So important a part did these processional rites play in the public life of the Roman people,—so characteristic are they too of the old Roman habit of thought and action, that they have given a wonderful word to the Latin language. Lustrare has many meanings; but the one which is immediately derived from the rites I speak of, that of slow processional movement, is the most beautiful and impressive of them all. When Aeneas first sees Dido in all her stately beauty, he says:[440]
in freta dum fluvii current, dum montibus umbrae lustrabunt convexa, polus dum sidera pascet, semper honos nomenque tuum laudesque manebunt, quae me cunque vocant terrae.
"So long as the cloud-shadows move slowly over the hollows of the hills." Here in Scotland you must have all seen this procession of the shadows, as I have watched it when fishing in Wales; let us always associate it with the magic of a poet of nature as well as with the religious processions of his people.
Lustrare, lustratio, are words which, as I think, belong to an age of religion, that is, according to our formula, of effective desire to be in right relation with the Power manifesting itself in the Universe. In other processes which are usually called purificatory, magic seems to survive: the word februum, from which comes the name of our second month, meant an object with magical potency, such as water, fire, sulphur, laurel, wool, or the strips of the victims sacrificed at the Lupercalia, and the verb februare meant to get rid of certain unwholesome or miasmatic influences by means of these objects.[441] What was the really primitive idea attached to these words need not concern us now; but Varro, and Ovid following him, explicitly explain them as meaning purifying agents and processes,[442] from which we may infer that they had a magical power to produce certain desired conditions, or to protect from evil influences, like charms and amulets. But lustrare and lustratio seem to belong to an age when the thing to be driven or kept away is rather spiritual mischief, and when the means used are sacrifices and prayers, with processional movement.
What is the original meaning of the word lustrare? It seems to be a strong form of luere; and luere is explained by Varro as equivalent to solvere.[443] The word lustrum, he says, i.e. the solemn five-yearly ceremony in the Campus Martius, is derived from luere in the sense of solvere, to pay; because every fifth year the contract-moneys for the collection of taxes and for public undertakings were paid into the treasury through the censors. Servius,[444] doubtless following him, explains such expressions as peccata luere, supplicium luere, on the same principle—in the sense of payment, just as we speak of paying the penalty. We might thus be tempted to fancy that the root-idea of lustrare is to perform a duty and so get rid of it, as we do in paying for anything we buy; but this would be to misapprehend the original meaning of the word as completely as Varro did when he explained luere by reference to the payments of contractors. Varro and Servius do, however, suggest the right clue; they see that the idea lurking in the word is that of getting rid of something, but they understand that something in the light, not of primitive man's intelligence, but of the duty of man in a civilised State. What exactly it was that was to be got rid of is a more difficult question; but all that we have so far learnt about the early religious ideas of the Romans strongly suggests that they were in what we may call an advanced animistic stage of religious ideas, and that whatever may have been the notion of their primitive ancestors, they themselves, in these rites as we know them, saw the means of getting rid of and so keeping away hostile spirits. A French sociologist, M. van Gennep, whose book Les Rites de passage I have read with great interest, has kindly written me a long letter in which he insists that this animistic interpretation of lustratio is really superfluous, and that the idea of separation alone, i.e. of separation between sacred and profane, without any reference to spirits or dei, is a fully sufficient explanation. So no doubt it may be among many savage peoples; but he would probably allow that as a people advances from one stage of superstition to another, while it retains in outline the scheme of its rites, it will apply new meanings to them in keeping with the changes in its mental attitude. This is one of the most interesting processes with which modern research has been occupied; we are now familiar with the adoption of pre-Christian ceremonies, with a complete change of meaning, in the ritual of the Christian Church. These very processions of lustratio, which had already been once metamorphosed in an animistic period, were seized upon by the Roman Church with characteristic adroitness, adapted to its ritual, and given a new meaning; and the Catholic priest still leads his flock round the fields with the prayers of the Litania maior in Rogation week, begging a blessing on the flocks and herds, and deprecating the anger of the Almighty.[445]
But let us now pass briefly in review the more important of these rites of lustration and compare them with each other; we shall find the essential features the same in all of them.
The first permanent difficulty of new settlers in Latium was to mark off their cultivated land from the forest or waste land beyond it, and so, as M. van Gennep would phrase it,[446] to make a margin of separation between the sacred and the profane, within which the sacred processes of domestic life and husbandry might go forward, undisturbed by dangers—human, spiritual, or what not—coming from the profane world without. The boundary was marked out in some material way, perhaps by stones (cippi) or posts, placed at intervals;[447] and thus "a fixed piece of ground is appropriated by a particular social group, so that if any stranger penetrated it he would be committing a sacrilege as complete as he would if he trespassed in a sacred grove or a temple." This boundary-line was made sacred itself by the passage round it (lustratio) at some fixed time of the year, usually in May, when crops were ripening and especially liable to be attacked by hostile influences, of a procession occupied with sacrifice and prayer. The two main features of the rite, as formulated by Cato in his treatise on agriculture, are—1, the procession of the victims, ox, sheep, and pig (suovetaurilia), the farmer's most valuable property; 2, 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 all kinds and the cattle within the boundary-line.[448] We are not expressly told that this procession followed the boundary throughout, but the analogy of other lustrations forbids us to doubt it; and thus the rite served the practical purpose of keeping it clear in the memory,—a matter of the utmost importance, especially for the practical Roman. In Cato's formula the farmer's object is to ward off disease, calamity, dearth, and infertility; and it is Mars who is invoked, i.e. a great god who has long ago emerged from the crowd of impersonal spirits; but we may safely believe that the primitive farmer used other language, addressing the spirits of disease and dearth themselves; and we may guess, if we will, that again before that there was no invocation or sacrifice at all, but that the object was only to mark the boundary between land civilised and sacred and land uncivilised and profane.
As we have seen, the farms and homesteads of the early Latins were grouped together in associations called pagi; and we can hardly doubt that these were subjected to the same process of lustratio as the farms themselves. We have no explicit account of a circumambulation in this case, but we have in the later poets several charming allusions to a lustratio pagi, and it is of a rite of this kind that Virgil must have been thinking when he wrote the beautiful passage in the first Georgic beginning "In primis venerare deos";[449] and the lines
terque novas circum felix eat hostia fruges, omnis quam chorus et socii comitentur ovantes, etc.,
clearly imply a procession with the object of keeping away harmful influences from the crops at a critical time. And when the city-state came into being we may be equally sure that its ager, so long at least as it was small enough to admit of such a processional ritual, was lustrated in the same way. In historical times this ager had become too extensive, and there is no procession to be found among the duties of the Fratres Arvales as we know them when they were revived by Augustus; but we have not, of course, the whole of the "acta" of the Brethren, and even if we had, it would not be likely that we should find any trace of a practice which must have been dropped in course of time as the Roman territory increased. Let us go on to the beginnings of the city, where we shall find the same principle and practice applied in striking fashion.