| Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941). The Golden
Bough. 1922. |
XVI. Dianus and Diana |
| |
| IN THIS CHAPTER I
propose to recapitulate the conclusions to which the enquiry has
thus far led us, and drawing together the scattered rays of light,
to turn them on the dark figure of the priest of Nemi. |
1 |
| We have found that at an early stage of society men,
ignorant of the secret processes of nature and of the narrow limits
within which it is in our power to control and direct them, have
commonly arrogated to themselves functions which in the present
state of knowledge we should deem
superhuman or divine. The illusion has been fostered and maintained
by the same causes which begot it, namely, the marvellous order and
uniformity with which nature conducts her operations, the wheels of
her great machine revolving with a smoothness and precision which
enable the patient observer to anticipate in general the season, if
not the very hour, when they will bring round the fulfilment of his
hopes or the accomplishment of his fears. The regularly recurring
events of this great cycle, or rather series of cycles, soon stamp
themselves even on the dull mind of the savage. He foresees them,
and foreseeing them mistakes the desired recurrence for an effect of
his own will, and the dreaded recurrence for an effect of the will
of his enemies. Thus the springs which set the vast machine in
motion, though they lie far beyond our ken, shrouded in a mystery
which we can never hope to penetrate, appear to ignorant man to lie
within his reach: he fancies he can touch them and so work by magic
art all manner of good to himself and evil to his foes. In time the
fallacy of this belief becomes apparent to him: he discovers that
there are things he cannot do, pleasures which he is unable of
himself to procure, pains which even the most potent magician is
powerless to avoid. The unattainable good, the inevitable ill, are
now ascribed by him to the action of invisible powers, whose favour
is joy and life, whose anger is misery and death. Thus magic tends
to be displaced by religion, and the sorcerer by the priest. At this
stage of thought the ultimate causes of things are conceived to be
personal beings, many in number and often discordant in character,
who partake of the nature and even of the frailty of man, though
their might is greater than his, and their life far exceeds the span
of his ephemeral existence. Their sharply-marked individualities,
their clear-cut outlines have not yet begun, under the powerful
solvent of philosophy, to melt and coalesce into that single unknown
substratum of phenomena which, according to the qualities with which
our imagination invests it, goes by one or other of the
high-sounding names which the wit of man has devised to hide his
ignorance. Accordingly, so long as men look on their gods as beings
akin to themselves and not raised to an unapproachable height above
them, they believe it to be possible for those of their own number
who surpass their fellows to attain to the divine rank after death
or even in life. Incarnate human deities of this latter sort may be
said to halt midway between the age of magic and the age of
religion. If they bear the names and display the pomp of deities,
the powers which they are supposed to wield are commonly those of
their predecessor the magician. Like him, they are expected to guard
their people against hostile enchantments, to heal them in sickness,
to bless them with offspring, and to provide them with an abundant
supply of food by regulating the weather and performing the other
ceremonies which are deemed necessary to ensure the fertility of the
earth and the multiplication of animals. Men who are credited with
powers so lofty and far-reaching naturally hold the highest place in
the land, and while the rift between the spiritual and the temporal spheres has not yet widened too far, they
are supreme in civil as well as religious matters: in a word, they
are kings as well as gods. Thus the divinity which hedges a king has
its roots deep down in human history, and long ages pass before
these are sapped by a profounder view of nature and man. |
2 |
| In the classical period of Greek and Latin antiquity
the reign of kings was for the most part a thing of the past; yet
the stories of their lineage, titles, and pretensions suffice to
prove that they too claimed to rule by divine right and to exercise
superhuman powers. Hence we may without undue temerity assume that
the King of the Wood at Nemi, though shorn in later times of his
glory and fallen on evil days, represented a long line of sacred
kings who had once received not only the homage but the adoration of
their subjects in return for the manifold blessings which they were
supposed to dispense. What little we know of the functions of Diana
in the Arician grove seems to prove that she was here conceived as a
goddess of fertility, and particularly as a divinity of childbirth.
