Italian "Sondergötter." Author(s): H. J. Rose Source: The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 3, Part 2 (1913), pp. 233-241 Published by: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/296227 . Accessed: 17/06/2014 01:31

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This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 01:31:37 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ITALIAN " SONDERGOTTER."

By H. J. ROSE.

Since Usener put prominently forward the theory of Sonder- g6tter,1 the idea has been subjected to trenchant negative criticism by two expertsin the fields of Greek and Roman religion respectively, Farnell2and Wissowa.3 The formerprotests, and rightly so, against the cheerfulassumption that, whenevera deity has a name describing a function, " Saviour," " Queen," " Victory," for example, we should regard him or her as a primitive Sondergott; since many examples teach us that such figures are often the products of a developed polytheism. He would suggest, as a better test than the name, the non-anthropomorphicconception of the god, or rather daimon, in the minds of his worshippers. Thus he clears the field of Greekreligion of a great many heroes and daimoneswho, whatever their names may be, are too developed and too late to have any claim to representprimitive thought. Wissowaattacks the question from a somewhat different standpoint. He sees in the formidable list of Roman Sonderg6tter nothing more recondite than Varro's attempt to arrangeall possible deities under " di certi," or at most the artificial" indigitamenta" of the pontifices which, in accordance with "die peinliche Genauigkeit in der Aufstellung der r6mischen Gebetsformeln," endeavoured to call upon whatever god was addressedunder all the names which applied to the actual petition. The Roman Sonderg6tter,he points out, have a habit of appearing in lists which contain, among the various names composing them, the various attributes of some important deity. Take for instance one of the principal passages in ancient literature relating to the point. Servius on Georg.i, 21, quotes from Fabius Pictor the well- known list of deities invoked in the SacrumCeriale, beginning with Veruactorand ending with Promitor. Here, says Wissowa,we have a " des ' Kreislauf der Feld- Zerlegung iibergeordneten Begriffes 4 arbeiten.'" In the familiarpassage in the Acta of the FratresArvales we have a similar"Zerlegung " of the processof felling and removing a tree. These are artificial developments of a state-cult.

Gitternamen, pp. 73, ff. 3 Ges. Abh. 304, ff. 2 Anthrop. Essays to Tylor, 81, ff. 4 p. cxxxvi, Henzen: cf. I47.

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 01:31:37 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 234 ITALIAN CcSONDERGOTTER." Now it cannot be denied that both these attacks on Usener's position contain much that is correct. Wissowa, in particular, has, as it seems to me, made it impossible for any fair-minded scholar to believe-in lists such as those of the Sondergotter of conception, birth, etc. which Augustine and other fathers of the church quote from Varro. Nor is it likely that such an elaborate list of parallel formations as Veruactor Reparator Imporcitor Insitor, or Adolenda Commolenda Deferunda, spring direct from popular belief. But when all this is cleared away, we are left with a residue which forces us to accept Sondergdtter as an element in Roman religion. Firstly, we have such dim figures as Anna Perenna and Genita Mana, which do not attach themselves to the cult of a higher deity nor form into lists, but are simply the daimones of a single event or set of events. Secondly, the list of the deities of the Sacrum Ceriale is not only, as Wissowa points out, incomplete, since, for instance, the spirits of manuring and threshing are not represented in it; it is also not a full list of the known agricultural daimones, since, even apart from the more important spirits like , we find outside it Stercutus or Stercutius,2 and Spiniensis.3 This surely " indicates that it contains, not a mere Zerlegung" of an artificial kind, such as the list of the Arvales almost certainly is, but rather a selection, here motived by the desire to have a body of twelve deities, from a larger existing number. Such selection was no doubt supple- mented by the insertion of fresh names of formation analogous to those already found in the list. In short, if the people had not believed in Sonderg6tter, we can hardly imagine their priests inventing them. I propose to follow up the negative criticism of these eminent scholars by a few positive suggestions as to the manner in which we may imagine the belief in Sonderg6tter to have originated. For it is clear that if we can arrive at such a conception by following up known trains of thought among men of undeveloped civilisation, it becomes a more natural and tenable theory that the early Italians did really think that way, and that the examples I have given are really survivals of an old stratum of religion, as Usener thought, and not fragments of priestly elaborations which have for the most part been lost. If we can find among Aryan or partly Aryan peoples any such processes of thought, it becomes still likelier that the Aryan Italians also possessed them. But first I wish to distinguish between two classes of Sonderg6tter, which appear to me to arise from quite different causes. In the

1 I do not believein the close connexionbetween 2 Augustine, C.D. xviii, 15, cf. Plin. N.H. Anna Perenna and postulated by Usener xvii, 50. (Rhein. Mus. xxx, 224) and Roscher (Lex. s.v. 3 Aug. C.D. iv, 21. Mars, 2401, 29). For Genita Mana as an indepen- dent deity see Plut. Q.R. 52.

