Chapter V: The Worship of Sacred Utensils 489 (3)

But it was a long stage in the evolution of society before man arrived at a better knowledge of his relation to the Power manifesting itself in the universe; before he reached the idea of a god or spirit realisable and nameable, and thus capable of being addressed, placated, worshipped. When this stage is reached, there supervenes almost always a strong tendency to regulate and systematise the methods of address, placation, and worship; and among some peoples, _e.g._ the Romans, for reasons which it is by no means easy to explain, this tendency is much stronger than among others. Wherever it has been strong, wherever these methods of putting oneself in right relation with the Power have been systematised by a central authority or priesthood, and thus made into religious law, there, as we might naturally expect, the performances and performers of magic have been most vigorously discountenanced and outlawed. The interests of religion and its officials are wholly antagonistic to those of magic and magicians. In civilised communities and in historical times magic is in the main individualistic, not social; magical ceremonies for the good of the community seem to be confined to races in a very early stage of development. The examples on which Dr. Frazer relies for his theory of the development of the public magician into a king[84] are of this primitive kind, or are mere survivals of magic in a higher stage of civilisation--such survivals as there will always be among forms and ceremonies, of which it is man's nature to be tenacious. But religion, once firmly established, invariably seeks to exclude magic; and the priest does his best to discredit the magician, as claiming to exercise mysterious powers outside the pale of the legally recognised methods of propitiation and worship. As Dr. Tylor observed long ago, the more civilised the race, the more apt it is to associate magic with men of inferior civilisation.[85] In the Jewish law, though magic was well known to the Jews and privately practised, there is no recognition of it; the magical books attributed to Solomon were suppressed, according to tradition, by the pious king Hezekiah.[86] So too at Rome, where the outward forms of religion were also very highly systematised, magic, as it seems to me, was rigorously excluded from the State ritual, though it continued in use in private life under certain precautions taken by the State; in the few genuine examples of it in the rites belonging to the _ius divinum_ (_i.e._ those used and sanctioned for the purposes of the community), it is nothing more than a survival of which the magical meaning was unknown to the writers from whom we hear of it.

A good example of such survivals is the curious ceremony of the _aquaelicium_, without doubt a genuine case of magical "rain-making"--one of the many inadequate and blundering attempts on the part of primitive man to obtain what he needs. Probably it may be classed under the head of "sympathetic magic," but the evidence as to what was done in the ceremony is not quite explicit enough to allow us to do this confidently.[87] It was, of course, not included in the religious calendar, as it would be only occasionally called for, and could not be fixed to a day; but there is clear evidence that it was sanctioned by the State, for the pontifices took part in it, and the magistrates without the _toga praetexta_, and the lictors carrying the fasces reversed.[88] A stone, which lay outside the walls near the Porta Capena, was brought into the city by the pontifices, so far as we can make out the details, and it has been conjectured that it was taken to an altar of Jupiter Elicius on the Aventine hard by, this cult-title of the god of the sky having possibly some relation to the technical name of the ceremony. What was done with the stone we unluckily do not know; but it has been reasonably conjectured that it was a hollow one, and that it was filled with water which was allowed to run over the edge, as a means of inducing the rain-god to suffer the heavens to overflow.[89] It was called _lapis manalis_; and the epithet here can have nothing to do with the Manes, as in the case of another _lapis manalis_, of which I shall have a word to say later on, but must mean "pouring" or "overflowing." One or two other fragments of evidence point in the same direction, and I think we may fairly conclude that the rite was originally one of sympathetic magic--that as the stone overflowed, so the sky would pour down rain. In my _Roman Festivals_ I have pointed out a remarkable parallel to this in the collections of the _Golden Bough_; in a Samoan village a stone represented the god of rain, and in a drought his priests carried it in procession and dipped it in a stream.

This parallel I owe to Dr. Frazer's wide knowledge of all such practices among savage peoples. But this ever helpful and friendly guide, in treating of the Jupiter Elicius concerned in this ceremony, has gone beyond the evidence, and attributed to the Romans another kind of magic of which I believe they were quite innocent. He has been led to this by his theory that kings were developed out of successful magicians. In his lectures on the early history of the Kingship[90] he maintains that the Roman kings practised the magical art of bringing down lightning from heaven. "The priestly king Numa passed for an adept in the art of drawing down lightning from the sky.... Tullus Hostilius is reported to have met with the same end (as Salmoneus, king of Elis) in an attempt to draw down Jupiter in the form of lightning from the clouds." To support these statements Dr. Frazer quotes Pliny, Livy, Ovid, Plutarch, Arnobius, Aurelius Victor, and Zonaras--truly a formidable list of authorities; but without any attempt to discover where any of these late writers found the stories. Yet he had but to read Aust's admirable article "Jupiter" in the _Mythological Lexicon_[91] to assure himself that legends which cannot be traced farther back than the middle of the second century B.C. cannot seriously be assumed to be genuinely Roman. Pliny happens to mention Calpurnius Piso as his authority; this was the man who is well known in Roman history as the author of the first _lex de repetundis_ of the year 149 B.C., a good statesman, but as an annalist much given to indulging a mythological fancy.[92] We happen to know that he wrote with happy confidence about the life and habits of Romulus, and a story about wine-drinking which he attributes to that king is obviously transferred to him from some more historical personage. Romulus would not drink wine one day because he was going to be very busy on the next. Then they said to him, "If we all did so, Romulus, wine would be cheap." "Nay, dear," he replied, "if every one drank as much as he wished; and that is exactly what I am doing."[93] I quote the story simply as a good example of the way in which Roman historians could deal with their kings, and of the absolute necessity of acquainting oneself with their methods before building hypotheses upon their statements. I hardly need to add that another of Dr. Frazer's authorities, Arnobius, informs us that he took the story from the second book of Valerius Antias, a later writer than Piso, whose name is a byword even with the uncritical Livy for shameless exaggeration and mis-statement.[94]

