At this point it may be well to ask what was the original idea of the virtue conveyed by going round a piece of land with victims to be sacrificed at the end of the circuit. Such circuitous processions, with or without victims, are to be found in all countries: perhaps the instance most familiar to all of us is that round the walls of Jericho, repeated seven times—the mystic number—in order to destroy their defensive power. But Roman folklore itself, preserved in great abundance by Pliny, supplies an example which goes some way, I think, to show the original nature of the process. Pliny tells us that if a woman in a certain condition, with bare feet and streaming hair, walked round a field, it was completely protected against insects.[121] The act of passing round a crop served as a charm to keep off noxious things—live insects in historical times, noxious spirits, if I am right, in the dawn of agriculture. The charm lay in the condition of the woman, as Dr. Frazer has abundantly shown in The Golden Bough (iii, ed. 2, p. 232 foll.), where he has quoted this passage of Pliny and others from the Roman writers on agriculture. Some power of a similar kind there must have been also in the victims about to be slain; they were chosen according to rule, and under favourable auspices (if we may argue back from the ritual of the city to that of the farm): they were therefore holy, and their blood was about to be shed at one point in the line of circuit. We have here, indeed, passed beyond the region of magic, but we are still in that early stage of religion when a magical idea is at the bottom of the ceremony, though fast losing itself in ideas more advanced and rational.
This religious process, the fencing out of hostile spirits by a boundary-line, and the discovery of the proper formulae for preserving it and all within it, may and indeed must have been the work of ages. But once discovered, the principle of it could be applied to any land or other property of man, and also to man himself. Let us now take some examples of such extensions of the simple practice of the farm.
The farms and homesteads of the early Latins were grouped together in associations called pagi; and these were subjected to the same process of lustratio as the farms themselves. So at least we can hardly doubt, though we have no explicit account of the processional character of the lustratio pagi. When Ovid, under date of the Paganalia (Jan. 24-6), describes the lustratio, he writes:
Pagus agat festum: pagum lustrate, coloni, Et date paganis annua liba focis:
but does not make it clear that he uses lustrare in the sense of a procession with the suovetaurilia. Nor can we be sure that the beautiful passage in the first Georgic (338 foll.), beginning, ‘In primis venerare deos,’ refers to a lustratio pagi, though Wissowa seems to imply it,[122] and the lines
Terque novas circum felix eat hostia fruges, Omnis quam chorus et socii comitentur ovantes Et Cererem clamore vocent in tecta ...
give a charming picture of a lustratio of this kind, without enabling us to decide whether he has the farm or the pagus in his mind. Let us go on to the beginnings of the city, where we shall find the same principle and process applied in most striking fashion.
Just as it was necessary to keep hostile spirits out of the homestead and its land, so it was necessary to keep them out of the city and its land. The walls of the Italian city were sacred, and so was a certain space outside them, called the pomerium. This is well illustrated in the rite used in the foundation of a city even in historical times, as described by Varro, Servius, and Plutarch:[123] it was believed to be of Etruscan origin, like so many other Roman rites, but it is now generally considered to be old Italian in a general sense. A white ox and a white cow were harnessed to a plough, of which the share must be made of bronze, and (on an auspicious day) drew a rectangular furrow where the walls of the city were to be: the earth was turned inwards to indicate the line of the wall, and the furrow represented the future pomerium. When the plough came to the place where there was to be a gate, it was lifted over it and the ploughing resumed beyond it. This meant that though the walls were sacred, the gates were profane; for, as Plutarch says, had the gates been holy, scruple would have been felt about the passage in and out of them of unholy things. The result of this religious process was to keep outside the sacred boundary of the wall all evil and strange spirits (or, as we may now say, seeing that we are entering an era of higher civilization, strange gods); and inside it there dwelt only those who belonged to the place and its inhabitants (indigetes), and whose alliance and protection had become assured. Inside it, too, and only within its limits, could the auspicia of the city be taken.
We might naturally expect that this sacred wall and boundary would have its holiness and efficacy secured by an annual lustratio of the same kind as that of the farm and pagus; and so it was. We know that there was at Rome a lustral rite called Amburbium, which probably took place at the beginning of the month of purification (February); but it is for us unluckily little more than a name. Later on in the same month we find the extraordinary rite of the Lupercalia (15th), in which the pomerium is so far concerned as that the Luperci, or young men who served as priests on the occasion, ran round the ancient boundary of the Palatine settlement, girt with the skins of the victims, striking at all women who came near them with strips cut from these same skins, in order to produce fertility. But was this really a lustratio urbis? In my Roman Festivals I treated it as such (p. 319), on the ground that Varro uses the word lustrare in alluding to it. I am now, however, disposed to think that Varro was here using the word in a general and not a technical sense, and that the object of it was not, as in the rites we have been discussing, to keep evil spirits away from the city as a whole. It seems to be a survival of some very primitive magico-religious ideas, into which I will not enter now. Certain it is that the leading feature of the true lustratio is absent from it; instead of a slow and stately procession of worshippers and victims, we have the wild running of almost naked youths, apparently personating or embodying a deity.
Fortunately we can illustrate the real lustratio of a city from a different source, and in this case most luckily a documentary one, but from an Umbrian city instead of a Latin one. The town of Gubbio, the modern form of Iguvium, still preserves the priestly instructions, drawn up from older sources probably at the beginning of the last century b. c., for the lustratio of its citadel, the arx (ocris Fisia), by a guild of priests called the Fratres Attiedii.[124] Here the ceremony has been developed under priestly influence into a series of ritualistic acts of the highest exactness and complexity; but the main features of the lustratio stand out quite clearly. The procession goes solemnly round the arx, with the victims, which are the same as those of the Latin lustratio; at each gate it stops, and offers sacrifice and prayer on behalf of the citadel, the city, and the whole people of Iguvium. The gates, three in number, are the scene of the actual sacrifice and prayer, because they are the weak points in the wall, as we have seen, and they need to be spiritually strengthened by annual religious operations, though not such as would make them permanently sacred like the wall itself. Doubtless the Fratres Attiedii would have been unable to explain this as I am explaining it; the sense of a hostile spiritual world outside the sacred boundary had vanished from the Italian mind when these elaborate liturgical formulae were drawn up. The prayers are cast in language that hardly differs from those of a Church of to-day which asks for a blessing on a community. The deities of the city are asked to preserve the name, the magistrates, rites, men, cattle, land, and crops—a list in which the name is the only item which carries us clearly back to pre-Christian times. The ideas and the deities have been developed into a religious system of considerable complexity, but the actual proceedings, the procession and the prayers at the gates, still remind us of the rock whence all this ritual was hewn.