactory explanation has not yet been offered. In the Lupercalia there is a trace of the mystic use of blood in sacrifice, but a very faint one: to this we shall return later on. The two Luperci had their foreheads smeared with the knife bloody from the slaughter of the victims, but the blood was at once wiped off with wool dipped in milk. This rite is of course in the old calendar; it stands almost alone in its mystical character, and may have been taken over by the Romans from previous inhabitants of the site of Rome. Lastly, in the Terminalia, or boundary-festival of arable land in country districts, the boundary-stone was sprinkled with the blood of the victims, showing that a spirit, or numen, was believed to reside in it; but I cannot find that this practice survived in the public sacrifices of the city. It is found only in the sacrifices (Graeco ritu) supervised by the XV viri sacris faciundis in that part of the Ludi Saeculares of Augustus which was concerned with Greek chthonic deities in the Campus Martius.

Yet unquestionably there had been a time when many inanimate objects were supposed to have a mystic or dangerous influence; this is sufficiently proved by the long list of taboos to which the unfortunate Flamen Dialis was even in historical times subject. He was forbidden to touch a goat, a dog, raw meat, beans, ivy, wheat, leavened bread; he might not walk under a vine, and his hair and nails might not be cut with an iron knife; and he might not have any knot or unbroken ring about his person. Dr. Frazer has the merit of being the first to point out the real meaning of this strange list of disabilities, and to explain the mystic or miasmatic origin of some of them. They need not detain us now, as they are survivals only, and survivals of ideas which must have been long extinct before Roman history can be said to begin. Almost the only one among them of which we have other traces is the taboo on iron, which must have been of comparatively late date, as the use of iron in Italy seems only to have begun about the eighth century B.C. This is found also in the ritual of the Arval Brotherhood, the ancient agricultural priesthood revived by Augustus, and better known to us than any other owing to the discovery of its Acta in the site of the sacred grove between Rome and Ostia. These Brethren had originally suffered from the taboo on iron; but in characteristic fashion they had discovered that a piacular or disinfecting sacrifice would sufficiently atone for its use whenever it was necessary to take a pruning-hook within the limits of the grove. We may here also recall the fact that no iron might be used in the building or repairing of the ancient pons sublicius, the oldest of all the bridges of the Tiber.

Every one who wishes to get an idea of the nature of taboo in primitive Rome, and of the way in which it was got rid of, should study the disabilities of the Flamen Dialis, and satisfy himself of their absence, with the exception just mentioned, and possibly one or two more, in the ritual of historical Rome. Nothing is more likely to convince him of the way in which Roman civilisation contrived to leave these superstitions as mere fossils, incapable any longer of doing mischief by cramping the conscience and inducing constant anxiety. If he is disposed to ask why such a large number of these fossils should be found attached to the priesthood of Jupiter, I must ask him to let me postpone that question, which would at this moment lead us too far afield.

I may, however, mention here that the Flaminica Dialis, who was not priestess of Juno as is commonly supposed, but assisted her husband in the cult of Jupiter, was also subject to certain taboos. On three occasions in the religious year she might not appear in public with her hair "done up," viz. the moving of the ancilia in March, the festival of the Argei in March and May, and during the cleansing of the penus Vestae in June. Also she might not wear shoes made from the skin of a beast that had died a natural death, but only from that of a sacrificial victim. There are traces of a religio about shoe-leather, I may remark, both in the Roman and in other religious systems. Varro tells us that "in aliquot sacris et sacellis scriptum habemus, Ne quid scorteum adhibeatur: ideo ne morticinum quid adsit." Leather was taboo in the worship of the almost unknown deity Carmenta. Petronius describes women in the cult of Jupiter Elicius walking barefoot; and we are reminded of the well-known rule which still survives in Mahommedan mosques. The original idea may have been that the skin of an animal not made sacred by sacrifice might destroy the efficacy of the worship contemplated. On the other hand, the skin of a duly sacrificed animal had potency of a useful kind—a fact or belief so widespread as to need no illustration here; but we shall come upon an example of it in my next lecture.

