Part 50

"Et quia boves solent in sacrificio daemonum multos occidere, debet iis etiam hac in re aliqua solemnitas immutari: ut die dedicationis, vel natalicii sanctorum martyrum quorum illic reliquiae ponuntur, tabernacula sibi circa easdem ecclesias quae ex fanis commutatae sunt, de ramis arborum faciant, et religiosis conviviis sollemnitatem celebrent: nec diabolo iam animalia immolent, et ad laudem Dei in esu suo animalia occident," etc.

Why should Gregory here take the trouble to describe the material out of which these huts were to be made? Surely because the custom was one which had been described to him by Augustine or Mellitus as part of the heathen practice, and one which he was willing to condone as harmless (possibly with a recollection of the Jewish feast), since the Britons set great store by it.

If these examples from Europe and Palestine are sufficient to suggest that there was originally a religious or mystic meaning in the custom, we must look for its explanation in anthropological research. Robertson Smith was, I think, the first to suggest a possible explanation of the Feast of Tabernacles, by comparing with it the rule, stated in Numbers xxxi. 19, that men might not enter their houses after bloodshed: "Do ye abide without the camp seven days: whosoever hath killed any person, and whosoever hath touched any slain, purify both yourselves and your captives on the third day and on the seventh day." He also pointed out that pilgrims are subject to the same rule, or taboo, in Syria and elsewhere. Since then an immense mass of evidence has been collected showing that all the world over persons in a holy or unclean state are placed under this or some similar restriction; and if this be the case with pilgrims and warriors after a battle, it may also have been so with worshippers at some particular festival, even if we are quite unable to recover the special character of the worship which produced the restriction. In the Feast of Tabernacles, which was a harvest festival, the cause seems to have been the great sanctity of the first-fruits, which are regarded with extreme veneration in many parts of the world. In the now famous festival of the first-fruits among the Natchez Indians of Louisiana, of which the details have been recorded with singular care and obvious accuracy, we find that the chief, the Great Sun, and all the celebrators, have to live in huts two miles from their village, while the corn, grown for the purpose in a particular spot, is sacramentally eaten. It is quite impossible, without further evidence, which is not likely ever to be forthcoming, to explain either the Greek, Roman, or British customs in this way; we must be content with the general principle that the holiness of human beings at particular times is liable to carry with it the practice of renouncing your own dwelling and living in an extemporised hut or booth. The tents that we hear of in the Greek rites I look upon as late developments of this primitive practice. The inscription of Andania, which is the best Greek evidence we possess, dates only from 91 B.C.; and by that time there would have been every opportunity for the rude huts to become civilised tents. The casae made by the vernae in Tibullus' poem were, I would suggest, a kind of unconscious survival of the same feeling and practice, the real religious meaning being almost entirely lost.

Lastly, I will venture to suggest that the casae of the Roman custom, made of branches at the Neptunalia and the feast of Anna Perenna, and of virgae by the slaves on the farm, are a reminiscence of the earliest form of Italian dwelling, which survived to historical times in the round temple of Vesta, and of which we have examples in the hut-urns discovered in the necropolis at Alba. The earliest form of all was probably a round structure made of branches of trees stuck into the ground, bent inwards at the top and tied together. Just as bronze instruments survived from an earlier stage of culture in some religious rites at Rome, so, I imagine, did this ancient form of dwelling, which really belongs to an age previous to that of permanent settlement and agricultural routine. The hut circles of the neolithic age, such as are abundant on Dartmoor, were probably roofed with branches supported by a central pole.

Fasti, iii. 525 foll. See R.F. p. 50 foll.

Tibull. ii. 5. 89 foll. Mr. Mackail has pointed out to me a passage in the Pervigilium Veneris, line 5, which seems to contain a hint of the same practice (cp. line 43).

Tibull. ii. 1. 1-24.

Classical Review, 1908, p. 36 foll. My conclusions were criticised by Dr. Postgate in the Classical Quarterly for 1909, p. 127.

Hor. Sat. ii. 3. 247.

Festus, ed. Mueller, p. 377.

Leviticus xxiii. 40-42. Cp. Plutarch, Quaest. conviv. 4. 2. This was a feast of harvest and first-fruits (Exodus xxiii. 16). Nehemiah viii. 13 foll. gives a graphic account of the revival of this festival after the captivity.

Athenaeus iv. 41. 8 F. Cp. Farnell, Cults of the Greek States, vol. iv., p. 260.

Dittenberger, Sylloge inscript. (ed. 2), 653, lines 34 foll. Cp. p. 200 (Teos).