It is reasonable, therefore, to suppose that in the discharge of
these important duties she was assisted by her priest, the two
figuring as King and Queen of the Wood in a solemn marriage, which
was intended to make the earth gay with the blossoms of spring and
the fruits of autumn, and to gladden the hearts of men and women
with healthful offspring. |
3 |
| If the priest of Nemi posed not merely as a king,
but as a god of the grove, we have still to ask, What deity in
particular did he personate? The answer of antiquity is that he
represented Virbius, the consort or lover of Diana. But this does
not help us much, for of Virbius we know little more than the name.
A clue to the mystery is perhaps supplied by the Vestal fire which
burned in the grove. For the perpetual holy fires of the Aryans in
Europe appear to have been commonly kindled and fed with oak-wood,
and in Rome itself, not many miles from Nemi, the fuel of the Vestal
fire consisted of oaken sticks or logs, as has been proved by a
microscopic analysis of the charred embers of the Vestal fire, which
were discovered by Commendatore G. Boni in the course of the
memorable excavations which he conducted in the Roman forum at the
end of the nineteenth century. But the ritual of the various Latin
towns seems to have been marked by great uniformity; hence it is
reasonable to conclude that wherever in Latium a Vestal fire was
maintained, it was fed, as at Rome, with wood of the sacred oak. If
this was so at Nemi, it becomes probable that the hallowed grove
there consisted of a natural oak-wood, and that therefore the tree
which the King of the Wood had to guard at the peril of his life was
itself an oak; indeed, it was from an evergreen oak, according to
Virgil, that Aeneas plucked the Golden Bough. Now the oak was the
sacred tree of Jupiter, the supreme god of the Latins. Hence it
follows that the King of the Wood, whose life was bound up in a
fashion with an oak, personated no less a deity than Jupiter
himself. At least the evidence, slight as it is, seems to point to
this conclusion. The old Alban dynasty of the Silvii or Woods, with
their crown of oak leaves, apparently aped
the style and emulated the powers of Latian Jupiter, who dwelt on
the top of the Alban Mount. It is not impossible that the King of
the Wood, who guarded the sacred oak a little lower down the
mountain, was the lawful successor and representative of this
ancient line of the Silvii or Woods. At all events, if I am right in
supposing that he passed for a human Jupiter, it would appear that
Virbius, with whom legend identified him, was nothing but a local
form of Jupiter, considered perhaps in his original aspect as a god
of the greenwood. |
4 |
| The hypothesis that in later times at all events the
King of the Wood played the part of the oak god Jupiter, is
confirmed by an examination of his divine partner Diana. For two
distinct lines of argument converge to show that if Diana was a
queen of the woods in general, she was at Nemi a goddess of the oak
in particular. In the first place, she bore the title of Vesta, and
as such presided over a perpetual fire, which we have seen reason to
believe was fed with oak wood. But a goddess of fire is not far
removed from a goddess of the fuel which burns in the fire;
primitive thought perhaps drew no sharp line of distinction between
the blaze and the wood that blazes. In the second place, the nymph
Egeria at Nemi appears to have been merely a form of Diana, and
Egeria is definitely said to have been a Dryad, a nymph of the oak.
Elsewhere in Italy the goddess had her home on oak-clad mountains.
Thus Mount Algidus, a spur of the Alban hills, was covered in
antiquity with dark forests of oak, both of the evergreen and the
deciduous sort. In winter the snow lay long on these cold hills, and
their gloomy oak-woods were believed to be a favourite haunt of
Diana, as they have been of brigands in modern times. Again, Mount
Tifata, the long abrupt ridge of the Apennines which looks down on
the Campanian plain behind Capua, was wooded of old with evergreen
oaks, among which Diana had a temple. Here Sulla thanked the goddess
for his victory over the Marians in the plain below, attesting his
gratitude by inscriptions which were long afterwards to be seen in
the temple. On the whole, then, we conclude that at Nemi the King of
the Wood personated the oak-god Jupiter and mated with the
oak-goddess Diana in the sacred grove. An echo of their mystic union
has come down to us in the legend of the loves of Numa and Egeria,
who according to some had their trysting-place in these holy
woods. |
5 |
| To this theory it may naturally be objected that the
divine consort of Jupiter was not Diana but Juno, and that if Diana
had a mate at all he might be expected to bear the name not of
Jupiter, but of Dianus or Janus, the latter of these forms being
merely a corruption of the former. All this is true, but the
objection may be parried by observing that the two pairs of deities,
Jupiter and Juno on the one side, and Dianus and Diana, or Janus and
Jana, on the other side, are merely duplicates of each other, their
names and their functions being in substance and origin identical.