But how did these writers come by such legends, which, as Dr. Frazer shows, are to be found also in Greece and in other parts of the world? Why should they have wished to make Roman kings into magicians? Rain-making we can understand at Rome,--it had a practical end in view, the procuring of rain for the crops,--but why lightning and thunder, which were so much dreaded that every bit of damage done by a thunderstorm had to be carefully expiated by a religious process? Rome is not in the tropics, where rain and thunder so often come together, and where an attempt to produce rain by magic might naturally include thunder, as in some of Dr. Frazer's examples from tropical lands. I entirely agree with the latest and most sober investigators of Roman ritual that this kind of magic is quite foreign to Roman ideas and practice;[95] there is no vestige of it in the Roman cult; these stories must have come from outside. And there is every probability that they came from Etruria, where the lore of lightning had become a pseudo-science, a waste of human ingenuity, for the origin of which we must look, as we are now beginning to understand, to Babylonia and the Eastern magic.[96] The Jupiter Elicius of the Aventine had nothing to do with lightning; he took his cult-title from the rite of _aquaelicium_; but as soon as the Romans began to interest themselves in the Etruscan lightning-lore, of which this electrical magic was only a part,[97] they perverted the meaning of the epithet to suit their new studies, and began to attribute to their legendary kings powers which properly belonged to Etruscan or Oriental magicians. The second century B.C., when Piso wrote his _Annals_, is exactly the period when we should naturally expect such studies to come into fashion, and with such perversions of "history" as their consequence.[98]

I go on to note one or two more examples of real magic in the State religion; but they are hard to find. Pliny tells that even in his day people believed that a runaway slave who had not escaped out of the city might be arrested by a spell uttered by the Vestal virgins.[99] I take this to mean that any one who had lost his slave might get the Vestals to use the spell as a means of keeping the runaway within the city. The word for spell is here _precatio_, _i.e._ a prayer, not _carmen_, which is the usual word for a spell; and Pliny evidently thinks of it as addressed to some god. But no doubt it was originally at least a genuine spell, of the same kind as others used in private life, which we shall notice directly; and it implies a belief in some magical power inherent in the Vestals, of whom we are told that if they accidentally met a criminal being led to punishment they might secure his release.[100] As the spell in this case seems to be telepathic, _i.e._ an exercise of will-power projected from a distance, it may perhaps be paralleled with certain mystical powers exercised by women, especially when their husbands are at war, among some savage peoples;[101] but we have no information about it beyond the passage in Pliny, and further guessing would be useless.

This last is a case of genuine magic, but it is outside the ritual of the State, though exercised by a State priesthood. Within that ritual there is one other very curious case of what must be classed as a magical process, and one that has accidentally become famous. At the Lupercalia on February 15, the two young men called Luperci, or, more strictly, belonging respectively as leaders to the two collegia of Luperci, girt themselves with the skins of the slaughtered victims, which were goats, and then ran round the base of the Palatine hill, striking at all the women who came near them or offered themselves to their blows, with strips of skin cut from the hides of these same victims. The object was to produce fertility; on this point our authorities are explicit.[102] Thus this particular feature of the whole extraordinary ritual of the Lupercalia is unmistakably within the region of magic rather than of religion. Some potency was believed to work in the act of striking, though apparently without a spoken spell or _carmen_, such as usually accompanies acts of this kind; and this part of the rite, grotesque though it was, was allowed to survive by the grave religious authorities who drew up the calendar of religious festivals. It was probably a superstition too deeply rooted in the minds of the people to admit of being excluded; and, strange to say, it survived, in outward form at least, until Rome had become cosmopolitan and even Christian. The Lupercalia has always been a puzzle to students of early religion, and as each new theory is advanced, this strange festival is seized on for fresh interpretation;[103] but for our present purposes it must suffice to point out that we clearly find embedded in it a piece of genuine magic, dating beyond doubt from a very primitive stage of thought.

There is one other very curious performance, occurring each year on the ides of May, which in my view is rather magical than religious, though the ancients themselves looked upon it as a kind of purification: I mean the casting into the Tiber from the _pons sublicius_ of twenty-four or twenty-seven straw puppets by the Vestal virgins, in the presence of the magistrates and pontifices. Recently an attempt has been made by Wissowa to prove that this strange ceremony was not primitive, but simply a case of the substitution of puppets for real human victims as late as the age of the Punic wars.[104] These puppets were called Argei, which word naturally suggests Greeks; and Wissowa has contrived to persuade himself not only that a number of Greeks were actually put to death by drowning in an age when everything Greek was beginning to be reverenced at Rome, but (still more extraordinary to an anthropologist) that the primitive device of substitution was had in requisition at that late date in order to carry on the memory of the ghastly deed. And the world of German learning has silently followed their leader, without taking the trouble to test his conclusions by a careful and independent examination of the evidence. It happens that this fascinating puzzle of the Argei was the first curiosity that enticed me into the study of the Roman religion, and for some thirty years I have been familiar with every scrap of evidence bearing on it; and after going over that evidence once more I can emphatically state my conviction that Wissowa's theory will not hold water for a moment. I shall return to the subject in a later lecture dealing with the religious history of the second Punic war; at present I merely express a belief that, whatever be the history of the accessories of the rite,--and they are various and puzzling,--the actual immersion of the puppets is the survival of a primitive piece of sympathetic magic, the object being possibly to procure rain. It is, in my opinion, quite impossible to resist the anthropological evidence for this conclusion, though we cannot really be certain about the object; for this evidence I must refer you to my _Roman Festivals_, and to the references there given.[105]