Baeda, Hist. eccl. i. 30 (ed. Plummer). There is a curious case of isolation in a hut in a process by which the sacrificer of the soma in the Vedic religion becomes divine, quoted by Hubert et Mauss, Melanges, p. 34. This may possibly afford a clue to the mystery.

Religion of the Semites, notes K and N at the end of the volume.

See e.g. Frazer, G. B. ed. 2, index, s.v. "Seclusion."

It has occurred to me that the shedding of blood in animal sacrifice may possibly be the reason in some of these rites. The last words of the passage quoted above from Baeda suggest this explanation in the case of the Britons. In the first-fruits festivals the "killing of the corn" may be a parallel cause of taboo. See G. B. i. 372.

Du Pratz, translated in G. B. ii. 332 foll.

See e.g. Helbig, Die Italiker in der Poebene, p. 50 foll. Lanciani, Ruins and Excavations of Ancient Rome, p. 132. It is worth noting that in a passage quoted by Helbig, Plutarch (Numa 8) uses for some of the most ancient Roman attempts at temple building the same word by which he describes the booths at the feast of tabernacles ([Greek: kaliades]).

Whether there was in later days any special religious signification in the use of green foliage and branches I will not undertake to say, but I have been struck by the constant use of them in cases of religious seclusion, even where the person is secluded in some part of the house, and not outside it. See e.g. G. B. ii. pp. 205-214.

Prof. Anwyl, Celtic Religion (Constable's series), p. 10. Mr. Baring-Gould told Mr. Anwyl that he had seen in some of the Dartmoor circles central holes which seemed meant for the fixing of this pole. I will add here that it has occurred to me that these huts must, in one sense at least, be a survival (like other points of ritual), from the days of pastoral life, and of the migration of the Aryans. Temporary huts are characteristic of pastoral as contrasted with agricultural life, and must have been used during the wanderings, as by the Israelites. See Schrader, Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples (Eng. Trans., London, 1890), p. 404.

APPENDIX II

PROF. DEUBNER'S THEORY OF THE LUPERCALIA (See pp. 34 and 106)

In the Archiv fuer Religionswissenschaft, 1910, p. 481 foll., Prof. Deubner has published an interesting study of this puzzling festival, to which I wish to invite attention, though it has reached me too late for use in my earlier lectures.

It has long been clear to me that any attempt to explain the details of the Lupercalia on a single hypothesis must be a failure. If all the details belong to the same age and the same original festival, we cannot recover the key to the whole ceremonial, though we may succeed in interpreting certain features of it with some success. Is it, however, possible that these details belong to different periods,—that the whole rite, as we know it, with all the details put together from different sources of knowledge, was the result of an accretion of various features upon an original simple basis of ceremonial? Prof. Deubner answers this question in the affirmative, and works out his answer with much skill and learning.

He begins by explaining the word lupercus as derived from lupus and arceo, and meaning a "keeper off of wolves." The luperci were originally men chosen from two gentes or families to keep the wolves from the sheepfolds, in the days when the Palatine was a shepherd's settlement, and they did it by running round the base of the hill in a magical circle (if I understand him rightly). If that be so, we need not assume a deity Lupercus, nor in fact any deity at all, nor need we see in the runners a quasi-dramatic representation of wolves as vegetation-spirits, as Mannhardt proposed (see my Roman Festivals, p. 316 foll.). This view has the advantage of making the rite a simple and practical one, such as would be natural to primitive Latins; and the etymology is apparently unexceptionable, though it will doubtless be criticised, as in fact it has been long ago.

But in course of time, Prof. Deubner goes on, there came to be engrafted on this simple rite of circumambulation without reference to a deity, a festival of the rustic god Faunus; and now there was added a sacrifice of goats, which seem to have been his favourite victims (kids in Hor. Odes, iii. 18). The luperci, who had formerly run round the hill quite naked, as in many rites of the kind (see p. 491), now girt themselves with the skins of the goats, in order to increase their "religious force" in keeping away the wolves, with strength derived from the victims.

But the luperci also carried in their hands, in the festival as we know it, strips of the skins of the victims, with which they struck at women who offered themselves to the blows, in order to make them fertile. This, Prof. Deubner thinks, was a still later accretion. Life in a city had obliterated the original meaning of the rite—the keeping off wolves; but a new meaning becomes attached to it, presumably growing out of the use of the skins as magical instruments of additional force. Here, too, Juno first appears on the scene as the deity of women, for the strips were known as amicula Iunonis (R.F. 321 and note). The strips may have been substituted for something carried in the hand to drive away the wolves; the goat, it should be noted, is prominent in the cult of Juno, e.g. at Lanuvium. The mystical meaning of striking or flogging has been sufficiently explained in this instance by Mannhardt (R.F. p. 320), and is now familiar to anthropologists in other contexts.