With regard to their names, all four of them come from the same
Aryan root DI, meaning “bright,” which occurs in the names of the corresponding
Greek deities, Zeus and his old female consort Dione. In regard to
their functions, Juno and Diana were both goddesses of fecundity and
childbirth, and both were sooner or later identified with the moon.
As to the true nature and functions of Janus the ancients themselves
were puzzled; and where they hesitated, it is not for us confidently
to decide. But the view mentioned by Varro that Janus was the god of
the sky is supported not only by the etymological identity of his
name with that of the sky-god Jupiter, but also by the relation in
which he appears to have stood to Jupiter’s two mates, Juno and
Juturna. For the epithet Junonian bestowed on Janus points to a
marriage union between the two deities; and according to one account
Janus was the husband of the water-nymph Juturna, who according to
others was beloved by Jupiter. Moreover, Janus, like Jove, was
regularly invoked, and commonly spoken of under the title of Father.
Indeed, he was identified with Jupiter not merely by the logic of
the learned St. Augustine, but by the piety of a pagan worshipper
who dedicated an offering to Jupiter Dianus. A trace of his relation
to the oak may be found in the oakwoods of the Janiculum, the hill
on the right bank of the Tiber, where Janus is said to have reigned
as a king in the remotest ages of Italian history. |
6 |
| Thus, if I am right, the same ancient pair of
deities was variously known among the Greek and Italian peoples as
Zeus and Dione, Jupiter and Juno, or Dianus (Janus) and Diana
(Jana), the names of the divinities being identical in substance,
though varying in form with the dialect of the particular tribe
which worshipped them. At first, when the peoples dwelt near each
other, the difference between the deities would be hardly more than
one of name; in other words, it would be almost purely dialectical.
But the gradual dispersion of the tribes, and their consequent
isolation from each other, would favour the growth of divergent
modes of conceiving and worshipping the gods whom they had carried
with them from their old home, so that in time discrepancies of myth
and ritual would tend to spring up and thereby to convert a nominal
into a real distinction between the divinities. Accordingly when,
with the slow progress of culture, the long period of barbarism and
separation was passing away, and the rising political power of a
single strong community had begun to draw or hammer its weaker
neighbours into a nation, the confluent peoples would throw their
gods, like their dialects, into a common stock; and thus it might
come about that the same ancient deities, which their forefathers
had worshipped together before the dispersion, would now be so
disguised by the accumulated effect of dialectical and religious
divergencies that their original identity might fail to be
recognised, and they would take their places side by side as
independent divinities in the national pantheon. |
7 |
| This duplication of deities, the result of the final
fusion of kindred tribes who had long lived apart, would account for
the appearance of Janus beside Jupiter, and of Diana or Jana beside
Juno in the Roman religion. At least this
appears to be a more probable theory than the opinion, which has
found favour with some modern scholars, that Janus was originally
nothing but the god of doors. That a deity of his dignity and
importance, whom the Romans revered as a god of gods and the father
of his people, should have started in life as a humble, though
doubtless respectable, doorkeeper appears very unlikely. So lofty an
end hardly consorts with so lowly a beginning. It is more probable
that the door (janua) got its name from Janus than that he
got his name from it. This view is strengthened by a consideration
of the word janua itself. The regular word for door is the
same in all the languages of the Aryan family from India to Ireland.