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 01:31:37 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ITALIAN SONDERGOTTER. 235 former of these is the daimon postulated to account for some isolated phenomenon in the external world, or as the highly specialised genius of a particular place. In the second is the daimon postulated to correspond to some action of the worshipper himself. The former class is represented by Eudromos and Taraxippos ; the latter by Spiniensis. Now it is apparent that the former class contains more objective reality. There really was at Olympia something which frightened the horses; there really was at Delphi a running-place which seems to have had, in or near it, something which was regarded, rightly or wrongly, as a tomb. The assumption was merely that in one case a buried hero was likely to cause disaster to the charioteers if not placated, in the other that a similar figure made the stadium his shrine. Whether men drove and ran or not, there remained something of the existence of those deities in the existence of the altar-like'stone at Olympial and of the temenos at Delphi.2 But Spiniensis and his like are of a different kind. He was invoked <' ut spinas ex agris eradicaret " says Augustine. If no pulling up of thorn-bushes was going on or contemplated, there was no proof that Spiniensis existed at all. He was " projected," to use a popular modern term, from the thorn-pulling or thorn-pullers, as a merely temporary deity, whereas the permanently existing stones of Olympia and Delphi permanently enshrined the others. It is this second class which I propose especially to consider. It is clear that they answer well enough to Farnell's proposed test. They are certainly not anthropomorphic, but amorphous. Their functions show them to be Sonderg6tter, if not Augenblicksgottheiten. Can we make it reasonably probable that they arose out of any early process of thought, conceivable among Aryan peasants and supported by real examples ? If not, despite all that has been said so far, we are justified in saying that those theorists who see in them nothing but " a late development of a certain logical tendency in Roman religious thought," 3 still hold their position. I think that we have the required evidence, from a people partly Aryan and long under Aryan domination, those of the Madras Presidency. Thurston4 gives a description so important for our purpose that I quote it at length:

" The festival of Ayudha Puja (worship of tools or implements) is observed by all Hindu castes during the last three days of the Dasara or Navarathri in the month of Purattasi (September-October). It is a universal holiday for all Hindu workmen. Even the Brahman takes part in this puja. His tools, however, being books, it is called Saraswati Pnja, or worship to the goddess or god of learning, who is either Saraswati or Hayagriva ...... Non-Brahmans clean the various implements used by them in their daily work, and worship them."

1 Paus. vi, xx, 15. 4 Omens and Superstitions of Southern India, 2 Bull. Corr. Hell. xxiii, p. 6I . p. I74. 3 Farnell, op. cit. p. 9o.

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Here we have a custom which consists in the occasional worship of objects which are commonly used to acquire various desirable things-corn, smith's work, wooden and other articles-in a rational manner by the performance of the various industrial processes, as being in some sense gods or daimones who can bestow these same desirable things. We can, I think, safely assume that the Brahmans did not originate this quaint custom, but merely modified it for their own purposes; it is noteworthy that a regular goddess, a sort of Indian Athena, is the official recipient of their particular puja, although the actual object they have before them at the time is " all the books in a house piled up in a heap." In schools, Thurston goes on to tell us, we sometimes have objects of a more developed cult; " he instances a bust of the late bishop Gell set up on an improvised altar, with a cast of Saraswati above, and various members of the Hindu pantheon around." But among the lower classes it would seem we get none of these definite gods or heroised mortals ; " fisher- men pile up their nets for worship," and so on. Not dissimilar is the curious rite of the Madigas1 of sacrifice to the pots used at a marriage.2 If this is so in India, and if a much higher polytheistic religion, that of the Vedas, has not only had no power to stop it but has actually adopted it, may we not reasonably suppose that there was a time when the Italian peasant worshipped, not indeed Veruactor or Messor, but his plough and his reaping-hook ? Let us see whether any traces of such a custom lingered on in popular ritual; for ideas of this kind, while logically preceding and often historically accounting for higher ones, do not generally die in giving them birth. I think that such traces can be clearly shown to exist. In describing the ritual of 9th June, in honour of , which included a holiday of the bakers and millers, Ovid says:

