THE 'ANTECEDENTS' OF ROMAN RELIGION
In every early religion there will of course be found, apart from
external influence, traces of its own internal development, of stages
by which it must have advanced from a mass of vague and primitive
belief and custom to the organised worship of a civilised community.
The religion of Rome is no exception to this rule; we can detect in its
later practice evidences of primitive notions and habits which it had
in common with other semi-barbarous peoples, and we shall see that the
leading idea in its theology is but a characteristically Roman
development of a marked feature in most early religions.
=1. Magic.=--Anthropology has taught us that in many primitive
societies religion--a sense of man's dependence on a power higher than
himself--is preceded by a stage of magic--a belief in man's own power
to influence by occult means the action of the world around him. That
the ancestors of the Roman community passed through this stage seems
clear, and in surviving religious practice we may discover evidence of
such magic in various forms. There is, for instance, what anthropology
describes as 'sympathetic magic'--the attempt to influence the powers
of nature by an imitation of the process which it is desired that they
should perform. Of this we have a characteristic example in the
ceremony of the _aquaelicium_, designed to produce rain after a long
drought. In classical times the ceremony consisted in a procession
headed by the pontifices, which bore the sacred rain-stone from its
resting-place by the Porta Capena to the Capitol, where offerings were
made to the sky-deity, Iuppiter, but[1] from the analogy of other
primitive cults and the sacred title of the stone (_lapis manalis_), it
is practically certain that the original ritual was the purely
imitative process of pouring water over the stone. A similar rain-charm
may possibly be seen in the curious ritual of the _argeorum sacra_,
when puppets of straw were thrown into the Tiber--a symbolic wetting of
the crops to which many parallels may be found among other primitive
peoples. A sympathetic charm of a rather different character seems to
survive in the ceremony of the _augurium canarium_, at which a red dog
was sacrificed for the prosperity of the crop--a symbolic killing of
the red mildew (_robigo_); and again the slaughter of pregnant cows at
the _Fordicidia_ in the middle of April, before the sprouting of the
corn, has a clearly sympathetic connection with the fertility of the
earth. Another prominent survival--equally characteristic of primitive
peoples--is the sacredness which attaches to the person of the
priest-king, so that his every act or word may have a magic
significance or effect. This is reflected generally in the Roman
priesthood, but especially in the ceremonial surrounding the _flamen
Dialis_, the priest of Iuppiter. He must appear always in festival
garb, fire may never be taken from his hearth but for sacred purposes,
no other person may ever sleep in his bed, the cuttings of his hair and
nails must be preserved and buried beneath an _arbor felix_--no doubt a
magic charm for fertility--he must not eat or even mention a goat or a
bean, or other objects of an unlucky character.
=2. Worship of Natural Objects.=--A very common feature in the early
development of religious consciousness is the worship of natural
objects--in the first place of the objects themselves and no more, but
later of a spirit indwelling in them. The distinction is no doubt in
individual cases a difficult one to make, and we find that among the
Romans the earlier worship of the object tends to give way to the cult
of the inhabiting spirit, but examples may be found which seem to
belong to the earlier stage. We have, for instance, the sacred stone
(_silex_) which was preserved in the temple of Iuppiter on the Capitol,
and was brought out to play a prominent part in the ceremony of
treaty-making. The fetial, who on that occasion represented the Roman
people, at the solemn moment of the oath-taking, struck the sacrificial
pig with the _silex_, saying as he did so, 'Do thou, Diespiter, strike
the Roman people as I strike this pig here to-day, and strike them the
more, as thou art greater and stronger.' Here no doubt the underlying
notion is not merely symbolical, but in origin the stone is itself the
god, an idea which later religion expressed in the cult-title specially
used in this connection, _Iuppiter Lapis_. So again, in all
probability, the _termini_ or boundary-stones between properties are in
origin the objects--though later only the site--of a yearly ritual at
the festival of the Terminalia on February the 23rd, and they are, as
it were, summed up in 'the god Terminus,' the great sacred
boundary-stone, which had its own shrine within the Capitoline temple,
because, according to the legend, 'the god' refused to budge even to
make room for Iuppiter. The same notion is most likely at the root of
the two great domestic cults of Vesta, 'the hearth,' and Ianus, 'the
door,' though a more spiritual idea was soon associated with them; we
may notice too in this connection the worship of springs, summed up in
the subsequent deity Fons, and of rivers, such as Volturnus, the
cult-name of the Tiber.