This rite of the Argei, then, was a case of genuine magic, and exercised by a State priesthood, virgins to whom certain magical powers were supposed to be attached; it was, I think, a popular performance, like one or two others which are also outside the limit of the Fasti,[106] and was embodied in a more complicated ceremonial long after that calendar had been drawn up. In the ritual authorised by the State, with public objects in view, _i.e._ for the benefit of society as a whole, there is hardly a trace of anything that we can call genuine magic apart from the examples I have just been explaining. There were, I need not say, many survivals of magical processes of which the true magical intent had long been lost--ancient magical deposits in a social stratum of religion, which I shall notice in their proper place. This is not peculiar to the religion of the Romans; it is a phenomenon to be found in all religions, even in those of the most highly developed type, and it is one apt to cause some confusion as to the true distinction between magic and religion.[107] It is easy to find magical processes even in Christian worship, if we have the will to do so; but if we steadily bear in mind that the true test of magic is not the nature of an act, but the intent or volition which accompanies it, the search will not be an easy one.

The modern French school of sociologists, which now has to be reckoned with in investigating the early history of religion, claims that magic was not originally, as we now see it, a matter of individual skill, but a sociological fact, _i.e._ it was used for the benefit of the community, as religion came to be in a later age. If this be true, as it very possibly is, we see at once how the dead bones of magical processes might survive, with their original meaning entirely lost, into an age in which higher and more reasonable ideas had been developed about the relation of Man to the Power manifesting itself in the universe. To take a single example from Rome, divination by the examination of a victim's entrails was originally a magical process, according to the opinion of most modern authorities;[108] but it ceases to be magic when it is used simply to determine in the State ritual whether in a religious process the victim is perfect and agreeable to the deity. In fact magical formulae, magical instruments, unless they are used in the true spirit of magic, to compel, not to propitiate a deity, are no longer magic, and may be passed over here. When we come to discuss the ritual of sacrifice and prayer, of _lustratio_, of vows, of divination, we may find it necessary to recall what has here been said. On the whole, we may conclude that organised religious cult, from its very nature and object, everywhere excluded magic in the true sense of the word; it implies prayer and propitiation, both of which are absolutely inconsistent with the object and methods of magic. Religion is the product of a higher stage of social development; it is the expression of a real advance of human thought; and in telling the story of the religious experience of the Roman people we are but indirectly concerned with those more rude and rudimentary ideas which it displaced.

But in private life, outside of the organised cult of the State and the family, magic was all through Roman history abundant, even over-abundant, and in this form I cannot pass it over entirely. Though the State authorities seem to have taken pains to exclude it rigidly from the public rites, and though there is little trace of it in the religious life of family and gens, yet there is evidence that it was deeply rooted in the nature of the people, and that they must have passed through an age in which it was an important factor in their social life. This fact, taken together with its almost complete elimination from the public religion, throws into relief the persistent efforts of the State authorities, from the framing of the old religious calendar to the time of the Augustan revival, to keep their relations with the Power clear of all that they believed to be unworthy or injurious. No better example can be found of the inherent antagonism between religion and magic.

Private magic may be divided into two kinds, according as it was used to damage another, or only to benefit oneself. In the former case the State interfered to protect the person threatened with damage, and treated this kind of magic as a crime. The commonest form of it was that of the spell, or _carmen_, no doubt often sung, and accompanied by some action which would bring it under the head of sympathetic magic; but the spell alone is taken cognisance of by the State. Pliny has preserved three words from the XII. Tables which tell their own tale: "qui fruges excantassit."[109] Servius, commenting on the line of Virgil's 8th _Eclogue_, "atque satas alio vidi traducere messes," writes, "magicis quibusdam artibus hoc fiebat, unde est in XII. Tabb. 'Neve alienam segetem pellexeris.'" These last words, with the verb in the second person, are probably not quoted exactly from the ancient text,[110] but they help to show us the nature of this hostile spell. There must have been a belief that the spirit, or life, or fructifying power of your neighbour's crops could be enticed away and transferred to your own. This is confirmed by a remark of St. Augustine in the _de Civitate Dei_;[111] after quoting the same line from Virgil, he adds, "eo quod hac pestifera scelerataque doctrina fructus alieni in alias terras transferri perhibentur, nonne in XII. Tabulis, id est Romanorum antiquissimis legibus, Cicero commemorat esse conscriptum et ei qui hoc fecerit supplicium constitutum?" Given the belief, the temptation can be well understood if we reflect that the arable land of the old Romans was divided in sections of a square, and that each man's allotment would have that of a neighbour on two sides at least.[112] If one man's corn were found to be more flourishing than that of his neighbours, what more likely than that he should have enticed away the spirit of their crops? The process reminds us, as it reminded Pliny, of the _evocatio_ of the gods of foreign communities, a rite which belongs to religion and not to magic, though it doubtless had its origin in the same class of ideas as the _excantatio_.