Certain places were also affected by the idea of taboo. In the later religious law of the City-state the sites of all temples, i.e. all places in which deities had consented to take up their abode, were of course holy; but this is a much more mature development, though it unquestionably had its root in the same idea that we are now discussing. Such sites, as we shall see in a later lecture, were loca sacra, and sacer is a word of legal ritual, meaning that the place has been made over to the deity by certain formulae, accompanied with favourable auspices, under the authority of the State. But there were other holy places which were not sacra but religiosa; and the word religiosum here might almost be translated "affected by taboo." Wissowa provides us with a list of these places, and this and the quotations he supplies with it are of the utmost value for my present subject. They comprised, of course, all holy places which the State had not duly consecrated, and therefore some which hardly concern us here, such as shrines belonging to families and gentes, and temple-sites in the provinces of a later age. More to our purpose at this moment are the spots where thunderbolts were supposed to have fallen. Such spots were encircled with a low wall and called puteal from their resemblance to a well, or bidental from the sacrifice there of a lamb as a piaculum; the bolt was supposed to be thus buried, and the place became religiosum. So, too, all burial-grounds were not loca sacra but loca religiosa, technically because they were not the property of the state or consecrated by it; in reality, I venture to say, because the place where a corpse was deposited was of necessity taboo. Such places were extra commercium, and their sanctity might not be violated: "religiosum est," wrote the learned Roman Masurius Sabinus, "quod propter sanctitatem aliquam remotum et sepositum est a nobis." So, too, the great lawyer of Cicero's time, Servius Sulpicius, defines religio as "quae propter sanctitatem aliquam remota ac seposita a nobis sit," where he is using religio in the sense of a thing or place to which a taboo attaches. And again, another authority, Aelius Gallus, said that religiosum was properly applied to an object in regard to which there were things which a man might not do: "quod si faciat," he goes on, "adversus deorum voluntatem videatur facere." These last words are in the language of the City-state; if we would go behind it to that of an earlier age, we should substitute words which would express the feeling or scruple, the religio, without reference to any special deity. Virgil has pictured admirably this feeling as applied to places, in describing the visit of Aeneas to the site of the future Rome under the guidance of his host Evander (Aen. viii. 347):—

hinc ad Tarpeiam sedem et Capitolia ducit, aurea nunc, olim silvestribus horrida dumis. iam tum religio pavidos terrebat agrestis dira loci: iam tum silvam saxumque tremebant. "hoc nemus, hunc," inquit, "frondoso vertice collem, (quis deus, incertum est) habitat deus."

This is a passage on which I shall have to comment again: at present I will content myself with noting how accurately the poet, who of all others best understood the instincts of the less civilised Italians of his own day, has used his knowledge to express the antique feeling that there were places which man must shrink from entering—a feeling far older than the invention of legal consecratio by the authorities of a City-state.

Lastly, the principle of taboo, or religio, if we use the Latin word, affected certain times as well as places. Just as under the ius divinum of the fully-developed State certain spots were made over to the deities for their habitation and rendered inviolable by consecratio, so certain days were also appointed as theirs which the human inhabitants might not violate by the transaction of profane business. But I have just pointed out that the consecration of holy places in this legal fashion was a late development of a primitive feeling or religio; exactly the same, if I am not mistaken, was the case with regard to the holy days. These were called nefasti, and belong to the life of the State; but there were others, called religiosi, which I believe to have been tabooed days long before the State arose.

When we come to examine the ancient religious calendar, it will be found that I shall not then be called upon to deal with dies religiosi, for the very good reason that they are not indicated in that calendar—there is no mark for them as religiosi, and some of them are not even dies nefasti, as we might naturally have expected. What, then, is the history of them? We may be able to make a fair guess at this by noting exactly what these days were; Dr. Wissowa has put them together for us in a very succinct passage. He begins the list with the 18th of Quinctilis (July), on which two great disasters had happened to Roman armies, the defeats on the Cremera and the Allia; and also the 16th, the day after the Ides, because, according to the legend, the Roman commander had sacrificed on that day with a view to gaining the favour of the gods in the battle. We may regard the story about the 18th as historical; but then we are told that all days following on Kalends, Nones, and Ides were likewise made religiosi (or atri, vitiosi, which have the same meaning) as being henceforward deemed unlucky by pronouncement of senate and pontifices; thus all dies postriduani, as they were called, were put out of use, or at any rate declared unlucky, for many purposes, both public and private, e.g. marriages, levies, battles, and sacred rites, simply because on one occasion disaster had followed the offering of a sacrifice on the 16th of Quinctilis. It is difficult to believe that thirty-six days in the year were thus tabooed, by a Roman senate and Roman magistrates, in a period when the practical wisdom of the government was beginning to be a marked characteristic of the State. Some people, we are told, went so far as to treat the fourth day before Kalends, Nones, and Ides in the same way; but Gellius declares that he could find no tradition about this except a single passage of Claudius Quadrigarius, in which he said that the fourth day before the Nones of Sextilis was that on which the battle of Cannae was fought.

