the age of puberty. They also wore the toga praetexta, which, though associated by us with secular magistrates, had undoubtedly a religious origin. There are distinct signs that children were in some sense sacred, and at the same time that they needed special protection against the all-abounding evil influences to be met with in daily life.13 Thus this particular form of amulet became a recognised institution of family life, and in due time little more than a mark of childhood. 43 Yet another kind of charm must be mentioned here which was used at certain festivals, though apparently not at any of those belonging to the authorised calendar. At the Compitalia, Paganalia, and feriae Latinae we are told that small images of the human figure, or masks, or simply round balls (pilae), were hung up on trees or doorways, and left to swing in the wind." At the Compitalia the images had a special name, maniae, of which the meaning is lost; but inasmuch as the charms were hung up at cross-roads on that occasion, where the Lares compitales of the various properties had their shrine, it was not difficult to manufacture out of them a goddess, Mania, mother of the Lares.45 The common word for these figures was oscilla, and the fact of their swinging in the wind suggested a verb oscillare, which survives in our own tongue with the same meaning. Until lately it used to be believed that they were substitutes for original human sacrifices a view for which there is not a particle of evidence, though it was originated by Roman scholars.46 Modern anthropology has found another explanation, which is by no means improbable. Dr. Frazer, in an appendix to the 2nd volume of the Golden Bough, has collected a number of examples of the practice of swinging by human beings as a magical rite; they come from many parts of the world, including ancient Athens, and even modern Calabria. He also points out that at the feriae Latinae the swingers seem to have been human beings, if we accept the evidence of Festus, s.v. "oscillantes"; thus we are left with the possibility that the oscilla were really imitations of men and women, though not of human sacrificial victims. Dr. Frazer is obviously hard put to it to explain the original meaning and object of this curious custom. In the Paganalia, as described by Virgil in the second Georgic," the object would seem to be the prosperity of the vinecrop. coloni versibus incomptis ludunt risuque soluto, hinc omnis largo pubescit vinea fetu, etc.48 But here we must leave a question which is still unsolved. All we can say is that the old idea of substitutes for human sacrifice must be finally given up, and that the oscilla, whether or not they were substitutes for human swingers, were probably charms intended to ward off evil influences from the crops. I am not disposed to put any confidence in what Servius tells us, that this was a purification by means of air, just as fire and water were also purifying agents; this looks like the ingenious explanation of a later and a religious age. 49 So much, then, for magical charms and spells, and the survivals of them in the fully developed Roman religion.50 It might seem hardly worth while to spend even so much time on them as I have done, and I cannot deny that I am glad now to be able to leave them. My object has simply been to show how little of this kind of practice, which meets us on the threshold of religion, was allowed to survive by the religious authorities of the State; in other words, I wished to make clear that in our inquiries into the nature of the Roman religion it is really religion and not magic that we have to do with. It is really religion; it is desire, beginning already to be effective, to be in right relation to the Power manifesting itself in the universe. The Romans, as I hope to show in the next lecture, when we can begin to know and feel an interest in them, had not only begun to recognise this Power in various forms and functions as one that must be propitiated, because they were dependent on it for their daily needs, but to regulate and make permanent the methods of propitiation. What was the relation between this simple religion and morality-between ritual and conduct-is a very difficult question, to which I shall return later on. Dr. Westermarck has recently come to the conclusion that the religion of primitive man has no true relation to morality, that it is not apt to give a sanction to good action, or to develop the germs of a conscience. But so far as I can discern, the idea of active duty, and therefore the germ of conscience, must have been so intimately connected with the religious practice of the old Latin family that it is to me impossible to think of the one apart from the other. Surely it is in that life that the famous word "pius" must have originated, which throughout Roman history meant the sense of duty towards family, State, and gods, as every reader of the Aeneid knows. That the formalised religion of later times had become almost entirely divorced from morality there is indeed no doubt; but in the earliest times, in the old Roman family and then in the budding State, the whole life of the Roman seems to me so inextricably bound up with his religion that I cannot possibly see how that religion can have been distinguishable from his simple idea of duty and discipline. NOTES TO LECTURE III 1. Westermarck, Origin etc. of Moral Ideas, ii. 584. 3. A useful summary of the whole subject, embodying the results and terminology of Tylor, Frazer, and other anthropologists, is Dr. Haddon's Magic and Fetishism, in Messrs. Constable's series, Religions Ancient and Modern. See also Marett, On the Threshold of Religion, passim. 4. Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, p. 89 foll. For an example not mentioned in the text (devotio) see below, p. 206 foll. This may have been originally practised by the Latin kings. I may here draw attention to the almost dogmatic conclusions of the modern French sociological school of research; e.g. M. Huvelin, in L'Année sociologique for 1907, begins by asserting as a fundamental law, proved by MM. Hubert et Mauss, that magic is just as much a social fact as religion: "Les uns et les autres sont des produits de l'activité collective" (Magie et droit individuel, p. 1). But M. Huvelin's paper is to some extent a modification of this dogma. He seeks to explain the fact that magic is both secret and private, not public and social, in historical times; and in the domain of law, with which he is specially concerned, he concludes that "a magical rite is only a religious rite twisted from its proper social end, and employed to realise the will or belief of an individual" (p. 46). This is the only form in which we shall find magic at Rome, except in so far as a few of its forms survive in the ritual of religion with their meaning changed. In early Roman law, as a quasi-religious body of rules and practices, there are a few magical survivals which will be found mentioned by M. Huvelin in this article; but they are of no importance for our present subject. 5. Primitive Culture, vol. i. ch. iv. See also Jevons, Introduction, p. 36 foll. 6. See Schürer, Jewish People in the Time of Christ (Eng. trans.), Division II. vol. iii. p. 151 foll. 7. Fowler, R.F. p. 232; Wissowa, R.K. p. 106. The most careful examination of the rite and the evidence for it is that of Aust in Mythological Lexicon, s.v. "Iuppiter," p. 656 foll. See also M. H. Morgan in vol. xxxii. of Transactions of the American Philological Association, p. 104. 8. Tertullian, de Jejun. 16. Petronius, Sat. 44, adds that the matrons went in the procession with bare feet and streaming hair (cp. Pliny xvii. 266); but this seems rather Greek than Roman in character, and Petronius is plainly thinking of the town (colonia he calls it) in southern Italy where the scene of Trimalchio's supper is laid; probably a Greek city by origin, Croton or Cumae. A translation of this passage will be found in Dill's Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, p. 133. The most useful words in it for our purpose are “Jovem aquam exorabant." 9. This suggestion was originally made by O. Gilbert, Röm. Topographie, ii. 184. 10. p. 204 foll. II. p. 657. The story is mixed up with Greek fables, e.g. that of Proteus, as Wissowa has pointed out, R.K. p. 106, note 10. 12. See Schanz, Gesch. der röm. Literatur, vol. i. (ed. 3) p. 270 foll. 13. This fragment of Piso is preserved by Gellius, xi. 14. 1. 14. See, eg., Schanz, Gesch. der röm. Literatur, vol. ii. P. 106. 15. Wissowa, Z.c. Aust in Roscher's Lexicon, s.v." Iuppiter," p. 657. 16. Cumont, Religions Orientales dans le paganisme romain, ch. 5. I shall return to this subject in my second course of lectures. 17. Müller-Deecke, Etrusker, ii. ch. vii., especially p. 176 foll. 18. Cp. below, Lecture XV. 66 19. Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 13: Vestales nostras hodie credimus nondum egressa urbe mancipia fugitiva retinere in loco precationibus." 20. Plutarch, Numa, 10. Virginity would increase the power of the spell; see Fehrle, Die kultische Keuschheit im Altertum, p. 54 foll. 21. See, e.g., Frazer, G.B. i. 360 foll. 22. See R.F. p. 320, notes 6 and 7. 23. Within the last thirty years or so the Lupercalia has been discussed (apart from writers on classical subjects exclusively) by Mannhardt in his Mythologische Studien, p. 72 foll.; Robertson Smith, Semites, p. 459; Deubner in Archiv, 1910, p. 481 foll.; and at the moment of writing by E. S. Hartland, Primitive Paternity, i. ch. ii. R.F. p. 310 foll. See Appendix D. 24. This view was originally stated in Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. “Argei.” I endeavoured to confute it in the Classical Review, 1902, p. 115 foll., and Wissowa replied in Gesammelte Abhandlungen, p. 211 foll. Since then my conviction has become stronger that this great scholar is for once wrong. Ennius alluded to the Argei as an institution of Numa, i.e. as primitive (frag. 121, Vahlen, from Festus p. 355, and Varro, L.L. vii. 44), yet Ennius was a youth at the very time when Wissowa insists that the rite originated. Wissowa makes no attempt to explain this. See below, p. 321 foll. 25. R.F. p. III foll. 26. eg. the October horse, which also occurred on the Ides; see R.F. p. 241 foll.; and the festival of Anna Perenna, also on Ides (March 15), R.F. p. 50 foll. It is just possible that all the three festivals were originally in the old calendar, and dropped out because the mark of the Ides had to be affixed to the day in the first place. See Wissowa, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, p. 164 foll.; R.F. p. 241. 27. Thus Messrs. Hubert et Mauss (Mélanges d'histoire des religions, Preface, p. xxiv.) maintain that there is no real antinomy between "les faits du système magique et les faits du système religieux." There is in every rite, they insist, a magical as well as a religious element. Yet on the same page we find that they exclude magic from all organised cult, because it is not obligatory, and cannot (if I understand them rightly) be laid down in a code, like religious practice. I think it would have been simpler to consider the magical element in religious rites as surviving, with its original meaning lost, from an earlier stage of thought. M. van Gennep, in his interesting work Les Rites de passage, p. 17, goes so far as to call all religious ceremonies magical, as distinguished from the theories (e.g. animism) which constitute religion. This seems to me apt to bring confusion into the discussion; for all rites are the outward expression of thought, and it is by the thought (or, as he calls it, theories) that we must trace F |