In more general terms the old Roman law (_i.e._ originally the _ius divinum_) forbade the use of evil spells, as we see in another fragment of the Tables, "qui malum carmen incantassit." In later times this was usually taken as referring to libel and slander, but there can be no doubt that the carmina here alluded to were originally magical, and became _carmina famosa_ in the course of legal interpretation. Cicero seems to combine the two meanings in the _de Rep._ (iv. 10. 2) when he says that the Tables made it a capital offence "si quis occentavisset, sive carmen condidisset quod infamiam faceret flagitiumve alteri" (to bring shame or criminal reproach on another). In the later sense these carmina have a curious history, into which I cannot enter now.[113] In the earlier sense they existed and flourished without doubt, in spite of the law; or it may be that, as the words of the Tables were interpreted in the new sense, the old form of offence was tolerated in private. "We are all afraid," says Pliny, "of being 'nailed' (_defigi_) by spells and curses" (_diris precationibus_).[114] These _dirae_, and all the various forms of love-charms, _defixiones_, accompanied by the symbolic actions which are found all the world over, lie outside my present subject, and are so familiar to us all in Roman literature that I do not need to dwell on them.[115]

Nor of the common harmless kind of magic need I say much now. It survived, of course, alongside of the religion of the family and State, from the earliest times to the latest, as it survives at the present day in all countries civilised and uncivilised; and being harmless the State took no heed of it. Some assortment of charms and spells for the cure of diseases will be found in Cato's book on agriculture, and one or two incidentally occur in that of Varro.[116] They performed the work of insurance against both fire and accident, and even such a man as Julius Caesar was not independent of such arts. Pliny tells us that after experiencing a carriage accident he used to repeat a certain spell three times as soon as he had taken his seat in a vehicle, and adds significantly, "id quod plerosque nunc facere scimus."[117] Such carmina were written on the walls of houses to insure them against fire.[118] Pliny has a large collection of small magical delusions and superstitions, many of which have an interest for anthropologists, in the 28th book of his _Natural History_.

Another kind of harmless magic, to which the Romans, like all Italians ancient and modern, were peculiarly addicted, is the use of amulets. Here there is no spell, or obvious and expressed exercise of will-power on the part of the individual, but the potent influence, _mana_, or whatever we choose to call it, resides in a material object which brings good luck, like the cast horse-shoe of our own times, or protects against hostile will-power, and especially against the evil eye. This curious and widely-spread superstition was probably the _raison d'etre_ of most of the amulets worn or carried by Romans. A modern Italian, even if he be a complete sceptic and materialist, will probably be found to have some amulet about him against the evil eye, "just to be on the safe side."[119] A list of amulets, both Greek and Roman, will be found in the _Dictionary of Antiquities_, and in Pauly-Wissowa, _Real-Encyclopaedie, s.v._ "amulet," and it is not necessary here to explain the various kinds in use in Italy; but I must dwell for a moment on one type, which had been taken up into the life of the family, and in one sense into that of the State, viz. the _bulla_ worn by children, both boys and girls.

The bulla was a small object, enclosed in historical times in a capsule, and suspended round the child's neck. It was popularly believed to have been originally an Etruscan custom,[120] and borrowed by the Romans, like so many other ornaments. It is, however, much more probable that the custom was old Italian (as indeed the "medicine-bag" is world-wide), and that the Etruscan contribution to it was merely the case or capsule, which was of gold where the family could afford it--gold itself being supposed to have some potency as a charm.[121] The object within the case was, as Pliny tells us, a _res turpicula_ as a rule,[122] and this may remind us that a _fascinum_ was carried in the car of the triumphator as _medicus invidiae_, to use Pliny's pregnant expression. The triumphing general needed special protection; he appeared in the guise of Jupiter himself, and was for the moment lifted above the ordinary rank of humanity. Some feeling of the same kind must have originally suggested similar means for the protection of children under the age of puberty. They also wore the _toga praetexta_, which, though associated by us with secular magistrates, had undoubtedly a religious origin. There are distinct signs that children were in some sense sacred, and at the same time that they needed special protection against the all-abounding evil influences to be met with in daily life.[123] Thus this particular form of amulet became a recognised institution of family life, and in due time little more than a mark of childhood.

Yet another kind of charm must be mentioned here which was used at certain festivals, though apparently not at any of those belonging to the authorised calendar. At the Compitalia, Paganalia, and _feriae Latinae_ we are told that small images of the human figure, or masks, or simply round balls (_pilae_), were hung up on trees or doorways, and left to swing in the wind.[124] At the Compitalia the images had a special name, _maniae_, of which the meaning is lost; but inasmuch as the charms were hung up at cross-roads on that occasion, where the Lares compitales of the various properties had their shrine, it was not difficult to manufacture out of them a goddess, Mania, mother of the Lares.[125] The common word for these figures was _oscilla_, and the fact of their swinging in the wind suggested a verb _oscillare_, which survives in our own tongue with the same meaning. Until lately it used to be believed that they were substitutes for original human sacrifices: a view for which there is not a particle of evidence, though it was originated by Roman scholars.[126] Modern anthropology has found another explanation, which is by no means improbable. Dr. Frazer, in an appendix to the 2nd volume of the _Golden Bough_, has collected a number of examples of the practice of swinging _by human beings_ as a magical rite; they come from many parts of the world, including ancient Athens, and even modern Calabria. He also points out that at the _feriae Latinae_ the swingers seem to have been human beings, if we accept the evidence of Festus, _s.v._ "oscillantes"; thus we are left with the possibility that the oscilla were really imitations of men and women, though not of human sacrificial victims.

