Taboo, Magic, Spirits

TABOO, MAGIC, SPIRITS: A STUDY OF PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS IN ROMAN RELIGION BY ELI EDWARD BURRISS (1931) Page 1 PREFACE ROMAN religion, as we meet it in historical times, is a congeries of many elements. One of the problems of the modern scholar is to separate and interpret these various elements—primitive, Latin, Etruscan, Greek, Oriental. Even the casual student of comparative religion, who is also familiar with Latin literature, cannot fail to recognize, running through the enormous mass of facts and ideas about religion and superstition, elements which are common to all religions, past and present, whether among savages or civilized men. Such elements, when discovered in a developed religion, may fairly be called primitive. In the study of the religion of any people, the starting point should be with these common elements. However, it has usually been the habit of scholars to trace the development of gods and god- desses, rites and priesthoods, to their historical sources, and to describe and interpret the Roman calendar with its many festivals; and if primitive elements have been treated at all, they have formed part of a larger work, or have been rather cursorily dismissed to clear the way for a study of the religion of the organized Roman State. Thus W. Warde Fowler, in The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic, and Georg Wissowa, in his Religion und Kultus der Romer, were concerned primarily with the facts of historical Roman religion. Fowler, to be sure, devoted two chapters in The Religious Experience of the Roman People to a study of primitive elements, but he was clearly anxious to hurry on to his main theme. H. J. Rose, in his Primitive Culture in Italy, has discussed briefly, but with sound scholarship, primitive elements in Roman religion as part of the general subject of primitive culture in Italy; and Jesse Benedict Carter, following afar his master Wissowa, seems to have had slender knowledge of comparative religion. To Sir J. G. Frazer scholars owe much for his valuable collection of rites and ideas parallel to those of the Romans. The Golden Bough is a veritable mine of such information; and the author’s more recent work, his edition of the Fasti of Ovid, is indispensable to the student of the subject. The latter reached my hands after I had completed the first draft of my manuscript for publication. Because of the pertinence of his notes on the passages from Ovid’s Fasti which I have used in this work, I have included in the footnotes references to Frazer’s work wherever possible. No one has as yet, so far as I know, made an attempt to gather from the ancient sources those elements in the Roman State religion and in the popular religious life of the Roman people which are commonly termed primitive. Eugene Tavenner, in his Studies in Magic from Latin Literature, has given us a valuable body of facts about magic, but has made little effort to interpret the material. It is obviously difficult, and in many cases impossible, to determine what elements are truly primitive and what are not. There are certain traces which are unmistakably primitive. These I have treated at length: positive and negative mana, the principles of sympathetic magic, naturalism, and animism. I shall discuss more fully certain subjects which have grown out of my study of the primitive elements, and of which a knowledge is necessary for the understanding of these elements. Most of the excerpts in this work have been obtained from a first-hand reading, over a period of five years, of the original sources. Some of this material was published, perhaps prematurely, in various periodicals, Classical Philology, The Classical Journal, The Classical Weekly, The Biblical Review, Art and Archaeology. It was only after I had gathered and classified and interpreted as best I could alone that I turned to the secondary sources. My debt both to these and to the original is indicated in the footnotes. Page 2 The translations are, except in one case, my own. I have adopted Frazer’s practice of translating into English the names of festivals wherever these names could not be readily understood by the reader who was not classically trained. It remains to thank my associates, Professor Casper J. Kraemer, Jr., and Miss Catherine Ruth Smith, for many helpful suggestions in preparing the manuscript. E. E. B. New York April, 1931 Page 3 CONTENTS Preface CHAPTER 1. Mana, Magic and Animism The Mind of Primitive Man. Positive and Negative Mana. Magic. Animism. II. Positive and Negative Mana (Taboo) Blood, Women, Children, Death and Corpses, Leather, Days. III. Miscellaneous Taboos Sex, Men, Strangers, Slaves, Linen