Let us now examine the several acts of the festival, to see how far they admit of explanation under the light of modern research into primitive ideas and ritual.
It began, as we saw, with the sacrifice of goats and a dog. Unluckily we cannot be sure of the god to whom they were offered, nor of the sacrificing priest. According to Ovid[[1395]] the deity was Faunus; according to Livy it was a certain mysterious Inuus, of whom hardly anything else is known[[1396]], though much has been written. There was no Lupercus, as some have vainly imagined; much less any such combination as Faunus Lupercus, which has been needlessly created out of a passage of Justin[[1397]]. Liber is suggested by Servius[[1398]]; who adds that others fancied it was a ‘bellicosus deus.’ Recently Juno has been suggested, because the strips which the runners carried were called ‘Iunonis amiculum’[[1399]]. Thus it is quite plain that the Roman of the literary age did not know who the god was. The common idea that he was Faunus is discredited by Livy’s account and his mention of Inuus, and also by the fact that Faunus is not associated with urban settlements: and may easily be accounted for by the myth of Evander and the Arcadians, whose Pan Lycaeus was of course identified with Faunus[[1400]], or by the girding of the Luperci with skins, which made them resemble the popular conception of the Fauni[[1401]]. Possibly the name was a secret; for there was a tendency to avoid fixing a god’s name in ritual, in order to escape making mistakes, and so offending him. ‘Iure pontificum cautum est ne suis nominibus dii Romani appellarentur, ne exaugurari possint[[1402]].’ We must also remember that the Lupercalia undoubtedly descends from the very earliest period of the Roman religion, when the individuality of deities was not clearly conceived, and when their names were unknown, doubtful, or adjectival only. In fact, we need not greatly trouble ourselves about the name of the god: his nature is deducible to some extent from the ritual. The connexion with the Palatine, with the wolf, and with fructification, seems to me to point very clearly in the direction of Mars and his characteristics.
It would be almost more profitable if we could be sure of the sacrificing priest; but here again we are in the dark. Ovid says, ‘Flamen ad haec prisco more Dialis erat[[1403]]‘; but it is impossible that this priest could have been the sacrificer (though Marquardt committed himself to this), for he was expressly forbidden to touch either goat or dog[[1404]], which seem to have been excluded from the cult of Jupiter. Even in the case of such exceptional piacula as this no doubt was, we can hardly venture without further evidence to ascribe the slaughter of the sacred animal to the great priest of the heavenly deity in whose cult it was tabooed. Plutarch says that the Luperci themselves sacrificed[[1405]]; and this is more probable, and is borne out by comparison with other cases in which the priest clothes himself, as the Luperci did, in the skin of the victim. It does not indeed seem certain that the two youths who thus girt themselves had also performed the sacrifice; but they represent the two collegia of Luperci, and lead the race[[1406]], as Romulus and Remus did in the explanatory legend.
As regards the victims, there is here at least no doubt that both goat and dog were exceptional animals in sacrifice[[1407]], and that their use here betokens a piacular rite of unusual ‘holiness.’ Thus their offering is a mystic sacrifice, and belongs to that ‘small class of exceptional rites in which the victim was drawn from some species of animals that retained even in modern times their ancient repute of natural holiness[[1408]].’ It is exactly in this kind of sacrifice that we find such peculiar points of ritual as meet us in the Lupercalia. ‘The victim is sacrosanct, and the peculiar value of the ceremony lies in the operation performed on its life, whether that life is merely conveyed to the god on the altar (i. e. as in burnt-sacrifices) or is also applied to the worshippers by the sprinkling of the blood, or some other lustral ceremony[[1409]].’ The writer might very well have been thinking of the Lupercalia when he wrote these lines. The meaning of these rites was originally, as he states it, that the holiness of the victim means kinship to the worshippers and their god, ‘that all sacred relations and all moral obligations depend on physical unity of life, and that physical unity of life can be created or reinforced by common participation in living flesh and blood.’ We may postpone consideration of this view as applied to the Lupercalia till we have examined the remaining features of the ceremony.
After the sacrifice was completed, Plutarch[[1410]] tells us that the foreheads of the two youths were touched with the bloody knife that had slain the victims, and the stain was then wiped off with wool dipped in milk, after which the youths had to laugh. This has often been supposed to indicate an original human sacrifice[[1411]], the he-goats being substituted for human victims, and the death of the latter symbolized by the smearing with their blood. This explanation might be admissible if this were the only feature of the ceremony; but it is so entirely out of keeping with those that follow—the wearing of the skins and the running—that it is preferable to look for another before adopting it. At the same time it may be observed that no reasonable hypothesis can be ruled out of court where our knowledge of the rite is so meagre and so hard to bring satisfactorily into harmony with others occurring among other peoples[[1412]].