Ecce coronatis panis dependet asellis et velant scabras florida serta molas.3

That the ass which turns the mill should have a holiday along with his master is natural enough, and does not need the Rabelaisian story which Ovid goes on to tell in order to make it intelligible. But what of the mill-stones ? They are wreathed with " florida serta," says Ovid; and the only things treated that way are either statues and other emblems of the gods, or things consecrated to the gods, victims and the like, or worshippers. That banqueters and magistrates wear a wreath is to be explained by the originally sacral

1 op. cit. p. II9. implements have long been worshipped: see 2 For a similar usage of the Fratres Arvales, Macdonell, Vedic Mythology, p. I54. The ayudha cf. Warde Fowler, Religious Experience, etc. puja is as old as the Rig-Veda, ibid. 155. appendix v. So in official Hinduism sacrificial 3 Fasti, vi, 31I.

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 01:31:37 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ITALIAN " SONDERGOTTER." 237 characterof all meals and by the priestly functionsof the magistrate; the old accountgiven by Fustel de Coulanges1 is still worth quoting. Under which categorydoes the mill-stone come ? Is it dedicated ? No, for it will be used againwhen the feast is over for ordinarywork; Vesta or the later Fornaxretains no claimover it. Is it a worshipper? Hardly,since it is inanimate. How, then, can we explainits wreathing unless we assume that it is in some way the object of cult ? Not dissimilaris the wreathing of the ship after a voyage in Virgil2; where, I suppose, no one is likely to take Servius' suggestion that "spirae funium" are meant. However, this might be explained as metonymy for the crowning of the images of the gods on board, and I lay no stress upon it. What I do wish to point out, however, is the occurrence in Greek folklore of the ceremoniousworship of weapons by Kaineus,3 Idmon,4 and Parthenopaios.5 Further, how can we explain the use of the word " Ianus " to mean both the god himself and the gateway, unless we suppose that the gate or door itself was in some way an object of worship ? Thus we see that in the present cult of a people partly Aryan, or at least Aryan-ruled,in the traditions of the Aryan Greeks and in certain primitive rites of the Romans themselves we can find that very state of things which I postulate as giving rise to the worship of Sondergottheiten; the preanimistic version of this, as I believe it to be, early animistic cult. 6 The next stage above this should be the worship, no longer of a plough or sickle, but of the daimon supposed to control these implements. Can we find any examplein the range of Romancult of such a process in the act of taking place ? Not exactly of this, I think, but of a closely parallel event, the passage from an object, in this case permanently, not temporarily,sacred, to a daimon who makesit sacred. This is the much-disputedfigure generally known as Iuppiter Lapis. It is worth while to sum up what we know about this deity. A convenient collection of the passagesreferring to him, with one or two referencesto modern discussions,may be found in Blinkenberg's Thunderweapon,p. III. We learn that the oath by Iuppiter Lapis was the most solemn possible7; that the manner of taking it was to hold a flint-stone in one's hand and say " Si sciens fallo, tum me Diespiter salua urbe arceque bonis eiiciat ut ego hunc lapidem," dropping the stone at the last words8; that this oath was taken by the Fetialesin makingtreaties, 9 andthat the Fetialesused a flint-stone

1 Cite antique, 24, 2Io. the meaning of this. For a historical example 2 cf. Plut. Georg. i, 304. Pelop. 29. i306 cf. Les fonctions mentales, p. 34. 3 Schol.a2Seorg-. Rhod. Levy-Briihl, Apoll. i, 57. 7 Gell. i, xxi, 4. 4ibid. 466. 8 Paulus, epit. Fest. p. II5M; Polyb. i,xxv, 8-9. 5 Aesch. Sept. 529. The other two examples show 9 Polyb. ibid.