In the period when the fertilisation of women became the leading feature of the rite, the State took up the popular festival, and it gained admittance to the religious calendar, which was drawn up for the city of the four regions (see above, Lect. IV., p. 106). The State was represented, as we learn from Ovid, by the Flamen Dialis (Fasti, ii. 282).

But we still have to account for some strange detail, which has never been satisfactorily explained in connection with the rest of the ceremony. The runners had their foreheads smeared with the blood of the victims, which was then wiped off with wool dipped in milk; after which, says Plutarch (Romulus, 21), they were obliged to laugh. These details, as Prof. Deubner remarks, seem very un-Roman; we have no parallel to them in Roman ritual, and I have remarked more than once in these lectures on the absence of the use of blood in Roman ceremonial. I have suggested that they were allowed to survive in the religion of the city-state, though actually belonging to that of a primitive population living on the site of Rome. Prof. Deubner's explanation is very different, and at first sight startling. These, he thinks, are Greek cathartic details added by Augustus when he re-organised the Lupercalia, as we may guess that he did from Suet. Aug. 31. They can all be paralleled from Greek religion. We know of them only from Plutarch, who quotes a certain Butas as writing Greek elegiacs in which they were mentioned; but of the date of this poet we know nothing. Ovid does not mention these details, nor hint at them in the stories he tells about the festival. (It is certainly possible that Augustus's revision may have been made after Ovid wrote the second book of the Fasti; it could not have been done until he became Pont. Max. in 12 B.C., and perhaps not till long after that, and the Fasti was written some time before Ovid's banishment in A.D. 9.) That Augustus should insert Greek cathartic details in the old Roman festival is certainly surprising, but not impossible. We know that in the ludi saeculares he took great pains to combine Greek with Roman ritual.

The above is a mere outline of Prof. Deubner's article, but enough, I hope, to attract the attention of English scholars to it. Whether or no it be accepted in whole or part by learned opinion, it will at least have the credit of suggesting a way in which not only the Lupercalia, but possibly other obscure rites, may be compelled ultimately to yield up their secrets.

APPENDIX III

THE PAIRS OF DEITIES IN GELLIUS xiii. 23 (see page 150)

The first paired deity mentioned by Gellius is Lua Saturni, also known as Lua Mater, of whom Dr. Frazer writes (p. 412), "In regard to Lua we know that she was spoken of as a mother, which makes it not improbable that she was also a wife." We are not surprised to find him claiming that because Vesta is addressed as Mater in the Acta Fratr. Arv. (Henzen, p. 147), that virgin deity was also married. This he does in his lectures on Kingship (p. 222), quoting Ennius and Lactantius as making Vesta mother of Saturnus and Titan. No comment on this is needed for any one conversant with Graeco-Roman religion and literature from Ennius onward. The title Mater here means simply that Vesta was to her worshippers in a maternal position: "quamvis virginem, indole tamen quadam materna praeditam fuisse nuper exposuit Preunerus," says Henzen, quoting Preuner's Hestia-Vesta, an old book but a good one (p. 333). But to return to Lua: I freely confess that I cannot explain why she was styled Mater. We only know of her, apart from the list in Gellius and one passage of Servius, from the two passages of Livy quoted without comment by Dr. Frazer. The first of these (viii. 1), which may be taken from the pontifical books, seems to let in a ray of light on her nature and function. In 338 B.C. the Volscians had been beaten, and "armorum magna vis" was found in their camp. "Ea Luae Matri se dare consul dixit, finesque hostium usque ad maritimam oram depopulatus est." That is, as I understand the words, he dedicated the enemy's spoils to the numen who was the enemy of his own crops. For if Lua be connected etymologically with lues, she may be the hurtful aspect of Saturnus, like Tursa Cerfia Cerfii Martii as Buecheler explains it (Umbrica, p. 98).

A curious passage of Servius may be quoted in support of this view, in which Luae is an almost certain correction for Lunae (see Jordan's edition of Preller's Rom. Mythol. vol. ii. p. 22). Commenting on Virgil's "Arboribusque satisque lues" (Aen. iii. 139), he writes: "quidam dicunt, diversis numinibus vel bene vel male faciendi potestatem dicatam, ut Veneri coniugia, Cereri divortia, Iunoni procreationem liberorum: sterilitatem horum tam Saturno quam Luae, hanc enim sicut Saturnum orbandi potestatem habere." Whatever Lua may originally have been, she seems to have been regarded as a power capable of working for evil in the crops and in women; if you could get her to work on your enemy's crops (cp. the excantatio, above p. 58), so much the better, and the better would her claim be to the title of Mater (but Dr. Frazer supplies us with examples of a hostile spirit being called by a family name, e.g., Grandfather Smallpox, G.B. iii. p. 98). When the consul had dedicated the spoils to her he proceeded to assist her in her functions by ravaging the crops of the enemy; thus she became later on a deity of spoils. In the Macedonian triumph of B.C. 167 we find her in company with Mars and Minerva as one of the deities to whom "spolia hostium dicare ius fasque est" (Livy xlv. 33).