It is dur in Sanscrit, thura in Greek, tür in
German, door in English, dorus in old Irish, and
foris in Latin. Yet besides this ordinary name for door,
which the Latins shared with all their Aryan brethren, they had also
the name janua, to which there is no corresponding term in
any Indo-European speech. The word has the appearance of being an
adjectival form derived from the noun Janus. I conjecture
that it may have been customary to set up an image or symbol of
Janus at the principal door of the house in order to place the
entrance under the protection of the great god. A door thus guarded
might be known as a janua foris, that is, a Januan door, and
the phrase might in time be abridged into janua, the noun
foris being understood but not expressed. From this to the
use of janua to designate a door in general, whether guarded
by an image of Janus or not, would be an easy and natural
transition. |
8 |
| If there is any truth in this conjecture, it may
explain very simply the origin of the double head of Janus, which
has so long exercised the ingenuity of mythologists. When it had
become customary to guard the entrance of houses and towns by an
image of Janus, it might well be deemed necessary to make the
sentinel god look both ways, before and behind, at the same time, in
order that nothing should escape his vigilant eye. For if the divine
watchman always faced in one direction, it is easy to imagine what
mischief might have been wrought with impunity behind his back. This
explanation of the double-headed Janus at Rome is confirmed by the
double-headed idol which the Bush negroes in the interior of Surinam
regularly set up as a guardian at the entrance of a village. The
idol consists of a block of wood with a human face rudely carved on
each side; it stands under a gateway composed of two uprights and a
cross-bar. Beside the idol generally lies a white rag intended to
keep off the devil; and sometimes there is also a stick which seems
to represent a bludgeon or weapon of some sort. Further, from the
cross-bar hangs a small log which serves the useful purpose of
knocking on the head any evil spirit who might attempt to pass
through the gateway. Clearly this double-headed fetish at the
gateway of the negro villages in Surinam bears a close resemblance
to the double-headed images of Janus which, grasping a stick in one
hand and a key in the other, stood sentinel at Roman gates and
doorways; and we can hardly doubt that in
both cases the heads facing two ways are to be similarly explained
as expressive of the vigilance of the guardian god, who kept his eye
on spiritual foes behind and before, and stood ready to bludgeon
them on the spot. We may, therefore, dispense with the tedious and
unsatisfactory explanations which, if we may trust Ovid, the wily
Janus himself fobbed off an anxious Roman enquirer. |
9 |
| To apply these conclusions to the priest of Nemi, we
may suppose that as the mate of Diana he represented originally
Dianus or Janus rather than Jupiter, but that the difference between
these deities was of old merely superficial, going little deeper
than the names, and leaving practically unaffected the essential
functions of the god as a power of the sky, the thunder, and the
oak. It was fitting, therefore, that his human representative at
Nemi should dwell, as we have seen reason to believe he did, in an
oak grove. His title of King of the Wood clearly indicates the
sylvan character of the deity whom he served; and since he could
only be assailed by him who had plucked the bough of a certain tree
in the grove, his own life might be said to be bound up with that of
the sacred tree. Thus he not only served but embodied the great
Aryan god of the oak; and as an oak-god he would mate with the
oak-goddess, whether she went by the name of Egeria or Diana. Their
union, however consummated, would be deemed essential to the
fertility of the earth and the fecundity of man and beast. Further,
as the oak-god was also a god of the sky, the thunder, and the rain,
so his human representative would be required, like many other
divine kings, to cause the clouds to gather, the thunder to peal,
and the rain to descend in due season, that the fields and orchards
might bear fruit and the pastures be covered with luxuriant herbage.
The reputed possessor of powers so exalted must have been a very
important personage; and the remains of buildings and of votive
offerings which have been found on the site of the sanctuary combine
with the testimony of classical writers to prove that in later times
it was one of the greatest and most popular shrines in Italy. Even
in the old days, when the champaign country around was still
parcelled out among the petty tribes who composed the Latin League,
the sacred grove is known to have been an object of their common
reverence and care. And just as the kings of Cambodia used to send
offerings to the mystic kings of Fire and Water far in the dim
depths of the tropical forest, so, we may well believe, from all
sides of the broad Latian plain the eyes and footsteps of Italian
pilgrims turned to the quarter where, standing sharply out against
the faint blue line of the Apennines or the deeper blue of the
distant sea, the Alban Mountain rose before them, the home of the
mysterious priest of Nemi, the King of the Wood. There, among the
green woods and beside the still waters of the lonely hills, the
ancient Aryan worship of the god of the oak, the thunder, and the
dripping sky lingered in its early, almost Druidical form, long
after a great political and intellectual revolution had shifted the
capital of Latin religion from the forest to the city, from Nemi to
Rome. |
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