Plutarch's Romane Questions - Plutarch

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are thus at once explained: "The double-head looking both ways was connected with the gate that opened both ways;" and in January, "after the rest of the middle of winter, the cycle of the labours of the field began afresh."[7]

      That the door or the threshold is the seat of a tutelary spirit or genius is a belief familiar enough in folk-lore: the door must not be banged,[8] nor wood chopped on the threshold,[9] for fear of disturbing him. He is apt to disappear, taking the luck of the house with him, if a cat is maliciously buried under the door-sill,[10] or if human hair is so buried.[11] The importance of the door as a possible entrance for evil spirits, or exit for lucky ones, is manifest in many customs, e.g., nailing a horse-shoe on the door or sticking a knife into the door, and in such beliefs as that when a door opens (apparently) of itself, a spirit is entering.

      Whether the Italian spirit of the doorway, who in origin is indistinguishable from the similar though nameless spirits to be found elsewhere, was capable by his own unaided efforts of raising himself to the rank of a god, is matter for speculation. What is clear is that he had not the chance: the introduction of Greek polytheism into Italy promoted him without exertion on his part.

      As, thus far, I have assumed a distinction between "gods" and "spirits," and have also assumed that a belief in the latter may exist without polytheism and precede it, it will be well here to state explicitly the distinction. And that I may not be suspected of drawing the distinction so as to suit my own ends, I shall here borrow from a standard work, Chantepie de la Saussaye's Religionsgeschichte (i. 90). De la Saussaye notes five characteristics involved in the conception of "gods." First, they are related to one another as members of a family or community, and as subject to one god, who is either lord of all, or at any rate primus inter pares. Second, with the growth of art, they are represented plastically and are made in the image of man. Third, as ethics advance, moral benefits are associated with their worship. Hence, in the fourth place, the gods are conceived as personal, individual beings, ideally good and beautiful. Finally, the human intellect demands that the relations of the gods to one another and to Nature should be co-ordinated into a system, and so theogonies and cosmogonies are invented.

      Now, if these be the marks whereby gods are distinguished from spirits, I submit that, before the introduction of Greek gods and cults, the Romans had not advanced as far as polytheism, but were still in the purely animistic stage. Here again, to avoid the temptation of interpreting the evidence unduly in favour of the conclusion to which it seems to me to point, I will confine myself to quotations. Ihne (Hist. of Rome, i. 118) says that to the Romans, before the period of Hellenic influence, "the gods were only mysterious spiritual beings, without human forms, without human feelings and impulses, without human virtues or weaknesses. … Though the divine beings were conceived as male or female, they did not join in marriage or beget children. … No genuine Roman legend tells of any race of nobles sprung from gods." Again, "The original Roman worship had no images of the gods or houses set apart for them" (Mommsen, i. 183). "A simple spear, even a rough stone, sufficed as a symbol" (Ihne, 119). Roman religion had nothing to do with morality: "it was designed for use in practical life" (Ibid. 120). "The religion of Rome had nothing of its own peculiar growth even remotely parallel to the religion of Apollo investing earthly morality with its halo of glory" (Mommsen, 172). Mommsen's observation that "the hero-worship of the Greeks was wholly foreign to the Romans" (174) is explained by the fact that a hero is a being of human origin raised by good deeds to the rank of a god, and the Romans had no gods. Myths about the love-adventures of the gods and theogonies were unknown to early Rome.[12] An Italian cosmogony has not yet been discovered, and even the wide-spread belief in the union of Father Sky and Mother Earth had not been evolved in Italy.

      In fine "the beings which the Romans worshipped were rather numina than personal gods."[13] Even the spirits whom we can trace back under definite names to the purely Italian period, such as Jupiter, Juno, Vesta, Mars, are not individual, personal beings. Each of these names is the name of a class of spirits. "Each community of course had its own Mars, and deemed him to be the strongest and holiest of all" (Mommsen, i. 175). Each household had its own Vesta. There were many Jupiters, many Junos. In England, in the same way, the name of Puck, who is a definite individual personality in one stage of our fairy mythology, was originally a class-name of the spirits whom, as Burton says in his Anatomy, "we commonly call poukes."

      I will conclude this section with quotations from two distinguished authorities on Mythology, who would both dissent from the views which have been advanced above, but whose words seem to me to bear unintentional testimony in favour of those views. E. H. Meyer, in his Indogermanische Mythen (ii. 612), says, "Roman religion seldom displays more than the elementary rudiments, or rather let us say the last remnants of mythology," and "whereas the cult of the greater gods is known to us in a form greatly affected by Hellenism, … the local gods usually scarcely rise above the rank of spirits (sich meistens kaum über daemonischen Rang erheben)." Preller, in his Römische Mythologie (i. 48), says, "The Romans' belief in gods would be termed more rightly pandæmonism than polytheism. … One is involuntarily reminded of those Pelasgians of Dodona who, according to Herodotus, assigned neither names nor epithets to their gods. … Indeed, most of the names of the oldest Roman gods have such a shifting, indefinite meaning, that they can scarcely be regarded as proper names, as the names of persons."

      III. Italian Cults.

      The Italians borrowed cults as well as gods from Greece, but "these external additions gathered round the kernel of the Roman religion without affecting or transforming its inmost core" (Ihne, i. 119). The distinguishing characteristic of the religion of Rome is that "it was designed for use in practical life" (Ibid. 120), "The god of the Italian was above all things an instrument for helping him to the attainment of very solid earthly objects" (Mommsen, i. 181). In fact, the Italian god was a fetich, i.e., a magical implement; and in this sense of the word it is true that "the Romans saw everywhere and in all things the agency and the direction of the gods" (Ihne, i. 118). Every act of life was entangled in a complicated network of ritual.[14] Every part of the house, the door, doorway, threshold, hinges, every process of farming, sowing, manuring, &c., every act of life from birth to burial, had its own particular spirit; and the object of the Roman with reference to each particular spirit was "to manage, and even in case of need to over-reach or to constrain him" (Mommsen, i. 177). Preller in his Römische Mythologie characterises the religion of Rome as, above all things, "a cultus-religion." We may add that in Rome, as in China, Assyria, and Babylonia, the cult was nothing but organised magic,[15] the superstitious customs, charms, and incantations familiar to the folk-lorist in all countries were organised by the practical Roman and were state-established by him. In fine, the Romans "in their gods worshipped the abstract natural forces, to whose power man is conscious that he is subject every instant, but which he can win over and render subservient to his purposes by scrupulously obeying the external injunctions which the State issues for the worship of the gods."[16]

      A fundamental difference between the Greek and Roman religions manifests itself in the matter of magic. Magic was foreign to the Greeks, and was disliked by them: when it appears in their mythology, it is practised by foreigners—e.g., Medea, Circe, Hecate—and is "barbarous." In fact, magic belongs to the animistic stage, and is opposed to the higher tendencies of polytheism. The forces of Nature, conceived as numina rather than as moral ideals, may well be influenced by magic to the advantage of the savage; but to control a deity by means other than prayer and good life is antitheistic.

      Finally, it is not accidental or unmeaning that, on the one hand, the Greeks had oracles while the Italians had none; and on the other hand, that in China and Babylon (which resemble Rome in other pertinent points) divination played as large and as official a part as at Rome. An oracle is the voice of a god; whereas divination is simply sympathetic magic inverted.[17]

      IV. Italian Myths.

      In sect. 1 it has been said that the Italians had no Nature-myths. The reason why they had none should now be clear: the Italians had no Nature-gods. The sky-spirit, Jupiter, was undoubtedly distinguished from the vault of heaven by the primitive Italians, but he was not generically different from the spirits

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