Whenever two peoples come into contact with each other for the first time,
a comparison of religions is set up; and one of the first-fruits of this
earliest exercise of the comparative study of religions is that
identification of gods and borrowing of cults and myths to which the term
"syncretism" is applied. The part played by syncretism in the history of
Italian religion is of singular importance: the Italian's misty, vaporous
belief in abstract, impersonal spirits was precipitated into premature
polytheism by the introduction of the anthropomorphic gods of Greece.
Fortunately, the process being premature, was, and to the end remained,
incomplete; and we are therefore able to employ the survivals from the
older form of belief so as to form some idea of the original Italian
religion. To the last, many spirits resisted the individualising process,
which is the essence and condition of polytheism: the Lares and the Manes
not only never became gods, but none of them was dignified by a proper
name, or attained even so much individuality as Puck or Robin Goodfellow.
Not can such general abstract appellations as Bona Dea, Dea Dia, be
regarded as personal names, _i.e._, as the names of definite, individual,
personal beings: they have not the personality of Venus or Vulcan, and yet
they were the beings whom the people at large worshipped in preference to
the State-gods, whose cult and myths were fashionably Hellenised.
She who, under the influence of Greek religion, became the goddess Diana,
was originally a tree-spirit, having no personal name, but known only by an
appellation as general and abstract as that of Bona Dea. The proof that the
qualities and attributes of the Greek goddess Artemis were attached by
syncretism to the Italian tree-spirit is brought to light by two of
Plutarch's penetrating questions (_R. Q._ 3 and 4), why harts' horns are
set up in all the temples of Diana save that on Mount Aventine, in which
are ox-horns? and why men are excluded from one particular temple of the
same goddess? These differences in cult obviously point to the worship of
different goddesses under the same name; and, as a matter of fact, we know
first that harts were sacred to the Greek goddess, Artemis, whereas the
genuine Italian Diana was the goddess of oxen; next, we know that the
identification of Artemis and Diana was effected by Servius Tullius.[61] To
understand the exclusion of men from the temple in the Patrician Street,
however, we must inquire into the nature of the Italian Diana. With this
object, we may either assume that the pro-ethnic Aryans were polytheists,
and that therefore the primitive Italians also worshipped Nature-gods; in
which case, starting from the etymology of the word Diana (from the root
_div_, "shine"), we must either at once make Diana a moon-goddess,[62] and
thus account for the fact that she was a goddess of child-birth, and
therefore men were excluded from her temple. But this seems improbable even
to a writer in Roscher's _Lexikon_ (Birt), who very properly notes (p.
1007) that "it is doubtful whether the belief that the moon influenced
child-birth can be shown to be Italian." Birt, therefore, interprets the
name to mean "the bright goddess," _i.e._, the goddess of bright daylight,
and boldly writes it down as a matter of course that the first attribute of
a daylight or sky goddess is her close relation to vegetable nature,
especially woods and forests. Those who find this mortal leap beyond their
power to follow, and who prefer to argue to the original nature of the
goddess from what we know of her cult as a matter of fact, rather than from
hypotheses as to the Nature-myths of the primitive Aryans, will note first
that her name is as purely general and abstract as that of the Dea Dia or
the Bona Dea, and means simply a bright spirit, or possibly simply a
spirit. Next, wherever Diana was worshipped in Italy, she was originally
worshipped in woods and groves, _e.g._, in the forests on Mount Tifata,
Mount Algidus at Anagnia, Corne, and Aricia. Indeed, in Aricia the place of
her worship was simply called _Nemus_, and the goddess herself plain
_Nemorensis_. In the next place, her worship is frequently associated with
that of Silvanus,[63] who is plainly a wood-spirit, and who is also a
patron-spirit of domestic cattle.[64] From this we may venture to class her
with the "agrestes feminæ quas silvaticas vocant" of Burchard of Worms:[65]
she is a wood-spirit who became a goddess because of her likeness to the
Greek Artemis. Her connection with child-birth does not indicate that she
was a moon-goddess. Roman women in primitive times, like Swedish women,
"twined their arms about a tree to ensure easy delivery in the pangs of
child-birth; and we remember how, in our English ballads, women, in like
time of need, 'set their backs against an oak.'"[66] Finally, the annual
washing and cleansing of the head, which Plutarch mentions in _R. Q._ 100,
was done on a day sacred to Diana, probably because, on the one hand, women
felt that they were under her protection specially, while, on the other, so
great is the sanctity of the head amongst primitive peoples,[67] that
washing it is not to be undertaken lightly: "the guardian spirit of the
head does not like to have the hair washed too often, it might injure or
incommode him."[68]
The _Romane Questions_ afford another instance in which syncretism has
obscured the original nature of an Italian field-spirit, and in which the
cult of the Hellenised deity still betrays the primitive object of worship.
In the pages of Virgil, Mars has so completely assumed the guise of the
Greek Ares, that if we had only the verses and the mythology of the
court-poet to instruct us, we could never even suspect that Mars had other
functions than those of a war-god. When, however, we turn from myth to
cult, and are confronted by the ceremony of the October horse, described in
_R. Q._ 97, we find, that though Mars was sung as "Lenker der Schlachten,"
he was worshipped as the spirit that makes the corn to grow. At Rome the
corn-spirit was represented as a horse, as it still is amongst the peasants
of Europe, not only near Stuttgart, but in our own country, in
Hertfordshire and in Shropshire. The fructifying power of the spirit is
supposed in modern folk-lore and in Africa, as it was at Rome, to reside
specially in the animal's tail, which therefore was preserved over the
hearth of the king's house, in order to secure a good harvest next year.
The antiquity of this custom at Rome, and the fact that it dates from long
before the Romans knew anything of the Greek Ares, are shown by the fight
for the horse's head waged between the inhabitants of the two wards, the
Via Sacra and the Subura, a fight which shows that the ceremonial goes back
to a time when the Subura and Rome were separate and independent villages.
In connection with the killing of the corn-spirit, we may note a passage of
the _Romane Questions_ (63) which has not yet taken its place in modern
works on the subject. Speaking of the _rex sacrorum_, Plutarch says, "Neere
unto _Comitium_, they use to have a solemn sacrifice for the good estate of
the citie; which, so soone as ever this king hath performed, he taketh his
legs and runnes out of the place as fast as ever he can." Necessary as it
was, according to primitive notions, that the vegetation-spirit should be,
as it were, decanted into a new vessel, when the animal in which he was for
the time residing was threatened with infirmity and decay, still the
killing of the sacred animal was a dangerous and semi-sacrilegious act.
Hence in Greece, the man who killed the ox in the sacrifice known as the
_bouphonia_ ran away as soon as he had felled the animal, and was
subsequently tried for murder, but was acquitted on the ground that the axe
was the real murderer; and so the axe was found guilty and cast into the
sea. The Roman _regifugium_ is obviously a fragment of a similar rite. The
folk-explanation treated it as a symbol commemorative of the expulsion of
the Tarquinii.