But before we go on to examine the nature and meaning of these processions it is necessary to go much further back, in order to get some idea of the primitive Italian ideas of ‘purification’ out of which they were developed. We know them only in the farm and the city of historical times; they belong at the earliest to the comparatively settled and civilized life of the Italian agricultural community, and reached their highest development in the highly organized City-State. But there is much to be said—much more than I have time to say now—about the ideas to which they owe their origin.

There are certain words in Latin bearing the sense of purification, which are older, if I am not mistaken, than lustrare and lustratio, and which belong, I should be inclined to believe, to a ‘pre-animistic’ period: to a period, that is, when the thing to be got rid of by what we call purification was not so much evil influences in the form of spirits as some mysterious miasmatic contamination. These words are februum, februare, februatio, from which the name of our second month, the month of purification, is derived. Februum is a material object with magical purifying power, which the late Romans might call piamen, or purgamen (Ovid, Fast. ii. 19 foll.), using a word belonging to the priestly ritual of the fully developed State. A number of such objects were in use at Rome on particular occasions, all called generically by this name februum—water, fire, sulphur, laurel, wool, pine-twigs, cakes made of certain ‘holy’ ingredients, and at the Lupercalia, strips of the skin of a victim. These belong to the region of magic, and are intimately connected with charms and amulets, which were and still are so popular and universal in Italy. They belong to the same category, psychologically considered, as the bulla of children, the apex of the flamines, a pointed twig fixed on the head or head-dress, and the galerus, the cap of the Flamen Dialis, made of the skin of a white victim which had been sacrificed to Jupiter. These are all survivals from an older stratum of religious thought than the processional rites which we are going to study: they date from a period when magical processes were the rule and religious processes the exception.

I am not going to let myself be drawn here into the vexed question of the relation of religion to magic—two words which, simply by virtue of their being words with constantly shifting connotation—are very apt to mislead us. But putting aside this controversy, it is helpful, I think, to suggest that februum and februare belong to an age when material contamination, e. g. of a corpse or of blood—in other words, of things ‘taboo’—could be got rid of by magical means, lustrare and lustratio to an age when the thing to be driven and kept away is spiritual mischief—the influence of spirits that may be hostile—and when the means used are sacrifices and prayer, with processional movement. To draw the line clearly, however, between a magical period and a religious period is in Roman history quite impossible, as indeed it is and must be everywhere. Magical and quasi-magical processes are taken up into the processes of a period which may be called religious, and survive in an amphibious condition for which it is difficult to find a name. The Flamen Dialis, for example, was priest of Jupiter, and as such in all his duties was an official of a highly organized religious system, yet he was afflicted with an extraordinary number of taboos—now familiar to all readers of The Golden Bough—which survived from a period long anterior to that of religion in the true sense of the word. The purification of new-born children on the dies lustricus is an essential part of the religion of the family, and the word lustricus is itself, in my view, a mark of a period of religion; but the original meaning of the ceremony is probably to be found in pre-animistic ideas. So too with the purification of the family after a funeral, where the original horror of a corpse common to all primitive peoples is still just discernible in the religious ritual of historical times.[116] And, as we shall presently see, the belief that he who has shed blood, even of an enemy, needs purification, is still to be found lurking in the form of one of those acts of lustratio with which we are about to occupy ourselves.

