The Religion of Numa | Page 6

feared as
being anything but good. These Di Manes had therefore no specific
relation to the individual, and the individual really ceased at death; the

only human relation which the Di Manes seem to have preserved was a
connection with the living members of the family to which they had
originally belonged. It is therefore very misleading to assert that the
Romans had from the beginning a belief in immortality, when we
instinctively think of the immortality of the individual. The thing that
was immortal was not the individual but the family. It is thoroughly in
keeping with the practical character of the Roman mind that they did
not concern themselves with the place in which these spirits of the dead
were supposed to reside, but merely with the door through which they
could and did return to earth. We have no accounts of the Lower World
until Greece lent her mythology to Rome, and imagination never built
anything like the Greek palace of Pluto. But while they did not waste
energy in furnishing the Lower World with the fittings of fancy, they
did keep a careful guard over the door of egress. This door they called
the mundus, and represented it crudely by a trench or shallow pit, at the
bottom of which there lay a stone. On certain days of the year this stone
was removed, and then the spirits came back to earth again, where they
were received and entertained by the living members of their family.
There were a number of these days in the year, three of them scattered
through the year: August 24, October 5, November 8; and two sets of
days: February 13-21 and May 9, 11, 13. The February celebration, the
so-called Parentalia, was calm and dignified and represented all that
was least superstitious and fearful in the generally terrifying worship of
the dead. The Lemuria in May had exactly the opposite character and
belongs to the category of the "expulsion of evil spirits," of which Mr.
Frazer in his Golden Bough has given so many instances.
In this connection it is interesting to notice two facts which stand
almost as corollaries to these beliefs. One fact is the religious necessity
for the continuance of the family, in order that there might always be a
living representative of the family to perform the sacrifices to the
ancestors. It was the duty of the head of the family not only to perform
these sacrifices himself as long as he lived but also to provide a
successor. The usual method was by marriage and the rearing of a
family, but, in case there was no male child in the family, adoption was
recurred to. Here it is peculiarly significant that the sanction of the
chief priest was necessary, and he never gave his consent in case the

man to be adopted was the only representative of his family, so that his
removal from that family into another would leave his original family
without a male representative. In cases of inheritance the first lien on
the income was for the maintenance of the traditional sacrifices unless
some special arrangement had been made. These exceptional
inheritances, without the deduction for sacrifices, were naturally
desired above all others and the phrase "an inheritance without
sacrifices" (hereditas sine sacris) became by degrees the popular
expression for a godsend. The other fact of interest in this connection is
that, inasmuch as ancestors were worshipped only _en masse_ and not
as individuals, that process could not take place in Roman religion
which is so familiar in many other religions, namely that the great gods
of the state should some of them have been originally ancestors whose
greatness during life had produced a corresponding emphasis in their
worship after death, so that ultimately they were promoted from the
ranks of the deified dead into the select Olympus of individual gods.
This has been a favourite theory of the making of a god from the time
of Euhemerus down to Herbert Spencer. There are religions in which it
is true for certain of the major gods, but there are no traces of the
process in Roman religion, and the reason is obvious in view of the
peculiar character of ancestor worship in Rome.
We have now seen the principal elements which went to make up the
family religion and that part of the state religion which was an
enlargement and an imitation of the family religion. But even in the
most primitive times a Roman's life was not bounded by his own hut
and the phenomenon of death. There was work to be done in life, a
living to be gained, and here, as everywhere, there were hosts of unseen
powers who must be propitiated. His religion was not only coincident
with every phase