Chapter III: Italian Cults

The Italians borrowed cults as well as gods from Greece, but "these external additions gathered round the kernel of the Roman religion without affecting or transforming its inmost core" (Ihne, i. 119). The distinguishing characteristic of the religion of Rome is that "it was designed for use in practical life" (_Ibid._ 120), "The god of the Italian was above all things an instrument for helping him to the attainment of very solid earthly objects" (Mommsen, i. 181). In fact, the Italian god was a fetich, _i.e._, a magical implement; and in this sense of the word it is true that "the Romans saw everywhere and in all things the agency and the direction of the gods" (Ihne, i. 118). Every act of life was entangled in a complicated network of ritual.[14] Every part of the house, the door, doorway, threshold, hinges, every process of farming, sowing, manuring, &c., every act of life from birth to burial, had its own particular spirit; and the object of the Roman with reference to each particular spirit was "to manage, and even in case of need to over-reach or to constrain him" (Mommsen, i. 177). Preller in his _Römische Mythologie_ characterises the religion of Rome as, above all things, "a cultus-religion." We may add that in Rome, as in China, Assyria, and Babylonia, the cult was nothing but organised magic,[15] the superstitious customs, charms, and incantations familiar to the folk-lorist in all countries were organised by the practical Roman and were state-established by him. In fine, the Romans "in their gods worshipped the abstract natural forces, to whose power man is conscious that he is subject every instant, but which he can win over and render subservient to his purposes by scrupulously obeying the external injunctions which the State issues for the worship of the gods."[16]

A fundamental difference between the Greek and Roman religions manifests itself in the matter of magic. Magic was foreign to the Greeks, and was disliked by them: when it appears in their mythology, it is practised by foreigners—_e.g._, Medea, Circe, Hecate—and is "barbarous." In fact, magic belongs to the animistic stage, and is opposed to the higher tendencies of polytheism. The forces of Nature, conceived as _numina_ rather than as moral ideals, may well be influenced by magic to the advantage of the savage; but to control a deity by means other than prayer and good life is antitheistic.

Finally, it is not accidental or unmeaning that, on the one hand, the Greeks had oracles while the Italians had none; and on the other hand, that in China and Babylon (which resemble Rome in other pertinent points) divination played as large and as official a part as at Rome. An oracle is the voice of a god; whereas divination is simply sympathetic magic inverted.[17]