=3. Worship of Trees.=--But most conspicuous among the cults of natural
objects, as in so many primitive religions, is the worship of trees.
Here, though doubtless at first the tree was itself the object of
veneration, surviving instances seem rather to belong to the later
period when it was regarded as the abode of the spirit. We may
recognise a case of this sort in the _ficus Ruminalis_, once the
recipient of worship, though later legend, which preferred to find an
historical or mythical explanation of cults, looked upon it as sacred
because it was the scene of the suckling of Romulus and Remus by the
wolf. Another fig-tree with a similar history is the _caprificus_ of
the Campus Martius, subsequently the site of the worship of Iuno
Caprotina. A more significant case is the sacred oak of Iuppiter
Feretrius on the Capitol, on which the _spolia opima_ were hung after
the triumph--probably in early times a dedication of the booty to the
spirit inhabiting the tree. Outside Rome, showing the same ideas at
work among neighbouring peoples, was the 'golden bough' in the grove of
Diana at Aricia. Nor was it only special trees which were thus regarded
as the home of a deity; the tree in general is sacred, and any one may
chance to be inhabited by a spirit. The feeling of the country
population on this point comes out clearly in the prayer which Cato
recommends his farmer to use before making a clearing in a wood: 'Be
thou god or goddess, to whom this grove is sacred, be it granted to us
to make propitiatory sacrifice to thee with a pig for the clearing of
this sacred spot'; here we have a clear instance of the tree regarded
as the dwelling of the sacred power, and it is interesting to compare
the many similar examples which[2] Dr. Frazer has collected from
different parts of the world.
=4. Worship of Animals.=--Of the worship of animals we have
comparatively little evidence in Roman religion, though we may perhaps
detect it in a portion of the mysterious ritual of the Lupercalia,
where the Luperci dressed themselves in the skins of the sacrificed
goats and smeared their faces with the blood, thus symbolically trying
to bring themselves into communion with the sacred animal. We may
recognise it too in the association of particular animals with
divinities, such as the sacred wolf and woodpecker of Mars, but on the
whole we may doubt whether the worship of animals ever played so
prominent a part in Roman religion as the cult of other natural
objects.
=5. Animism.=--Such are some of the survivals of very early stages of
religious custom which still kept their place in the developed religion
of Rome, but by far the most important element in it, which might
indeed be described as its 'immediate antecedent,' is the state of
religious feeling to which anthropologists have given the name of
'Animism.' As far as we can follow the development of early religions,
this attitude of mind seems to be the direct outcome of the failure of
magic. Primitive man begins to see that neither he nor his magicians
really possess that occult control over the forces of nature which was
the supposed basis of magic: the charm fails, the spell does not
produce the rain and when he looks for the cause, he can only argue
that these things must be in the hands of some power higher than his
own. The world then and its various familiar objects become for him
peopled with spirits, like in character to men, but more powerful, and
his success in life and its various operations depends on the degree in
which he is able to propitiate these spirits and secure their
co-operation. If he desires rain, he must win the favour of the spirit
who controls it, if he would fell a tree and suffer no harm, he must by
suitable offerings entice the indwelling spirit to leave it. His
'theology' in this stage is the knowledge of the various spirits and
their dwellings, his ritual the due performance of sacrifice for
purposes of propitiation and expiation. It was in this state of
religious feeling that the ancestors of Rome must have lived before
they founded their agricultural settlement on the Palatine: we must try
now to see how far it had retained this character and what developments
it had undergone when it had crystallised into the 'Religion of Numa.'
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Frazer, _Golden Bough_, vol. i. pp. 81 ff.
[2] _Golden Bough_, vol. i. pp. 181-185.