Dr. Frazer is obviously hard put to it to explain the original meaning and object of this curious custom. In the Paganalia, as described by Virgil in the second _Georgic_,[127] the object would seem to be the prosperity of the vine-crop.

coloni
versibus incomptis ludunt risuque soluto,
oraque corticibus sumunt horrenda cavatis,
et te Bacche vocant per carmina laeta, tibique
oscilla ex alta suspendunt mollia pinu.
hinc omnis largo pubescit vinea fetu, etc.[128]

But here we must leave a question which is still unsolved. All we can say is that the old idea of substitutes for human sacrifice must be finally given up, and that the _oscilla_, whether or not they were substitutes for human swingers, were probably charms intended to ward off evil influences from the crops. I am not disposed to put any confidence in what Servius tells us, that this was a purification by means of air, just as fire and water were also purifying agents; this looks like the ingenious explanation of a later and a religious age.[129]

So much, then, for magical charms and spells, and the survivals of them in the fully developed Roman religion.[130] It might seem hardly worth while to spend even so much time on them as I have done, and I cannot deny that I am glad now to be able to leave them. My object has simply been to show how little of this kind of practice, which meets us on the threshold of religion, was allowed to survive by the religious authorities of the State; in other words, I wished to make clear that in our inquiries into the nature of the Roman religion it is really religion and not magic that we have to do with.

It is really religion; it is desire, beginning already to be effective, to be in right relation to the Power manifesting itself in the universe. The Romans, as I hope to show in the next lecture, when we can begin to know and feel an interest in them, had not only begun to recognise this Power in various forms and functions as one that must be propitiated, because they were dependent on it for their daily needs, but to regulate and make permanent the methods of propitiation. What was the relation between this simple religion and morality--between ritual and conduct--is a very difficult question, to which I shall return later on. Dr. Westermarck has recently come to the conclusion that the religion of primitive man has no true relation to morality, that it is not apt to give a sanction to good action, or to develop the germs of a conscience. But so far as I can discern, the idea of active duty, and therefore the germ of conscience, must have been so intimately connected with the religious practice of the old Latin family that it is to me impossible to think of the one apart from the other. Surely it is in that life that the famous word "_pius_" must have originated, which throughout Roman history meant the sense of duty towards family, State, and gods, as every reader of the _Aeneid_ knows. That the formalised religion of later times had become almost entirely divorced from morality there is indeed no doubt; but in the earliest times, in the old Roman family and then in the budding State, the whole life of the Roman seems to me so inextricably bound up with his religion that I cannot possibly see how that religion can have been distinguishable from his simple idea of duty and discipline.

NOTES TO LECTURE III

[81] Westermarck, _Origin etc. of Moral Ideas_, ii. 584.

[82] Jevons, _Introduction_, p. 33.

[83] A useful summary of the whole subject, embodying
the results and terminology of Tylor, Frazer, and other
anthropologists, is Dr. Haddon's _Magic and Fetishism_,
in Messrs. Constable's series, _Religions Ancient and
Modern_. See also Marett, _On the Threshold of
Religion_, passim.

[84] _Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship_, p.
89 foll. For an example not mentioned in the text
(_devotio_) see below, p. 206 foll. This may have been
originally practised by the Latin kings. I may here
draw attention to the almost dogmatic conclusions of the
modern French sociological school of research; _e.g._ M.
Huvelin, in _L'Annee sociologique_ for 1907, begins by
asserting as a fundamental law, proved by MM. Hubert et
Mauss, that magic is just as much a social fact as
religion: "Les uns et les autres sont des produits de
l'activite collective" (_Magie et droit individuel_, p.
1). But M. Huvelin's paper is to some extent a
modification of this dogma. He seeks to explain the fact
that magic is both secret and private, not public and
social, in historical times; and in the domain of law,
with which he is specially concerned, he concludes that
"a magical rite is only a religious rite twisted from
its proper social end, and employed to realise the will
or belief of an individual" (p. 46). This is the only
form in which we shall find magic at Rome, except in so
far as a few of its forms survive in the ritual of
religion with their meaning changed. In early Roman law,
as a quasi-religious body of rules and practices, there
are a few magical survivals which will be found
mentioned by M. Huvelin in this article; but they are of
no importance for our present subject.

[85] _Primitive Culture_, vol. i. ch. iv. See also
Jevons, _Introduction_, p. 36 foll.

[86] See Schuerer, _Jewish People in the Time of Christ_
(Eng. trans.), Division II. vol. iii. p. 151 foll.

[87] Fowler, _R.F._ p. 232; Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 106. The
most careful examination of the rite and the evidence
for it is that of Aust in _Mythological Lexicon_, _s.v._
"Iuppiter," p. 656 foll. See also M.H. Morgan in vol.
xxxii. of _Transactions of the American Philological
Association_, p. 104.

[88] Tertullian, _de Jejun_. 16. Petronius, _Sat._ 44,
adds that the matrons went in the procession with bare
feet and streaming hair (cp. Pliny xvii. 266); but this
seems rather Greek than Roman in character, and
Petronius is plainly thinking of the town (_colonia_ he
calls it) in southern Italy where the scene of
Trimalchio's supper is laid; probably a Greek city by
origin, Croton or Cumae. A translation of this passage
will be found in Dill's _Roman Society from Nero to
Marcus Aurelius_, p. 133. The most useful words in it
for our purpose are "Jovem aquam exorabant."