But on the whole it may be said of the Romans, as Dr. Farnell has said of our Teutonic ancestors (Evolution of Religion, p. 108), that cathartic ritual did not weigh heavily on their consciences. Assuredly it may be so said of the Romans of historical times, subjected to the quieting influences of priestly law and ritual, which found infallible remedies for the conscience of the individual, for his fear of evil powers material or spiritual—expedients to emancipate him from the bondage of taboo[117]—in the religious action of the State as a whole. It may perhaps be guessed that even in an age long before the State arose the conscience of the Latin was never ‘intensified’ as regards purification from bloodshed or other mischance or misdeed. The impurity or holiness of blood, as conceived by all primitive peoples, has left no obvious trace in Roman ideas, legends, or literature; it is to be found, but it does not attract our attention as it does in Greece. I believe that the explanation of this lies in the genius of the Roman for law, and in his early and very distinct conception of the State and of the authority of its officials. It may, indeed, be also due to the invasion of Latium by a people of advanced culture, who had but little to say to the grosser material ideas of an aboriginal population; but this is still merely speculation, into which I cannot enter now. Whatever the cause, the religion of the Romans as we know it shows no horror, no fear, so long as the worship of the gods is performed exactly and correctly according to the rules of the State priesthoods: there is no sense of sin or of pollution, of taboo irremediably broken, haunting the mind of the individual: all is cheerfully serious, regular, ordered, ritualistic; and nowhere can we see this better than in the public and private lustral processions of the Roman people.

A word, however, in the first place about the original meaning of the word lustratio. Lustrare is a strong form of luere: and luere is explained by Varro as equivalent to solvere (De Ling. Lat. vi. 11): ‘Lustrum nominatum tempus quinquennale a luendo, id est solvendo; quod quinto quoque anno vectigalia et ultro tributa per censores persolvebantur.’ He is followed by Servius, who explains such expressions as ‘paena commissa luere’, ‘peccata luere’, ‘supplicium luere’,[118] on the same principle. We might, therefore, be tempted to think that the root-meaning of lustrare is to perform a duty or an obligation, and so to rid oneself of it—to go through a religious rite as due to a deity. But this would be to misconceive the original meaning of the word as completely as Varro did when he explained luere by reference to the payment of taxes. We have not yet arrived at a period in Roman thought when we can speak of a sense of religious duty: it is not a money obligation or a ritualistic one that has to be got ‘rid of’, in the earliest ages of the Latin farm or City-State, but those ubiquitous spirits, presumably hostile until they are reclaimed, which haunt the life of man in the animistic stage. Varro and his successors do, however, give us the right clue; they see that the idea lurking in the word is that of purging yourself or getting rid of something, but they understand that something in the light, not of primitive man’s intelligence, but of the relation of man to man in a civilized state.

If, then, lustrare originally embodies this sense of ridding oneself of something, we can now go on to examine the oldest forms of lustratio. I will not here go into the further question whether lues, a pest, and the shadowy deity Lua Mater, who was the consort or companion in some antique sense of Saturnus, are words belonging to the same group and explicable on the same principle.

Now, in order to understand clearly how this necessity of getting rid of hostile spirits came to suggest those solemn processional rites which we associate with the word lustratio, we must fully appreciate the fact that the earliest settlers in Italy who had any knowledge of agriculture found it a country of forest-clad hills; the river valleys were marshy and unhealthy, and the earliest settlements were in clearings made in the woodland. This fact was dimly appreciated by the Romans themselves, and is proved by the archaeological evidence available to-day. The first thing, then, to be done was to make a clearing; and this was a most perilous task, for when you cut down trees and dug up the soil, how were you to tell what unknown spirits you might be disturbing and aggravating? They might be in the trees and the plants, they might be in the animals whose homes were in the trees and the ground, the rocks and the springs. In the later Roman ritual we can still see traces of this old feeling of peril. Cato has preserved for us the formula used by the farmer in historical times when making a new clearing; the prayer accompanying his sacrifice began with ‘Si deus, si dea’—for how was he to know the name or sex of the spirit of the wood he was invading? When digging up the soil he had to offer an expiatory sacrifice; and the ancient gild of the Fratres Arvales had to offer special piacula for the falling of a bough in their grove, or for any injury to a tree in it.[119]

