The Religion of Numa | Page 3

go back to old manners of thought, and these manners of thought
are not peculiar to the Romans but are found in many primitive peoples
of our own day. The greatest contribution which anthropology has
made to the study of early Roman religion is "animism."
Not much more than a quarter of a century ago the word "animism"
began to be used to describe that particular phase of the psychological
condition of primitive peoples by which they believe that a spirit
(anima) resides in everything, material and immaterial. This spirit is
generally closely associated with the thing itself, sometimes actually
identified with it. When it is thought of as distinct from the thing, it is
supposed to have the form of the thing, to be in a word its "double."
These doubles exercise an influence, often for evil, over the thing, and
it is expedient and necessary therefore that they should be propitiated
so that their evil influence may be removed and the thing itself may
prosper. These doubles are not as yet gods, they are merely powers,
potentialities, but in the course of time they develop into gods. The first
step in this direction is the obtaining of a name, a name the knowledge
of which gives a certain control over the power to him who knows it.
Finally these powers equipped with a name begin to take on personal
characteristics, to be thought of as individuals, and finally represented
under the form of men.
It cannot be shown that all the gods of Rome originated in this way, but

certainly many of them did, and it is not impossible that they all did;
and this theory of their origin explains better than any other theory
certain habits of thought which the early Romans cherished in regard to
their gods. At the time when our knowledge of Roman religion begins,
Rome is in possession of a great many gods, but very few of them are
much more than names for powers. They are none of them personal
enough to be connected together in myths. And this is the very simple
reason why there was no such thing as a native Roman mythology, a
blank in Rome's early development which many modern writers have
refused to admit, taking upon themselves the unnecessary trouble of
positing an original mythology later lost. The gods of early Rome were
neither married nor given in marriage; they had no children or
grandchildren and there were no divine genealogies. Instead they were
thought of occasionally as more or less individual powers, but usually
as masses of potentialities, grouped together for convenience as the
"gods of the country," the "gods of the storeroom," the "gods of the
dead," etc. Even when they were conceived of as somewhat individual,
they were usually very closely associated with the corresponding object,
for example Vesta was not so much the goddess of the hearth as the
goddess "Hearth" itself, Janus not the god of doors so much as the god
"Door."
But by just as much as the human element was absent from the concept
of the deity, by just so much the element of formalism in the cult was
greater. This formalism must not be interpreted according to our
modern ideas; it was not a formalism which was the result and the
successor of a decadent spirituality; it was not a secondary product in
an age of the decline of faith; but it was itself the essence of religion in
the period of the greatest religious purity. In the careful and
conscientious fulfilment of the form consisted the whole duty of man
toward his gods. Such a state of affairs would have been intolerable in
any nation whose instincts were less purely legal. So identical were the
laws concerning the gods and the laws concerning men that though in
the earliest period of Roman jurisprudence the ius divinum and the _ius
humanum_ are already separated, they are separated merely formally as
two separate fields or provinces in which the spirit of the law and often
even the letter of its enactment are the same. Such a formalism implies

a very firm belief in the existence of the gods. The dealings of a man
with the gods are quite as really reciprocal as his dealings with his
fellow citizens. But on the other hand though the existence of the gods
is never doubted for a moment, the gods themselves are an unknown
quantity; hence out of the formal relationship an intimacy never
developed, and while it is scarcely just to characterise the early cult as
exclusively a religion of fear, certainly real affection is not present until
a much later day. The potentiality of the gods always overshadowed
their personality. But this was not all loss, for the absence of
personality prevented