The Religion of Ancient Rome | Page 2

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