[89] This suggestion was originally made by O. Gilbert,
_Roem. Topographie_, ii. 184.

[90] p. 204 foll.

[91] p. 657. The story is mixed up with Greek fables,
_e.g._ that of Proteus, as Wissowa has pointed out,
_R.K._ p. 106, note 10.

[92] See Schanz, _Gesch. der roem. Literatur_, vol. i.
(ed. 3) p. 270 foll.

[93] This fragment of Piso is preserved by Gellius, xi.
14. 1.

[94] See, _e.g._, Schanz, _Gesch. der roem. Literatur_,
vol. ii. p. 106.

[95] Wissowa, _l.c._ Aust in Roscher's _Lexicon_, _s.v._
"Iuppiter," p. 657.

[96] Cumont, _Religions Orientales dans le paganisme
romain_, ch. 5. I shall return to this subject in my
second course of lectures.

[97] Mueller-Deecke, _Etrusker_, ii. ch. vii., especially
p. 176 foll.

[98] Cp. below, Lecture XV.

[99] Pliny, _N.H._ xxviii. 13: "Vestales nostras hodie
credimus nondum egressa urbe mancipia fugitiva retinere
in loco precationibus."

[100] Plutarch, _Numa_, 10. Virginity would increase the
power of the spell; see Fehrle, _Die kultische
Keuschheit im Altertum_, p. 54 foll.

[101] See, _e.g._, Frazer, _G.B._ i. 360 foll.

[102] See _R.F._ p. 320, notes 6 and 7.

[103] Within the last thirty years or so the Lupercalia
has been discussed (apart from writers on classical
subjects exclusively) by Mannhardt in his _Mythologische
Studien_, p. 72 foll.; Robertson Smith, _Semites_, p.
459; Deubner in _Archiv_, 1910, p. 481 foll.; and at the
moment of writing by E. S. Hartland, _Primitive
Paternity_, i. ch. ii. _R.F._ p. 310 foll. See Appendix
D.

[104] This view was originally stated in Pauly-Wissowa,
_s.v._ "Argei." I endeavoured to confute it in the
_Classical Review_, 1902, p. 115 foll., and Wissowa
replied in _Gesammelte Abhandlungen_, p. 211 foll. Since
then my conviction has become stronger that this great
scholar is for once wrong. Ennius alluded to the Argei
as an institution of Numa, _i.e._ as primitive (frag.
121, Vahlen, from Festus p. 355, and Varro, _L.L._ vii.
44), yet Ennius was a youth at the very time when
Wissowa insists that the rite originated. Wissowa makes
no attempt to explain this. See below, p. 321 foll.

[105] _R.F._ p. 111 foll.

[106] _e.g._ the October horse, which also occurred on
the Ides; see _R.F._ p. 241 foll.; and the festival of
Anna Perenna, also on Ides (March 15), _R.F._ p. 50
foll. It is just possible that all the three festivals
were originally in the old calendar, and dropped out
because the mark of the Ides had to be affixed to the
day in the first place. See Wissowa, _Gesammelte
Abhandlungen_, p. 164 foll.; _R.F._ p. 241.

[107] Thus Messrs. Hubert et Mauss (_Melanges d'histoire
des religions_, Preface, p. xxiv.) maintain that there
is no real antinomy between "les faits du systeme
magique et les faits du systeme religieux." There is in
every rite, they insist, a magical as well as a
religious element. Yet on the same page we find that
they exclude magic from all organised cult, because it
is not obligatory, and cannot (if I understand them
rightly) be laid down in a code, like religious
practice. I think it would have been simpler to consider
the magical element in religious rites as surviving,
with its original meaning lost, from an earlier stage of
thought. M. van Gennep, in his interesting work _Les
Rites de passage_, p. 17, goes so far as to call all
religious _ceremonies_ magical, as distinguished from
the _theories_ (_e.g._ animism) which constitute
religion. This seems to me apt to bring confusion into
the discussion; for all rites are the outward expression
of thought, and it is by the thought (or, as he calls
it, theories) that we must trace the sociological
development of mankind, the rites being used as indexes
only. I cannot but think that (as indeed in these days
is quite natural) this French school lays too much
stress upon the outward acts, and that this tendency has
led them to find real living magic where it is present
only in a fossil state.

[108] _e.g._ Tylor, article "Magic" in _Encycl. Brit._,
and _Primitive Culture_, 1. ch. iv.; Marett, _Threshold
of Religion_, 83. See below, p. 180.

[109] Pliny, _N.H._ xxviii. 17 and 18. For the singing
or murmuring of spells in many countries, see Jevons,
_Anthropology and the Classics_, p. 93 foll.

[110] Bruns, _Fontes Iuris Romani_, note on this
passage.

[111] _Civ. Dei_, viii. 19.

[112] See, _e.g._, Wordsworth, _Fragments and Specimens
of Early Latin_, p. 446, for an account of simple land
measurement which will suffice to illustrate the point
made here.

[113] The _carmina famosa_ sung at a triumph by the
soldiers had the same origin, but were used to avert
evil from the triumphator. The best exposition of this
is in H. A. J. Munro's _Elucidations of Catullus_, p. 76
foll.