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 01:31:37 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 238 ITALIAN " SONDERGOTTER." also to sacrifice the oath-victim, again invoking a curse, this time on the Roman people, if they were false to the oath'; that there were several of these stones2; and that they were kept in the temple of Iuppiter Feretrius. 3 I do not agree with Blinkenberg in classing this under thunder- stones. Iuppiter as thunder-god appears to me to have nothing to do with the whole ritual; the word ferito in the oath of the Fetiales need not refer to that form of divine vengeance rather than another. I would see in the lapis silex nothing more than an ancient flint-knife, used and regarded as such, and sacred from its venerable association with a solemn form of oath. It was, like the sagmina, part of the traditional apparatus of the . Originally no deity needed to be invoked in that simple magical ritual of killing and throwing; the obvious symbolism of the actions was enough. But later came the idea that, unless some god stood behind it, all the ritual was of no avail; it must be, not the stones themselves, but the daimon of the stones, who made the oath binding and would punish the offender against it. Whether there was once a daimon of the flint-knife, a Silicius or Feritor,4who was supposed to be active in the rite, we do not know; if there was, the great oath-god Iuppiter had swallowed up his vague personality. Or it may be that the idea of the efficacy of the stone or of the rite in itself lingered on until it was too late for anyone to imagine that any but Iuppiter or his off-shoot Fides could be the presiding deity. Here, then, we have a case of the reverential handling (worship we can hardly call it) of a material thing passing into the invocation of a Sondergott. For a Sondergott Iuppiter Lapis surely is, although this could not be said of Iuppiter in general. He is here so depart- mental as not to be even a god of oaths; he is merely the daimon who enforces the one oath by the stone: that he is the stone, or in the sense in which the Romans seem to have understood it, resided in the stone, is clear from the form of the name; a form, by the way, which so puzzled Polybius that, at some cost to grammar, he keeps it throughout in the accusative as he found it. This discussion of Iuppiter Lapis, if its main outlines be accepted, gives us a hint of another source for Sondergottheiten. I have said that we cannot exactly speak of any worship of the sacred stones; rather, they are used in important magical ceremonies. Keeping this in mind, we can perhaps answer a rather puzzling question. Doors and gateways are not sacred, says Plutarch5; and he gives an excellent reason for it, namely that gates have to be used for the

1 Livy, i, xxiv, 8-9. position if we derive his name from ferire: see 2 Livy, xliii, 9. Carter, de Deorum RomanorumCognominibus, p. 43; 3 Paul. Fest. p. 92, s.v. Feretrius. but I hold this etymology to be false. epit. 6 4 Iuppiter Feretrius might put in a claim to this Q.R. 27.

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 01:31:37 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions " ITALIAN SONDERGOTTER." 239 transit of all manner of unholy things. Why, then, have we a group of deities of the unholy gate, Ianus, Limentinus and Limentina, , but none, I believe, of the holy wall ? Thanks to the evidence of the Iguvian Tables, which has been set in a clear light by Mr. W. Warde Fowler,1 we can give the answer. It is at the gate that the most elaborate rites of the lustratio take place. Therefore we have a daimon, or rather a whole group of daimones, corresponding to these rites. So in the ritual of those falsely reported dead, and in the case of the entry of a captive or bound man into the house of the Dialis,2 the door, the vulnerable point, was protected. I do not side unreservedly with those zealous followers of Durckheim " who people all Olympus with deities projected " from the ritual of thiasoi or worshippers, but I find that this idea applies well enough to such cases as these. The process is not from the material object through the idea of its sacredness under certain circumstances to a Sondergott corresponding to it, but from the material object, through a ritual having for its end the protection of that object, to a Sondergott of the object, corresponding to or projected from the ritual. A few Sondergottheiten, and these among the most undoubted, seem to fall between the two classes; indeed, the Lapis might be included with them. Instances are the three good spirits who keep Silvanus at bay after a birth, Intercidona, Pilumnus, and Deverra.3 These are not exactly the spirits of the axe, the pestle, and the broom, nor are they wholly projected from the ritual, if that can be called ritual which is merely a ceremonious display of the presence of these homely articles, like the ostentatious display of iron in the driving out of the Trows in Shetland.4 They are rather a combination of the two. The next stage introduces the "logical tendency in Roman religious thought," working, as their grammatical reasonings so often did, along the lines of analogy. Since there were gods of harrowing, ploughing, and the like, and since it was no longer clearly seen that these were the offspring of the plough and so forth; since also there were gods corresponding to various magico-religious acts, and the exact relation of act and deity was forgotten; so, for acts which were not magico-religious, or which employed no material instrument which could be worshipped or honoured, there were postulated deities of which the primitive religious ideas of Italy had known nothing. This process we actually see taking place. Where but in the Acta Fratrum Arvalium do we hear of the list of Sondergottheiten who govern the felling of the obnoxious tree ? The similar rite in Cato5 invokes only " si deus si dea." In the list

3 1 Anthropology and the Classics, last essay; Aug. C.D. vi, 9. in substance in 4 repeated Religious Experience of Frazer, Golden Bough3, vi, p. I68. the Roman People. 2 Plut. ibid. 5; Gell. x, xv, 8. Agric. 139.