I may add here that Dr. Frazer has another arrow in his quiver to prove that Saturnus was married: if Lua was not his wife (which no Roman asserts) certainly (he says) Ops was. He quotes a few words from Macrobius (i. 13. 19) in which these two are mentioned as husband and wife. If he had quoted the whole passage, his reader would have been better able to judge of the value of the writers of whom Macrobius says that they "crediderunt" that Ops was wife of Saturn. For it appears that some of them fancied that Saturnus was "a satu dictus cuius causa de caelo est"—(a desperate attempt to make the old spirit of the seed into a heaven-god), while Ops, whose name speaks for itself, was the earth. But the real companion deity to Ops was not Saturnus, but Consus. This has been placed beyond all reasonable doubt by Wissowa in his de Feriis (reprinted in Gesammelte Abhandlungen, p. 154 foll.). See also my R.F. p. 212. The names Ops and Consus obviously refer to stored corn, and everything in their cult points the same way. Saturnus' connection with Ops is a late and a mistaken one, derived from the Graecising tendency, which brought Cronos and Rhea to bear on them.

Next a word about Hora Quirini. As this coupling of names is followed by Virites Quirini, in the characteristic method explained in the text (cp. Cic. Nat. Deor. ii. 27 of Vesta, "vis eius ad aras et focos pertinet"), it is hardly necessary to comment on it. Hora is perhaps connected with Umbrian Heris (cp. Buecheler, Umbrica, index), which with kindred forms means will, willingness. Thus in "Nerienem Mavortis et Herem" (Ennius, fragm. 70, in Baehrens, Fragm. Poet. Lat.) we may see the strength and the will of Mars (cp. Herie Iunonis). Hora is also connected in legend with Hersilia (Ov. Met. 14. 829), and this helps to show how the Alexandrian erotic legend-making faculty got hold of her. But, says Dr. Frazer, Ennius regarded her as wife of Quirinus: "Teque Quirine pater veneror, Horamque Quirini" (fragm. 71 of the Annales). This is Dr. Frazer's interpretation of the words, but Ennius says nothing of conjugal relations; and even if he had, his evidence as to ancient Roman conceptions would be worthless. Ennius was not a Roman; he came from Magna Graecia; and if Dr. Frazer will read all that is said about him, e.g. in Schanz's history of Roman literature, he will allow that every statement of such a man about old Roman ideas of the divine must be regarded with suspicion and subjected to careful criticism.

Next we come to Salacia Neptuni. Of this couple Dr. Frazer says that Varro plainly implies that they were husband and wife, and that this is affirmed by Augustine, Seneca, and Servius. The accumulation of evidence seems strong; but Varro implies nothing of the kind (L.L. v. 72). He is indulging in fancy etymologies, and derives Neptunus from nubere, "quod mare terras obnubit ut nubes caelum, ab nuptu id est opertione ut antiqui, a quo nuptiae, nuptus dictus." If he had meant to make Salacia wife of Neptunus, this last sentence would surely have suggested it; but he goes on after a full stop, "Salacia Neptuni a salo." It is only the later writers, ignorant of the real nature of Roman religious ideas, who make Salacia into a wife. It is worth noting that Varro adds another feminine deity in his next sentence, Venilia, whom Virgil makes the mother of Turnus (Aen. x. 76); and Servius, commenting on this line, goes one better, and says she was identical with Salacia. Perhaps both were sea or water spirits, connected with Neptunus as famulae or anculae (see Wissowa, R.K. p. 19), but they are lost to us, and speculation is useless. In R.F. p. 186, I suggested an explanation of Salacia which I am disposed to withdraw. But for anyone wishing to study the treatment of old Roman numina by the mythologists and philosophers of the Graeco-Roman period, I would recommend an attentive reading of the whole chapter of Augustine from which Dr. Frazer quotes a few words (C.D. vii. 22); and further a careful study of the Graeco-Roman methods of fabricating myths about Roman divine names, for which he will do well to read the passages referred to by Wissowa in R.K. pp. 250 and 251, and notes.