[114] Pliny, _N.H._ xxviii. 19. For the technical sense
of _defigere_, _defixio_, see Jevons in _Anthropology
and the Classics_, p. 108 foll.

[115] The most familiar examples are Virgil's eighth
_Eclogue_, 95 foll.; Ovid, _Met._ vii. 167, and
elsewhere; _Fasti_, iv. 551; Horace, _Epode_ v. 72; cp.
article "Magia" in Daremberg-Saglio; Falz, _De poet.
Rom. doctrina magica_, Giessen, 1903. There is a
collection of Roman magical spells in Appel's _De
Romanorum precationibus_, p. 43 foll. Many modern
Italian examples and survivals will be found in Leland's
_Etruscan Roman Remains in Popular Tradition_, pt. ii.

[116] Cato, _R.R._ 160; Varro, _R.R._ i. 3.

[117] Pliny, _N.H._ xxviii. 21.

[118] _Ib._ xxviii. 20. The following sections of this
book are the _locus classicus_ for these popular
superstitions.

[119] See, _e.g._, _Italian Home Life_, by Lina Duff
Gordon, p. 230 foll.

[120] Juvenal v. 164. The idea probably arose, as a
passage of Plutarch suggests (_Rom._ 25), from the fact
that the triumphator, whose garb was no doubt of
Etruscan origin, wore the bulla.

[121] Frazer, _G.B._ i. 345, note 2, where we learn that
gold was taboo in some Greek worships, _e.g._ at the
mysteries of Andania, which sufficiently proves that it
possessed potency. Pliny, xxxiii. 84, mentions cases of
such potency as medicine, and among them its application
to children who have been poisoned.

[122] Pliny, _N.H._ xxviii. 39.

[123] See an article by the author on the original
meaning of the _toga praetexta_ in _Classical Review_,
vol. x. (1896) p. 317.

[124] For the Compitalia, Macrob. i. 7. 34; Festus p.
238. For the Paganalia, Probus, _ad Georg._ ii. 385,
assuming the _feriae Sementinae_ there mentioned to be
the Paganalia (see _R.F._ p. 294). For the _feriae
Latinae_, Festus, _s.v._ "oscillantes."

[125] Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 193, with whose view I entirely
agree. We learn of the imaginary goddess from Varro,
_L.L._ ix. 61. Pais, I may remark in passing, is certain
that Acca Larentia was the mater Larum; see his
_Lectures on Ancient Legends of Roman History_, p. 60
foll.

[126] 46. Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 354, note 5.

[127] _Georg._ ii. 380 foll. It is not certain that
Virgil is describing the festival generally known as
Paganalia, which took place early in January; but it
seems probable from line 382 that he is thinking of some
festival of the pagus. The _oscilla_ may have been used
at more than one.

[128] Note that Virgil writes of masks used in rude
play-acting, as well as of _oscilla_ hung on trees, and
conjoins the two as though they had something in common.
The evidence of an engraved onyx cup in the Louvre, of
which a cut is given in the article "Oscilla" in the
_Dict. of Antiquities_, seems to make it probable that
masks worn by rustics on these occasions were afterwards
hung by them on trees as _oscilla_. Some of these masks
on the cup are adorned with horns, which may explain an
interesting passage of Apuleius (_Florida_, i. 1):
"neque enim iustius religiosam moram viatori obiecerit
aut ara floribus redimita ... aut quercus cornibus
onerata, aut fagus pellibus coronata," etc. See also
_Gromatici veteres_, ii. 241.

[129] See, however, Dr. Frazer's remarks in _G.B._ ii.
p. 454. He thinks that the air might in this way be
purged of vagrant spirits or baleful ghosts, as the
Malay medicine man swings in front of the patient's
house in order to chase away the disease. Cp. _G.B._ ii.
343, where a rather different explanation is attempted
of the _maniae_ and _pilae_.

[130] Magic in the old forms, or many of them, has
survived not only into the old Roman religion, but to
the present day, in many parts of Italy. "The peasants
have recourse to the priests and the saints on great
occasions, but they use magic all the time for
everything," was said by a woman of the Romagna Toscana
to the late C.G. Leland (_Etruscan Roman Remains_,
Introduction, p. 9). This enterprising American's
remarkable book, though dealing only with a small region
of northern Italy, deserves more consideration than it
has received. The author may have been uncritical, but
beyond doubt he had the gift of extracting secrets from
the peasantry. He claims to have proved that "la vecchia
religione" contains much that has come down direct from
pre-Christian times; and the appearance of Mr. Lawson's
remarkable book on _Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient
Greek Religion_ may tempt some really qualified
investigator to undertake a similar work in Italy before
it is too late.

LECTURE IV

THE RELIGION OF THE FAMILY

Some of the survivals mentioned in the last two lectures seem to carry us back to a condition of culture anterior to the family and to the final settlement on the land. Some attempt has recently been made to discover traces of descent by the mother in early Latium;[131] if this could be proved, it would mean that the Latins were already in Latium before they had fully developed the patriarchal system on which the family is based. However this may be, the first real fact that meets us in the religious experience of the Romans is the attitude towards the supernatural, or "the Power that manifests itself in the Universe," of the family as settled down upon the land. The study of religion in the family, as we know it in historical times, is also that of the earliest organisation of religion, and of the most permanent type of ancient Italian religious thought. Aust, whose book on the Roman religion is the most masterly sketch of the subject as yet published, writes thus of this religion of the family:[132] "Here the limits of religion and superstition vanish ... and in vain we seek here for the boundary marks of various epochs." By the first of these propositions he means that the State has not here been at work, framing a _ius divinum_, including religion and excluding magic; in the family, magic of all kinds would be admissible alongside of the daily worship of the family deities, and thus the family would represent a kind of half-way house between the age of magic and all such superstitions, and the age of the rigid regulation of worship by the law of a City-state. By the second proposition he means that the religious experience of the family is far simpler, and therefore far less liable to change than that of the State. Greek forms and ideas of religion, for example, hardly penetrated into its worship:[133] new deities do not find their way in--the family experience did not call for them as did that of the State. It may be said without going beyond the truth that the religion of the family remained the same in all essentials throughout Roman history, and the great priesthoods of the State never interfered with it in any such degree as to affect its vitality.[134]