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 01:31:37 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 240 ITALIAN C;SONDERGOTTER." of Fabius Pictor, already quoted, what need is there of Conditor when Consus already existed ? The process, on which Wissowa lays such stress, is most characteristically Roman, and in view of it I heartily subscribe to his division of Sonderg6tter into " echte and " falsche." Varro merely shows the logical development of such a tendency. Another part of the same tendency was, I believe, as follows. The rites connected with any one sphere of action, agriculture for instance, began to require a presiding power as the theistic ideas of the people became more prominent. This power might be supplied in either of two ways, both amply illustrated from the rest of the world. Either a group of spirits, formed on some such lines as already indicated, might be invoked (Frazer gives us endless instances of such spirits), or, as happened in Greece, all such processes might be attached chiefly to the cult of one great deity. Thus Mars is the 1 principal or only god invoked in the rites described by Cato. But a third course was open, and it was one which would commend itself to the organising minds of the pontifices. This was to combine the two methods, subordinating the vaguer figures to those of the greater deities. Whether the concept of the famuli divi preceded or grew out of this practice, I do not pretend to decide. It is note- worthy that a similar, though less organised, arrangement is often found in Greece, as exemplified by the association of the shadowy local daimones, Eubouleus, Demophoon, and the rest, with the Two Goddesses at Eleusis. Finally would come a double artificial process. The first part would be the treatment of the subordinate names thus produced to form a mere " Zerlegung" of the central idea in the rite. Later still, we may suppose, all the subordinate names would be felt to be names of the one deity or pair of deities ( and Tellus, in the example I have been using) to whom the prayer and sacrifice were principally directed. The tendency to syncretism needs no illus- tration here, but a well-known passage in the Carmen Saeculare may serve to remind us of how it penetrated the state cult in classical times: Rite maturos aperire partus lenis, Ilithyia, tuere matres, sive tu probas vocari seu Genitalis " (I3-I6). The invention of new and unheard-of names was a mere incident to this. Another development would perhaps be the multiplication of abstractions, a process which went on also in the later days of Greek religion. 2 The Roman abstractions, however, were more the

1 2 op. cit. 83, I41. Automatia, Nep. Timol. 4; Plut. Timol. 36; Asebeia and Paranomia, Polyb. xviii, iv, Io.

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 01:31:37 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ITALIAN <( SONDERGOTTER." 24I objects of official cult and less the result of the piety or mockery of individuals like Timoleon or Dikaiarchos. To sum up: if the above arguments be accepted, we have a reasonable explanation, supported by the known beliefs and practices of ancient and modern peoples, of the origin of the deities known as Sonderg6tter; we have also a sketch of the probable way in which the belief in them at Rome took the form known to us from the surviving fragments of Varro; and incidentally we have a refutation, not indeed of the whole of Wissowa's masterly critique, but of that part of it which would turnwhat I believe to be, in its origins, an ancient stratum of religious thought, into a mere late elaboration.

NOTE.-Since the above article was written, a criticism of the passage in Polybios has been published by E. Harrison (Essays, etc. presentedto Ridgeway, Cambridge, 1913, pp. 92, ff). He rightly points out that on this passage alone depends the identification of Iuppiter Lapis with the lapis silex of the Fetiales; and he inclines to believe Polybios mistaken or his text corrupt (he would read 8ta for Al'a). But (I) Can we suppose that Polybios, a fair Latinist,l a member of the learned Scipionic circle, and a man interested in Roman religion,2 would make a blunder on such a point ? (2) Would he or any other Greek say 6uvvY,t ta&X\iov for 6iUvvp,Xi'ov ? The unwillingness of many scholars to accept the identification arises from their inability to see how this stone could be regarded as a god. I have tried (p. 237, above) to show how the transformationtook place.

1 Polyb. iii, xxii, 3. 2 e.g. vi, Ivi, 6.

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