There is a curious passage in Apollonius Rhodius[[1413]], where purification from a murder is effected by smearing the hands of the murderer with the blood of a young pig, and then wiping it off ἄλλοις χύτλοισι; and the Scholiast on the lines describes a somewhat similar method of purification which was practised in Greece. This would raise a presumption that the youths were not originally the victims at the Lupercalia, but rather the slayers; and that they had to be purified from the guilt of the blood of the sacrosanct victim[[1414]]. When this was done they became one with the victim and the god by the girding on of the skins, and were able to communicate the new life thus acquired in the course of their lustratio of the city by means of the strips of skin to the women who met them. This explanation is open to one or two objections; for example, it hardly accounts for the laughter of the youths, unless we are to suppose that it was an expression of joy at their release from blood-guiltiness[[1415]]. And we have indeed no direct evidence that the youths were ever themselves the sacrificers, though the collateral evidence on this point, as I have already said, seems to be fairly strong[[1416]]. Yet I cannot but think that the true significance of the essential features of the ceremony is to be looked for somewhere in the direction thus indicated.
There is, however, another explanation of the application of the bloody knife, the wiping, and the laughing, which Mannhardt proposed, not without some modest hesitation, in his posthumous work[[1417]]. In his view these were symbolic or quasi-dramatic acts, signifying death and renewed life. The youths were never actually killed, but they were the figures in a kind of acted parable. The smearing with blood denoted that they partook of the death of the victim[[1418]]; the wiping with milky wool signified the revival to a new life, for milk is the source of life. The laughing is the outward sign of such revival: the dead are silent, cannot laugh[[1419]]. And the meaning of all this was the death and the revival of the Vegetation-spirit. I have already more than once profited by Mannhardt’s researches into this type of European custom, and they are now familiar to Englishmen in the works of Mr. Frazer, Mr. Farnell, and others. Undoubtedly there are many bits of grotesque custom which can best be explained if we suppose them to mean the death of the Power of growth at harvest-time, or its resuscitation in the spring, perhaps after the death of the powers of winter and darkness. But whether the Lupercalia is one of these I cannot be so sure. These rites do not seem to have any obvious reference to crops, but rather to have come down from the pastoral stage of society: and it is not in this case the fields which are lustrated by the runners, but the urbs and its women[[1420]]. And the earlier parts of the ritual bear the marks of a piaculum so distinctly that it seems unnecessary and confusing to introduce into it a different set of ideas.
There is a similar divergence of opinion in explaining the next feature, the wearing of the skins of the victims[[1421]]. Dr. Mannhardt believed that this was one of the innumerable instances in which, at certain times of the year, animals are personated by human beings, e. g. at Christmas, at the beginning of Lent (Carnival), and at harvest. These he explained as representations of the Vegetation-spirit, which was conceived to be dead in winter, to come to life in spring, and at harvest to die again, and which was believed to assume all kinds of animal forms. This has been generally accepted as explaining several curious rites both in Greece and Italy, e. g. that of the Hirpi Sorani at Soracte not far from Rome[[1422]]. But it is a question whether it will equally well explain the Luperci and their goat-skins. In this case Mannhardt is driven to somewhat far-fetched hypotheses; he derives Lupercus from lupus-hircus[[1423]] (p. 90), and suggests that the two collegia represented respectively wolves and goats, according to the view of the Vegetation-spirit taken by the two communities of Palatine and Quirinal[[1424]]. But this solution, the result of a bias in favour of his favourite Vegetation-spirit, does not strike us as happy, and Dr. Mannhardt himself does not seem well pleased with it[[1425]].
It would seem safer to take this as one of the many well-known piacula in which the worshipper wears the skin of a very holy victim, thereby entering sacramentally into the very nature of the god to whom the victim is sacrificed[[1426]]. Whether or no we are to look for the origin of these practices in a totemistic age, is a question that cannot be discussed here; and there is no sign of totemism in the Lupercalia save this one[[1427]].
But if this be the right explanation, what, we may ask, was meant by the name Luperci? If it meant wolves, are we not rather thrown back on Mannhardt’s theory? To this it may be answered; (1) that no classical author suggests that the runners were looked upon as representing wolves; by the common people we are told that they were called creppi[[1428]], the meaning of which is quite uncertain, though it has been explained as = capri, and as simply arising from the fact that the runners were clad in goat-skins[[1429]]. There is in fact no necessary connexion at all between the skins and the name Luperci. If that name originally meant wolf-priests, its explanation is to be found rather in connexion with the wolf of Mars, and the cave of the she-wolf, than in the skins of the sacrificed goats, which were worn by only two members of the two collegia bearing the name.