And when your clearing was complete, and you had settled down with your own household spirits, e. g. of the hearth-fire and the store-cupboard (Vesta and Penates), or had induced some of the native spirits to be friendly and serviceable to you—those especially of the land and the springs,—there was yet another difficulty of the greatest importance, viz. to keep those wild ones still dwelling in the woodland around you from encroaching on your clearing or annoying you in your dwelling. That they really could be thus annoying is proved by a curious bit of folklore of which Varro knew, and which has luckily been preserved by St. Augustine, a student of Varro’s works, as an example of Pagan absurdity (Civ. Dei, vi. 9). After the birth of a child, three spirits were invoked—Intercidona, Pilumnus, and Deverra—to prevent Silvanus (the later representative of the woodland spirits generally) from coming into the house and making mischief by night. These three spirits, as their names show, represented the life of settled agriculture: the cutting and pruning of trees (Intercidona), the pounding of corn for the daily meal (Pilumnus), and the raking and sweeping up of the grain (Deverra); and Varro says that they were represented by three men, who imitated the action of axe, pestle, and broom. The real significance of this delightful bit of mummery has never, I think, been correctly understood, simply because the vital difference to the earliest settler between the benevolent spirits of the reclaimed clearing and the hostile spirits of the wild woodland has never been quite fully appreciated.

But this device was one to which you need only have recourse on a particular occasion; the permanent difficulty was to mark off your cultivated land from the forest and its dangerous spiritual population, in some way by which the latter might be prevented from making itself unpleasant. You must draw a definite line between good spirits and bad, between white spirits and black. Here it is that we find the origin of a practice which lasted all through Roman history, passed on into the ritual of the Church, and still survives, as at Oxford on Ascension Day, in the beating of parish bounds. The boundary of the cultivated land was marked out in some material way, perhaps by stones placed at intervals, like the cippi of the old Roman pomerium, from the woodland lying around it; and this boundary-line was made sacred by the passage round it (lustratio) at some fixed time of the year—in May as a rule, when the crops were ripening and especially liable to be attacked by hostile influences—of a procession occupied with sacrifice and prayer. I must dwell for a moment on this procession as it is described by old Cato; but at this point I may just interpolate the remark that the object of its mysterious influence was the arable land only and the crops.[120] The sheep and cattle were otherwise protected, when, after their seclusion within the boundary during the winter, they were driven out in April to pasture beyond it, where they would be in far greater peril from enemies spiritual and other. If you wish to see how this was done, read Ovid’s account of the Parilia in the fourth book of his Fasti, and Dr. Frazer’s illuminating commentary on it (St. George and the Parilia) in the Revue des Études Ethnographiques et Sociologiques for 1908, p. 1 foll.

Cato in his treatise on agriculture has left us, in the form of instructions to a real or imaginary bailiff, the formula of the lustratio as it was used in the second century b.c. It is obviously applicable in detail rather to the estate of that period than to a farm of primitive Latium: there are, for example, words which suggest that it was not necessary in those days to go in procession round the whole of the boundary; as was the case afterwards with the lustratio of the ager Romanus, the form survived accommodated to the great increase of the land concerned. But the two main features of the whole rite are no doubt identical with those of the earliest form of it—i. e. the procession of the victims, ox, sheep, and pig, the farmer’s most valuable property, with the sacrificer and his helps, in this case the bailiff and his assistants: and secondly the prayer to Mars pater, after libations to Janus and Jupiter, asking for his kindly protection of the whole familia of the farm, together with the crops of every kind, and the cattle within the boundary-line. Though it is not explicitly told us, we can hardly doubt that originally the procession followed the boundary-line, and thus served to keep it clear in the memory as well as to preserve everything within it from hostile spirits outside of it. In Cato’s formula it is disease, calamity, dearth, and infertility, that the farmer seeks to ward off—that is the language of the second century b.c.: and it is Mars pater who is invoked, i. e. a great god who has long ago emerged from the crowd of impersonal spirits; but we need not doubt that the primitive farmer used language of a different kind, and addressed the spirits of disease and dearth themselves, of whom one survived into historic times—Robigus, the spirit of mildew. In the ritual of the Arval Brethren, who perhaps retained some details more antique than those of Cato’s instructions, it is a nameless deity, the Dea Dia, who is the chief object of petition (Acta Fratr. Arv., p. 48).