anthropologists is hardly disposed to do so), it is plain that magical
practices are of a totally different kind from religious practices, as
being the result of a different mental attitude towards the
supernatural; they belong to a ruder and more rudimentary idea of the
relation of Man to the Power manifesting itself in the universe. True,
they have their origin in the same kind of human experience, in the
difficulties man meets with in his struggle for existence, and his
desire to overcome these; but unlike religion, magic is a wholly
inadequate attempt to overcome them. This inadequacy was long ago well
explained by Dr. Jevons.[82] He showed that man in that early stage of
his experience did not understand the true relation of cause and effect;
that, "turned loose as it were among innumerable possible causes (of a
given effect), with nothing to guide his choice, the chances against his
making the right choice were considerable." As a matter of fact he
usually made the wrong one, and is still apt to do so. There is probably
more magic going on behind the scenes even in civilised countries, and
more especially both in Greece and Italy, than either men of science or
men of religion have any idea of. In its various forms as they are now
classified,[83] _e.g._ contagious magic, and homoeopathic magic, the
exercise of the mysterious will-power, real or imaginary, is to be found
all the world over, accompanied usually with a spell or incantation
which is believed to enforce and increase that power--a kind of
telepathy, which seems to be the psychological basis, so far as there is
one, of the whole system. In these rites the virtue resides in some
action, which, together with the spell or incantation, enforces the
desired result by calling out the will-power, or _mana_, if we adopt the
convenient Melanesian word lately brought into use. Whatever percentage
of psychological truth may lie at the root of such performances, it is
obvious that they must in the main be wholly inadequate, and must
constantly tend to pass into mere quackery and become discredited; and
it was the special function of the religious organisation of early
society to eliminate and discredit them.
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]