But in order to understand the religion of the family, we must have some idea of what the family originally was. When a stock or tribe (_populus_) after migration took possession of a district, it was beyond doubt divided into clans, _gentes_, which were the oldest kinship divisions in Italian society. All members of a clan had the same name, and were believed to descend from a common ancestor.[135] According to the later juristic way of putting it, all would be in the _patria potestas_ of that ancestor supposing that no deaths had ever occurred in the gens; and, indeed, the idea that the gens is immortal in spite of the deaths of individuals is one which constitutes it as a permanent entity, and gives it a quasi-religious sanction. For primitive religion, as has been well said, disbelieves in death; most of the lower races believe both in a qualified immortality and in the non-reality or unnaturalness of death.[136] In regard to the kinship of a clan, death at any rate has no effect: the bond of union never breaks.

Now a little reflection will show that a clan or gens of this kind might be maintained intact in a nomadic state, or during any number of migrations; it is, in fact, manifestly appropriate to such a mobile condition of society, and expresses its natural need of union; and when the final settlement occurs, this body of kin will hold together in the process, whether or no it has smaller divisions within it. We may be certain that this was the one essential kin-division of the Latin stock when it settled in Latium, and all through Roman history it continues so, a permanent entity though families may die.[137] Every Roman lawyer will recognise this fact as true, and I need not dwell on it now.

It is when the gens has settled upon the land that the family begins to appear as a fact of importance for our purpose. Such operations as the building of a permanent house, the clearing and cultivation of a piece of land, can best be carried out by a smaller union than the gens, and this smaller union is ready to hand in the shape of a section of the gens comprising the living descendants of a _living_ ancestor, whether of two, three, or even four generations.[138] This union, clearly visible to mortal eye, and realisable in every-day work, settles together in one house, tends its own cattle and sheep, cultivates its own land with the help of such dependants as it owns, slave or other, and is known by the word _familia_. This famous word, so far as we know, does not contain the idea of kinship, at any rate as its leading connotation; it is inseparable from the idea of land-settlement,[139] and is therefore essentially _das Hauswesen_, the house itself, with the persons living in it, free or servile, and with their land and other property, all governed and administered by the paterfamilias, the master of the household, who is always the oldest living male ancestor. The familia is thus an economic unit, developed out of the gens, which is a unit of kin and little more. And thus the religion of the familia will be a religion of practical utility, of daily work, of struggle with perils to which the shepherd and the tiller of the soil are liable; it is not the worship of an idea of kinship expressed in some dimly conceived common ancestor; the familia, as I hope to show, had no common ancestor who could be the object of worship, except that of the gens from which it had sprung. The life of the familia was a realisation of the present and its needs and perils, without the stimulus to take much thought about the past, or indeed about the future; for it, sufficient for the day was the evil thereof; for what had been and what was to come it could look to the gens to which it owed its existence. But in practical life the gens was not of much avail; and instead of it, exactly as we might expect, we find an artificial union of familiae, a union of which the essential thing is not the idea of kin, but that of the land occupied, and known all over Italy by the word _pagus_.[140] Before I go on to describe the religion of the family, it is necessary to put the familia into its proper relation with this territorial union.

The pagus is the earliest Italian administrative unit of which we know anything; a territory, of which the essential feature was the boundary, not any central point within the boundary. In all probability it was originally the land on which a gens had settled, though settlement produces changes, and the land of gens and pagus was not identical in later times. But within this boundary line, of which we shall hear something more presently, how were the component parts, the familiae of the gens, settled down on the land? Of the village community so familiar to us in Teutonic countries, there is no certain trace in Latium. _Vicus_, the only word which might suggest it, is identical with the Greek [Greek: oikos], a house; later it is used for houses standing together, or for a street in a town. But the vicus in the country has left no trace of itself as a distinct administrative union like our village community; the vico-magistri of the Roman city were urban officers; and what is more important, we know of no religious festivals of the vicus, like those of the pagus, of which there are well-attested records. The probability then is that the unit within the pagus was not the village but the homestead, and that these stood at a distance from each other, as they do in Celtic countries, not united together in a village, and each housing a family group working its own land and owning its own cattle.[141] The question of the amount and the tenure of the land of this group is a very difficult one, into which it is not necessary to enter closely here. There can, however, be no doubt that it possessed in its own right a small piece of garden ground (_heredium_), and also an allotment of land in the arable laid out by the settlers in common--_centuriatus ager_; whether the ownership of this was vested in the individual paterfamilias or in the gens as a whole, does not greatly matter for our purposes.[142] Lastly, as it is certain that the familia owned cattle and sheep, we may be sure that it enjoyed the right of common pasture on the land not divided up for tillage.