I am strongly inclined to suggest that the traditional explanation of the tabooing of these thirty-six, or possibly seventy-two days was neither more nor less than an aetiological myth, like hundreds of others which were invented to account for Roman practices, religious and other; and this supposition seems to be confirmed as we go on with the list of dies religiosi as given by Wissowa. The three days—Sextilis 24, October 5, November 8—on which the Manes were believed to come up from the underworld through the mundus (to which I shall return later on) were religiosi; so were those when the temple of Vesta remained open (June 7 to 15), those on which the Salii performed their dances in March and October, two days following the feriae Latinae (a movable festival), and the days of the Parentalia in February and the Lemuria in May, which were concerned with the cult and the memory of the dead. Now the religio or taboo on these days obviously springs either from a feeling of anxiety suggested by very primitive notions of the dead and of departed spirits; or in the case of the temple of Vesta, by some mystical purification or disinfection preparatory to the ingathering of the crops, which I noticed in my Roman Festivals (p. 152 foll.); or again in the case of the Salii, by some danger to the crops from evil spirits, etc., which might be averted by their peculiar performances. In fact, all these dies religiosi date as such, we may be pretty sure, from a very primitive period before the genesis of the City-state, and were not recognised—for what reason we will not at present attempt to guess—as religiosi by the authorities who drew up the Calendar. Some of them appear in that calendar as dies nefasti, but not all; and I am entirely at one with Wissowa, whose knowledge of the Roman religious law is unparalleled for exactness, in believing that a religio affecting a day had nothing whatever to do with its character as fastus or nefastus.

If all these last-mentioned dies religiosi are such because ancient popular feeling attached the religio to them, we may infer, I think, that the same was really the case also with the dies postriduani. The fact that the authorities of the State had made one or two days religiosi as anniversaries of disasters, supplied a handy explanation for a number of other dies religiosi of which the true explanation had been entirely lost; but that there was such a true explanation, resting on very primitive beliefs, I have very little doubt. Lucky and unlucky days are found in the unwritten calendars of primitive peoples in many parts of the world. An old pupil, now a civil servant in the province of Madras, has sent me an elaborate account of the notions of this kind existing in the minds of the Tamil-speaking people of his district of southern India. The Celtic calendar recently discovered at Coligny in France contains a number of mysterious marks, some of which may have had a meaning of this kind. Dr. Jevons has collected some other examples from various parts of the world, e.g. Mexico. The old Roman superstition about the luckiness of odd days and the unluckiness of even ones, which appears, as we shall see, in the arrangement of the calendar, was probably at one time a popular Italian notion, not derived, as used to be thought, from Pythagoras and his school.

I therefore conclude that we may add times and seasons to the list of those objects, animate and inanimate, which were affected by the practice of taboo in primitive Rome; and I hold that the word religiosus, as applied both to times and places, exactly expresses the feeling on which that practice is based. The word religiosus came to have another meaning (though it retained the old one as well) in historical times, and the Romans could be called religiosissimi mortalium in the sense of paying close attention to worship and all its details. But the original meaning of religio and religiosus may after all have been that nervous anxiety which is a special characteristic of an age of taboo. To discover the best methods of soothing that anxiety, or, in other words, the methods of disinfection, was the work of the organised religious life of family and State which we are going to study. But I must first devote a lecture to another class of primitive survivals.

NOTES TO LECTURE II

Renel, Les Enseignes, p. 43 foll. For the contrary view, Deubner in Archiv, 1910, p. 490.

On taboo in general, Jevons, Introduction to the History of Religion, ch. vi.; Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 142 foll.; Frazer, Golden Bough (ed. 2), i. 343; Crawley, The Mystic Rose, passim. On the relation of taboo to magic, Marett, Threshold of Religion, p. 85 foll. Lately M. van Gennep in his Rites de passage has attempted to classify and explain the various rites resulting from taboo.

See the Transactions of the Congress (Oxford University Press), vol. i. p. 121 foll. M. Reinach had alleged that the gens Fabia was originally a totem clan, Mythes et cultes, i. p. 47.

Marett, On the Threshold of Religion, p. 137 foll. "In taboo the mystic thing is not to be lightly approached (negative aspect); qua mana, it is instinct with mystic power (positive aspect)": so Mr. Marett states the distinction in a private letter.

Evolution of Religion, p. 94.

Introduction, ch. viii.; Westermarck, Origin and Development of Ethical Ideas, i. 233 foll.

See a paper by the author in the Transactions of the Congress of the History of Religions, 1908, ii. 169 foll.

Macrobius, Sat. i. 16. 36; De Marchi, La Religione nella vita domestica, i. p. 169 foll.; Samter, Familienfeste der Griechen und Roemer, p. 62 foll., where the dies lustricus is compared with the Greek [Greek: amphidromia]. Unfortunately the details of the Roman rite are unknown to us, which seems to indicate that the primitive or magical character of it had disappeared. Van Gennep, op. cit. ch. v., reviews and classifies our present knowledge of this kind of rite. See also Crawley, Mystic Rose, p. 435 foll.