and Wool, Knots, Iron and Bronze, Places. IV. Magic Acts: The General Principles Homoeopathic and Contagious Magic. V. Removing Evils by Magic Acts By Washing and Burning. By Sweep- ing and Striking. By Drawing a Magic Circle. By Dancing. The Scapegoat. VI. Incantation and Prayer Prayer a Command. Prayers Chanted. Prayers Uttered in an Undervoice. Prayers Repeated. Exactness in Naming the God and in the Wording of the Prayer. Prayers for Ill. No God Involved. VII. Naturalism and Animism The Worship of Stones, Trees and Groves. Water. Fire. INDEX [NOT INCLUDED—e.f.] Page 4 TABOO, MAGIC, SPIRITS CHAPTER I MANA, MAGIC AND ANIMISM The Mind of Primitive Man EARLY man, in common with present-day savages, was unable to form correct inferences concerning the world about him. The reason for this seems to lie in the ignorance and in the intensely powerful imagination of the savage, which make him unable to distinguish truth from error. This characteristic, in turn, may be due to the fact that the brain of the savage is not developed enough physiologically to enable him to form correct associations and to draw correct inferences. Furthermore, the imaginings of the savage are heightened by his precarious life and by the intensity of the dangers which beset him in his struggle to survive. This inability to think correctly led, for instance, to the feeling that blood possessed peculiar and dangerous properties—a feeling extremely common among savages, and, for that matter, even among civilized persons. So in the old Roman days Titus Manlius, having killed a gigantic Gaul in a hand-to-hand conflict, cut off the Gaul’s head, “wrenched off his necklace and placed it, reeking with blood, on his own neck.” From that time on he and his descendants bore the surname Torquatus (torques—a chain or necklace).[1] The family of Torquatus had the necklace as a device down to the time of the Emperor Caligula, who forbade its use.[2] Again, in a much later time, during one of the pagan persecutions, a Christian, Saturus, was thrown to the leopards. A single gnash of the wild beast bathed him in blood. Turning to a soldier who was also, but in secret, a Christian, he asked for the ring which he was wearing; and when the soldier gave it to him, he smeared it with his own lifeblood and handed it back.[3] These are not merely the actions of a bloodthirsty soldier, crazed with victory, and of a religious fanatic. It was the inability to think correctly that caused Torquatus to place the gory necklace of his slain opponent about his own neck, and that impelled Saturus to smear the ring of his fellow Christian with his own blood and hand it back to him. The curious twist in thinking which produced these actions has been considered a characteristic of the so-called age of magic; but it is by no means limited to that theoretical period, nor, indeed, to the savage, for it may be found to-day among children and even among adults. Thus a four-year-old child came running to her kindergarten teacher in a fright, sobbing out, “The sky barked at me!”[4] The child had observed the barking of a dog; the sky made a noise which seemed to her exactly like it. Hence she felt that the sky was like a dog, if not actually a dog. Page 5 In his capacity as a minister my father frequently had occasion to christen children, sprinkling them with water. One of his parishioners, on returning from a visit to Palestine, brought back a gallon of water from the Jordan. The members of the parish, learning of this, made frequent requests that this water be used to sprinkle their children at christening ceremonies. Had anyone asked them why they wanted their children christened with Jordan water, they would probably have been quite at a loss, or else have suggested some sentimental reason or other. But their actions, if analyzed, might have yielded the following process of reasoning: Christ was baptized in the Jordan two thousand years ago; the Jordan is, therefore, a holy river. Water from the Jordan, having been in contact with Christ, is equal to Christ, so far, at least, as its sanctifying effects are concerned. Therefore children who are sprinkled with water from the Jordan come in contact with Christ. No one would assert that the child, before crying out that the sky barked at her, went through any conscious process of thinking. No more did Torquatus reason when he smeared the necklace with the blood of his Gallic foe. But their actions can only be analyzed by tracing the faulty and unconscious line of reasoning upon which they were based. Folk stories abound in similar actions, capable of analysis on the basis of the modes of thinking of an educated man.

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